📜 The Short History of the Rubik's Cube
How a Hungarian architect invented the world's most popular puzzle • 3 min read
Went down the history rabbit hole of the Rubik’s cube this week. The Smithsonian Magazine has a short and sweet write up of how Erno Rubik came up with the twisty puzzle:
At first glance, the cube seems deceptively simple, featuring nine colored squares on each side. In its starting state, each side has a uniform color — red, green, yellow, orange, blue, or white. To solve the puzzle, you must twist the cubes so that eventually each side returns to its original color: The challenge is the astounding number of potential variations — more than 43 quintillion of them.
To master the cube, you must learn a sequence of movements that can be performed in successive order — the subject of several best-selling books as well as online tutorials. And the evolution of the cube — from a three-by-three-by-three shape to larger four-by-four-by-four and five-by-five-by-five ones — offers different complicated mathematical principles of group theory.
– Hope Reese, writing for Smithsonian Magazine
This piece couples well with the Rubik’s cube’s history entry on Ruwix, the speedcubing wiki:
The Rubik’s Cube had made its mark on the world. In 1980, the same year that the cube was released worldwide, it won the Toy of the Year Award. The cube hooked both youngsters and adults, and by 1982 over 100 million cubes had been sold.
The apparent simplicity but incredible difficulty of the puzzle stumped millions, and very few people even today can say that they have solved a Rubik’s Cube without a guide or tutorial.
– Ruwix
Three (other) things I enjoyed this week
🎼 One song
Sufjan Stevens’ The Predatory Wasp of The Palisades is Out To Get Us! – one of my favorite tracks from the multi-instrumentalist and folk musician Sufjan Stevens, it recounts their experience in a Methodist summer camp they attended in their youth.
📹 One video
The Wall Street Journal’s How TikTok's Algorithm Figures You Out – this fascinating deep dive into TikTok’s algorithm helped me visualize how content is aggregated and distributed on the platform. A must see for anyone interested in how some of our feeds suss out what we might like to see next.
📖 One article
The Wall Street Journal’s These People Who Work From Home Have a Secret: They Have Two Jobs – this article is a wild ride: never knew people could have enough bandwidth to juggle multiple full time jobs.
Alone in their home offices, they toggle between two laptops. They play “Tetris” with their calendars, trying to dodge endless meetings. Sometimes they log on to two meetings at once. They use paid time off—in some cases, unlimited—to juggle the occasional big project or ramp up at a new gig. Many say they don’t work more than 40 hours a week for both jobs combined. They don’t apologize for taking advantage of a system they feel has taken advantage of them.
– Rachel Feintzeig, writing for The Wall Street Journal