Off the Deep End

Off the Deep End

In a one man world, where the only standard is your standard, how do you know you haven’t lost it? You haven’t turned into the Canadian Crowhurst? You haven’t gone off the deep end?

It’s a good question and solo adventurers are asked it in one form or another all the time. Here’s my answer: My very own Crazymeter.

I love complexity cloaked in simple things. Things like sails, hi-tech rope, and blowing on a conch shell. And yes, as you might have guessed, the Rubix cube.

If I ever tire of solving it, I’ll know I’m no longer me and I need to get off the boat before I do something rash. The shoreteam also knows this so even if I don’t know I’m not me, they’ll know I’m not me and they’ll do what’s necessary to get me home and helped. It’s a lot to ask of a simplistic plastic toy I know but bear with me.

There are about 43 quintillion combinations of a 6×4 Rubix cube. That’s 43 with 19 zeros added. You could cover Great Britain a thousand times over with that many cubes. That number is also a billion times larger that all the web pages Google has indexed. I could go on but I suspect you get the point.

There are just over 420,000 solutions. 420,001 if you count peeling off the stickers. Considering the number of combinations, the number of solutions is infinitesimally small. I know exactly one and for some reason I cannot explain, I never tire of solving the cube the same way over and over again. I do know that if I did, my elevator is no longer going to the top.

If you thought I was not quite all there to be out here all by me lonesome, this just might have clinched it for you…

Follow my tracks in real-time:
https://bit.ly/svseaburban