thomasng [dot] net a nerds life. changing things one byte at a time.

The Pursuit of Happyness

I saw the Pursuit of Happyness with Chantelle. It was a great movie, based on real events and was very well done. The ending was a little short, though. You have to see it.

I liked the quote where Chris [Will Smith] said “Happiness isn’t something that you can obtain, but it’s something that you must pursue.” I found the internal monologe to be entertaining as well, such as “This is the part of my life where I was being stupid. Trusting my bone density scanner to some hippie girl.” Great movie, but its one of those movies were you only see it once.

Warning… geeky facts about the Rubik’s cube below!

Factoid 1: The Rubik’s cube has approximately 4.21239*10³⁶ combinations. This should break down to (correct me if I’m wrong!):

54!/((8*3)*(9!)⁶) = 4.21239*10³⁶

• 54! (thats 54*53*52*…*3*2*1, or 2.3084*10⁷¹) represents the number of combinations that you can orient all of the cubes (assuming that the Rubix cube doesn’t have the pieces attached to each other)
• There are 8 corners, with 3 possible combinations that a fixed corner can be oriented.
• 9! (that’s 9*8*7*6*5*4*3*2*1, or 362880) represents the number of facelet combinations (just the visible face with the colored sticker)
• And finally, the 6th power because there are six sides.

When it comes down to it, ThinkGeek has it right:

There are 43 quintillion possible combinations with your Rubik’s cube. That’s 43 million million millions. There are about 30 million seconds in a year. You would need over a thousand million years assuming you could look at a thousand patterns every second just to see all the possible combinations.

So you might want to start with the virtual Rubik’s cube now.

Factoid 2: Leyan Lo, a 20-year-old Cal Tech student, currently holds the fastest cube solve time. His time: 11.13 seconds. Welcome to the world of speed cubing.

Factoid 3: Cubaholics Anonymous was formed in 1980 to help curb people off the cube.

I just bought a cube for myself. I’ll have hours of brain smashing fun :-p. I solved it in 20 minutes.

-Thomas