This puzzle's mystery is the
same as it's bigger cousin's.
 
 
 
 


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 


Once upon a time, there were three one-eyed gods called “Cyclops.”  While this picture looks like someone looking at you cross-eyed, it really is those three gods hiding from you.  Look back at them cross-eyed, and you will see all of them.  And you will see that the one in the middle has an eye with its retina in the back of his head.

You can discover some fun things about the “Cyclopean retina” in the book Foundations of Cyclopean Perception by Bela Julesz. 
And you can discover some other Cyclopean facts by surfing over to  www.pacifier.com/~ppenn/pagel7.html. (You’ll discover even more if you recognize that that is a lower-case L in front of the seven, not a number 1.)
  


A carpenter, working with a buzz saw, wishes to cut a wooden  cube, three inches on a side, into 27 one-inch cubes.  He can do this job easily by making six cuts through the cube, keeping the pieces together in the cube shape.  Can he reduce the number of necessary cuts by rearranging the pieces after each cut?
Buzz-Saw  Certainty
This puzzle comes from Martin Gardner’s out-of-the-past “Mathematical Games” feature of Scientific American.  When you see its answer, you know something with a very special kind of certainty.  And you know...those who don’t see it will look just a bit silly to you if they try to explain that your answer is wrong.
  What’s more, there’s a Cyclopean answer to this puzzle hidden in that pagel7 link.

 
Some people might push us, cajole us, tempt us...tempt us — tempt all — toward dumbing down into the pits of anti-intellectualism, the wallow of oblivious hedonism.   What an easy life...the life of a post-modern, wired, gigahertz sybarite—fed by fiber optics  (big band-pass)
    ...filtered by MSNBC and Symantec  (keep it coming, conforming and comforting)                ...feeling frustrated by work, both physical and mental
                               ...should work raise its ugly head. (ughh!)
 Nice life!

But what if we want to enter the long-distance, all-out mental sprint needed to keep up with a rapidly changing technology?  These days, life-long learning also requires ever deepening understanding.  Today, our mottoes should sound something like these:

  Think
                                                       Don’t be gulled into dumbing down
                                     Try to see, not just learn 
 When trying to see, don’t shirk hard work 
    Look for the obvious that goes stubbornly unobserved
         Look beyond the obvious

                          Those are mottoes of the Platinum Plover.
              Look inside her egg.
Look at the yolk.


I have learned that everyone wants to live on the peak of the mountain, without knowing that real happiness is in how it is scaled.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez