Move over Flowbee, inventor Joseph Herscher of Joseph's Machines has figured out a fresh new way to cut one's hair at home using a swinging chandelier and a large kitchen knife. He calls it the "Terrifying Automatic Hair Cutter."

Wouldn't it be nice to get a haircut in the comfort of your own home, for free? I've made a machine for that. Don’t try this at home folks, it may not look like it but I am a professional!

Previously: A complex Rube Goldberg machine that serves cake and A useless machine that wraps gifts in 10 seconds Read the rest

Joseph Herscher of Joseph's Machines has outdone himself with his latest machine. It's an incredibly complex Rube Goldberg machine that took him three months to make called "The Cake Server" and it does just that... serve cake. The "cherry on top" is literally a cherry on top. Watch!

Now watch the behind-the-scenes video:

Previously: A useless machine that wraps gifts in 10 seconds Read the rest

Yep, the Harlem Globetrotters are still doing their thing and as evidenced by their YouTube channel (don't miss their "one take" video from last year), these basketball-spinning darlings are doing it better than ever.

These courtside jesters recently teamed up students from Georgia Tech's colleges of Industrial Design and Music to make this Rube Goldberg 'trick shot' machine. Watch as their starred, red, white, and blue basketball makes its way through a complicated path from a Globetrotter to an impressive hole-in-one.

It's a fun watch (despite all those editing cuts).

(Sploid) Read the rest

Directed by Allen Cordell: "The Aristocrats!" Read the rest

Diguo's Luxury Royal Family Balance Syphon Coffee Maker is an amazingly elaborate coffee siphon, a brewing method dating to the 1830s which is said to produce "a delicate, tea-like cup of coffee," albeit with the caveat that it is "quite persnickety." Read the rest

German sculptor Daniel Kühn created the "Light & Cigarette Machine," which plays Candide while lighting and extending a cigarette; it was later owned by Leonard Bernstein, and was auctioned off to a German collector after his death. Read the rest

Kaplamino made this delightful Rube Goldberg-esque demo using magnets and steel balls.

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Sebastian Ly Serena's website consists solely of a bizarre HTML contraption that animates form elements until all of them have expanded and the author's email address is exposed. It's built entirely from standard web forms and javascript, ugly as sin, and completely wonderful. [via Hacker News, whose commenters are unimpressed because the underlying code doesn't really model a chain reaction.] Read the rest

Mechanical engineering students from The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology built this fantastic Rube Goldberg machine last year to tell the story of Passover, the Jewish holiday starting the evening of April 22 that celebrates the biblical story of the Israelites' exodus from slavery in Egypt. Of course my favorite part of the story, and this video, is the Ten Plagues.

(Thanks, Candy Mabry!)

And here's a behind-the-scenes video:

Read the rest

Wintergatan is Martin Molin's musical alterego, who runs 2,000 steel ball-bearings through its many channels and troughs to strike out a musical composition, turning handles, throwing switches and making other adjustments as needed to play his composition, which is rather catchy. Read the rest

Inventor, director and tinkerer Bob Partington made what he claims is the world's slowest Rube Goldberg Machine. Read the rest

Chain reaction artists and domino builders have collaborated to create what they hope will go on record as the largest chain reaction in history. Read the rest

Engineering, Architecture and Planning students at Technion--Israel Institute of Technology are remembering the story of Moses this Passover as only engineers, architects and planners can. Read the rest

Seth Goldstein's Why Not machine is a glorious Rube Goldberg device that can tie (and untie) a necktie. It's a kinetic sculpture, slow and beautiful and inefficient in a way that can only be called artistic. It's headed for exhibition at the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia. Its inventor, a retired engineer, revels in its unuselessness: "That's not something you can economically justify, but if you're a retiree, you don't have to worry about that anymore. I'm free!" Read the rest

The winners of Purdue University's Rube Goldberg Machine Contest show off their creations on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Read the rest

K'Nex master Austron is constrcting the world's largest K'Nex ball machine. It's located at Bloomington, Minnesota's The Works museum. Austron says:

The machine stands 23.5 feet tall and 40 feet long, and contains over 100,000 pieces. It has 2 lifts, 3 motors, and 8 paths, including a 20 foot free-fall, an 8 foot tall big-ball-factory spiral, and a 60 foot long path which hangs from the ceiling. It takes 3 and a half minutes for a ball to climb to the top of the tallest tower.

"World's Largest K'nex Ball Machine - Teaser" (via Smithsonian) Read the rest

Earlier this week David reviewed and previewed the large-format book, The Art of Rube Goldberg: (A) Inventive (B) Cartoon (C) Genius by Jennifer George. The publisher, Abrams ComicArts, has kindly offered to give a copy to one lucky Boing Boing reader. To enter the giveaway, all you have to do is use the above form to "like" Boing Boing's Facebook page (and if you already have liked Boing Boing's Facebook page, you are in the running to win.) Good luck!

Note: if you aren't on Facebook, don't despair. We will hold more giveaways in the future that don't require Facebook membership.

UPDATE: The winner will also get a redeem code for the iOS app, Rube Works: The Official Rube Goldberg Invention Game Read the rest