One of the 5 platonic solids.

3 faces (and edges) meet at every vertex.

So the dual polyhedron is the octahedron.

NOTE: To follow is summary of plot, delivered in my trademark witty style. If you don't want the intricacies and vicissitudes of this labyrinthine work revealed to you, don't read. Ok? Ok.
My girlfriend became temporarily obsessed with this movie and forced me to watch it with her. A brief rundown of what I recall: Ok, see, there's the guys, right? And they're in this big fucking cube. Like, really big. Like, Death Star big. Only bigger. Well, probably not, but it's still pretty big.

Anyway, they're in this cube. And the cube keeps trying to kill them. There's poison gas, slicers, dicers, stompy thingies, the whole nine yards. And it's made up of little, cube-like rooms. Cubes within cubes, get it? Like a fractal! Oh yeah, and there's an elevator. That's important.

It's sorta like Aliens, in that each member of the cast gets killed individually until only the hero and his love interest are left, except Aliens didn't make me want to make a hole in my cerebellum with an electric drill. The cast is varied, too - there's the Lesbian Bitch, the Old Dude, the Retard, the Chick, the Nerd, the White Asshole, and the Black Asshole. You see, here's where the film's mastery becomes most apparent. The white asshole starts out as more of an asshole, because of his devil-may-care attitude and constant references to pornography, whereas the black asshole emerges as the clear leader figure. But there's a twist! Somewhere through the movie, the black asshole goes absolutely psychotic and starts plotting to kill the whitey and rape the nubile young white woman, or something. So the white asshole has to come to her rescue. Guess who dies!

No, not the retard. Sadly.

Usually considered either a game or a creative psychology exercise, which could be tied into dream symbolism, lucid dreaming, etc. It goes a little something like this: (don't read the end until you've done each step, don't skip steps...)

You are in a desert. Bring to mind a detailed picture of said desert. What does it look like, how do you feel being there, etc? Once you are satisfied with the amount of detail, go on to the next step-

Somewhere in the desert there is a cube of some sort. Describe it. What color is it, how large, where is it, what is it made out of, etc.

Somewhere there is a ladder. Where is it in relation to the cube, what is it made out of, what is it doing?

There is a horse in this desert. Describe it. What does it look like, what is it doing, where is it?

Somewhere in the scene there is a storm. Where is it, is it coming or going? What sort of storm is it and how does it affect--or not affect--the cube, ladder, horse? How do you feel about it?

There are also some flowers. How many, what sort, and where in relation to the other objects in the scene?

After you are satisfied with the details of your scene, you can apply the following info to it:

The desert represents your view of the world.
The cube represents you.
The ladder represents friends and acquaintances.
The horse represents a lover or love interest, or what you seek in a mate.
The storm represents trouble of some kind.
The flowers represent children.

CTSS = C = cubing

cube n.

1. [short for `cubicle'] A module in the open-plan offices used at many programming shops. "I've got the manuals in my cube." 2. A NeXT machine (which resembles a matte-black cube).

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

In cooking, to cube means to cut into pieces roughly the size and shape of dice. This contrasts with the cooking sense of "dice", in which the pieces are generally smaller.

Cube - 1997
Directed by Vincenzo Natali
Written by André Bijelic & Graeme Mason

Six strangers awake to find themselves trapped inside a gigantic cube with thousands of rooms also shaped like cubes. Each room looks exactly like the last, but only in a different color. Certain rooms are also booby trapped, instantly killing anyone who sets foot inside them. Initially the members of the group work together and try to escape from the cube, but soon hunger sets in and they begin to argue and fight amongst themselves.

Cube is a pretty good film that was made for under $500,000. Each actor is very good in their role, especially the geek chick Leaven (Nicole de Boer) and the cop Quentin (Maurice Dean Wint). The retarded character is mildly annoying, as are most retarded movie characters. There is also a lot of math in the movie, most of which flew completely over my head.

In a production such as this, with such a low budget and essentially using only one set, the script must be God. If there is no quality script, than you have no film. I think that Cube’s script manages to hold out up until the very end, when one character undergoes a very drastic change that I don’t think was adequately explained, and two others make a choice that is completely illogical. But it still worked in conveying the claustrophobic feel of being trapped in a box and in interactions between tired and scared protagonists. This film also definitely has the sort of “what the fuck?” ending that will be the deciding factor of whether you love it or hate it.

So what do we have? A low-budget psychological thriller with lots of math and an ending that makes no sense, with a couple of quality kills thrown in for good measure. Not the type of film for most of the general population, but I think it’s better than much of the crap out there today. At least they were willing to take chances.

A sequel entitled Cube 2: Hypercube was completed, and was released direct to video in April 2003. No one from the original production was involved.

In Australia, a cube is also a commonly purchased quantity of beer. A cube consists of 30 cans (not bottles), each holding 375 ml. Sold in cubes are the cheaper, more mainstream brands of lager. Exactly what these brands are varies from city to city and state to state, but brands commonly sold in cubes include Victoria Bitter, Carlton Draught, Toohey's Red and Boags Classic Bitter.

Cubes are popular among bogans and uni students, for two reasons. The first is that a cube costs between 30-35 dollars (AUD), meaning that this is an incredibly cheap, although not the absolute cheapest, way of getting messily drunk without making your own. The second reason is that two or three people can go on a ten or fifteen minute there-and-back walk to the bottle-o and will still have at least a slab remaining by the time they get back.

From the homepage at http://wouter.fov120.com/cube/

Landscape-style engine that pretends to be an indoor first person shooter engine. Combines very high precision dynamic occlusion culling with a form of geometric mipmapping on the whole world for dynamic LOD for configurable fps & graphic detail on most machines.

Using OpenGL and SDL (Simple Direct Media Layer), this 3D engine is in fact a very capable gaming engine for multiplayer deathmatch games, and if you wish old-fashioned run around and kill stuff this is your friend. At writing time, the 8.63 megabyte free download with game binaries for both Windows and Linux/ LinuxPPC and servers for Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD from the homepage is very much worth it. There should also be a Mac OS X version, available from http://batteryacid.org/blog/ (May 25th, 2003), however I have not been able to test this, though people on the CUBE forum report it as working.

The engine is a masterpiece of usability. The editing of game maps is performed from within the game and can be done over the network (local or wide area) with more people editing the same map, according to the author the first engine to allow you to do so. Basically, you fly around the map in full 3D and edit it using your mouse to point and drag map elements. The simple map layout also means that with today's powerful computers you do not need to compile the maps, as they are simple enough to be both computed, rendered and lighted on the fly. Like UNIX applications should be, the game is designed around the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) programming principle, so rather than having a large set of very finely tuned exeptions to a rule like most modern game engines such as Quake and Unreal, the engine uses brute force to do a lot of things using one system.

To get help for the game in any way, either resort to the documentation on the homepage or in the archive or to the forum, or you can go onto the CUBE IRC channel #cube on irc.gamesnet.net

Cube (k?b), n. [F. cube, L. cubus, fr. Gr. a cube, a cubical die.]

1. Geom.

A regular solid body, with six equal square sides.

2. Math.

The product obtained by taking a number or quantity three times as a factor; as, 4x4=16, and 16x4=64, the cube of 4.

Cube ore Min., pharmacosiderite. It commonly crystallizes in cubes of a green color. -- Cube root. Math., the number or quantity which, multiplied into itself, and then into the product, produces the given cube; thus, 3 is the cube root of 27, for 3x3x3 = 27. -- Cube spar Min., anhydrite; anhydrous calcium sulphate.

 

© Webster 1913.


Cube, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Cubed (k?bd); p. pr. & vb. n. Cubing.]

To raise to the third power; to obtain the cube of.

 

© Webster 1913.

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