Celebrating Solving Puzzle Cubes
The Rubik's Cube continues to demonstrate how amazing humans can be.
It is amazing how fast people can solve a Rubik's Cube. Humans are incredible. You know what is even more impressive? Our ability to build machines that can solve a cube in less than a second. That is exactly what Mitsubishi Electric did with their remarkable cube-solving robot. It's time? .305 seconds! Feel free to blink because even with your eyes open you won't be able to see how fast this thing is moving.
I have been obsessed with the Rubik's Cube since it came out, and it was my first podcast. I would then revisit it again for my 108th episode and then covered the cartoon, Rubik the Amazing Cube. Most people thought that the cube was going to be a short-lived trend back in the eighties, but I am happy to see that we are probably going to be solving these things for a very long time.
(If you have retro finds you would like for me to share, I want to hear them. What old useful website are still lurking on the web? Some old TV show streaming online? Old tech being brought back? Let me know.)
ONE COOL VIDEO
The first Rubik's Cube World Championship was held in June 1982 in Budapest. The highlights include lots of impressive cubing from contestants from around the world. They are fast, but not as fast as most modern speed cubers.
TEN THINGS RETRO
⚙️ Technology - Did you ever want to watch movies on your Atari 2600? Now you can with MovieCart.
📺 Television - I don’t know if you heard, but classic cartoons are back on television. If you have a TV and antenna, you should be tuned into MeTV Toons.
📖 Magazines - Weird Tales was a ground-breaking publication that launched the careers of many great writers. Did you know that a large part of their archive is available online?
🕹️ Video Game - Adverware video games have come a long way since Pepsi Invaders. The restaurant Chili’s has put out a version of the video game BurgerTime, that is very playable.
🍪 Food - Kintsugi is the practice of mending broken pottery that doesn’t hide the breaks, but accentuates them. What does it look like when the same practice is applied to Oreos?
🎵 Music - It took over 4 decades, but they finally identified the model that was used for Patrick Nagel’s artwork on the cover of Duran Duran’s Album, Rio.
🥤 Soda - Big update in the ongoing Soda Wars. Pepsi, who were for a long time giving Coke a run for their money, is no longer the number two soda in America. That honor belongs to one of the older soda’s in the U.S., Dr. Pepper.
🕹️ Video Game - 3D Printers have been out for a while now. You can do lots of interesting things with them, but the coolest might be classic video game dioramas.
🎥 Movie -Butterfly in the Sky, I can go twice as high. Take a look, it's in a book, a Reading Rainbow!
💎 Magic Gemstone - You can buy a magic crystal that, can turn whatever you are to look through it at, into 8-bit.
FROM THE RETROIST ARCHIVE
Let's take a moment to look back at four posts from the Retroist's past. I have been at this a long time.
One Year Ago…
Five Years Ago…
🐉 Erol Otus – Dungeons & Dragons Artist
Ten Years Ago…
🍒 Anyone else miss Cherry Cola Slice?
Fifteen Years Ago…
🎵 Cylon Love Songs – “I Can’t Smile without You”
My father bought a book to learn how to beat a Rubik's Cube which I thought of as cheating but I'm sure most people just check out a hack on YouTube nowadays.