Whether or not it’s actually the best way to lure audiences away from their mobile devices and back to TV remains to be seen, but what’s for certain is that the desperate attempts to win back eyeballs have certainly been entertaining. The Discovery channel had a snake eat a man, but the National Geographic channel went a decidedly less disgusting route with a massive 3.6-tonne Rube Goldberg machine.
The utterly useless yet highly entertaining contraption was built to promote the network’s new science-focused programming, and appropriately harnesses inertia, gravity, and other scientific principals to grab our attention and hopefully a few extra ratings points. [YouTube via Taxi]