Things Engineers Like: Rubik's Cube
It's the cube with six colors. Maybe it's a cube with six pictures. Most of the time it's all messed up left unsolved. Invented in the 70s, it may be the world's best selling puzzle game ever; it's the Rubik's Cube! For the average person, it seems like an impossible task to solve it with color coordination! But for engineers (And a select few), it's a challenge (Well, challenge for some people) that they are willing to take on.
Engineers usually have a strong sense of methodology to solving problems so it makes sense the Rubik's Cube is popular among them. To solve it, it is all algorithms. For engineers, anything can be solved with an algorithm. If you can solve it once, you can solve it over and over again.
Maybe it's not the sense of puzzle solving that attracts engineer to this wonderful little toy. Maybe it's the arrogant nature of engineers that entices them. The feeling of achieving something the average human being fears to even imagine doing. But isn't that what engineers do on a daily basis? It's so simple to just entertain someone with the fast paced turns of the puzzle. Maybe it's not that, maybe it's that you can take a Rubik's Cube apart and put it together again. You know how professional weight lifters "Pick stuff up, and put them down"? Engineers "Take things apart, and put them back". Putting it back correctly is a completely different matter though. But the pride of having the smoothest Rubik's Cube of all your friends is definitely something to be proud of. As smooth as Santana and Rob Thomas, if you know what I mean.
Would it be a terrible joke to put in such a way that the Rubik's Cube would be impossible to solve? Yes, it would be a stubborn engineer's worst nightmare!
Things Engineers Like will be a recurring segment on my blog in order to maintain my ego of being an engineer.