Austin: Dear Nintendo...
Austin: Hi! It's-a Me!
A-Austin!
I'm taking a break between melancholy, thought-provoking videos in order to sit comfortably
in my wheelhouse of too much math about cartoon violence about things nobody
asked for, and today we're doing a big one, one that I've been planning since, I kid you not,
at least November of 2017, and that is this:
How strong would Mario have to be in order to break these brick blocks?
BOOM!
One of the oldest conventions in modern gaming, and we're gonna bust it wide open!
Are you ready? I'm ready. (All of us are)
Lets. Do this.
This episode was delayed for over a year, because honestly,
I kind of desperately wanted to see if I could pay someone to try and break open an actual brick block,
but it turns out that nobody in all of Illinois is willing to risk thousands of dollars of hospital bills for the slight chance of getting a few bucks for me.
Cowards! (Says you)
But, the more I looked into it, the more I understood why I couldn't get Anybody to try, because, first of all,
professional stuff breakers are, well, a little bit swindlers.
I mean, okay, not, not entirely, because doing this does require a significant amount of skill,
but what you may not understand is that these strongman displays are often just for show.
You do have to be strong and careful, but they're stacking the deck in their favor.
They use more easily-broken materials and, like, a stack of cement carefully placed with spacers is easier to break than a solid cement block of the same mass.
In fact, MOST of these demonstrations boil down to a mechanical advantage, not a strength advantage.
Breaking one block at a time and taking advantage of the weight above pressing down on blocks below using leverage on the side of bricks
to maximize the impact of your force, folding a phone book in a specific way so you're actually tearing through
individual pages one at a time instead of all of them at once,
all of these are taking advantage of leverage and conservation of energy.
All of these things come into play one way or another.
And there's a huge difference between the loosely-packed cement used to make cinder blocks and the dense,
fire-hardened clay bricks that are used in Super Mario World.
Breaking just one of these is difficult, but an entire block constructed of these? That is quite the feat, but, is it possible?
Let's figure it out.
You know what revelation blew my mind?
The observation that Mario is not hitting these blocks with his head, which I thought for YEARS was the case. He is punching them!
I know most of you probably know this by now, but the few of you who don't, check out how he jumps, how he's Always jumped.
The fist is ABOVE his head.
This has been confirmed by Nintendo President, Tatsumi Kimi-Shama (*Shima*) who, when asked about how Mario is hitting the blocks, replied:
"If you mean, specifically, Mario, the answer is his FIST."
"I realized the graphics are relatively small in those games, and, of course, cruder than we have now achieved, but it is absolutely his fist."
"Unfortunately, his brother did not learn from his example."
DAMN IT, LUIGI!
AAAAAAAnyway, this is good for our little plumber, because the top of your head is NOT the best thing to be hitting a giant brick block with.
You're just asking for concussions, serious brain damage, and skull fractures.
If you were gonna do this with a part of your head, you'd probably want to use the frontal upper portion here, the frontal bone,
and NOT the sutures that connect the various plates that are separated from each other when you're born in order to aid in the birthing process and allow for brain growth.
Using measurements from the most recent Mario game, Super Mario Odyssey, and Mario's canon height, which we've confirmed several times over the course of the show, to be accurate,
1.55 meters, we can determine that a brick block is over a meter tall and would weigh over 171 kilograms,
OR OVER TWO AUSTINS!
For proud Americans like me, that's over 350 pounds, and also explains why it was essentially impossible
to find a mason willing to build me one of these things, considering I'd need it to be mobile.
We know that these are, for sure, construction-grade bricks, because we see them supporting weight, the entire weight of castles, point effect,
so these aren't like flimsy Styrofoam bricks, otherwise they'd blow away, and honestly, tiny Mario would be more than capable of busting them up,
and I guess now is as good a time as any to talk about forces in engineering.
There's three main forces to be worried about:
tensile, compressive and shear forces, which, in short, can be thought of as pulling, pushing and cutting forces.
Bricks have very, very high compressive strength, which is why they're excellent for building with.
According to several studies run in the 80s, fired-clay bricks have a compressive strength of anywhere between 18 to 75 Newtons per square millimeter.
However, they have very low shear strength by comparison, which means while they can have a ton,
like, literally tons of weight placed upon them before they start to fail,
they can withstand significantly less impact and shear stresses before breaking.
This is good for us, because, like, if the shear strength and the compressive strength were at all similar,
it would require like, a bomb going off to break these bricks.
But, don't start to celebrate yet. These blocks, when broken, split into four pieces.
Stresses are measured in cross sections; given that each block is a little over a meter,
this means that one cross section is 1.15 square meters.
If you double this, because, you know, it actually breaks into four pieces and not two, you get a cross-sectional area of 2.306 square meters.
With the average shear strength of construction grade bricks being 3.49 Newtons per square millimeter,
this means it'd take, no joke,
over 8 MILLION Newton's to split these blocks apart!
For context, that's the weight of four blue whales under Earth's gravity,
but that's not like THE most unbelievable thing, because what REALLY matters is pressure.
There's plenty of blue whales out there hanging out, but nothing bad happens, because they're not running into anything.
Meanwhile, bullets can hit you with as little as sixty two newtons of force, but because they deliver it over such a small surface area,
they deliver an incredible amount of pressure that can, you know, kill you!
Measuring Mario's fist at a liberal 5,000 square millimeters, this means delivering a punch powerful enough to crack a brick block in this way would require...
Ho Ho Hooah! Ha Hah!
244,000,000 Pascals of pressure!
That is significant!
That is the chamber pressure of a .50 Caliber Browning Machine Gun, and is significantly more than enough to shatter bones.
It is basically a small bomb.
Plus, knowing that Force = Mass x Acceleration, either Mario weighs 800,000 kilograms, or his fist is impacting those bricks several times the speed of sound,
and even THEN he'd still have to weigh several tons.
DOUBLE YEW TEE EFF
How?! How is that possible?!
You can't even say it's weak mortar or something, because you can clearly see the bricks splitting in two and go flying.
They're not just falling apart at the seams!
And poor Luigi! Tall, good boy Luigi!
According to Kiri (*Kimi*) shama, he's hitting the bricks with his head!
How is he not dead, or even severely brain damaged?!
*Austin's Frustrated Noises*
Totally ignoring the fact that every brick in the kingdom is made out of the inhabitants of the Mushroom Kingdom, and they're essentially committing murder,
but, I mean, look, *struggling to speak*  look at Mario!
He's totally fine! Eight bajillion games of cracking bricks and nothing's wrong!
AAAAAAH!
How did they even let him be in Smash Brothers?! That's terrifying!
He's clearly not a human being, and the fact that his fist is basically like, a pneumatic Jackhammer is Not Okay! Not okay at all!
Every time he punches an opponent, they should be exploding into blood and guts everywhere! Just everywhere! That is not sportsman-like.
This guy is in the wrong game.
He should be in, like, Mortal Combat, or Killer Instinct or something.
Do not let him near Street Fighter!
Poor Chun-Li. Her Helicopter Kick would be no match for this... capable of blasting apart construction-grade ceramics.
I just- Nintendo, why are you always putting me in these situations?
Pokemon that can destroy the planet, home run bats that goo-ify anyone hit with them,
moves that would collapse the entire economy of the Pokemon universe, cataclysmic weather in Zelda games,
it's almost like you're just making games to just be fun instead of following a strict code of consistent science and mathematics to appease the nitpickers of the world.
Okay, you know what, on second thought, that does seem like a better business model.
Just, you know what, er, never mind. Ignore me.
Sincerely, Austin.
P.S.
Austin: Okay, so I am currently outside in Chicago Winter...
Austin: Because my video ended up being just short...
of 30 minute- *corrects himself* 10 minutes long, um, which is bad for watch times and promotion,
and so I figured I would pad time, but instead of just adding a bunch music at the end, I'm gonna break some bricks with
this 16 pound sledge that I decided to buy like an idiot,
Uh-Hum,
Because I was like,
"I should buy the heaviest one!"
and didn't take into account that I haven't been working out this year at all,
and the bricks are not construction grade, because I couldn't find construction grade bricks at the hardware store,
because apparently you actually have to buy them in bulk for a brick yard,
and I'm impulsive, and did not plan, but I'm gonna do it anyway, so give me a second, I'm gonna set up and then we'll do this real quick.
(The Set-Up)
Peach Butt
(The Set-Up)
(The Preparation)
(The Failure)
(IKR)
(The Redemption)
(The Failure)
(The Retry)
(The Reenactment)
(A Brick and a Hard Place, directed by Michael Bay)
