Homer3

Homer Simpson gets sucked into the third dimension... a rather cheesy 3D animation, back in the days when they were difficult to make. Among the shiny cones, cubes and other objects, there are a few interesting easter eggs put in by the animators:

• The Utah teapot
• The ascii sequence 46 72 69 6E 6B 20 72 75 6C 65 73 - "Frink rules"
• The Fermat near miss 1782^12 + 1841^12 = 1922^12
• e^(pi*i) = -1
• P = NP
• The library and fish pond from Myst. The background music sounds rather familiar too.
• 1 + 1 = 2. Not quite as complex as the other formulae.

Although I'll be damned if I can figure out what the number 734 is supposed to signify.

"It should be obvious to even the most dimwitted individual... who holds an advanced degree in hyberbolic topology... that Homer Simpson has entered...

the Third Dimension!!!"

I loved this episode. I was never sure whether Matt Groening et al. had found new depths to their humour or whether the geeks who did the animation did all the jokes.

The Utah teapot, the first object to be convincingly rendered in 3D, appears in the same frames where the number 734 is glowing in midair. This confused me for a while---why not 196, or the Hardy-Ramanujan number, or something more interesting?...---then it finally dawned on me that 734 is l33tsp34k for `tea'.

Sigh.