For those who like to seat the small stuff

Blog

Who was Mr Lidl?

By Mark Mason on 18-11-14 16:21. Comments (1)

As a nation changes, so does its trivia. Traditional supermarkets - your Tescos and Sainsburys and Asdas - have been joined in recent years by those cheeky young upstarts Lidl and Aldi. The latter gets its name from Albrecht (the family who started it) Diskont (meaning, of course, ‘pricing policy that has people flocking out of Tesco when a recession hits'.) But where does the name ‘Lidl' come from?

Other pages in this section...

Books

Walks

Inspired by my book Walk the Lines: the London Underground - Overground, each of these trivia-packed walks uncovers London’s history by following a section of a Tube line ... at street level.
Read more...

Quizzes

Tailor made quizzes
Read more...

Podcasts

Aural delights from the world of trivia
Read more...

Content

Rubik's Cube

A Rubik’s cube has more combinations than light travels inches in a century. This is my favourite illustration of how a very small number of factors can produce an absurdly complicated situation. A silly little toy, with only three squares in each of its three dimensions. How can that get complicated? Well, as anyone who's ever tried to solve one just by guessing will tell you, it gets very complicated. The number of possible combinations is 43,252,003,274,489,856,000. Forget billions - that's 43 quintillion and change. (In fact the cube's manufacturers just said ‘billions' in their advertising, figuring that no one would know what a quintillion was. It's a billion billion.) The number of inches light travels in a century, meanwhile, is a mere 37,165,049,856,000,000,000. Or thereabouts.