Posts by Jason

Have you ever faced a disheartening situation where it felt like a beluga whale randomly fell from the sky right onto your very soul?   This happened to me last Wednesday, except the beluga whale was a short, unexpected yet discouraging email.  I won’t go into the blubbery details of that email, but it did leave me feeling like my soul was physically being scoured by a cheese grater.  I left for church that evening on BART into Berkeley still feeling awful (I commute about 50 minutes to 360 Church, so it gives me a lot of time to sit and think).  Thinking about that email only seemed to exacerbate my feelings, so I decided to play with my Rubik’s Cube instead as I usually do on these long commutes.   While I was twisting and turning, an older man...

In 1980 a Hungarian architect released into the wild a simple toy which immediately exploded in popularity and brought hours of pure torture to the whole family.  The Rubik’s Cube.  Six colors.  Nine tiles per side.  Match them up.  It sounded so simple (like winning the lottery), but the more turns you made, the worse it got.  Over 43 quintillion possible combinations (that’s 43 followed by 18 zeros—and you thought the mail you had in your inbox was a large number).  You could give a Rubik’s Cube to all 7 billion people on the planet and let them play with it for every second of every hour until the day they die and you still wouldn’t exhaust every possible combination.  Yet researchers have found that no matter how much the puzzle is scrambled,...