Happy Birthday, again, America. Whatever faults remain, even 237 years later, and whatever new wrinkles you might now countenance, you remain the globe’s shining symbol of hope. And your flag, that enduring icon of freedom, waves proudly still.
A cubing tribute to your Stars and Stripes:
Well, Mr. Snowden just can’t stay out of the headlines — and probably doesn’t care to — what with his (not-so-)clandestine flight to Moscow, his newfound alliance with Wikileaks, etc. Dude’s in a mess of trouble.
I couldn’t help but snicker when I read the opening lines in this NY Times article last week:
WASHINGTON — The source had instructed his media contacts to come to Hong Kong, visit a particular out-of-the-way corner of a certain hotel, and ask — loudly — for directions to another part of the hotel. If all seemed well, the source would walk past holding a Rubik’s Cube. They followed the directions. A man with a Rubik’s Cube appeared. It was Edward J. Snowden....
Just one issue: Seems like this self-proclaimed hero du jour didn’t realize that no one over 16 has played with a Rubik’s cube in public since about 1982. (Even our esteemed cubing competitions take place behind closed doors — or, with World in Vegas this year, at least away from anyone who would notice or care.)
Like Manning before him, Snowden seems better at stealing secrets than counter-intelligence. Even our bad spies are no good!?!
I wrote a while back about my older son exploring the cube. Well, when my 20-month-old saw me filming the Megaminx walk-through yesterday (on the eve of Fathers’ Day), he wanted in on the act, too.
He rejected the technique in my tutorial as inefficient, and devised his own way of solving the Megaminx: Drop it. Watch pieces fly off. Put it back together. Repeat.
To all the dads out there doing all the things dads do, and to my boys and wife who make this a very meaningful day for me, HAPPY FATHERS’ DAY!
I’ve been on a Megaminx kick for the past 10 days. After posting that 10-minute (plus) non-last-layer solve, I practiced a bit more and finally did learn the last layer (beginners’ tutorial coming soon). I’m down to about 6 minutes now for a full solve. With one exception that I’ll point to in my upcoming last layer post, I couldn’t find many good Megaminx tutorials online. Instead, I kept bumping into statements that solving a Megaminx is just like solving a 3×3 — but with a bunch more F2L steps. Yeah, that is basically right. But not entirely.
On a cube there are just 4 F2L slots. Except for some incremental efficiency gains, there’s really no magic to the order in which you fill those slots. On a Megaminx, order does matter — at least, I found that certain face/slot orders flows more smoothly, with a lot less potential for accidentally destroying already-solved portions.
I also found that there will always be one tricky V-shaped slot formed by an edge-corner-edge (ECE) trio. In the end, it turns out that’s it’s not that hard to form and insert the trio without breaking up the solved neighboring faces. I just wish someone would have created a clear tutorial one it, since it’s not entirely intuitive. Having figured out a technique that worked well for me, I decided to do a quick walk-thru video showing the face/slot order I use and then explaining the way I fill that ECE trio:
This is a beginner doing a beginner’s work; there’s some inefficiency and excess hunting throughout. Continue reading
A friend and I have a unspoken tradition of buying gag gifts for each other off our Amazon wish-lists, which amounts to us placing a bunch of random stuff on the lists to see what the other orders. Traditionally, it’s been music or movies, but we’ve definitely had some weird things come up — digital home thermostats, drill bits, and the like. Long ago, I placed a stickerless Dayan Megaminx (a dodecahedron shaped puzzle) on my list and forgot about it. I had no real interest in it, had no expectation of ever being able to solve it (I was a 2-minute 3×3 solver at the time), and, more than anything, thought it would be a funny item for the wishlist. Lo and behold, it arrived at my house last December. I messed with a few times, got frustrated, and stashed it on my shelf.
A couple days ago, my 19-month-old brought it over to me, having scrambled it on his way. My OCD thusly challenged, solve it I had to. Which meant learning how to solve it.
I approached it entirely intuitively after realizing through a couple web searches that it’s essentially a complicated 3×3 — with 12 faces (rather than six), each with 5 edges and 5 corners (rather than 4). I experimented a couple times and then, on my third, decided to give it a go on video. Here is the result — a 10-minute solve (excluding the last layer), presented at 3x speed: Continue reading
adventures in cubing 