Solving a Rubik's Cube is certainly a way for someone to show off their smarts. It's something else entirely to solve one while falling tens of thousands of feet from the sky.
A new YouTube video posted Monday shows someone doing just that, jumping out of a plane and then calmly solving the puzzle while in free fall. It takes approximately 51 seconds for the man to do so before he deployed his chute, letting out a "Woo! Yeah!"
To get an idea of how complicated the popular 3-D combination puzzles are to solve, check out this nugget from the New York Times last year:
A Rubik’s cube can be twisted and twiddled in 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different ways, and 43,252,003,274,489,855,999 of them are wrong.
Those truths — especially the second, maddeningly frustrating one — have been known since soon after the modish, Mondrianish plastic object was invented in 1974. The cube went on to become the must-have toy of 1980 and 1981.
Its popularity faded fast.
By 1982, the cube was so last year, doomed to Hula-Hoop faddishness. In 1986, The New York Times said the cube had been "retired to the attic, the garbage heap and, with a bow to its elegance and ingeniousness, to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art."
Lately it has undergone a resurrection in a world in which engineers and computers can generate helpful algorithms that would-be cube solvers can share with each other. But some things have not changed. The typical Rubik’s cube still has nine squares on six sides, and the same eye-popping colors. And those unfathomable huge numbers in the first paragraph are still quintillions.
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In the 40 years since it was invented, the cube has made some intriguing cameo appearances. Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has leaked intelligence secrets, told two journalists he had arranged to meet that they would recognize him outside a restaurant in Hong Kong because he would have a Rubik’s cube in his hand. Mr. Hoffman said that sounded like an homage to the 2009 film "Duplicity," in which spies played by Julia Roberts and Clive Owen realize who they are because they are both carrying Rubik’s cube key chains.
That could not have happened to the cube’s inventor, Erno Rubik, 69. He said he did not travel with a cube.
"I don’t need to," Mr. Rubik said as he previewed the exhibition this week.
For the record, he calls it "my cube."