cubes

colored cubes have always fascinated me.

who hasn't seen the all-famous rubik's cube? the 6-faced 6-colored 3X3X3 wonder that had me marvelling at the beauty of its symmetry and geometry for hours together at a stretch. the puzzle which gave me immense satisfaction when i figured out, all by myself, how to solve one face. but then, however much i strained my puny little brain, i couldn't figure out a strategy to solve it in its entirety, and had to resort to cheating by looking the solution up. solving it is still my favorite pastime, and i try to get faster and faster at it. right now though, i'm no where close to the gifted 'speed-cubers', who can solve a scrambled cube in under 20 friggin' seconds.



anyway, then came the rubik's revenge:




and the professor's cube:



i haven't dared to lay my hands on either one . . . . . yet!! why, you ask? have you ever laid your hands on a rubik's cube? if you did, you'd know why.


moving on, do you think people would stop there? oooooooooh no siree. because people are crazy. so they went on to create an extended version of rubik's cube in 4 dimensions!! it looks like this when projected onto a screen:



if you think that's mad, how about this? a bunch of freaks took that concept one huuuuuuuuuuge step further and extended it into 5 - that's right - five bloody dimensions!! when you project that onto a mere 2 dimensional screen, you're bound to get dizzy:



and the last time i checked, there were three actual people who solved the 5d version. they're members of the 'hall of insanity' - yep they're not famous, they sure are insane. after knowing the existence of such freaks, now i have all the guts needed to attack the rubik's revenge followed by the professor's cube. if i'm still alive after solving these, i'll try to look at these 4 and 5 dimensional ones.

oh, and there are plenty of other such puzzle games for those who're interested:

here's presenting the square1:



and the pyraminx:



and the megaminx:



makes me wonder what else exists in the world of mathematics? i'm gonna solve these (atleast make an attempt to solve these) someday.

for now, i ran into another interesting puzzle game. here it is. unlike the scary ones presented above, this game's actually (relatively) easily solvable. go ahead rack your brains :)

p.s. - all images have been taken from wikipedia, except the 4d one which has been taken from whatever showed up on google images, and the 5d one which has been taken from a link on a recent post on /.

-w

greatest countries of all time?

here's an article whose title is a bit too grand, but answer the question below before you open the link:

the 10 greatest countries in the history of the world

Now, seriously, just by looking at the title, what do you think is the merit of the article?
a) bullshit
b) bullshit
c) bullshit
d) all of the above

now, you may proceed and read the article above.

what the hell do people think? i mean, how can you compile a list of ten, yes ten countries, and call them the greatest in all of history, without branding yourself stupid? there can be no such thing. the best anyone can hope to do is to define a whole bunch of parameters to replace the word 'greatest', say for example, "the 10 countries that have most been bombed by the united states in the last 20 minutes" - now that would be a much less contentious topic to discuss, right? and placing so many restrictions doesn't even prevent the size of the list from exploding, does it?

this is the exact kind of article that can spark off major fire-spitting sessions. however, i must say that the comments here are waaaaaaaaay cleaner than i expected them to be. either they're being moderated well, or this is a relatively new article and not many people have read it yet. i could think of a third option - that people have realized that it's probably not worth wasting time arguing about such things - but ruled it out after 2.7 micro seconds when i realized that people always have time to waste. yep - me being one of them.

-w

just showing off

this is a picture of the inside of a room whose occupants conduct breaking research in the field of microbiology. that's the board on which all ideas are jotted down and detailed. basically, the board here is the birthplace of new ideas and new discoveries. and i'm proud to announce the fact that my handwriting is on that board in this picture.



just showing off . . .

-w