Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Cube + Juggling = NPR?

Ravi Fernando is a name that's already made the rounds among cubers, but it would appear that NPR has finally taken notice of him after this video posted a few days ago.


I'd seen Ravi do something like this before - check this out from last year. This trick goes on for a while since he's messing with three cubes. It's clearly not designed for a short news segment, but he's working on his craft here more than his showmanship.

Arguably, this cubing plus juggling thing has gone on for some time - here's Shotaro Makisumi (usually referred to as "Macky") doing an early version of this trick.
 Since cubing at its fastest is a combination of visual recognition and muscle memory, it would stand to reason that it's not that tough for the best cubers to engage the brain in other activities while cubing, since the actual cubing part doesn't take up a lot of working memory once mastered. This is largely the same technique I use to carry most of a conversation while I'm doing my relatively slow solves with a corners-first method. I have so much time while I'm doing moves that I can easily hold up part of a conversation, or if I'm talking about cubing itself I have enough mentally pre-scripted material that I can just explain what I'm doing while I'm doing it without slowing myself down in any noticeable way.

That being said, I'm not ready to start juggling anytime soon.

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