2785: Marble Run

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Marble Run

Title text: I have so many plans. It would incorporate a Galton board, a Ranque-Hilsch marble vortex tube, and a compartment lined with pinball bouncers with a camera-and-servo Maxwell's Demon that separated the balls into fast and slow sides.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by MAXWELL'S DEMON - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT roll away this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

There have long been fascinations with complex mechanical devices, both typically practical (e.g. typical clock mechanisms) or rather more contrived. A 'Marble Run' may make the otherwise simple act of allowing one or more marbles to roll and fall through gravity (or mostly so) into a vastly more complex process. A Rube Goldberg machine is a fancifully complicated real or fictional device which is made deliberately complex to an extended degree, part of the enjoyment of the viewer being to see how disparate and normally unrelated mechanisms (or, sometimes, living creatures as key 'components') interact to achieve a possibly trivial, and perhaps unnecessary, aim. Beyond the US, many other names are used for such devices, named for people such as Heath Robinson (UK) and Storm P (Denmark) who developed similar themes of creativity.

Enticed by hearing the mere mention of such a thing, Cueball knows that he is going to end up building a cool marble run of his own, with a long and interesting path to get there. In the last panel, it plays off the fact that he is acting like one of the marbles in a cool marble run. He, like the marble, is going to take a long route, one that is interesting, to get to the place where he is inevitably going to get to (building cool marble runs).

A Galton board is a device that demonstrates the normal bell-curve distribution. It is the inspiration for pachinko-style games.

A Ranque-Hilsch Vortex tube is a device for separating compressed gas into hot and cold streams. While it could not be used for separating marbles by temperature, the same principles could conceivably be used (assuming enough small marbles are poured into the machine at once, and that they do not break or chip in the process of colliding with each other) to produce a "vortex" of marbles leaving one end of the tube and a straight "beam" of rapidly spinning marbles leaving the other.

Maxwell's Demon is a thought experiment by James Clerk Maxwell which would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If implemented, it would, in fact, separate the balls into fast and slow streams. The original thought experiment involved a "demon" controlling a door between two chambers. The demon would only allow fast-moving molecules to move in one direction through the door and slow-moving molecules in the other direction, cause one chamber to warm and the other to cool, through no direct 'external' work, and would decrease the total entropy of the system (which is forbidden by the Second Law), thus proving information is itself a type of entropy and you can convert between the two types.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[Megan is walking towards Cueball and showing her phone. Cueball holds a hand to his face and looks away.]

Megan: Check out this cool video of a Rube Goldberg marble run.

Cueball: No! Not yet.

[Megan has lowered her phone. Cueball has his hand in a fist.]

Cueball: I've always known I'm doomed to eventually become one of those people who builds elaborate marble runs in their garage.

Cueball: I can feel the pull.

Cueball: So satisfying.

[Close-up on Cueball.]

Cueball: I just want to do as many other things as I can before I give in and disappear into that world.

[Megan and Cueball are walking.]

Megan: So you know where you're going to end up, but you're trying to take a really interesting and circuitous path to get there.

Cueball: Exactly. Bounce around, maybe go off a few jumps.

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Discussion

Sorry if this is a mess (it's my first time editing). ProgrammerG (talk) 22:02, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

It's honestly much better than anything I could have done. Trogdor147 (talk) 22:04, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Hey, it's all good. Not sure what you wrote (as opposed to anyone else that then pounced upon it, before I first saw it), but we have our own Rube Goldbergesque way of bashing it all into a (largely) mutually-approved shape. I think I spot some further changes I'd like to make, so I'm going to dive back in in a moment, but it has to start somewhere!

...the only big picky thing I'd say (to whoever did this, here or elsewhere recently), is that its fairly standard to note use the [URL link text] format when you can use the hand {{w}}-template to write {{w|Wiki article title|link text}}, instead, and often this lets you miss the "|link text" part out because the Wiki article title is the link text you want. I mean someone who died whilst creating a template to make this more streamlined, ought to have their work put to good use... ;) 162.158.74.21 23:36, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Added Citation-needed for pacincko inspiration. I mean, I think the order of appearance is even wrong for that to be possible.RandalSchwartz (talk) 00:04, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Hold it. Is this an actual citation needed, or a sarcastic one? If it's a sarcastic one, keep it as is, but I don't think it is. If it is an actual one, then use this tag.^{[actual citation needed]} Trogdor147 (talk) 02:58, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

I read it as an ACN instance (thought as much myself, but hadn't then done basic checks), and the above statement reinforces the feeling.

• Use {{Citation needed}} for "this is so obvious, it'd be funny to say it isn't" situations. And sparingly! ...like, you don't even need one in every single article, never mind several in a single paragraph, because it then just becomes a "who can put a CN in every article/paragraph first" competition, rather than a considered bit of humour (which others might consider is better elsewhere/not there because of their own ideas about that, of course). There are exceptions where maybe over-use is the point (self-referentially in the Wikipedian Protestor article, arguaby), and long and complicated comic descriptions might have many opportunities across a large number of sub-sections for which choice CNing can pop up in a wide sample of their mini-explanations. Although you will find that it's perfectly possible to go too far and thus a later editor decides that none of them deserve to remain, even the genuinely well placed one(s).
• Use {{Actual citation needed}} for genuine 'proper' use of tag, as per elsewhere. Again, sparingly. If you know it's a wrong fact, best to factualise it (or contextualise it, where there's vital nuance that you're aware of) whenever you can. "Begging the question" (an ambiguous phrase, but either use of it) should be considered a stop-gap. Perhaps you intend to return and phrase your doubts properly when you have confirmed your objections/suspicions (or, otherwise, can remove it).

And also put it after the punctuation. e.g. following any comma,{{like here}} and not displacing the punctuation{{like here}}. (Although it can be tricky for some cases.{{here is fine}} But it probably needs a rewrite, anyway, if you're left with a tricky question of placement.{{like here?}}){{or here?}} ...but if you're not trying to shoehorn the tags in, beyond reasonable use, if you can't decided how it looks best then perhaps that means that it also has no point being there, which just reinforces my earlier suggestion on constraint.

YMMV, but then (OtherPeople's)MMV too. So things tend to settle down to the compromise consensus where it just works nicely enough for everyone. 172.70.86.153 09:58, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't know why, but I feel like the phrase "maybe go off a few jumps" has been used by Randall (or somewhere) before, but I can't find anywhere except here/in the original cartoon and it's bugging me that it seems so familiar but there's no evidence of it in the 30-ish seconds of searching I've done so far. 172.71.30.77 16:35, 7 June 2023 (UTC)