(Roughly) Daily

“For the past seven years I have done nothing but travel around the world getting shot up, locked up, blown up … and all I have to show for it are a couple of empty rolls of duct tape.”
– MacGyver (MacGyver, Season Two, “Friends”)

Readers of a certain age will remember MacGyver– the man-with-a-mullet who, from 1985 through 1992, fashioned jury-rigged solutions to the dangerous problems that were his weekly lot as the secret agent star of his eponymously-titled TV series.

Now Fathom Information Design has compiled an interactive collection of every “recipe” from the show…

click the image above, or here

Have you ever wondered in how many different episodes MacGyver has made an arc welder (answer: 3 times in episodes 6, 52, and 87)? Or perhaps you forgot about your favorite episode (season 1, episode 12) when Mac escapes via a casket that transforms into a jetski. And how many times has Mac made a diversion? In order to placate all of your MacGyver-related curiosities, we offer you MacRecipes.

We assembled data from MacGyverOnline and IMDB, and using Processing and Processing.js we produced the ultimate MacGyver recipe book. Click on any of the recipes to see information about the ingredients as well as information about the episode. Further investigate the ubiquity of simple recipe ingredients and products by clicking on words listed under “Similar Recipes.”

Younger readers not yet familiar with this inspirational icon of inventiveness (and older readers who are nostalgic) can find all seven seasons streaming on Netflix Instant…

[TotH to Flowing Data]

As we resolve to Be Prepared, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 that U.S. Patent No. 4,666,425 for keeping a severed (human) head alive (“DEVICE FOR PERFUSING AN ANIMAL HEAD“) was issued to “Chet Fleming.”  “Fleming” was the pseudonym of engineer and patent attorney Patrick Kelly, who believed that the patent might allow him to block– or at least to slow– research in this area (which, as he describes in his book If We Can Keep a Severed Head Alive …, he saw as ethically dangerous).  Sadly for Kelly’s cause, the patent was subsequently invalidated.

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