I'm trying to solve Rubik's

I'm trying to solve Rubik's Cube. This article about Erno Rubik has fascinated me. This man, who created one of the world's greatest toys, is a great character. "The cube has turned him into a taciturn, suspicious, friendless man. One moment he's a professor of design who makes $150 a month and has never been outside the Iron Curtain; the next he's the richest and most famous man in Hungary, beset by money-grubbing communists and capitalists alike." It's so great.

I haven't solved the Rubik's Cube since I was perhaps in first or second grade. Picking it up for the first time, and immediately scrambling it, I was able to get one side fairly quickly (1/2 hour), but getting more than that has been much slower. My brain is slowly building up a list of moves that can do simple tasks, like moving colors from one side to another side without disturbing the other colors on that side, and swapping two blocks on opposite sides of the cube without disturbing the others. One task is proving to be more difficult though: say that I have a whole side a certain color, but along two neighboring sides the middle cubes on each need to be swapped. I think it takes a little more than 12 moves to get them swapped, but so far my short term memory has not been able to keep track of my progress long enough to resolve that situation and bring it all the way back to its original state. It's like trying to dive down into a pool for a ring resting on the bottom. It's so far down there that before I reach the bottom I panic and have to come back up for air. My lungs aren't strong enough. Sometimes, I just go all the way down and grab the ring, but then realize that I don't have enough air to make it back up. I get tangled in sea-weed and get distracted by glimmers on the surface that would bring me back up somewhere other than where I started. This brings me to my point.

Our short term memory is nearly useless. How much is it to ask that our minds be able to store a list of 12 or so simple instructions for less than a minute, maintaining the order of the instructions. I mean, a simple calculator is smart enough to store calculations that go back more than 12 steps, why can't our brain? Our brain is supposed to be the most complex object in the known universe, and yet storing a phone number pushes the limits of our memory's capacity. I say, bunk! Memory is cheap. I want to be able to store at least 1K of data in my short term memory. That costs a penny. If that's not possible, then someone should be developing alternate solutions for us. There should be massive research into the area of creating tools that allow us to supplement our memory, whether that's in creating simple recording devices (perhaps a pair of glasses) that is perpetually storing the past 2 minutes of visual and audio data for immediate retrieval, I don't care. I just want to buy one. Come on, America, come on, human kind!