DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I was a sophomore in High School in 1982, at the height of Erno Rubik’s slick-fingered stranglehold on Western culture. His eponymous puzzle was everywhere, including my book bag.

The teacher of my Introductory Physical Sciences class, a bookish old Jesuit who wore tinted eyeglasses and whistled when he spoke, had already earned major points with the class by conducting a wood-distillation experiment in which one team of distracted amateur scientists had inadvertently shot a flaming section of tongue depressor across the room with a startling bang. He put himself into my hall of fame by taking a Friday off of the usual curriculum to teach us all how to solve Rubik’s Cube.

He distributed a one-page solution, which he’d typed up and mimeographed. (Check out the purple ink! If you’re my age, you’ll remember the sharp chemical smell, and that damp flaccid feeling that contradicts every sense of the phrase hot off the press. But, forgive an old man, I digress.)

I know not whether his work was original. Two solutions had been published by then, according to Wikipedia, although I would not be surprised if my professor had spent a few long evenings in the J.S. residence, peering through dark glasses at the bright cube, working out his own algorithms.

His steps are presented longhand, e.g. “front clockwise.” My pencilled shorthand is a variation of what I learned tonight has come to be called “cube notation.” Whether this shorthand was my invention or my teacher’s, I don’t remember; the official cube notation, introduced (acc. to Wikipedia) by David Singmaster in his 1980 publication Notes on Rubik’s Magic Cube, uses a prime mark rather than the “-1” I used to indicate counter-clockwise rotation. Had Singmaster’s book been the source of my teacher’s solution, I imagine he would have presented the notation as well.

Then, too, there’s the enigmatic description of the 12-step “Rubik’s Maneuver,” which Google finds only six references to — all of which are in Japanese. Had that phrase appeared in one of the published solutions, one would expect it to have propagated into the community, quotes intact. But no.

My personal best time was on the order of 65 seconds, according to the sweep second hand on the oven clock, before which I would perch on the kitchen stool for a few minutes of what passed for speed-cubing before the M*A*S*H reruns started. This was of course for the 3x3x3 cube; the 4x4x4 was a travesty of human puzzle-solving ability, as far as I was concerned. (Yes, I have seen the videos of Frank Morris solving a 5x5x5 in 1 minute 46 seconds, but clearly he’s not human.).

I took my cube apart during that quest for speed, and swabbed the guts with Vaseline — yet another Cube-born instance of simultaneous invention. But I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to improve on the basic algorithms, aside from one maneuver I discovered by manipulating a solved cube — it did a nifty job of orienting and permuting a fairly common combination of final edge pieces in fewer moves than prescribed by the ditto sheet. Unfortunately, the mnemonic for this maneuver escapes me.

The other formulas I can recite to this day, although I had no recollection of how to apply them until I found the original solution sheet (pictured above) during a garage-purging exercise. Under it was my original, much worn and beloved circa-1981 Rubik’s Cube. My immediate thought was to work through the solution again in silent tribute to the best day of my Jesuit education.

Unfortunately, 20 years’ worth of neglect and Vaseline residue had taken a toll; the adhesive on several of the Cube’s colored decals had been eaten away.

Two great resources for Cube aficionados: Wikipedia’s Rubik’s Cube article, and this amazing algorithm playback applet, which apparently takes any Cube notation as a URL argument, reverses it out of a solved cube, and then plays it back. Drag the cube to rotate it in three dimensions — amazing!

Tags: rubik's cube
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2007-01-25 16:43:19

Electricity consumption for a Dell 1900FP LCD monitor, as measured with my Kill-a-Watt:

The 1900FP isn’t sold any more, but I imagine the current revision (1907FPv) measures similarly. It is interesting to note that the unit draws two watts whether it’s sleeping or switched off; I’m inclined to leave it switched on during the day, then cut the power at night (via a switched power strip).

Tags: kill-a-watt, dell, 1900fp
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2007-01-23 05:17:50

This is so cool! My new Hanes Men’s Cushion Crew Socks come in a resealable Ziplock bag — so the last pair will be just as fresh as the first!

Putting socks in a resealable bag is just dumb. Is there a sock buyer in the country who doesn’t simply rip the package apart and dump the entire contents into the drawer? (Or, for those who grew up in the days of flame-retardant jammies, into the washing machine?) Seriously, who saves socks for later?

Silly packaging isn’t enough to merit one of our coveted Corinthian Leather Awards, though, unless you go on and on about it. What cemented the victory here is that the silly packaging is horribly flawed: the resealable package cannot be opened without destroying the bag.

Click for previous Corinthian Leather Awards.

Tags: hanes, socks, corinthian leather
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2007-01-19 08:06:35

Electricity consumption for a dual-processor PowerMac G5, as measured with my Kill-a-Watt:

Specs: dual 2.0 GHz PowerPC G5 processors, 1.5 GB RAM, two 150 GB SATA disk drives in RAID-1 (mirrored) array. USB keyboard and mouse were attached. See additional specs on the Power Macintosh G5 at apple-history.com.

Tags: kill-a-watt
posted to channel: Conservation
updated: 2007-01-18 07:50:41

I had a chance to step outside my home environment for a week in December, during a visit with family. Their energy use was jarring: they have two refrigerator/freezers, plus a beer cooler behind the bar, yet someone goes to the grocery store daily (granted, they had guests in town). Dozens of incancescent lights were left on, most of the day. The thermostat is set a couple degrees higher than I’m used to. The washing machine runs once or twice a day (just for the few people who live there).

I’m not taking cold showers to save a couple more BTUs, but this was a different world altogether. This was a total disconnect between lifestyle and the big utility bill that comes at the end of the month. And, more to the point, with the cumulative effect of all those excess tons of C02 being generated on their behalf.

The point of this is not to pick on my own family. My green tendencies would have remained latent had I not moved to California and gotten involved with Care2.com. 20 more years in the Midwest and I would personally have regarded long-haired Californians with PV arrays as scary liberal treehuggers. And I sure as heck wouldn’t have been willing to visit such people, given that their houses would be cold and dimly lit. My family is much more gracious than I would be in this regard. For example, they’d never write a story about me in a public journal.

No, the point of this is that the global warming prevention movement has its work cut out for it.

Seth Godin recently challenged bloggers to write about compact fluorescent light bulbs. I’ve been doing that for over five years, but I haven’t even reached my own family. (Hmm, maybe they’re too busy doing laundry?)

I love Seth’s idea that the right story would help push CFLs as a mainstream, or even a trendy product. As an engineer I’m inclined to think that a higher-tech device that lasts longer, uses less power, creates less waste, and saves both time and money ought to pretty well sell itself. But logic has no place in the market, as both Seth Godin and George Lakoff will tell you. That’s why Wal-Mart’s CFL push is a big deal. (Does anyone have figures on its success?)

Here’s another engineering-centric solution to this small piece of the global warming problem: Put an Energy Cost gauge on the refrigerator door. Wire it into the main electrical circuit, so it measures instantaneous electricity usage for the entire house, multiplies by the local utility rate, and shows the result in dollars per hour in 4''-high numbers.

Part of the problem of CFLs is that consumers have to take it on faith that they’ll save money. CFLs are cheaper than ever but still a lot more expensive than incandescent bulbs; one needs a longer-term view to see the benefit — just as with solar electric systems, which take 8-12 years to break even.

I don’t know if such a device exists. The closest I’ve seen is the Kill-A-Watt, which completely and utterly fails the Mom test, and even for the adventurous will only measure single devices, and only those that are plugged into a wall socket.

Tony Robbins (to drop another name) has said, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” If people could monitor their moment-to-moment energy use like they monitor the ambient temperature, you can bet they’d start to manage it too.

Tags: pv, wal-mart, cfl, godin
posted to channel: Conservation
updated: 2007-01-17 16:25:41