Word: cubed
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Along with diet books, cat books and advisories on how to make a profit from the coming apocalypse, there is a growing shelf concerned solely with mastering that infuriating, six-sided, six-colored, 27-part boggler with 42.3 quintillion possible combinations known as Rubik's Cube. The latest entry: You Can Do the Cube (Penguin; $1.95) by Patrick Bossert, 13, a London schoolboy who discovered the cube only this spring during a family ski vacation in Switzerland. Within five days he had mastered the monster, and later began selling his schoolmates a four-page, mimeographed tip sheet...
...Roarty's suspicious eye and argue why earthworms are scarce and if a doe hare drops her kits all in one den. Roarty's bizarre attempts to unveil his blackmailer also reveal the tragicomedy of the Other Ireland. Locals fight the design of a new church-"a cube surmounted by a cone"-and investigate a blackguard who steals the priest's maid's knickers from the wash line. Without the precisely plotted mystery, this might merely be another scenic tour of Eire. But Bogmail is something more: "A novel with murder." McGinley has concocted a different...
...dust cloud so dense that it blocked off the sunlight, ruined the planet's food chain, and thereby brought on the extinction of the dinosaurs-an event that profoundly redirected evolution. It is arguable (at least agnostically for a moment) that life itself-the lightning in the sugar cube, the huge fortuities of weather and climate and chemistry, of amino acids and proteins and oxygen-emanates from sheer cosmic luck...
David Singmaster, 42, an American who lectures on mathematics and computing at London's Polytechnic of the South Bank, is believed to know more about Rubik's Cube than even Ernö Rubik. Singmaster, whose 60-page Notes on Rubik's "Magic Cube" has gone into five editions, has become an unofficial repository of the puzzle's lore. An English postal engineer wrote him to report that cube playing had reduced his office's efficiency to zero, but that "being a government department, no one noticed." A Whitehall bureaucrat pleaded with him to supply...
...found a method." Unlike scientists, who concentrate on plotting specific procedures called algorithms that will reduce the number of necessary moves, brainy young cubers seem more interested in setting speed records. One English high school student, Nicolas Hammond, 16, has managed to unscramble a cube in 28 seconds. Some whiz kids "tune" their cubes, as their less intellectual peers might tune a hotrod; the technique consists mostly of taking the puzzle apart (no easy matter) and lubricating its moving parts...