The perplexing life of Ernő Rubik (1986)
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The perplexing life of Ernő Rubik (1986)
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Re: The perplexing life of Ernő Rubik (1986)
#2"It also violated the toy industry's standards: it didn't talk, whistle, cry, shoot, change clothes, appear in a movie, or require batteries."
And it absolutely will not stop, EVER, until you are dead.
Re: The perplexing life of Ernő Rubik (1986)
#3I remember those quite dark times in Hungary, I was a small boy in school and one couldn't travel without complicated paperwork and the option of refusals to the West - and we got permission to buy foreign money only once per three years, so that was quite limiting. In those times Rubik was a huge inspiration, even for me. Parents were telling their children in that era of hopelessness and contra selection that "if you are smart like Rubik, you can also achieve things when you grow up".
I vaguely remember an interview with him in the late 80's, I think he said that he made the cube because he was outraged by the lack of 3D vision of his students.
The "Oliver Twisting" remark is quite funny, actually.
Re: The perplexing life of Ernő Rubik (1986)
#4In 2009 our 9th grade geometry teacher had us all learn to solve Rubiks' cube for a semester project. Never knew the story of the inventor thlugh, pretty cool.
Re: The perplexing life of Ernő Rubik (1986)
#5This would make a really good movie ;) Hungarian language complexity and propensity for 3D thinking are world renown.
The Atomic bomb Considered as Hungarian High School Science Fair Project
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-conside...
Denis Gabor's Nobel Lecture On Holography, 1971
https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/19...
Re: The perplexing life of Ernő Rubik (1986)
#6This would make a really good movie ;) Hungarian language complexity and propensity for 3D thinking are world renown. The Atomic bomb Considered as Hungarian High School Science Fair Project http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-conside... Denis Gabor's Nobel Lecture On Holography, 1971 https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/19...
>Hungarian language complexity and propensity for 3D thinking are world renown
Could you elaborate on this or provide a link? I've never heard about it before.
Re: The perplexing life of Ernő Rubik (1986)
#7This would make a really good movie ;) Hungarian language complexity and propensity for 3D thinking are world renown. The Atomic bomb Considered as Hungarian High School Science Fair Project http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-conside... Denis Gabor's Nobel Lecture On Holography, 1971 https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/19...
>Hungarian language complexity and propensity for 3D thinking are world renown Could you elaborate on this or provide a link? I've never heard about it before.
The language is probably in the top 3 for hardest to learn. Not sure of the 3D stuff.
Re: The perplexing life of Ernő Rubik (1986)
#8Ernö was a professor of mine in an international School in Hungary when I was there for study abroad. He was one of the most insightful people I have ever met and lessons learned from my conversations with him - about perspective, emotion and complexity - still reverberate in my head daily.
Re: The perplexing life of Ernő Rubik (1986)
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Hungarian language complexity and propensity for 3D thinking are world renown Could you elaborate on this or provide a link? I've never heard about it before.
The language is probably in the top 3 for hardest to learn. Not sure of the 3D stuff.
Isn't this because it's so different from anything else?
You can sort of divine some German if you're an English speaker and some Italian if you also understand Spanish, etc. But hey, Japanese is highly regular and also very hard to learn.
(I did play with Duolingo Hungarian for a while, and it seems interestingly regular, although not in ways you might expect)
Re: The perplexing life of Ernő Rubik (1986)
#10> By 1982 the craze was over and the toy's Hungarian manufacturer was going
bust — quite a feat when you consider that probably more than 100 million Cubes
were sold worldwide. But that was precisely the problem: a centrally planned
economy isn’t accustomed to dealing with consumer crazes. A Budapest writer,
Mezei Andras, has written a book and a play called The Hungarian Cube
chronicling the debacle. It started when the officials at the small
manufacturing cooperative, Politech nika, insisted on trying to expand their
operations to meet the burgeoning demand instead of farming out work to other
factories.
> “The company took a loan from the government,” Andras told me, “but they had to wait nine or ten months for it to be approved by all the proper committees. Then it took them six months to order and receive the manufacturing equipment they needed. By that time the craze was finished, so the company had a large debt and no popular product, and the state had to save it from going bankrupt.”
There's a lesson in that episode, which applies both to government and large corporations — it's a good part of why startups have such an economic advantage: they can pivot at the drop of a hat, relatively speaking.