Plastic Injection Molding Is Fascinating?
Yes, yes, it is fascinating. At least when Bill Hammack, aka Engineer Guy, explains how it all works. Don’t miss the bit at the end for how quietly ingenious Lego’s injection molding process is. (via digg)
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kottke.org posts about Lego
The full-sized Lego car
Raul Oaida built a full-sized car out of half-a-million Lego pieces that actually drives. The 256-cylinder engine is powered by compressed air. Top speed is 20 mph.
This is a stunning and insanely clever achievement. My favorite part, aside from that 256-cylinder engine, is the windshield built out of two dozen tiny Lego windshields. (via devour)
Behind the scenes of The Lego Movie
Nice four-minute video about how the creators of The Lego Movie used CGI to make the movie look like it was 100% constructed with real Lego bricks with fingerprints and everything and animated in stop motion.
I’ve watched it twice with my kids, and The Lego Movie was way better than it had any right to be. They so easily could have bollocksed the whole thing up. Maybe the secret is Chris Pratt? Guardians of the Galaxy was better than it should have been as well. I’m bearish on Jurassic World, but come on Indy! (via devour)
A working Lego particle accelerator
Huh. Someone built a working particle accelerator out of Lego bricks. Ok, it doesn’t accelerate protons, but it does spin a small Lego ball around the ring much faster than I would have guessed.
Update: I stand corrected, the Lego particle accelerator does indeed accelerate protons, just a lot of them very slowly, accompanied by all manner of other particles.
Fantastic 1970s Letter From Lego to Parents
At some point in the 1970s, Lego included the following letter to parents in its sets:
The text reads:
The urge to create is equally strong in all children. Boys and girls.
It’s imagination that counts. Not skill. You build whatever comes into your head, the way you want it. A bed or a truck. A dolls house or a spaceship.
A lot of boys like dolls houses. They’re more human than spaceships. A lot of girls prefer spaceships. They’re more exciting than dolls houses.
The most important thing is to the put the right material in the their hands and let them create whatever appeals to them.
The letter seems like the sort of thing that might be fake, but Robbie Gonzalez of io9 presents the case for its authenticity.
In our home, Lego currently rules the roost…the kids (a boy and a girl) spend more time building with Lego than doing anything else. This weekend, they worked together to build a beach scene, with a house, pool, lifeguard station, car, pond (for skimboarding), and surfers. Dollhouse stuff basically. Then they raced around the house with Lego spaceships and race cars. Nailed it, 1970s Lego.
Update: QZ confirms, the letter is genuine.
Renting Lego sets
My kids and I went to the new Lego Store in the Flatiron this weekend, and I again noticed how freaking expensive Lego sets are. The Death Star set is $400 + tax and even small sets are $30-40. Afterward I wondered if renting Lego sets would be an economically viable business and sure enough, someone is giving it a go: Pley. It works a bit like Netflix’s DVD service: you pay a flat subscription fee each month and can check out as many sets as you want, one at a time. Doesn’t look like they rent out Lego Stephen Hawking or Lego Mona Lisa though.
Lego model of the Simpsons House
This Lego version of the Simpsons house looks amazing. Not sure if it’s $200 amazing, but still. These minimalist Lego Simpsons characters are much cheaper.
Lego to make set of female scientist minifigs
A proposal by geochemist Ellen Kooijman for a minifigure set of female scientists has won Lego’s Winter 2014 Review. The set, called “Research Institute,” is on track to be released by Lego Ideas in August 2014, more than two years after a campaign that took off with huge support from the internet.
Kooijman designed twelve figures in total, plus accessories. Lego will tweak the final designs and hasn’t announced the specific characters or total number that will be included. Kooijman’s proposed set includes an astronomer, a paleontologist, and a chemist:
Me, I’m a fan of the robotics engineer (pictured below, right, with a falconer and geologist):
Lego already has one female scientist minifigure, released just last fall (after Koojiman’s original proposal). She’s a chemist/theoretician, with the typical glasses (safety glasses! according to materials scientist Deb Chachra), pocket protector, and laboratory flasks. But scientists have all kinds of tools and look all sorts of different ways, even broader than Kooijman’s all-yellow/caucasian team with generic Lego hair. (“Ideally, Lego would use some ‘rare’ face and hair designs if they were to produce a set,” she writes.)
Besides, go back and look at the composition of some of Lego’s other sets to see if it could use more than one female scientist. Minifigure Series 1 had sixteen characters, with the two women being “Cheerleader” and “Nurse.” The “Scientist” just came out in Series 11, along with “Grandma,” [ok fine] “Pretzel Girl,” [really?] “Diner Waitress,” [ugh!] and the admittedly awesome “Lady Robot,” who loves to party. “Some day she might decide she’s ready to stop partying…but not yet!” Go ahead, be gone with it, Lady Robot.
Update: The retail version of the Lego Research Institute has arrived! It’s Kooijman’s original trio of paleontologist, astronomer, and chemist, with tweaked designs and accessories. Here’s a picture:
(Thanks, @debcha)
The Lego Movie
If you missed it in the theater (like us), The Lego Movie is available to buy on Amazon right now. I mean, you could wait until mid-June for the DVD/Blu-ray, but one of your kids’ friends is going to see it this way and come to school and lord it over your kid that he saw THE LEGO MOVIE AT HOME and then your kid is going to feel bad and why would you want that so you should just buck up and watch it already so your kid can have the cool cred at school for once and parlay that into greater social & academic success and then she’ll get into Harvard and have a fantastic life. What I’m saying is, watch The Lego Movie now and your child will become President basically. Why wouldn’t you want that? Are you history’s greatest monster? Ok, I’m calling child services…
Lego Mona Lisa
This Lego Mona Lisa is amazing:
Crazy recognizable even with only ~400 pixels. The Girl With the Pearl Earring is pretty good too. Of course, nothing beats Lego Stephen Hawking. (via mlkshk)
The trailer for The Lego Movie
Some Hollywood people are making a Lego movie called The Lego Movie. Batman’s in it and the plot is from The Matrix. I can’t decide if it looks horrible or amazing.
An ordinary guy named Emmet (Chris Pratt) is mistaken as being the Master Builder, the one who can save the Lego universe. With the aid of an old mystic named Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman), a tough young lady named Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), and Batman (Will Arnett), Emmet will fight to defeat the evil tyrant Lord Business (Will Ferrell) who is bent on destroying the Lego universe by gluing it together.
The Wikipedia page notes The Lego Movie Video Game will be released in conjunction with the movie. Which, if you’re following along, is a video game based on a movie based on stacking toys & figures containing characters based on other movies that are based on comic books. I can’t wait for The Lego Movie Videogame Comic Book Movie that comes out in 2019.
Lego calendar
Vitamins is a design studio in London that made a wall calendar out of Lego. They also built a mechanism to sync an online calendar to the Lego one: you just take a photo of the Lego calendar and send it to a special email address and voilà!
(via ★interesting)
LEGO paper airplane folding machine
It does what it says on the tin.
My favorite part is how it shoots the airplane out at the end. “Be gone, good sir, I am quite done with you!” (thx, Alex)
Lego Stephen Hawking kit
The awesome Lego Stephen Hawking model I posted a few years ago is available from Amazon as a kit!
Update: Or, if you have a massive trove of bricks, here are the instructions to build your own. (via @nickmelville)
Lego Macintosh
The Lego Stephen Hawking is still number one, but this Lego Macintosh is pretty great.
Built by Chris McVeigh. Rumor has it he will be offering the plans for this one as well as a limited number of kits. Prints of the photo are available now.
The Star War$ and £ego universe
Now that I have a 5-year-old, I pay attention to things like Star Wars branded Lego sets. And they are a rip off. Why are these little plastic bricks so expensive? The cheapest set I can find is $7, most of the minifigs are more expensive than that, many sets are a few hundred dollars, and the most expensive sets are the price of a used car: there’s a Lego Star Destroyer for $1600 and a Lego Millenium Falcon for $3400.
Now get off my lawn!
Update: Ah, the Star Destroyer and Millenium Falcon are discontinued and collectable, that’s why they are thousands of dollars. Original prices were $300-500. It’s so difficult to tell these things on Amazon when you’re old and crotchety and and and wait, where are my pants? (thx, everyone)
Update: Why are Legos so expensive? Because each brick has to fit perfectly with every other brick ever made. (thx, @johnhutch)
Lego version of Felix Baumgartner’s record jump
This has got to be some sort of record for quickest Lego parody of an event: watch as a Lego man jumps from a balloon hanging high in the air, just like Felix.
(via ★thoughtbrain)
Stop-Motion Lego Dr. Strangelove
Two sequences from Dr. Strangelove done in Lego: Muffley’s call to Kissoff on the hotline in the war room and Dr. Strangelove’s increasingly erratic presentation of his plan to preserve humanity in a mine shaft.
This is really well done. (via bb)
The Lego Wire
Marissa Mayer has only been CEO at Yahoo! for a day and she’s already creating viral content like a stop motion Lego version of The Wire. Imagine what we’ll get when she’s been there a week.
Audible guffaws at, “What’s up his ass?” “No one likes our season, that’s what.” (via @jonahkeri)
Cool Anatomical Sculptures of Lego People
Artist Jason Freeny is making these neat anatomical sculptures of Lego people.
You can see more of his work in progress on his Facebook page. Reminds me of Michael Paulus’ work. (via colossal)
Watching 130 episodes of The Simpsons simultaneously
If you’ve never seen the early seasons of The Simpsons, a good way to catch up might be to watch this:
Just a quick hack to experiment what happens if you watch a lot of The Simpsons episodes at the same time. It just took 10 lines of code and a few hours of processing.
About the video:
-Top to bottom: each row shows a season (from season 1 to season 10)
-Left to right: each column shows an episode (from episode 1 to episode 13)A total of 130 episodes is displayed, framerate is 25fps, thumbnails have been captured at 80x60px
I also enjoyed this minimalist representation of the Simpson family in Lego:
(via @TrevorBaum)
The Free Universal Construction Kit
The challenge facing children of the last half generation of how to connect their LEGO pieces to their Lincoln Logs to their K’Nex has been solved by The Free Universal Construction Kit and access to a 3D printer. (Did they choose the name for the acronym?) Apparently Construx have fallen so out of favor the Kit does not wish to connect them with pieces of other species. They should have made the list on the strength of this theme song alone.
Old man says: We never had this problem when playing with wooden blocks. (via @djacobs)
Building a scale Lego model of the Death Star
Rhett Allain from Wired asked and then answered, “could you build a scale Lego model of the Death Star?” Using the scale of the Lego people as a guide, Allain estimated that the Lego Death Star would be much taller than the world’s tallest buildings and weigh more than 2 billions tons. My favorite bit: a visual of what the Lego Death Star would look like in low earth orbit. “That’s no moon” indeed. (via @educurate)
Lego camera
This photo was taken by a camera made almost entirely out of Legos:
Even the lens is homemade; it’s just plexiglass ground into shape with fine-grit sandpaper. I misunderstood: the lens is store-bought but the focusing screen is made of plexi. (via ★alexandra)
50 Legos
Tyler Neylon decided to create 50 designs with a base set of 50 Lego pieces.
(via hacker news)
Lego letterpress
A clever pair of designers are using Lego bricks to make 8-bit letterpress prints. Like so:
Lego versions of famous photos
I’ve probably posted these before but they’re still neat: iconic photographs recreated in Lego.
The original version of the above can be seen here. (via @matthiasrascher)
I Lego N.Y. book
Remember Christoph Niemann’s excellent I Lego N.Y.? He’s coming out with a book based on that post:
There’s a short trailer for the book on YouTube. (via @h_fj)
The Matrix in Lego
This is amazing: a stop-motion recreation of the Neo-dodges-bullets-on-the-roof scene from The Matrix done entirely in Lego.
What do kids call Lego pieces?
Giles Turnbull convened a kiddie focus group and asked them what they call all the different Lego pieces.
Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. “Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2x2?” No. In our house, it’ll always be: “Dad, please could you pass me that four-er?”
Don’t miss the chart at the end.
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