Reporter Lauren Olesky with Florida news station WPEC proved she can multi-task like few others, delivering her Friday weather report while also solving a Rubik’s Cube.
Multitasking to the max: Weather reporter solves Rubik’s cube while giving the forecast
June 14, 2018 • 2:00 pm
Of course since the weather is the same down there nearly everyday they could just tape that thing.
Wow.
Very impressive, indeed.
I wonder if this will be the start of other Rubik’s Cube challenges. Rubik’s Cube while reporting a hurricane live on the beach. Rubik’s Cube while performing surgery. While giving birth. (Anything but that coffee trick from an earlier post.)
This reminded me of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WALkJpwA_4
I’ve only watched a handful of his videos. This one was bearable for me at least.
It makes it less impressive, in my opinion. You know there’s a formula for solving it no matter how scrambled it is.
That’s pretty impressive!
I can do the Rubik’s Cube and hold a coherent conversation, and I can see she does the cube the same way I do. There’s no way I could deliver a weather report and solve it though. That’s a whole new level.
It probably helps to know what you’re doing with delivering the report, but I’m sure as heck not trying to take anything away from her. She’s amazing.
I dunno, Heather. I bet you could, if the weather was read off a prompter, like she did.
Also not taking anything away from her. Walking and chewing gum took a LOT of practice for me.
Reading it off a prompter would be harder than it seems I think. Concentrating on two things at once like that would screw me up. I guess the form of the text is similar every day, which would help since she’s used to it. I suppose reading the weather, assuming she wrote it in the first place, would take a less concentration for her too.
She uses the same technique I learned in the early 1980s – when I could simultaneously explain the physics homework and “do” the cube. Once you’ve got the “top” face solved, you only need to look at it for a couple of seconds a time to work out which orientation is needed for the “mid-face fill-in” moves, then for the corner placement moves, then for the bottom-face edge cycling. The actual algorithms are done on muscle memory, and go faster if you don’t look while doing them.
My fastest time – on a mini-cube – was under a minute, and my mean about 2 minutes. I got a cube again 4 or 6 years ago, and it took a few hours to work it out again. A stiff new cube – it exploded into pieces in a couple of days when I crossed it’s corners.
What I find more baffling than solving the cube (no I’ve never tried, but obviously any combination of colours can be arrived at by a sufficiently convoluted series of moves) – is how the damn thing works, physically. How *can* the internal mechanism allow rotation in three axes? (Same goes even more for four- and five- cubes). I just can’t get my mind around it.
cr
Dismantling a 3-cube answers that question easily. I’ve never had hold of a 4-cube or 5-cube to try them.
Ah. The internal arrangement of flanges doesn’t necessarily need to respect the dimensions of the visible cube fragments. I can envisage how to make that work for “edge” pieces and “corner” pieces. I haven’t got a mental picture for the fragments around the central spindle on each face.
You had noticed that the central squares of each face never change their relationship to each other?
Yeah, that’s how I do it. I got a new one a few years ago, and I relied on muscle memory doing the corners of the last face. I couldn’t remember the moves, but my body could. Now I do it every few months to make sure I still can, and it’s about time I tried again. It’s been a couple of years.
I’m not quick. I’ve never tried to be, and I don’t do it very often anyway so I’m not practiced enough. And I don’t like ending up with greasy fingers, which you do if you use the cube of someone who’s got their’s set up for speed. It takes me 3-7 minutes.
You go girl.
Like a boss!
That was awesome! I also love how you can hear the crew becoming increasingly excited as the forecast goes along.
Ah, I see she has a wedding ring. Damn. My dreams are dashed once again!
I believe that ring is on her right hand, duder. There may be hope for you yet!
Yeah, but that means that she’s married to another girl, doesn’t it? At least ,that’s how I’ve seen it used, before same-sex civil partnerships were legal.
In the image before you press play, it’s on her right hand, but it’s on her left during the video. Weird.
If she’s single, I think she might be a good match for my brother.
Oh well. I was bound to end up with some competition.
Personally, I don’t think this is impressive at all. I got an original Rubik’s Cube back in the 80s and solved it in 5 hours. I didn’t learn all the algorithms and then just go through the motions like most of these people. I mean, after I solved it the first time in 5 hours, I got quicker and quicker and I think my fastest time is a little over a minute. But again, learning the algorithms just so you can see how fast you can put the cube back in order is not the same as originally solving the puzzle.
First time I tried to solve a Rubik’s Cube it took me 10 minutes.
I broke it apart into individual pieces and then reassembled it.
LOL! I did that too but not within 10 minutes. I think I saw it done years later and then tried it. You know the old saying, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” (Sorry Jerry)
Who cares about Rubik’s cube. It is after 5 pm – what is going on with the ducks?
Mere amateur – the best I have seen was a young women reciting pi to many decimal places while balancing some books on her head and solving rubric’s cube -on youtube somewhere
Actually she didn’t solve the Rubik’s Cube, she recited the forecast backward while starting with a solved cube and twisting it at random, then they played it back in reverse.
Love the idea! But have you ever tried speaking backwards?
cr
Can be done with a lot of practice, even with distractions, but it may not (yet) be possible to make it sound normal when played back.
I first came across Kurt Quinn on this Smarter Every Day Episode. Destin keeps trying more and more intrusive forms of multitasking challenges.
It’s impressive but once you’ve learned the algorithm for solving a cube you don’t even need to look at it apart from the initial orientation. Just follow the formula and you’re done. It probably takes a bit of practice for the sequence to become muscle memory though.
There is a Robot that does it in about 3 seconds.
There is a robot that is under 1 sec. 3 secs is kind of slow since the human record is 4.22 secs currently.
At a magician’s convention last year, a magician was solving the cube while talking. He was, of course, selling his solution to other magicians. He told us that it was a matter of muscle memory, as are so many things in magic.
The Internet is full of solutions. Amazon sells books with the solution too.
Some random facts:
(1) She used the “beginner’s method” which is very slow compared to modern methods (CFOP for most solvers).
(2) She took about 2 mins to solve the cube. A random amateur (like me) can solve it in about 20 secs, and a good amateur is closer to 10 secs. The current WR is 4.22 by Feliks Zemdegs, an Aussie who has been the best in the world for years now.
(3) Solving a cube isn’t a sign of intelligence or coordination or anything other than a willingness to memorize a few algorithms and practice a lot. To be decently fast, you need to memorize 78 different algorithms for the 3rd layer to go quickly (57 OLL algorithms, 21 PLL algorithms). Muscle memory and lots of practice…