August 29, 2019 • 48 mins
Rubik's Cubes. Ronald Reagan. Jerry Falwell. Just Say No. One of these things was awesome. Take a guess and hop on board the 80s train.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff. You should know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, You'm welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry's
over there, and we're cubing it up with Rubic the Cube.
Did you see um that cartoon, Rubic the Amazing Cube?
(00:24):
Did you come across that? Okay? I I feel like
we are um well within our rights as far as
fair use goes, since we are talking about this, to
at least play the highly disturbing but also strangely cute
voice of Rubic the Amazing Cube. Can I play this
real quick? Sure? Okay? That is it. It is awfully unusual,
(00:50):
especially when you see this cube. They just basically took it.
Do you remember the Goblin face on Maximum Overdrive on
that on the front of that semi sort of it's
kind of like a cuter version of that that they
put onto a Rubik's Cube, put some feed on it,
and then gave it superpowers. That's Rubic the Amazing Cube.
(01:11):
Before we go any further, Chuck, I just want to
give a shout out for my Chicago show. May I. Yes,
I'm doing a solo End of the World Live show
in Chicago on September twelve at Lincoln Hall and if
you want tickets, go to l h hyphen st dot com. Okay, okay,
So back to rubic Chuck. Yeah, it was kind of
(01:33):
hard to believe that it took until two thousand fourteen
for this thing to be granted National Toy Hall of
Fame inductee status. Uh. It seems like it would have
been much sooner than that because they have sold hundreds
and hundreds of millions of Rubik's Cube since I had one.
I still have one. I could do it at one point.
(01:57):
Oh really, Yeah, I could do it in a couple
of minutes. Wow, Chuck, I'm impressed. I had no idea. Yeah,
I can still do. I can still do one side
and like the top row surrounding that side on all sides,
And that's where I completely forget. Oh, I see, So
you couldn't do it in a couple of minutes now
you just have you could in the past. Yeah, when
(02:19):
I was nine. Um, I'm impressed. I've never been able
to solve a Rubik's Cube. I've never been sucked in
enough to, um like really spend a significant amount of time.
But um I was playing with my niece's Rubik's Cube
the other day studying for this, and um I was like, yeah,
(02:44):
I could see how somebody would become obsessed with this
kind of thing for sure. Yeah, it was fun and
it was you know, to call it all the rage
is an understatement. It was one of the most popular
toys of all time, invented in nine by a math
enthusiast and Hungary and architect professor named er No Rubik.
(03:06):
Appropriately enough, they named him after the cube. That's right.
And if you don't know what we're talking about, it
seems weird to describe a Rubik's Cube, but we'll probably
be taking a task if we do not. I would say,
just come out from under the rock that you've been
living under. But we may have some young listeners who
don't even know what this thing is, this piece of
(03:27):
eighties ephemera, even though it's not ephemera because they're still
pretty popular. But it is a cube made up of
twenty six little mini cubes called cubs, which is kind
of a cute little name. I think, so not as
cute as Rubic the Amazing Cube, but yeah, little cubs
and they're in a three inch by three inch by
three inch. Well that's not quite true, a three by
(03:49):
three by three grid eventually creating a cube that measures
two point two five inches or five point seven centimeters
per side. Right, And so what there's six six cube
faces because it's a cube, and each face has a
different color. There's orange, blue, green, yellow, white, and red
(04:11):
and um. When you when you mix these things up,
it's just a jumble, a riot of different colors like
you've never seen your life. But the point is to
move these cubes around through the eighteen different ways you
can move any given cube, um, so that all of
the colors are lined up, all the colored cubes are
(04:33):
all the same on each face. And it sounds easy, friends,
it is not easy, not at all. Like maybe for
some people it's easy, but for the rest of us,
normal focus normis, it is not easy in any way,
shape or form. No, it is not. Uh And in fact,
they even suggest that you read about how to solve
(04:53):
the Rubik's cube. It is the very rare individual that
can literally just figure it out without any help at all. Um,
that's really tough to do. So it's not like you're
not a cheat. If you look at like how to
solve the Rubik's cube and then memorize these patterns and
practice them. That's sort of the point, right, Yeah, like
go look it up like it's fine. No one will
(05:15):
will get mad at you for that, because it's no
fun to never solve a puzzle. Well, that's why I
think I've never gotten sucked in. I was like, I'm
not even there's no way I'm gonna possibly stumble across this,
and I just don't think like this. My spatial reasoning
is terrible. I'm not great at math. I'm color blind.
Everything just looks white. No, it's really not. I can't
(05:37):
discern squares from from circles. It's just I'm off. So um. Originally,
the Rubik's cube was called the magic cube, and it
was invented, like you said, by Erno Rubik, who was Hungarian.
So it was originally called the Beavish Kotzka, which is
magic cubean the Hungarian means butt head. I believe it does.
(06:00):
The magic butt head was Bevis and butt head a right,
nice man. It's like, where's he going with this after
all these years? It's no, I didn't, but I was like,
I'm I'm going with this will Chuck. I trust him
and I paid off to So Mr Rubik got his
(06:20):
Hungarian patent on the mechanical design of this in and
it was in Hungary only for a while. Uh, and
it did pretty well and hungry. Um, but that's kind
of where it stayed. It was. Uh. It was because
of the politics of the time and the fact that
it was hungry. It was not super easy to get
a an American patent or to bring it over and
(06:43):
market it here in the West, so it was pretty
much a Hungarian local sensation for its early like probably
first year. Yeah, he had like a Hungarian toy manufacturer
make like ten thousand of them, but he wasn't happy
with him, so we cut the run off at five thousand.
So there were five thousands of these things floating around
Budapest and and maybe Hungry in general. And it was
(07:05):
just total serendipity that there was a guy named Tibor Laxi.
And I'm quite sure that's not exactly how you say
his last name, but that's how it's how it spelled.
It's probably like Lucia or something like that. But um,
t Bor, I'm I just love that name. It's a
great name. Um. He was an entrepreneur who had left
Hungry and moved to Austria, so he had really developed
(07:27):
a taste for capitalism. While he happened to be visiting
back home in Budapest when he was at a restaurant
and he noticed a waiter playing with the Beavish kotska,
the magic cube, and um, he said, you there, what
is that? And uh, he said, well, it's the Beavish kotzka.
How about I sell it to you for a dollar?
And I believe he bought that for a dollar, played
(07:49):
around with it for a minute. It was like this
could be big. So he found out who invented it,
and he scheduled a meeting with Erno Rubic. Yeah, and
he would say later on that he that Erno Rubik
had a lot to do with why he decided to
get into business with him. And here's his quote. He said,
when Rubik first walked into the room, I felt like
giving him some money. He looked like a beggar. He
(08:11):
was terribly dressed. You gotta remember this guy as a professor,
so they're not known for their sharp attire. He was
terribly dressed and he had a cheap Hungarian cigarette hanging
out of his mouth. But I knew I had a
genius on my hands, and I told him we could
sell millions. Yeah he was right. Oh man, was he
ever right? He understated it actually, um the t Boar,
(08:36):
I'm just gonna call him t Boar. He took this
magic cube and he started going to toy fairs, uh,
and I think he struck out at a few of them.
But he really hit it out of the park at
the Nuremberg Toy Fair when he met a toy expert
who had connections with Ideal Toy Company. Remember Ideal back
(08:56):
in the day. I think I do for sure. I'm
pretty sure they made that um the uh the uh
what was the daredevil's name, Evil Kin? I think they
made the Evil kinevil stunt bike. You know what's funny
is um they make those now for other they have
(09:16):
there's like an incredible stunt bike with plastic girl. It's
the same exact function. We have one in our house
and you load it up and crank it and there
she goes. Is it the exact same mold? They just
put like different pain on it or something like that.
Knockoff toys. Man, it's slightly different, uh in its design,
but it's clearly like the same exact toy. Do you
(09:38):
remember that gallery of knockoff toys I made back when
we used to blog those. I think it's still up
somewhere on our stuff. You should remember how excited we
would get about gallery page views. Yeah, oh, we'd be like,
holy cow, we're up to seventy and it's only been
up for a week and a half. So funny. So
at the Nuremberg Toy Fair, uh t boor runs into
(10:01):
the guy from Ideal and they end up purchasing it.
They purchased the rights to this, the global rights, and
they they they basically sign up to create a million
Rubik's cubes. Yeah. Also we should say it this toy fair,
he did a pretty smart thing. Instead of like buying
a booth, he just came and worked the floor with
Rubik's cubes and got this like ground buzz going by
(10:24):
walking around and giving these things to people, and like
that's genius. Like for something like this, that's the perfect
way to pique someone's curiosity is not to have some
flashy uh like spinning giant Rubik's cube, is to actually
get in the hands of people walking around the floor,
especially if you say, I'm Tibor Let's party. I bet
(10:46):
you want to call it t boards Cube. It's pretty
good name. He probably did, although he was smart because
I remember originally it was called the Magic Cube. At
some point. If it wasn't t Boor, it was Ideal
who said we're gonna rename this the Rubik's Cube. And
I'm sure Erno Rubik was like, oh, okay, I guess
if you insist. I wonder if he was into it
or not, or if he pushed forward, or if he
(11:06):
was like, I'm not really into that, but if you
think it'll sell cubes, that's what I'm guessing he probably did.
I don't think he was going to stand in the
way of it, but he was not like vying for
it by any means. That's my impression. But I'm just
totally making that up, but that I have the same impression,
which means that if you put our two impressions together,
it equals fact. So Ideal sells one hundred million Rubik's
(11:31):
cubes in the first two years. They just signed up
to sell one million. They sold a hundred million in
two years. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure they had problems
keeping up with production. Uh, some of the accolades, and
eight and eighty one at won the UK's Toy the
Year Award two years running. Um In eighty two, there
were five books about solving it on the New York
(11:53):
Times bestseller list, one of which I owned. I owned
the classic, The Simple Solution to the Rubics Cube by
James G. Norris Q. He was a chemistry student at
Stanford And get this, dude, this book was the number
one best selling book of night period. He sold six
(12:14):
point seven million books and it is still the fasting
selling book in the history of Bantam Books. Is that right?
Can you believe that out of all the books that year,
that was the number one? I can, because that really
kind of underscores just how nuts the not just America,
the world went for Rubicks cube. That the number one
(12:35):
selling book was a book about solving the toy. That
that that was it. Yeah, they had sold five hundred
million of them by the time rolled around. So so
talking about the books though for another second. At one
point the number one, two, and four positions on the
New York Times bestseller list where all Rubik's Cube Solution books.
Three he was probably Stephen King or something, probably and
(12:57):
one of those books was written by a twelve of
year old named Patrick Bossert called You Can Do the Cube,
which is pretty adorable if you think about it, and
Christians later made a movie called Gleaming the Cube, one
of my all time favorites, which had nothing to do
with Rubik's cubes. As it turns out, it was about skateboarding. Um,
so there's a just a craze going on around the world,
(13:21):
like everyone is into the Ruby's Cube. Everyone's buying one.
They sold, like I've seen anywhere from three hundred and
fifty million. The highest I've seen is six hundred million.
They sold a ton of these things, hundreds and hundreds
of millions of them. Are those are the official ones too?
There were plenty of knockoffs. Sure, there was books on
(13:41):
the New York Times bestseller list about this. It was
featured in Times Scientific, American News Scientists. Um. There was
a paper that was printed in the New England Journal
of Medicine that talked about cubists thumb, which is a
real thing. It's a type of tendonitis in your thumb
that you get in your non dominant hand because that's
(14:03):
the hand that you used to stabilize the Rubik's cube,
and so the edge of the cube pressing into the
heel of your thumb where it meets the rest of
your thumb um, that could create tendonitis for people who
were staying up for days on end just playing with
this thing, trying to to beat this puzzle. There was
a craze like like no other. I say, we take
(14:27):
a break, okay, uh, and we come back and we
talk about uh, Mr Rubic or maybe he's a doctor.
I'm gonna call him Dr Rubic, and how he created
the mechanics of this puzzle. Alright, so supposedly Dr Rubik,
(15:06):
surely he's a doctor. I would let's call him Professor
Ruby because he was definitely an architecture professor in a
math genius. Though I'm I'm with he's got to be
a doctor, all right, Professor Dr Rubik, uh supposedly was
not even trying to create this puzzle in n I'm
sorry seventy four when he first started out um, as
legend has it, he was trying to create a mathematical
(15:27):
model for three D design class, which makes sense considering
his job. Other people say, no, he was just really
kind of guy that like to tinker. He was fascinated
by geometry and shapes, and he was trying to just
solve a problem of mechanics in three dimensions. But according
to the Toy Hall of Fame, he was very much
(15:47):
trying to invent a puzzle. Uh, and that may just
be folklore. Yeah, he he knew what he wanted. He
wanted to make this three by three cube that was
made up of smaller cubes that could all like interact
in twist store around like. He had the idea for
the Rubik's cube, which was step one, but step two
was a doozy, and that was figuring out how to
(16:08):
invent a mechanical solution to make this thing work the
way he wanted it to. And apparently he was. Um.
There was a pretty good article Mental Floss by a
guy named Noah Davis who recounted that um one day
Rubic was walking down the Danube alongside the Danube in
Budapest and looked down and noticed that there was just
(16:31):
a pile of nice, polished rounded river rocks and thought,
I've got it. I've been thinking about a cube. Everything's
got to be a cube. But what if I added
a sphere to the mix? Two? And that these things
rotated around us. Fear that would give the freedom of
motion that I need to make this thing work. And
that was that that that that was the solution to
(16:53):
the puzzle, as it were. Yeah, I mean, if you're
like me and probably lots of other kids in the
early eighties, you took your rubiscube apart at some point,
did you? I never, I never saw one. Lots of
video on this. Yeah. Oh yeah, I've got a screw
driver out in pretty short order and pomp those things apart. Uh.
And it's kind of cool when you look at the
you know, when you take all those cubs out, you
(17:14):
get down to the center and those three x s
um and they have each one is tipped with two
opposing center cubis. It's kind of cool looking. And then
it makes sense how all these things fit together and
how it works. Yeah, another way to think about it
is just think about like a sphere a ball, and
then you've got six arms sticking out in in um
(17:34):
at right angles from it, so that it forms a
three dimensional plus side plus signed and at the end
of each one of these arms is a cube, a
colored cube. And though that's the skeleton of the thing,
and then what what erno Rubik figured out was that
that's all that needed to be attached to the center.
You could make the other cubes attached to those those
(17:57):
face cubes, those center cubes qubis. Um. You could make
some cubes qubis attached to those cubis, and then other
cubs attached to the other cubs, and then they will
all kind of rotate around each other. But they're all
really rotating on three different axis coming out of that sphere.
It's a gene like this guy has gotten, like if
(18:18):
he started a craze and as you know, kind of
viewed as this great inventor for the toy like math, physics, architecture,
um in the in a number of different fields. He's
botanical engineering for sure. Yeah, he's viewed as just a
god in some senses for for cracking this this problem
(18:38):
and creating this three dimensional structure that actually works in
in reality that people can learn and study from. That's right.
So he's figured out this the mechanics of it all,
but it's still not a puzzle yet until he applies
these colors. That's what makes it a puzzle, because like
we said that at the beginning, the idea is that
you have all the colors on each side matching one,
(18:59):
and there he applies these colored stickers all over mixes
and twisted up a little bit, and he's like, I've
invented the cube. And then he's like, wait a minute,
I don't know how to solve the puzzle. So he
actually had built this thing, stickered it up, and looked
at it, I imagine with some level of accomplishment, and
(19:20):
then realized that the biggest, probably uh, the hardest thing
to do in this whole process, still lay in front
of him, which was because there were no books out
at this point. Right. He invented it, so he had
to figure out how to solve his own puzzle, and
it took him a while. It took him a month
from what I saw, Yeah, and I imagine he worked
(19:42):
on this pretty much NonStop to figure this thing out.
He he did, and he would like write down like
the different different moves, combination of moves which now they're
called algorithms. Um, it's just types of moves that if
you do them in a specific sequence, will solve a
specific jumbled Rubik's cube. Right, Um, So he wrote them down.
(20:03):
He kind of kept track of it, and that was
like the first the first um, first time anyone had
kind of applied analysis to this, but it would not
be the last, obviously, is the New York Times bestseller shows.
But the reason why it's so difficult to solve a
Rubik's cube just by happenstance is that just the sheer
(20:25):
number of possible configurations of the cube. Right, each face
has nine cubs, and there's six um faces, so there's
fifty four cubs, but they all relate to one another,
and so if you move one, that's one configuration, If
you move it another direction, that's another configuration, and so
on and so on, and so with these fifty four cubs, Chuck,
(20:48):
are you ready for this? Yes? The possible number of
configurations is forty three quintillion, two hundred and fifty two quadrillion,
three trillion, two hundred and seventy four billion, four hundred
and eighty nine million, eight hundred and fifty six thousand
possible configurations of a Rubri's cube. Amazing, and one of
(21:09):
them one is the right one where all six faces
are all the same color. Qubi's just one. So just
doing it accidentally, your chances are one in about forty
three trillion that you're going to stumble upon that right combination,
which is pretty amazing, don't you think. And by the way,
I think I said in their fifty four there's twenty cubes.
(21:35):
I believe there's fifty four faces. Yeah, I mean that's
a deal. Each qub has three sides or two sides,
depending on if it's a corner or an edge, or
one if it's in the center. Right, So it's kind
of confusing. But but nine times six, so nine nine
squares or nine different colors squares times six faces is
(21:57):
fifty four I think fifty four faces twenty something cubies.
This is how good at Matthew Man, It's it's really
because it's so funny because it's such a simple little thing.
But once you start really breaking it down, you're like,
we could make this super confusing if we dried hard,
for sure. But what people have figured out is that
they're they're like, you may have like a one and
(22:19):
forty three quintillion chance of stumbling across the right configuration
by accident, but what people have figured out is that
there are combination of moves like you know, um uh
front right up, up twice and then down. That's that's
an algorithm, and if you apply that to a certain
kind of scrambled a certain configuration of a scrambled Rubik's cube,
(22:41):
it will bring it back to solved. And so people
have spent a lot of time developing algorithms, and that's
why Erno Rubik was originally doing when he was like, oh,
if I do this, this and this, it will make
it solved. And he wrote that down. That's what's called
an algorithm. Yeah, And I remember in the book, like
each book had their own little shorthand, I guess, but
I remember the one that I had. It definitely had
(23:02):
the algorithms all spelled out with like shorthand for what
each move was called. So it would sort of look
like a math problem made out of letters, right, Like
I saw you for up and dfer down, which makes
a lot of sense. But then also, um, you can
you know there you can move something to the right.
You can twist one of the rows of cubes to
(23:24):
the right, but you can also twist it to the
left too. So I saw an apostrophe after like l
apostrophe would be counterclockwise left, and then you can add
a number two, so you do that twice, which is
really a d eighty degree counterclockwise turn. So interesting. It
really is kind of interesting. It like at first, you know,
when I first, um went over this article the first time,
(23:46):
just taking it in, like how this is pretty neat.
But the Rubik's cube I found has many many layers
to it, and you can really keep going deeply into it,
well beyond just playing with the cube and try to
solve it. Like there's a lot of math involved. There's
a lot of physics and mechanics involved. You. I mean,
(24:07):
you can get us sucked into it as you like, Buddy,
just try not to go insane like erno Rubik did.
He did not when he set that that building on fire.
He Uh. It's interesting though, how big of a hit
this became sort of it flew in the face of
a lot of um like sort of rules of the
toy industry and that uh it didn't make sounds, um,
(24:30):
it didn't have interchangeable parts. It didn't have things that
you could sell along with it, like you know, clothing,
You couldn't. I guess you could dress your little Rubik's cube,
but then you have a special relationship with it, I guess,
so you could dress it up and be like him Ruby.
It didn't have batteries. It was never like, well, I
guess it appeared on a TV show. Was that a
TV show? Yeah, it was. It was a Saturday morning
(24:53):
cartoon that came on right before pac Man, which was
honestly one of the all time great cartoons ever. Yeah,
it just it wasn't Mark Codable though, like you would
think it's toy would be. The reason that it appealed
and endured is because it is a real challenge and
you get a real sense of reward once you've done
it right, and that really hooks people. It really does
(25:15):
hook people. And again there's like not there's no shame
in going and looking up algorithms to solve UM Rubik's cubes,
like just processes. And in fact, if you start doing
any kind of research on rubicscues, you'll find like there's
actually specific UM methods of attack that people suggest for
for beginners to start with. There's one called the white
(25:37):
Cross method class which is um entails eating a handful
of white Cross gas station speed up for four days
until you until you get done. It's actually you start
with the edge pieces and then you move to the
corner pieces, putting them all in place and then you
um go on from there, starting with the white face
(25:58):
of the cube. That's right. And uh, this toy was
a big hit anyway, but it it is endured, Uh
not because of stocking stuffers or nostalgia, but it is
endured all these years later because of competition. Yeah. So
let's take a break now and we'll talk about speed
cubing right after this. Well, now we're on the road
(26:21):
driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing or
two from Josh Man Chuck. It's stuff you should know,
all right, Okay, So the Rubik's Cube comes out in
(26:52):
the world basically in ninety and the next year, the
very next year, countries around the world were whole holding
national championships for um solving Rubik's cubes as fast as
you possibly could. It's called speed cubing. Yes. And then
a year after that they all got together, all the
champions of the countries for the very first Rubik's Cube
(27:14):
World Championship in Budapest, which is kind of cool. Um,
And that's what has kept people going for so long,
because there there's people are still trying to beat these records.
I saw a kid and it's kind of hard to
tell what the top times because they list the top
times in these competitions. But I saw a kid on
YouTube do it in like six seconds or four or
(27:36):
five seconds. I saw one do it in three point
four seven. Yeah, I don't know how, like how it's
officially judged though there's a timer, um and one of
those there's one of those mats that you keep your
hands on, But like, why does it say that that
those aren't world records? Then? I don't know. That's what
(27:59):
I saw was the world record was in two thousand eighteen.
It was three point four seven seconds by Yu Shang
Yu Shang do sorry of China. So you've seen other
things listed. I just don't know if there's like the
bodies aren't speaking to one another or what. Maybe it's
that was a a non championship uh time sanctioned event
(28:23):
or even even maybe it was a qualifier or something
like that. So it doesn't count as the world record
unless you get whatever time is done at the World
championship that's considered the world record. Who knows. It's crazy
to see how fast these kids and it's usually kids
that win, um, I guess with their little nimble fingers
and brain sponges. Uh it's crazy how fast they're doing.
(28:46):
It doesn't look real. It looks like some sort of
weird faked video. Yeah. And here's the other thing too.
I'm glad you mentioned brain sponges because it is like
a um, an intellectual pursuit. Like from the beginning of this,
this toy's release in nine teen eighty, like they win
a different route, like you're saying it doesn't require batteries.
It was you know, um, it doesn't make a noise
(29:07):
or anything like that, so they went a different route
in advertising it. And so this is an intelligent game,
like I'm sure Isaac Newton discovered gravity, but could he
solve a Rubik's cube? You know, So they really kind
of play that up. And it's true because these kids
who are solving or people who are solving Rubik's cubes
super fast. It's not just like look or their fingers
are just moving forward them. They have memorized hundreds, if
(29:30):
not thousands, of these algorithms and have gotten to the
point where they can look at a cube and figure
out which algorithm is going to solve it the fastest,
and then when the time starts, they can also move
their fingers really really quick and that's how they're getting
these amazing times. It's not just speed and dexterity, it's
also knowing what algorithm is going to work best. Yeah,
(29:53):
for sure, you know, it died out pretty quickly, like
most fad toys. Um, once you sell a lot of these,
you don't need another one unless you break yours or something.
So it's kind of one of those things where and
which is again why it flew in the face of
the toy industry because they couldn't sell ancillary products alongside it.
But uh, you know, it died out pretty quickly in
(30:15):
the championship. Uh two was the last one for about
twenty years until the Internet comes along and all of
a sudden there are people posting faster times than ever
before than twenty years earlier. And in two thousand three,
UM in Canada, there was a speed cuber named Dan
Gosby who organized a competition in Toronto. And this is
(30:39):
where they're getting it down to, like twenty seconds, and
they have different categories like blindfolded, fewest moves, one handed,
feet feet feet dude. Last year someone did it in
twenty three seconds by foot, which was about the quickest
time by hand at the first competition, Yes, and it
took them longer to figure out that they had solved
(31:00):
it then it did to actually solve it because they
had to use a stick to turn the Rubik's cube
over because they had used their feet to solve it.
And I think, uh, when you participate, it didn't pay
off as well as I thought it would. Sight. Uh,
you get fifteen seconds to look at the cube over.
Um they are all started. Uh, like the cubes are
(31:21):
all started the same with like a computer generated random scramble.
It's just fair. You get that fifteen seconds, you check
it out, you set it on your mat, and then
you go and it's just like I said, it's amazing
to see these things done in like sub four seconds. Yeah,
because they're there. I mean their hands actually do kind
of blur, like you can't really follow where their hands
(31:42):
are at any given time. They barely touch the rubrics cube.
And they're using To be fair, they're using specialized speed cubes.
They're not just using like off the shelf rubrics cubes.
We'll talk about those, go ahead, talk about them. Sure. Yeah.
So so people go to the trouble of getting a
speed cube. It's like, you know, you can get one
for you can get a good one from what I understand,
(32:03):
for about seventies seventy five bucks. And these things are
literally well oiled machines that are just super fast. Some
of them use magnets so that you can tell when
they're snapped into place, and um, they move a lot
more easily and quickly. Um. There you can just look
at and be like, that's a high end Rubik's cube
right there. Yeah. Like you can pay to get your
(32:25):
cube serviced, uh and checked out at speed cube shop.
So someone will take it apart, a technician and they
will look at each of those little cubs for defects
and like, has it got a little bump here that
will slow it down? They'll smooth that out, like you said,
Sometimes they use magnets, um. And one of the reasons
(32:45):
for the magnets is it creates that snap when a
turn is completed. Because if you want to move these
things really fast, you don't want it to be you know,
even if it's an eighth of an inch out of whack,
you're not gonna be able to turn it the other way.
So you want it to snap up and lock into place. Uh,
you know, you want it's just amazing, how how engineered
(33:08):
these things have become. What in these speed cubing competitions, right, well,
I mean just to keep up, you've gotta you've gotta
get yourself a speed cube. If you showed up, like
to an actual competition with just a regular Rubik's cube,
I don't know if you'd be laughed out of place,
but they would. They would certainly feel bad for you.
You know. What they should do is like because you know,
(33:29):
I remember them loosening up really well and getting faster
just because you played with it more. Instead of giving
everyone speed cubes and trying to get this ultra red
Bull record, which they sponsor the events now by the way, Uh,
they should give everyone like out of the package. Make
it as hard as possible. I agree. I think that
there would be some um, you know, preteens who are
(33:52):
really high strung that would cry if they were confronted
with that challenge, if they had to put their speed
cube down. Yeah, they'd be like, this is not fair.
No one prepared me in my life for this. I
did mention Red Bull because it was kind of controversial
for many years. Uh, the Rubics World Championships, Uh, we're
co hosted by the World Cube Association with the support
(34:15):
of the brand. But then clearly some money changed hands
a couple of years ago. That was the Red Bull
Rubik's Cube World Championship. Uh you know, red Bull got involved,
the brand, Rubik got involved, which means there was money
changing hands. You're really fascinated with that money changing hands,
aren't too? Well? I mean sure, because it was I
think everyone saw it as for what it was, which was,
(34:36):
all of a sudden, there's a corporate sponsor attached to it. Yeah,
and that that is like a pretty important point because
like this was there was already a World Championship and
it was like a grassroots organization that had grown up
since two thousand and three and they were doing really well,
and then all of a sudden, fifteen years later, red
Bull comes along attached to the Rubik's Brain is like,
out of the way, nerds, this is the real one.
(34:58):
And so apparently, um, it was a there was a
lot of controversy, like you were saying, but um, now
they kind of coexist and the Red Bull Rubics sponsored
one changed their name from World Championship to World Cup
so that they don't step on each other's feet. At all.
But if you think about it, that's a pretty big
win for this grassroots world cubing association to to be
(35:19):
able to keep their original name and not have to
change their name. You know, Hats off to them. Hats
off indeed. So um one of the uh the the
things that I said about the Rubik's cube, Chuck is
that it's got a lot of layers too, and there's
a lot of surprising math involved. Specifically, there is a
(35:39):
kind of algebra called UM group theory, and um one
of the one of the things that has long kind
of fascinated mathematicians is that there is somewhere in there
a a number of moves, there's an algorithm that has
or there's a number of moves associated with any number
(35:59):
of algorithms. Man, I'm making this way harder than it
actually is. Where it represents the maximum number of moves
you would need to use to solve any configuration, any
of the forty three quintillion configurations of a Rubik's cube.
And some people figured out that this number must exist,
and brother they got obsessed with it. From to two
(36:23):
thousand ten, some people almost set a building full of
Rubik's cubes on fire yeah. I mean they've really researched
this stuff to the point where, uh, like computer scientists
are looking into this. There was a guy, uh named
Thomas rakiki Um who got that the upper limit down
to twenty two moves and this is like Google is
(36:45):
helping him out with the processing power. So they call
it God's algorithm. I mean, in the case of Rubik's cube,
um they got down to twenty is where they landed, right, Yeah,
But God's algorithm can be used for any uzzle really,
uh you know, and that is and why do they
call it God's algorithm? It's what how God would solve
(37:07):
the puzzle. So from what I saw is God's God's
number is that the maximum number of moves that God
would require to solve any configuration of the puzzle. Got
a little confusing in this article because it's a bit
of a brain trick. It's like the fewest moves, but
(37:28):
it's a maximum number of moves right right exactly. It's
it's hard to wrap your mind around. And then there's
actually fewer moves for other algorithms. So I saw God's
number is actually probably more like somewhere between nineteen and twenty.
But because there are algorithms out there that have to
be done in no less than twenty moves. That's still
(37:51):
God's number. And there's also the Devil's number. I saw
it too, which is the number of moves in an
algorithm that it would take to go through all forty
three plus quintillion um configurations before you solve it. Which
I think that's a pretty good name for that one. Yeah,
now that's the one that they're on the trail of now.
(38:13):
But they're they're done at twenty, right, they are. But
I think I think it's interesting that that we're not
entirely certain. It's not like, okay, this has been proven,
it's done. What the reason why they arrived at twenties
because they actually built an algorithm to try to solve
these algorithms. They taught an AI basically how to play
Rubik's Cuba. They said, here's a Rubik's Cuba teacherself, and
(38:36):
then they had it play just just some mind numbing
number of different Rubik's cubes hands trying to solve it,
and it kept coming up with twenty and so it
came up with twenty enough times that they're like, well,
our computer God has told us that twenty is the
is God's number. So there you have it. But we
no one, It wasn't proven, it wasn't solved. It was
(38:58):
just like, this thing is so so smart that we're
just gonna go with twenty. So someone still working on
it then, probably, I guess, but I think I get
the impression that they have moved on to the devil's number. So,
as you would imagine, with the toy of this caliber,
they were bound to be other people saying they invented it,
and patent battles would ensue, and of course this was
(39:18):
the case with the Rubik's Cube. Uh in ninety seven,
when Rubict got his Hungarian patent for the magic Cube,
there was another inventor named Larry Nichols who had already
patented something very similar in the US. Isn't that amazing? Yeah,
this was in nineteen seventy two, but his was for
a two by two by two cube, a three by
(39:39):
three by three, still same concept, And at first he
was like, this is this is hilarious. You know, I
had the same idea, and now it's become a national craze.
It's kind of satisfying. And somebody said, do you have
any idea. How much money you are losing out on
right now? You should sue? He said, Oh my gosh,
you're right, I should sue. And I get the impression
that either the company he worked for or the company
(40:00):
he sold the patent to really lead the charge in
suing for this patent infringement. Um. But he had a
pretty good case. I mean, he had invented it and
patented it years before. It was just the number of
cubes involved was smaller. Yeah, I mean there was another
guy too, a guy named Frank Frank Fox, I thinking
seventy four. He actually did the three by three by three,
(40:22):
but he let his patent laps, whereas Nichols did not.
And those people like you were talking about that he
that actually owned nichols patent were called uh Molecular Research Corporation.
That sounds scary yeah and ligitious. Yeah, yeah they do.
So I want to point out, though, it's definitely worth
saying out right, there is no evidence, and I don't
(40:44):
think anyone's ever leveled in accusation that Erno Rubic stole
this idea. It was just arrived at independently, and he
was working behind the iron curtain at the time too,
So the chances of any exposure are pretty low. It
was just some people kind of came up with the
same idea at the same time. And erno Rubik's is
(41:04):
the one that hit trite. A federal district court ruled
in favor of Moleculon, but then in eighty six and
appeals court overturned that, saying only that two by two
by two uh Rubik's cube because they started making different variations. Um,
they made a smaller one that they said in French.
In fact, I remember now I had a little guy
(41:25):
on a car key for a short time. Oh yeah,
I remember that. I'm not mistaken. But then in nineteen
eighty nine, another appeals court upheld the previous appeals court decision.
I should I should say. I read an article by
that guy uh Nichols who had the original patent, and
they were like, you know you, I think they were
suing for like fifty million or something, and there were
(41:45):
you satisfied with the outcome? He said, yeah, I was satisfied.
He's like, I got enough to put both of my
kids through Harvard, so I'm pretty happy with that. And um,
you know, like he invented this thing that he was
able to send his kid through Harvard with you know, yeah,
that's always interesting when someone wins something like that. But
(42:05):
it wasn't like stolen from him, right, It was just
he had the patent first and they agreed. You know
What's what's even crazier that makes that story just absolutely insane.
He had approached Ideal toys with and they had not
bought it, And then they went on years later to
buy um the the Erno Rubic version. Yeah, they put
(42:27):
out a bunch of difference. They made big ones, like
the tiny ones I just talked about. I remember I
had a snake. I did too, and I had no
idea what to do with that. I just played with
it like it was a snake. I did the same thing. Yeah,
I just twisted around stuff. I still don't know what
you were supposed to do with that thing. I think
eventually the snake would be put together in some sort
of a three dimensional octagon or something, if I remember
(42:49):
for hexagon. Yeah, I was way off, but yeah, I
didn't know how to I didn't even try to learn.
I just kind of played with it. I taught mine
did drink water. Mine drinks from a ups right, that's
very rough. Wickham Uh, Erno Rubik is still alive and well.
He lives in Hungary, still teaches architecture. Uh I imagine,
(43:10):
has a boatload of money, so he's founded some multiple
foundations with the conventers. It's very cool. Yeah, he has
a boatload of money, so much so that his success
story is considered by some to have been the thing
that opened the gates to capitalism in Hungary. Amazing um.
They also made him the president of the Hungarian Engineering
(43:34):
Academy and he's still I think shows up once in
a while to the World Championships and maybe the World Cup.
I don't know. He didn't seem like a very controversial type.
It seems like a good guy. And if you really
want to go crazy, if you've solved a ton of
Rubik's cubes, but this has kind of made your nostalgic
to try something harder. They make a thirteen by thirteen
by thirteen Rubik's Cube, and there's something else called the
(43:56):
S Cube as K E W B and it is
I don't even know what you're supposed to do with it.
It's like the Snake times a trillion to me. And
there's also a movie called Cube which is like Saw
with math. Oh I saw that? Yeah, yeah, it has
nothing to do with Rubik's cubes. And there's uh, The
(44:17):
Pursuit of Happiness where Will Smith gets a job as
a stockbroker because somebody sees him solve a Rubik's cuban
something like two minutes or less. And apparently while he
was promoting that movie he solved one in less than
a minute himself in real life. You mean the movie
The Pursuit of Halpwayness. Did they explain that in the movie.
(44:40):
I'm sure I never saw it. I just always called
it Hapwayness. Did you ever see that one where he
was like super depressed in his his colleagues at work,
like just gaslight him into thinking he's being visited by angels? No?
I didn't. Did you see the one where he went
he was from West Philadelphia and he went to live
with his rich relative. Yeah, I did, as he dressed
(45:04):
very colorfully. He was I think in bel Air. Uh
what was it kill there? I think I was Santa Barbara.
You're right, okay? Uh, Well, if you want to know
more about Will Smith, you can type his name into
the search bar at how stuff works dot com. And
since I said Will Smith it's time for listener mail.
(45:25):
I've got a coconut tree correction. Hey, guys, correction on
something said during the episode The Cult of the Coconut
when you guys talked about the culpa rishka. First of all,
it's not pronounced that way. Uh, it is pronounced culpa rushka.
But we were way off, all right, She says, Uh,
(45:50):
rushka or rushka depending on transliteration, simply means tree in Sanskrit. Okay.
Also always mispronounced by people in the West. By the way,
Oh well, I don't feel that bad. Yeah, exactly correct
pronunciation is uh sounds screwed. Now she's saying sanscrit as
always mispronounced. Oh oh, I see, so it's sand screwed.
(46:11):
Sounds cruteus like as best I can convey. That's what
she says. Wow, okay, yeah, I've always said sanscrit. This
person is a real really into words though, and very smart. Second,
the coconut tree is just one of the trees considered
a how do you pronounce it again, college called cold
(46:33):
cold cook screw cock. Uh huh. There you getting you
nailed it. Not because it is all you need to survive, though,
but because every single part of the coconut tree is
useful to humans, the bark that leaves, the fibers, and
of course the coconuts and their entirety. This concept is
tied closely with why Indians culturally revere certain animals e g.
(46:54):
Cow and plants and trees e g. Banyan and coconut. Okay,
I've noticed on the podcast how you too often go
out of your way to correctly pronounce words or names
in foreign languages like we were, which is something I
appreciate as a bicultural uh penta lingual individual. Perhaps you
could explain your efforts to include not just Western languages,
(47:17):
but Eastern languages too. After all, sal Screwed belongs to
the same language group as German. If you think about it,
I think it would be true to the spirit of
your show. Guys, keep up the good work. And that
is from Ruta our duty A Did Ruta say, did
she sign off with later lamos? No, thanks a lot, Ruta. Yeah.
(47:38):
It's not like we're like, oh, we'll only go to
the trouble of pronouncing something in German or French, which
by the way, we don't very often, and we thought
we were pronouncing it correctly in the Eastern languages. So sorry, Ruda,
I didn't know what sand screwed. I had no idea,
not just us chuck. Like a million people just learned that. Yeah,
(47:59):
close to a mill. I agree. Uh well, thanks a
lot again, Bruta. And if you want to get in
touch with us, like Ruda did, you can go to
stuff you Should Know dot com and check out our
social links, or you can send us a good old
fashioned email to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios
(48:20):
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows
Welcome to Stuff. You should know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, You'm welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry's
over there, and we're cubing it up with Rubic the Cube.
Did you see um that cartoon, Rubic the Amazing Cube?
(00:24):
Did you come across that? Okay? I I feel like
we are um well within our rights as far as
fair use goes, since we are talking about this, to
at least play the highly disturbing but also strangely cute
voice of Rubic the Amazing Cube. Can I play this
real quick? Sure? Okay? That is it. It is awfully unusual,
(00:50):
especially when you see this cube. They just basically took it.
Do you remember the Goblin face on Maximum Overdrive on
that on the front of that semi sort of it's
kind of like a cuter version of that that they
put onto a Rubik's Cube, put some feed on it,
and then gave it superpowers. That's Rubic the Amazing Cube.
(01:11):
Before we go any further, Chuck, I just want to
give a shout out for my Chicago show. May I. Yes,
I'm doing a solo End of the World Live show
in Chicago on September twelve at Lincoln Hall and if
you want tickets, go to l h hyphen st dot com. Okay, okay,
So back to rubic Chuck. Yeah, it was kind of
(01:33):
hard to believe that it took until two thousand fourteen
for this thing to be granted National Toy Hall of
Fame inductee status. Uh. It seems like it would have
been much sooner than that because they have sold hundreds
and hundreds of millions of Rubik's Cube since I had one.
I still have one. I could do it at one point.
(01:57):
Oh really, Yeah, I could do it in a couple
of minutes. Wow, Chuck, I'm impressed. I had no idea. Yeah,
I can still do. I can still do one side
and like the top row surrounding that side on all sides,
And that's where I completely forget. Oh, I see, So
you couldn't do it in a couple of minutes now
you just have you could in the past. Yeah, when
(02:19):
I was nine. Um, I'm impressed. I've never been able
to solve a Rubik's Cube. I've never been sucked in
enough to, um like really spend a significant amount of time.
But um I was playing with my niece's Rubik's Cube
the other day studying for this, and um I was like, yeah,
(02:44):
I could see how somebody would become obsessed with this
kind of thing for sure. Yeah, it was fun and
it was you know, to call it all the rage
is an understatement. It was one of the most popular
toys of all time, invented in nine by a math
enthusiast and Hungary and architect professor named er No Rubik.
(03:06):
Appropriately enough, they named him after the cube. That's right.
And if you don't know what we're talking about, it
seems weird to describe a Rubik's Cube, but we'll probably
be taking a task if we do not. I would say,
just come out from under the rock that you've been
living under. But we may have some young listeners who
don't even know what this thing is, this piece of
(03:27):
eighties ephemera, even though it's not ephemera because they're still
pretty popular. But it is a cube made up of
twenty six little mini cubes called cubs, which is kind
of a cute little name. I think, so not as
cute as Rubic the Amazing Cube, but yeah, little cubs
and they're in a three inch by three inch by
three inch. Well that's not quite true, a three by
(03:49):
three by three grid eventually creating a cube that measures
two point two five inches or five point seven centimeters
per side. Right, And so what there's six six cube
faces because it's a cube, and each face has a
different color. There's orange, blue, green, yellow, white, and red
(04:11):
and um. When you when you mix these things up,
it's just a jumble, a riot of different colors like
you've never seen your life. But the point is to
move these cubes around through the eighteen different ways you
can move any given cube, um, so that all of
the colors are lined up, all the colored cubes are
(04:33):
all the same on each face. And it sounds easy, friends,
it is not easy, not at all. Like maybe for
some people it's easy, but for the rest of us,
normal focus normis, it is not easy in any way,
shape or form. No, it is not. Uh And in fact,
they even suggest that you read about how to solve
(04:53):
the Rubik's cube. It is the very rare individual that
can literally just figure it out without any help at all. Um,
that's really tough to do. So it's not like you're
not a cheat. If you look at like how to
solve the Rubik's cube and then memorize these patterns and
practice them. That's sort of the point, right, Yeah, like
go look it up like it's fine. No one will
(05:15):
will get mad at you for that, because it's no
fun to never solve a puzzle. Well, that's why I
think I've never gotten sucked in. I was like, I'm
not even there's no way I'm gonna possibly stumble across this,
and I just don't think like this. My spatial reasoning
is terrible. I'm not great at math. I'm color blind.
Everything just looks white. No, it's really not. I can't
(05:37):
discern squares from from circles. It's just I'm off. So um. Originally,
the Rubik's cube was called the magic cube, and it
was invented, like you said, by Erno Rubik, who was Hungarian.
So it was originally called the Beavish Kotzka, which is
magic cubean the Hungarian means butt head. I believe it does.
(06:00):
The magic butt head was Bevis and butt head a right,
nice man. It's like, where's he going with this after
all these years? It's no, I didn't, but I was like,
I'm I'm going with this will Chuck. I trust him
and I paid off to So Mr Rubik got his
(06:20):
Hungarian patent on the mechanical design of this in and
it was in Hungary only for a while. Uh, and
it did pretty well and hungry. Um, but that's kind
of where it stayed. It was. Uh. It was because
of the politics of the time and the fact that
it was hungry. It was not super easy to get
a an American patent or to bring it over and
(06:43):
market it here in the West, so it was pretty
much a Hungarian local sensation for its early like probably
first year. Yeah, he had like a Hungarian toy manufacturer
make like ten thousand of them, but he wasn't happy
with him, so we cut the run off at five thousand.
So there were five thousands of these things floating around
Budapest and and maybe Hungry in general. And it was
(07:05):
just total serendipity that there was a guy named Tibor Laxi.
And I'm quite sure that's not exactly how you say
his last name, but that's how it's how it spelled.
It's probably like Lucia or something like that. But um,
t Bor, I'm I just love that name. It's a
great name. Um. He was an entrepreneur who had left
Hungry and moved to Austria, so he had really developed
(07:27):
a taste for capitalism. While he happened to be visiting
back home in Budapest when he was at a restaurant
and he noticed a waiter playing with the Beavish kotska,
the magic cube, and um, he said, you there, what
is that? And uh, he said, well, it's the Beavish kotzka.
How about I sell it to you for a dollar?
And I believe he bought that for a dollar, played
(07:49):
around with it for a minute. It was like this
could be big. So he found out who invented it,
and he scheduled a meeting with Erno Rubic. Yeah, and
he would say later on that he that Erno Rubik
had a lot to do with why he decided to
get into business with him. And here's his quote. He said,
when Rubik first walked into the room, I felt like
giving him some money. He looked like a beggar. He
(08:11):
was terribly dressed. You gotta remember this guy as a professor,
so they're not known for their sharp attire. He was
terribly dressed and he had a cheap Hungarian cigarette hanging
out of his mouth. But I knew I had a
genius on my hands, and I told him we could
sell millions. Yeah he was right. Oh man, was he
ever right? He understated it actually, um the t Boar,
(08:36):
I'm just gonna call him t Boar. He took this
magic cube and he started going to toy fairs, uh,
and I think he struck out at a few of them.
But he really hit it out of the park at
the Nuremberg Toy Fair when he met a toy expert
who had connections with Ideal Toy Company. Remember Ideal back
(08:56):
in the day. I think I do for sure. I'm
pretty sure they made that um the uh the uh
what was the daredevil's name, Evil Kin? I think they
made the Evil kinevil stunt bike. You know what's funny
is um they make those now for other they have
(09:16):
there's like an incredible stunt bike with plastic girl. It's
the same exact function. We have one in our house
and you load it up and crank it and there
she goes. Is it the exact same mold? They just
put like different pain on it or something like that.
Knockoff toys. Man, it's slightly different, uh in its design,
but it's clearly like the same exact toy. Do you
(09:38):
remember that gallery of knockoff toys I made back when
we used to blog those. I think it's still up
somewhere on our stuff. You should remember how excited we
would get about gallery page views. Yeah, oh, we'd be like,
holy cow, we're up to seventy and it's only been
up for a week and a half. So funny. So
at the Nuremberg Toy Fair, uh t boor runs into
(10:01):
the guy from Ideal and they end up purchasing it.
They purchased the rights to this, the global rights, and
they they they basically sign up to create a million
Rubik's cubes. Yeah. Also we should say it this toy fair,
he did a pretty smart thing. Instead of like buying
a booth, he just came and worked the floor with
Rubik's cubes and got this like ground buzz going by
(10:24):
walking around and giving these things to people, and like
that's genius. Like for something like this, that's the perfect
way to pique someone's curiosity is not to have some
flashy uh like spinning giant Rubik's cube, is to actually
get in the hands of people walking around the floor,
especially if you say, I'm Tibor Let's party. I bet
(10:46):
you want to call it t boards Cube. It's pretty
good name. He probably did, although he was smart because
I remember originally it was called the Magic Cube. At
some point. If it wasn't t Boor, it was Ideal
who said we're gonna rename this the Rubik's Cube. And
I'm sure Erno Rubik was like, oh, okay, I guess
if you insist. I wonder if he was into it
or not, or if he pushed forward, or if he
(11:06):
was like, I'm not really into that, but if you
think it'll sell cubes, that's what I'm guessing he probably did.
I don't think he was going to stand in the
way of it, but he was not like vying for
it by any means. That's my impression. But I'm just
totally making that up, but that I have the same impression,
which means that if you put our two impressions together,
it equals fact. So Ideal sells one hundred million Rubik's
(11:31):
cubes in the first two years. They just signed up
to sell one million. They sold a hundred million in
two years. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure they had problems
keeping up with production. Uh, some of the accolades, and
eight and eighty one at won the UK's Toy the
Year Award two years running. Um In eighty two, there
were five books about solving it on the New York
(11:53):
Times bestseller list, one of which I owned. I owned
the classic, The Simple Solution to the Rubics Cube by
James G. Norris Q. He was a chemistry student at
Stanford And get this, dude, this book was the number
one best selling book of night period. He sold six
(12:14):
point seven million books and it is still the fasting
selling book in the history of Bantam Books. Is that right?
Can you believe that out of all the books that year,
that was the number one? I can, because that really
kind of underscores just how nuts the not just America,
the world went for Rubicks cube. That the number one
(12:35):
selling book was a book about solving the toy. That
that that was it. Yeah, they had sold five hundred
million of them by the time rolled around. So so
talking about the books though for another second. At one
point the number one, two, and four positions on the
New York Times bestseller list where all Rubik's Cube Solution books.
Three he was probably Stephen King or something, probably and
(12:57):
one of those books was written by a twelve of
year old named Patrick Bossert called You Can Do the Cube,
which is pretty adorable if you think about it, and
Christians later made a movie called Gleaming the Cube, one
of my all time favorites, which had nothing to do
with Rubik's cubes. As it turns out, it was about skateboarding. Um,
so there's a just a craze going on around the world,
(13:21):
like everyone is into the Ruby's Cube. Everyone's buying one.
They sold, like I've seen anywhere from three hundred and
fifty million. The highest I've seen is six hundred million.
They sold a ton of these things, hundreds and hundreds
of millions of them. Are those are the official ones too?
There were plenty of knockoffs. Sure, there was books on
(13:41):
the New York Times bestseller list about this. It was
featured in Times Scientific, American News Scientists. Um. There was
a paper that was printed in the New England Journal
of Medicine that talked about cubists thumb, which is a
real thing. It's a type of tendonitis in your thumb
that you get in your non dominant hand because that's
(14:03):
the hand that you used to stabilize the Rubik's cube,
and so the edge of the cube pressing into the
heel of your thumb where it meets the rest of
your thumb um, that could create tendonitis for people who
were staying up for days on end just playing with
this thing, trying to to beat this puzzle. There was
a craze like like no other. I say, we take
(14:27):
a break, okay, uh, and we come back and we
talk about uh, Mr Rubic or maybe he's a doctor.
I'm gonna call him Dr Rubic, and how he created
the mechanics of this puzzle. Alright, so supposedly Dr Rubik,
(15:06):
surely he's a doctor. I would let's call him Professor
Ruby because he was definitely an architecture professor in a
math genius. Though I'm I'm with he's got to be
a doctor, all right, Professor Dr Rubik, uh supposedly was
not even trying to create this puzzle in n I'm
sorry seventy four when he first started out um, as
legend has it, he was trying to create a mathematical
(15:27):
model for three D design class, which makes sense considering
his job. Other people say, no, he was just really
kind of guy that like to tinker. He was fascinated
by geometry and shapes, and he was trying to just
solve a problem of mechanics in three dimensions. But according
to the Toy Hall of Fame, he was very much
(15:47):
trying to invent a puzzle. Uh, and that may just
be folklore. Yeah, he he knew what he wanted. He
wanted to make this three by three cube that was
made up of smaller cubes that could all like interact
in twist store around like. He had the idea for
the Rubik's cube, which was step one, but step two
was a doozy, and that was figuring out how to
(16:08):
invent a mechanical solution to make this thing work the
way he wanted it to. And apparently he was. Um.
There was a pretty good article Mental Floss by a
guy named Noah Davis who recounted that um one day
Rubic was walking down the Danube alongside the Danube in
Budapest and looked down and noticed that there was just
(16:31):
a pile of nice, polished rounded river rocks and thought,
I've got it. I've been thinking about a cube. Everything's
got to be a cube. But what if I added
a sphere to the mix? Two? And that these things
rotated around us. Fear that would give the freedom of
motion that I need to make this thing work. And
that was that that that that was the solution to
(16:53):
the puzzle, as it were. Yeah, I mean, if you're
like me and probably lots of other kids in the
early eighties, you took your rubiscube apart at some point,
did you? I never, I never saw one. Lots of
video on this. Yeah. Oh yeah, I've got a screw
driver out in pretty short order and pomp those things apart. Uh.
And it's kind of cool when you look at the
you know, when you take all those cubs out, you
(17:14):
get down to the center and those three x s
um and they have each one is tipped with two
opposing center cubis. It's kind of cool looking. And then
it makes sense how all these things fit together and
how it works. Yeah, another way to think about it
is just think about like a sphere a ball, and
then you've got six arms sticking out in in um
(17:34):
at right angles from it, so that it forms a
three dimensional plus side plus signed and at the end
of each one of these arms is a cube, a
colored cube. And though that's the skeleton of the thing,
and then what what erno Rubik figured out was that
that's all that needed to be attached to the center.
You could make the other cubes attached to those those
(17:57):
face cubes, those center cubes qubis. Um. You could make
some cubes qubis attached to those cubis, and then other
cubs attached to the other cubs, and then they will
all kind of rotate around each other. But they're all
really rotating on three different axis coming out of that sphere.
It's a gene like this guy has gotten, like if
(18:18):
he started a craze and as you know, kind of
viewed as this great inventor for the toy like math, physics, architecture,
um in the in a number of different fields. He's
botanical engineering for sure. Yeah, he's viewed as just a
god in some senses for for cracking this this problem
(18:38):
and creating this three dimensional structure that actually works in
in reality that people can learn and study from. That's right.
So he's figured out this the mechanics of it all,
but it's still not a puzzle yet until he applies
these colors. That's what makes it a puzzle, because like
we said that at the beginning, the idea is that
you have all the colors on each side matching one,
(18:59):
and there he applies these colored stickers all over mixes
and twisted up a little bit, and he's like, I've
invented the cube. And then he's like, wait a minute,
I don't know how to solve the puzzle. So he
actually had built this thing, stickered it up, and looked
at it, I imagine with some level of accomplishment, and
(19:20):
then realized that the biggest, probably uh, the hardest thing
to do in this whole process, still lay in front
of him, which was because there were no books out
at this point. Right. He invented it, so he had
to figure out how to solve his own puzzle, and
it took him a while. It took him a month
from what I saw, Yeah, and I imagine he worked
(19:42):
on this pretty much NonStop to figure this thing out.
He he did, and he would like write down like
the different different moves, combination of moves which now they're
called algorithms. Um, it's just types of moves that if
you do them in a specific sequence, will solve a
specific jumbled Rubik's cube. Right, Um, So he wrote them down.
(20:03):
He kind of kept track of it, and that was
like the first the first um, first time anyone had
kind of applied analysis to this, but it would not
be the last, obviously, is the New York Times bestseller shows.
But the reason why it's so difficult to solve a
Rubik's cube just by happenstance is that just the sheer
(20:25):
number of possible configurations of the cube. Right, each face
has nine cubs, and there's six um faces, so there's
fifty four cubs, but they all relate to one another,
and so if you move one, that's one configuration, If
you move it another direction, that's another configuration, and so
on and so on, and so with these fifty four cubs, Chuck,
(20:48):
are you ready for this? Yes? The possible number of
configurations is forty three quintillion, two hundred and fifty two quadrillion,
three trillion, two hundred and seventy four billion, four hundred
and eighty nine million, eight hundred and fifty six thousand
possible configurations of a Rubri's cube. Amazing, and one of
(21:09):
them one is the right one where all six faces
are all the same color. Qubi's just one. So just
doing it accidentally, your chances are one in about forty
three trillion that you're going to stumble upon that right combination,
which is pretty amazing, don't you think. And by the way,
I think I said in their fifty four there's twenty cubes.
(21:35):
I believe there's fifty four faces. Yeah, I mean that's
a deal. Each qub has three sides or two sides,
depending on if it's a corner or an edge, or
one if it's in the center. Right, So it's kind
of confusing. But but nine times six, so nine nine
squares or nine different colors squares times six faces is
(21:57):
fifty four I think fifty four faces twenty something cubies.
This is how good at Matthew Man, It's it's really
because it's so funny because it's such a simple little thing.
But once you start really breaking it down, you're like,
we could make this super confusing if we dried hard,
for sure. But what people have figured out is that
they're they're like, you may have like a one and
(22:19):
forty three quintillion chance of stumbling across the right configuration
by accident, but what people have figured out is that
there are combination of moves like you know, um uh
front right up, up twice and then down. That's that's
an algorithm, and if you apply that to a certain
kind of scrambled a certain configuration of a scrambled Rubik's cube,
(22:41):
it will bring it back to solved. And so people
have spent a lot of time developing algorithms, and that's
why Erno Rubik was originally doing when he was like, oh,
if I do this, this and this, it will make
it solved. And he wrote that down. That's what's called
an algorithm. Yeah, And I remember in the book, like
each book had their own little shorthand, I guess, but
I remember the one that I had. It definitely had
(23:02):
the algorithms all spelled out with like shorthand for what
each move was called. So it would sort of look
like a math problem made out of letters, right, Like
I saw you for up and dfer down, which makes
a lot of sense. But then also, um, you can
you know there you can move something to the right.
You can twist one of the rows of cubes to
(23:24):
the right, but you can also twist it to the
left too. So I saw an apostrophe after like l
apostrophe would be counterclockwise left, and then you can add
a number two, so you do that twice, which is
really a d eighty degree counterclockwise turn. So interesting. It
really is kind of interesting. It like at first, you know,
when I first, um went over this article the first time,
(23:46):
just taking it in, like how this is pretty neat.
But the Rubik's cube I found has many many layers
to it, and you can really keep going deeply into it,
well beyond just playing with the cube and try to
solve it. Like there's a lot of math involved. There's
a lot of physics and mechanics involved. You. I mean,
(24:07):
you can get us sucked into it as you like, Buddy,
just try not to go insane like erno Rubik did.
He did not when he set that that building on fire.
He Uh. It's interesting though, how big of a hit
this became sort of it flew in the face of
a lot of um like sort of rules of the
toy industry and that uh it didn't make sounds, um,
(24:30):
it didn't have interchangeable parts. It didn't have things that
you could sell along with it, like you know, clothing,
You couldn't. I guess you could dress your little Rubik's cube,
but then you have a special relationship with it, I guess,
so you could dress it up and be like him Ruby.
It didn't have batteries. It was never like, well, I
guess it appeared on a TV show. Was that a
TV show? Yeah, it was. It was a Saturday morning
(24:53):
cartoon that came on right before pac Man, which was
honestly one of the all time great cartoons ever. Yeah,
it just it wasn't Mark Codable though, like you would
think it's toy would be. The reason that it appealed
and endured is because it is a real challenge and
you get a real sense of reward once you've done
it right, and that really hooks people. It really does
(25:15):
hook people. And again there's like not there's no shame
in going and looking up algorithms to solve UM Rubik's cubes,
like just processes. And in fact, if you start doing
any kind of research on rubicscues, you'll find like there's
actually specific UM methods of attack that people suggest for
for beginners to start with. There's one called the white
(25:37):
Cross method class which is um entails eating a handful
of white Cross gas station speed up for four days
until you until you get done. It's actually you start
with the edge pieces and then you move to the
corner pieces, putting them all in place and then you
um go on from there, starting with the white face
(25:58):
of the cube. That's right. And uh, this toy was
a big hit anyway, but it it is endured, Uh
not because of stocking stuffers or nostalgia, but it is
endured all these years later because of competition. Yeah. So
let's take a break now and we'll talk about speed
cubing right after this. Well, now we're on the road
(26:21):
driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing or
two from Josh Man Chuck. It's stuff you should know,
all right, Okay, So the Rubik's Cube comes out in
(26:52):
the world basically in ninety and the next year, the
very next year, countries around the world were whole holding
national championships for um solving Rubik's cubes as fast as
you possibly could. It's called speed cubing. Yes. And then
a year after that they all got together, all the
champions of the countries for the very first Rubik's Cube
(27:14):
World Championship in Budapest, which is kind of cool. Um,
And that's what has kept people going for so long,
because there there's people are still trying to beat these records.
I saw a kid and it's kind of hard to
tell what the top times because they list the top
times in these competitions. But I saw a kid on
YouTube do it in like six seconds or four or
(27:36):
five seconds. I saw one do it in three point
four seven. Yeah, I don't know how, like how it's
officially judged though there's a timer, um and one of
those there's one of those mats that you keep your
hands on, But like, why does it say that that
those aren't world records? Then? I don't know. That's what
(27:59):
I saw was the world record was in two thousand eighteen.
It was three point four seven seconds by Yu Shang
Yu Shang do sorry of China. So you've seen other
things listed. I just don't know if there's like the
bodies aren't speaking to one another or what. Maybe it's
that was a a non championship uh time sanctioned event
(28:23):
or even even maybe it was a qualifier or something
like that. So it doesn't count as the world record
unless you get whatever time is done at the World
championship that's considered the world record. Who knows. It's crazy
to see how fast these kids and it's usually kids
that win, um, I guess with their little nimble fingers
and brain sponges. Uh it's crazy how fast they're doing.
(28:46):
It doesn't look real. It looks like some sort of
weird faked video. Yeah. And here's the other thing too.
I'm glad you mentioned brain sponges because it is like
a um, an intellectual pursuit. Like from the beginning of this,
this toy's release in nine teen eighty, like they win
a different route, like you're saying it doesn't require batteries.
It was you know, um, it doesn't make a noise
(29:07):
or anything like that, so they went a different route
in advertising it. And so this is an intelligent game,
like I'm sure Isaac Newton discovered gravity, but could he
solve a Rubik's cube? You know, So they really kind
of play that up. And it's true because these kids
who are solving or people who are solving Rubik's cubes
super fast. It's not just like look or their fingers
are just moving forward them. They have memorized hundreds, if
(29:30):
not thousands, of these algorithms and have gotten to the
point where they can look at a cube and figure
out which algorithm is going to solve it the fastest,
and then when the time starts, they can also move
their fingers really really quick and that's how they're getting
these amazing times. It's not just speed and dexterity, it's
also knowing what algorithm is going to work best. Yeah,
(29:53):
for sure, you know, it died out pretty quickly, like
most fad toys. Um, once you sell a lot of these,
you don't need another one unless you break yours or something.
So it's kind of one of those things where and
which is again why it flew in the face of
the toy industry because they couldn't sell ancillary products alongside it.
But uh, you know, it died out pretty quickly in
(30:15):
the championship. Uh two was the last one for about
twenty years until the Internet comes along and all of
a sudden there are people posting faster times than ever
before than twenty years earlier. And in two thousand three,
UM in Canada, there was a speed cuber named Dan
Gosby who organized a competition in Toronto. And this is
(30:39):
where they're getting it down to, like twenty seconds, and
they have different categories like blindfolded, fewest moves, one handed,
feet feet feet dude. Last year someone did it in
twenty three seconds by foot, which was about the quickest
time by hand at the first competition, Yes, and it
took them longer to figure out that they had solved
(31:00):
it then it did to actually solve it because they
had to use a stick to turn the Rubik's cube
over because they had used their feet to solve it.
And I think, uh, when you participate, it didn't pay
off as well as I thought it would. Sight. Uh,
you get fifteen seconds to look at the cube over.
Um they are all started. Uh, like the cubes are
(31:21):
all started the same with like a computer generated random scramble.
It's just fair. You get that fifteen seconds, you check
it out, you set it on your mat, and then
you go and it's just like I said, it's amazing
to see these things done in like sub four seconds. Yeah,
because they're there. I mean their hands actually do kind
of blur, like you can't really follow where their hands
(31:42):
are at any given time. They barely touch the rubrics cube.
And they're using To be fair, they're using specialized speed cubes.
They're not just using like off the shelf rubrics cubes.
We'll talk about those, go ahead, talk about them. Sure. Yeah.
So so people go to the trouble of getting a
speed cube. It's like, you know, you can get one
for you can get a good one from what I understand,
(32:03):
for about seventies seventy five bucks. And these things are
literally well oiled machines that are just super fast. Some
of them use magnets so that you can tell when
they're snapped into place, and um, they move a lot
more easily and quickly. Um. There you can just look
at and be like, that's a high end Rubik's cube
right there. Yeah. Like you can pay to get your
(32:25):
cube serviced, uh and checked out at speed cube shop.
So someone will take it apart, a technician and they
will look at each of those little cubs for defects
and like, has it got a little bump here that
will slow it down? They'll smooth that out, like you said,
Sometimes they use magnets, um. And one of the reasons
(32:45):
for the magnets is it creates that snap when a
turn is completed. Because if you want to move these
things really fast, you don't want it to be you know,
even if it's an eighth of an inch out of whack,
you're not gonna be able to turn it the other way.
So you want it to snap up and lock into place. Uh,
you know, you want it's just amazing, how how engineered
(33:08):
these things have become. What in these speed cubing competitions, right, well,
I mean just to keep up, you've gotta you've gotta
get yourself a speed cube. If you showed up, like
to an actual competition with just a regular Rubik's cube,
I don't know if you'd be laughed out of place,
but they would. They would certainly feel bad for you.
You know. What they should do is like because you know,
(33:29):
I remember them loosening up really well and getting faster
just because you played with it more. Instead of giving
everyone speed cubes and trying to get this ultra red
Bull record, which they sponsor the events now by the way, Uh,
they should give everyone like out of the package. Make
it as hard as possible. I agree. I think that
there would be some um, you know, preteens who are
(33:52):
really high strung that would cry if they were confronted
with that challenge, if they had to put their speed
cube down. Yeah, they'd be like, this is not fair.
No one prepared me in my life for this. I
did mention Red Bull because it was kind of controversial
for many years. Uh, the Rubics World Championships, Uh, we're
co hosted by the World Cube Association with the support
(34:15):
of the brand. But then clearly some money changed hands
a couple of years ago. That was the Red Bull
Rubik's Cube World Championship. Uh you know, red Bull got involved,
the brand, Rubik got involved, which means there was money
changing hands. You're really fascinated with that money changing hands,
aren't too? Well? I mean sure, because it was I
think everyone saw it as for what it was, which was,
(34:36):
all of a sudden, there's a corporate sponsor attached to it. Yeah,
and that that is like a pretty important point because
like this was there was already a World Championship and
it was like a grassroots organization that had grown up
since two thousand and three and they were doing really well,
and then all of a sudden, fifteen years later, red
Bull comes along attached to the Rubik's Brain is like,
out of the way, nerds, this is the real one.
(34:58):
And so apparently, um, it was a there was a
lot of controversy, like you were saying, but um, now
they kind of coexist and the Red Bull Rubics sponsored
one changed their name from World Championship to World Cup
so that they don't step on each other's feet. At all.
But if you think about it, that's a pretty big
win for this grassroots world cubing association to to be
(35:19):
able to keep their original name and not have to
change their name. You know, Hats off to them. Hats
off indeed. So um one of the uh the the
things that I said about the Rubik's cube, Chuck is
that it's got a lot of layers too, and there's
a lot of surprising math involved. Specifically, there is a
(35:39):
kind of algebra called UM group theory, and um one
of the one of the things that has long kind
of fascinated mathematicians is that there is somewhere in there
a a number of moves, there's an algorithm that has
or there's a number of moves associated with any number
(35:59):
of algorithms. Man, I'm making this way harder than it
actually is. Where it represents the maximum number of moves
you would need to use to solve any configuration, any
of the forty three quintillion configurations of a Rubik's cube.
And some people figured out that this number must exist,
and brother they got obsessed with it. From to two
(36:23):
thousand ten, some people almost set a building full of
Rubik's cubes on fire yeah. I mean they've really researched
this stuff to the point where, uh, like computer scientists
are looking into this. There was a guy, uh named
Thomas rakiki Um who got that the upper limit down
to twenty two moves and this is like Google is
(36:45):
helping him out with the processing power. So they call
it God's algorithm. I mean, in the case of Rubik's cube,
um they got down to twenty is where they landed, right, Yeah,
But God's algorithm can be used for any uzzle really,
uh you know, and that is and why do they
call it God's algorithm? It's what how God would solve
(37:07):
the puzzle. So from what I saw is God's God's
number is that the maximum number of moves that God
would require to solve any configuration of the puzzle. Got
a little confusing in this article because it's a bit
of a brain trick. It's like the fewest moves, but
(37:28):
it's a maximum number of moves right right exactly. It's
it's hard to wrap your mind around. And then there's
actually fewer moves for other algorithms. So I saw God's
number is actually probably more like somewhere between nineteen and twenty.
But because there are algorithms out there that have to
be done in no less than twenty moves. That's still
(37:51):
God's number. And there's also the Devil's number. I saw
it too, which is the number of moves in an
algorithm that it would take to go through all forty
three plus quintillion um configurations before you solve it. Which
I think that's a pretty good name for that one. Yeah,
now that's the one that they're on the trail of now.
(38:13):
But they're they're done at twenty, right, they are. But
I think I think it's interesting that that we're not
entirely certain. It's not like, okay, this has been proven,
it's done. What the reason why they arrived at twenties
because they actually built an algorithm to try to solve
these algorithms. They taught an AI basically how to play
Rubik's Cuba. They said, here's a Rubik's Cuba teacherself, and
(38:36):
then they had it play just just some mind numbing
number of different Rubik's cubes hands trying to solve it,
and it kept coming up with twenty and so it
came up with twenty enough times that they're like, well,
our computer God has told us that twenty is the
is God's number. So there you have it. But we
no one, It wasn't proven, it wasn't solved. It was
(38:58):
just like, this thing is so so smart that we're
just gonna go with twenty. So someone still working on
it then, probably, I guess, but I think I get
the impression that they have moved on to the devil's number. So,
as you would imagine, with the toy of this caliber,
they were bound to be other people saying they invented it,
and patent battles would ensue, and of course this was
(39:18):
the case with the Rubik's Cube. Uh in ninety seven,
when Rubict got his Hungarian patent for the magic Cube,
there was another inventor named Larry Nichols who had already
patented something very similar in the US. Isn't that amazing? Yeah,
this was in nineteen seventy two, but his was for
a two by two by two cube, a three by
(39:39):
three by three, still same concept, And at first he
was like, this is this is hilarious. You know, I
had the same idea, and now it's become a national craze.
It's kind of satisfying. And somebody said, do you have
any idea. How much money you are losing out on
right now? You should sue? He said, Oh my gosh,
you're right, I should sue. And I get the impression
that either the company he worked for or the company
(40:00):
he sold the patent to really lead the charge in
suing for this patent infringement. Um. But he had a
pretty good case. I mean, he had invented it and
patented it years before. It was just the number of
cubes involved was smaller. Yeah, I mean there was another
guy too, a guy named Frank Frank Fox, I thinking
seventy four. He actually did the three by three by three,
(40:22):
but he let his patent laps, whereas Nichols did not.
And those people like you were talking about that he
that actually owned nichols patent were called uh Molecular Research Corporation.
That sounds scary yeah and ligitious. Yeah, yeah they do.
So I want to point out, though, it's definitely worth
saying out right, there is no evidence, and I don't
(40:44):
think anyone's ever leveled in accusation that Erno Rubic stole
this idea. It was just arrived at independently, and he
was working behind the iron curtain at the time too,
So the chances of any exposure are pretty low. It
was just some people kind of came up with the
same idea at the same time. And erno Rubik's is
(41:04):
the one that hit trite. A federal district court ruled
in favor of Moleculon, but then in eighty six and
appeals court overturned that, saying only that two by two
by two uh Rubik's cube because they started making different variations. Um,
they made a smaller one that they said in French.
In fact, I remember now I had a little guy
(41:25):
on a car key for a short time. Oh yeah,
I remember that. I'm not mistaken. But then in nineteen
eighty nine, another appeals court upheld the previous appeals court decision.
I should I should say. I read an article by
that guy uh Nichols who had the original patent, and
they were like, you know you, I think they were
suing for like fifty million or something, and there were
(41:45):
you satisfied with the outcome? He said, yeah, I was satisfied.
He's like, I got enough to put both of my
kids through Harvard, so I'm pretty happy with that. And um,
you know, like he invented this thing that he was
able to send his kid through Harvard with you know, yeah,
that's always interesting when someone wins something like that. But
(42:05):
it wasn't like stolen from him, right, It was just
he had the patent first and they agreed. You know
What's what's even crazier that makes that story just absolutely insane.
He had approached Ideal toys with and they had not
bought it, And then they went on years later to
buy um the the Erno Rubic version. Yeah, they put
(42:27):
out a bunch of difference. They made big ones, like
the tiny ones I just talked about. I remember I
had a snake. I did too, and I had no
idea what to do with that. I just played with
it like it was a snake. I did the same thing. Yeah,
I just twisted around stuff. I still don't know what
you were supposed to do with that thing. I think
eventually the snake would be put together in some sort
of a three dimensional octagon or something, if I remember
(42:49):
for hexagon. Yeah, I was way off, but yeah, I
didn't know how to I didn't even try to learn.
I just kind of played with it. I taught mine
did drink water. Mine drinks from a ups right, that's
very rough. Wickham Uh, Erno Rubik is still alive and well.
He lives in Hungary, still teaches architecture. Uh I imagine,
(43:10):
has a boatload of money, so he's founded some multiple
foundations with the conventers. It's very cool. Yeah, he has
a boatload of money, so much so that his success
story is considered by some to have been the thing
that opened the gates to capitalism in Hungary. Amazing um.
They also made him the president of the Hungarian Engineering
(43:34):
Academy and he's still I think shows up once in
a while to the World Championships and maybe the World Cup.
I don't know. He didn't seem like a very controversial type.
It seems like a good guy. And if you really
want to go crazy, if you've solved a ton of
Rubik's cubes, but this has kind of made your nostalgic
to try something harder. They make a thirteen by thirteen
by thirteen Rubik's Cube, and there's something else called the
(43:56):
S Cube as K E W B and it is
I don't even know what you're supposed to do with it.
It's like the Snake times a trillion to me. And
there's also a movie called Cube which is like Saw
with math. Oh I saw that? Yeah, yeah, it has
nothing to do with Rubik's cubes. And there's uh, The
(44:17):
Pursuit of Happiness where Will Smith gets a job as
a stockbroker because somebody sees him solve a Rubik's cuban
something like two minutes or less. And apparently while he
was promoting that movie he solved one in less than
a minute himself in real life. You mean the movie
The Pursuit of Halpwayness. Did they explain that in the movie.
(44:40):
I'm sure I never saw it. I just always called
it Hapwayness. Did you ever see that one where he
was like super depressed in his his colleagues at work,
like just gaslight him into thinking he's being visited by angels? No?
I didn't. Did you see the one where he went
he was from West Philadelphia and he went to live
with his rich relative. Yeah, I did, as he dressed
(45:04):
very colorfully. He was I think in bel Air. Uh
what was it kill there? I think I was Santa Barbara.
You're right, okay? Uh, Well, if you want to know
more about Will Smith, you can type his name into
the search bar at how stuff works dot com. And
since I said Will Smith it's time for listener mail.
(45:25):
I've got a coconut tree correction. Hey, guys, correction on
something said during the episode The Cult of the Coconut
when you guys talked about the culpa rishka. First of all,
it's not pronounced that way. Uh, it is pronounced culpa rushka.
But we were way off, all right, She says, Uh,
(45:50):
rushka or rushka depending on transliteration, simply means tree in Sanskrit. Okay.
Also always mispronounced by people in the West. By the way,
Oh well, I don't feel that bad. Yeah, exactly correct
pronunciation is uh sounds screwed. Now she's saying sanscrit as
always mispronounced. Oh oh, I see, so it's sand screwed.
(46:11):
Sounds cruteus like as best I can convey. That's what
she says. Wow, okay, yeah, I've always said sanscrit. This
person is a real really into words though, and very smart. Second,
the coconut tree is just one of the trees considered
a how do you pronounce it again, college called cold
(46:33):
cold cook screw cock. Uh huh. There you getting you
nailed it. Not because it is all you need to survive, though,
but because every single part of the coconut tree is
useful to humans, the bark that leaves, the fibers, and
of course the coconuts and their entirety. This concept is
tied closely with why Indians culturally revere certain animals e g.
(46:54):
Cow and plants and trees e g. Banyan and coconut. Okay,
I've noticed on the podcast how you too often go
out of your way to correctly pronounce words or names
in foreign languages like we were, which is something I
appreciate as a bicultural uh penta lingual individual. Perhaps you
could explain your efforts to include not just Western languages,
(47:17):
but Eastern languages too. After all, sal Screwed belongs to
the same language group as German. If you think about it,
I think it would be true to the spirit of
your show. Guys, keep up the good work. And that
is from Ruta our duty A Did Ruta say, did
she sign off with later lamos? No, thanks a lot, Ruta. Yeah.
(47:38):
It's not like we're like, oh, we'll only go to
the trouble of pronouncing something in German or French, which
by the way, we don't very often, and we thought
we were pronouncing it correctly in the Eastern languages. So sorry, Ruda,
I didn't know what sand screwed. I had no idea,
not just us chuck. Like a million people just learned that. Yeah,
(47:59):
close to a mill. I agree. Uh well, thanks a
lot again, Bruta. And if you want to get in
touch with us, like Ruda did, you can go to
stuff you Should Know dot com and check out our
social links, or you can send us a good old
fashioned email to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios
(48:20):
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
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Josh Clark
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