Via GeekPress, blogger Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo is quite taken with this video of a Yoshimoto cube in action.

Diaz comments that the video “blows his mid and fries his brain.”

I was interested to see in the comments that quite a few readers don’t share his enthusiasm:

Wow…he can use both of his hands at the same time to do the same thing….how does he do it!?!?!?!? (sarcasm).

What’s so hard to understand? I mean, it’s just able to fold into 2 separate cubes because there’s space on the inside that you can’t see. And when they are together, it is only gold and silver on 3 sides of the 2x2x2 cube, the sides which are facing you.

I don’t know how this is impressive. It’s a simple concept….

Nothing new here. I had one of these as a child more than 20 years ago. It was fun at the time, but nothing too tricky to work out.

Say — and I’m just asking, here — can’t something have a simple mathematical explanation, and be perfectly understandable, and have been around for long time, and still be really impressive? Totally amazing, even?

I don’t see how a sense of wonder — especially somebody else’s sense of wonder — does anyone any harm. And, other than a need to establish one’s own relative sophistication and intellectual superiority, why would anyone ever go to the trouble of telling someone else that they shouldn’t be impressed by something?

I think I’ll go ahead and be amazed, anyway. The world is a little more interesting and a lot more fun if we don’t insist that there’s nothing worth getting all worked up about. Let’s go ahead and get worked up, shall we?

Let’s be amazed.

Via GeekPress, blogger Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo is quite taken with this video of a Yoshimoto cube in action.

Diaz comments that the video “blows his mid and fries his brain.”

I was interested to see in the comments that quite a few readers don’t share his enthusiasm:

Wow…he can use both of his hands at the same time to do the same thing….how does he do it!?!?!?!? (sarcasm).

What’s so hard to understand? I mean, it’s just able to fold into 2 separate cubes because there’s space on the inside that you can’t see. And when they are together, it is only gold and silver on 3 sides of the 2x2x2 cube, the sides which are facing you.

I don’t know how this is impressive. It’s a simple concept….

Nothing new here. I had one of these as a child more than 20 years ago. It was fun at the time, but nothing too tricky to work out.

Say — and I’m just asking, here — can’t something have a simple mathematical explanation, and be perfectly understandable, and have been around for long time, and still be really impressive? Totally amazing, even?

I don’t see how a sense of wonder — especially somebody else’s sense of wonder — does anyone any harm. And, other than a need to establish one’s own relative sophistication and intellectual superiority, why would anyone ever go to the trouble of telling someone else that they shouldn’t be impressed by something?

I think I’ll go ahead and be amazed, anyway. The world is a little more interesting and a lot more fun if we don’t insist that there’s nothing worth getting all worked up about. Let’s go ahead and get worked up, shall we?

Let’s be amazed.