rubik’s cube – Life In A Word

For Christmas this year I’m putting a small ornament into my wife’s stocking. It’s a miniature of… well… let’s just leave it at “a miniature” in case she reads this post. But I know she’ll love this ornament and promptly hang it on our tree for the remainder of the season. Why will she love it? Because it’ll spark fond, romantic memories. But she’ll also love this ornament because she can’t help loving something that’s a little, well, little.

One of my bucket list items – still to be fulfilled – is a trip to the south of France for a taste of those wonderful wines created from Burgundy or Bordeaux grapes. Maybe you hope to make the same trip some day so I’ll let you in on a little secret. If your trip only allows a visit to Paris, you can still visit a vineyard… right in the middle of the city. Most people visit the neighborhood of Montmartre to see the Sacre Coeur cathedral but most don’t know about the tiny vineyard just steps away. Clos Montmarte produces wine on a single acre, from 2,000 vines forging a connection to the long-ago rural times of the region. Compare an acre to the wineries in Bordeaux, with vines covering an average of fifty times that much property.

Harvesting the grapes at little Clos Montmartre

Clos Montmarte wines probably aren’t award-winning. Who knows if I’d even care for the taste of their reds or rosés. But does it really matter? I love the thought of a teeny-tiny field of grapes right in the middle of Paris. I love how the grapes are harvested by locals and transported to the cellars of the nearby Town Hall to be pressed and turned into wine. The whole operation is appealing to me because it’s quaint and because it’s small.

This affection for itty-bitty things must hearken back to our childhoods. Who among us didn’t spend countless hours of playtime with (take your pick) little dolls, little cars, little houses, or scaled-down trains? When we played at the beach we built little castles. When we played in creeks we made little boats out of sticks or leaves and watched them flow with the water. Tea parties meant tiny cups and plates on tiny tables.

In today’s world the toys might be different but the attraction to small things remains. It fascinates me to watch my (little) granddaughter choose her favorite toy from among dozens: a set of ten two-inch high Sesame Street characters. She stands them up all over the house. She hides them and then finds them. She always seems to have one or two in her hands. Even though my granddaughter doesn’t speak in complete sentences yet, she probably has complete thoughts as she considers tiny Big Bird. You are a lot smaller than me and that’s why I like you so much.

If you include Japanese toymaker MegaHouse in this year’s Christmas purchases, maybe you’ll go for their world’s smallest operational Rubik’s cube. You can’t get one until next April, but picture this: the minuscule marvel is one 1,000th of the size of the original. Pull out your metric measure to confirm it; a single face of the wee cube measures only 5mm from side to side. Best throw a pair of tweezers into the Christmas stocking along with the cube. There’s no way you’ll be able to rotate the Rubik’s colors with fingers alone.

Would I want the world’s smallest operational Rubik’s cube, you ask? Heck yeah! Consider, the faces of a traditional Rubik’s cube contain a 9×9 grid. Then someone went and created a miniature Rubik’s cube with 2×2 grids. I thought, how very cute. I just had to have one so my original would have a little buddy. My cubes are hanging out together on my home office shelf as we speak. And they’re asking for an even littler buddy for Christmas.

So let’s summarize the pint-sized products we’ve covered today. I already have the ornament for my wife in-hand (soon to be in-stocking). I won’t put a bow on a bottle of Montmartre wine this year because I want the chance to see the tiny Paris winery for myself first. And you probably thought I sprung for one of MegaHouse’s pee-wee Rubik’s cubes (and a pair of tweezers). Sadly, no. I don’t have the $5,300 it costs to buy one (minuscule marvels aren’t cheap!) Thankfully, my wife will be happy with an adorable little ornament for $15 instead.

Some content sourced from the CNN Travel article, “The secret vineyard in the middle of Paris…”, and the CNN Style article, “This is the world’s smallest Rubik’s cube…”

My Amazon order history says a lot about my purchasing habits. I am a buyer of needs vs. wants. Pet food. Printer ink. Humidifier filters. But every now and then, a little something nostalgic sneaks into My Shopping Cart. Favorite childhood books for my one-year-old granddaughter. A balloon-launching catapult to make a Thanksgiving turkey fly (it didn’t). Italian chocolates from Perugia, also discovered during a year abroad in college. And just today – on total impulse – a Rubik’s Cube.

Rubik’s Cube – adding a few wrinkles to us baby boomers – celebrates its forty-fifth birthday this year. Back in 1974 when it was invented (and originally dubbed “Magic Cube”), the 3x3x3 trinket earned our attention for its mechanical magic as well as its almost-impossible-to-memorize solution.

To be precise, there are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 (that’s “quintillion”) possible positions of Rubik’s colorful squares. The Cube comes with neither instructions nor answers. Already solved in its packaging, you can’t help twisting it up into a mess of color. In our pre-Internet world, Rubik’s Cube required endless gyrations in search of the answer (instead of just, “Hey Alexa”). But there was something immensely satisfying about the resulting nine squares of single color on each of its six sides. There was also something tempting about peeling off the colored stickers and rearranging them instead.

Erno Rubik, a Hungarian inventor, was an architect and architecture professor “searching to find a good task for his students” when he completed the Cube’s first working prototype – a mess of wood blocks and rubber bands. A small plastics company took a chance on its manufacture and the rest is history. In the first four years alone, two hundred million Cubes were produced and sold.

I was in college (and also an architecture student) when Rubik’s Cube first hit the shelves. Its perfect symmetry and twisting ability to reinvent its colorful look went hand-in-hand with my interest in building design. I remember keeping a Cube on my dorm room desk – at first for mindless manipulation; later for successful solving. Not that I could solve it quickly, mind you. The world record – an average of five solves – is six seconds. The world record with one hand (???) is nine seconds. The world record using only your feet (again, ???) is twenty-two seconds. My solve is expressed in minutes, if not hours.

Few puzzles compete with Rubik’s Cube for sheer “can’t put it down”. But there are a few. One of my favorites was the wooden double maze, the box-like puzzle with the Etch-A-Sketch dials on the side, maneuvering the steel ball through the walled maze without dropping it through one of several holes. I devoted hours and hours to that puzzle, always sweating those final tricky turns to the finish. Another favorite: Marble Solitaire, where you hop-eliminated marbles in search of the perfect solution: a single marble standing proudly in the board’s center divot. Finally (courtesy of Cracker Barrel restaurants), how about “Triangle Peg Solitaire”, the hop-elimination puzzle with the colored golf tees? Thanks to that little game, my kids were supremely patient after the dinner order was placed.

With somewhere near four hundred million sold, Rubik’s Cube is considered the best-selling toy of all time. Its inventive design landed the Cube in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1982. The Cube also garnered “Toy of the Year” in eight countries, including Germany, France, and the U.S.

Inevitably, there were attempts to advance Rubik’s design, such as a 4x4x4 version (“Rubik’s Revenge”), or pyramid, dodecahedron, and hexahedron shapes. But going completely off the rails, look no further than GoCube – a thoroughly high-tech update to Rubik’s. GoCube is also 3x3x3, but rimmed with LED lights, and contains wireless smart sensors, an embedded gyro, and an accelerometer. Download the GoCube app to your phone (of course there’s an app), and watch your twists on-screen instead of on the cube itself. The app guides you to the solution (if you so choose), creates alternative mosaic-looking puzzles, and run reports on solving speed and efficiency. You can even wage virtual head-to-head competitions. All for “only” $119.

“The Pursuit of Happyness” (courtesy of Warner Brothers)

I’m sure Erno Rubik (and Will Smith) would pooh-pooh GoCube as too much of a good thing. I would agree. The app-driven, light-up, hundred-dollar GoCube is over the top, with zero nostalgia to boot. On the other hand, Rubik’s Cube cost me $4.59 on Amazon. That’s a sweet deal, and a cheap way to learn how to do the twist all over again.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”, and the Wall Street Journal article, “Never Solved the Rubik’s Cube?…”

Tag: rubik’s cube

Minuscule Marvels

Let’s Do the Twist!