I don’t know why, but I never learned to solve a Rubik’s Cube. I am exactly the right age; the durned things appeared on the scene just before I got to primary school and they were common in my high school. But I never got into it. I had one, of course. I pretty much immediately took it apart (very carefully) to see how it worked… just honestly curious about how it worked, not trying to solve it. When I put it back together, I put it together in the solved state because it seemed obvious that if I put it together randomly it couldn’t be solved by then trying to rotation-solve it as usual.

Aside: Yes, of course I did. Any time I found a cube, I’d surreptitiously mechanically detach and flip a few pieces, and then scramble it. Few people are good enough to quickly figure out what has happened.

…and then I never was interested in solving one after I understood how it worked. Tetris? Okay, yeah, that game ate years of my life—because you can’t solve it, you just do it. Anyway, I’m 50 and I just got a Rubik’s Cube.

And what am I doing? Measuring it: Let’s call it 2.2 inches on an edge. How many of them are there? Wikipedia says 350,000,000. Crap, that’s a lot of plastic. How big a pile is that? How big are 350,000,000 2-inch cubes? …and I was hoping Wolfram Alpha would give me units of Empire-State-Buildings or something. Instead, I learned something about the total number of Angels according to the Bible. (That should get you to click, no?)

What’s that? How many ESBs is it? …oh, sorry, it’s 0.0583 ESB. I know right? We’ve only 6% filled the ESB with Rubik’s Cubes?! We need to ramp up production.

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