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When it comes to chain reactions, San Jose resident Alex Huang and the rest of the six-person Reactica team are real artists. Coming from various homes around North America, they’re part of a YouTube community that builds and shares videos of their Rube Goldberg machines that are made with everything from ping pong balls, playing cards, Altoids tins and even a rice cooker.
While they mostly interact with each other online, this week they’re together IRL at the Tech Interactive with the goal of setting a Guinness World Record for the Largest Rube Goldberg Machine. The current record is 412 steps — a step is a transfer of energy from one object to another — and the Reactica team will try to best that at noon Saturday at the Tech’s New Venture Hall. Last year, the team built the biggest chain reaction in California at the Children’s Discovery Museum.
“We all just really love to build,” said Huang, 20, who studies civil engineering at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and started building in 2011. “This whole community centered around this art that no one seems to know about.”
Besides Huang, the team captain, the other builders are Alex Berlaga of Palo Alto; Evan Voeltner of Milwaukee; Chase Blanchette from Ellicott City, Maryland; Lyle Broughton from Leominster, Massachusetts; and Joel Yantha from Kingston, Ontario. The effort, which raised more than $3,000 through a Kickstarter campaign, is being sponsored by the Tech and the H5 Domino Community. The public can watch the set up between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. this week and the noon “fall down” is open to the public.
Each builder puts his own personality into the machine through the objects he chooses, but much of the framework for the entire machine — spread out over 12 six-foot tables — are K’NEX building sets and tracks from Hot Wheels car sets. There are also wood frames, standardized domino-style pieces and lots of string to connect one piece to another. It’s part engineering, part art and a lot of fun — with the occasional dash of frustration when something doesn’t fall the way it’s expected to.
Huang has done the calculations and says if each of the 420 steps in the machine had a 99% chance of working, the whole machine still has only a 1.5% chance of working. “We’re going to test it over and over,” he said. “Literally, anything can happen.”
IT’S A VEGGIE CELEBRATION: We’ve had bacon festivals, taco festivals and even Sriracha festivals, so why not a festival to celebrate vegetables? This used to be the Valley of the Heart’s Delight, after all. The San Jose Veggie Fest is set for Saturday at Martial Cottle County Park in South San Jose, with performances, games, plant-based food trucks, a beer garden and lots of produce vendors. Admission is free to the event, which runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., but parking is $6.
Colleen Janke, the owner of San Jose cooking school Savory Kitchen, offered some tips for getting the best summer produce and using them in some interesting ways. She says melons, stone fruits and squash are all at their peak right now and can be used to dress up a salad or, in the case of peaches and apricots, adding flavor to a vegan pizza.
The bad news, at least in California, is that the avocado harvest was extremely short. “Try some heirloom tomatoes instead,” she says. “Those are just coming out.”
