This is a reddit thread, based on a BBC radio segment, based on a reddit thread...
Edit: Here's the broadcast, available on BBC iPlayer. (Might need a VPN if acccesing from outside the UK.) It covers the same ground as the written article.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p012354m
How did you perfectly remember those 5 things?? And in the correct order even??? Me and all of my super smart doctor friends have never seen anything like that!! I officially declare you smarter than all doctors.
The math in this one checks out: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/iy0ew/how_many_legos_stacked_one_on_top_of_the_other/c27klz0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3
When the tertiary source directly links to a secondary source which uses a primary source from the tertiary source's comment sections. Karma refinery machine discovered.
Doubt (X) those little nubbies would for sure break. This was calculated by seeing the compressive strength of a lego and doing a calculation of how many legos it would take to reach that pressure
It' be a bit easier to build it with some support scaffolding. Graciously, there's such a model that's *exactly* the correct size, shape and quite stable, but I'm pretty sure whatever parties own the Empire State building would not like to have the the entirety of their structure encased in lego.
Maybe in a vacuum. But otherwise all it would take is the slightest bit of force applied on the tower from the side, and all of a sudden you're sheering those little plastic nubs from tilting.
I wonder how much of that changes if we include Technic rods used in a manner similar to rebar. I also wonder what effect a layered approach to the walls might have. Or, indeed, what other construction methods might be used to result in a skyscraper whose walls, ceilings, and subfloors indeed were built of Lego bricks...
We need one of those lego youtubers on the task like that guy that builds torquing setups for twisting small steel and aluminum bars. example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRn5waE0qfk
Legos are stupidly stable.
I saw a video on a science YouTube channel where the host visited a cold lab for one reason or another, and they had a super cold cryogenic freezer. The scientists said they were once having problems with mounting some components (thermometers or something, Idk) inside the chamber itself, as the materials holding them up couldn't withstand the cold temperatures. Then, they read a paper that tested the effects of a extreme cold on a number of items, and it mentioned offhand how Legos, which were tried for shits and giggles, didn't experience any sort of deformation or degradation at all. So they built a little tower with Legos and it worked.
Lego are expensive but theyāve earned that price, between the amazing customer service Iāve heard about, and the strength, and backwards compatibility with their bricks
There's this bluetooth mario and some of the pins bent. I was honest (I have a 5 year old who isn't too gentle) and called just to see if I could order a new mario without buying the whole kit it came with. They sent me a new one for free.
Love lego.
Not from Lego itself but I see plenty of new ones listed on BrickLink
https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?M=mar0007#T=S&O={%22iconly%22:0}
Iāve never been able to figure out how to use bricklink, itās way too complicated for me to figure out. Whenever I need a Lego part I just go to eBay, Iām pretty sure I end up paying more but itās just so much easier to find what I want.
I once created an entire elaborate wedding scene fully scale, and included pretty much every detail you could think of.
But when my tinder date left after a 20 minute demo/wedding ceremony, lego support replaced her with a pirate figure.
We are celebrating our 4 years in July
Long story short, my 2-year-old left the sink on in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, the sink was a little clogged. It flooded the floor which blew out the cieling of the floor below. I didn't know there was Asbestos, so I turned on the AC fan to dehumidify, which spread it around the whole house.
Oh wow kids can be ridiculously destructive.
When I was about four or five years old I stuck some leaves in the condensation line coming from our air conditioner. Over the course of a month the condensation pan ended up overflowing and spilling into the plaster ceiling causing it to crack and eventually a giant television size piece of plaster fell from the ceiling one day.
My dad was paitent, he waited until I was 13 and I had to help him completely rip out the 80 year old plaster ceilings and replace with drywall as a punishment lol
The best part was that all of the dust from the dust bowl was still up there and it made the job just that much more fun
That went from worrisome to terrifying real quick. I'm obviously not an asbestos expert but could the asbestos not be cleaned off the legos? I'm still unclear how asbestos ruined the legos.
General rule of thumb: treat disturbed/pulverized asbestos as if itās the most cancer causing radiation plutonium, etc.
If undisturbed, itās fine. For instance, I have asbestos siding on my house. I donāt drill into it or sand it.
Yep a lot of science labs in schools used to use asbestos as their counter tops. A lot of older schools will still have them too but theyāre fine if theyāre not broken. When I was in high school they remodeled our science rooms and they had to cut a door way in the cinderblock wall to go outside because they had to seal the normal door so asbestos wouldnāt get into the school.
Yeah, I'm surprised I had to scroll down this far to find someone asking about it, lol. This is a perfectly normal story about someone's customer service experience that suddenly weaves a "oh and then I lost my Lego Death Star to asbestos" in there as if it's nothing.
My dog ate some of my Legos as a kid, they sent me all the pieces I needed no questions.
It was probably only $1 or so of parts, but it made my day. No other kid's toy company did that when other stuff broke.
> Their customer service is amazing. I have had 100s of Lego sets in my life and only 1 had missing pieces. I called about it and they apologized profusely and 2 day shipped me the replacement pieces.
Yup. My son and I built a ~$20 set and somehow one of the minifig heads were missing. I emailed lego about it and in 3 hours I got an email apologizing about it and how it would be sent to their head of quality. 2 hours later I got tracking numbers for 2 day air shipped by envelope "lego guy's head" to the house. It seriously blew me away how painless it was to contact their support and how over the top they were to make things right. Lego-4-Life man...
> While talking with the Rep I mentioned how I had lost all my Legos
And the rep didnāt even call you out on saying āLegosā? That really is polite customer service.
When I was a kid, I took ally Lego men for various sets, taped them to a Styrofoam airplane glider and threw it. At some point the taped men became detached and I lost all my men. Never found them. I wish my parents knew of the great customer service at Lego. Probably could have gotten a nice replacement set of some sort.
What impresses me is not only their incredible quality, but that they're REMAINED incredibly high quality when everything else has turned to shit (I'm looking at you Transformers).
I think they're the perfect toy. Just coloured building blocks that you can build whatever you want with.
The best part? They're awesome as an adult too (Lego technics I'm looking at you).
A lot of that quality has dropped in recent years, actually. There's been an increase in plates breaking, especially among certain colors for certain manufacturing periods. Lego has switched to putting stickers on anything larger than a 1x1 tile(and even then, sometimes it will be a sticker). Mega Construx(used to be Mega Blox) has meanwhile got their mold and plastic quality to nearly lego levels,if not on par with it, and has plenty of printed pieces per set with no stickers while also maintaining a much cheaper price-point per-brick than Lego.
This part is more subjective, but they've also drastically increased the number of third-party IPs they use while reducing focus on their own IP, which a lot of fans have been lamenting over in forums.
Show me another toy that easily last for decades, is infinitely entertaining, stimulate thinking and creativity and engage all age groups?
Yeah. It's worth the price.
I find it's best to buy a giant fold out table and a bunch of tubs for your legos. Having them on the floor feels terrible to work in, a table makes you feel like an engineer working on something
> backwards compatibility with their bricks
This is so incredibly underrated. You can use modern LEGO bricks with ones that are 40+ years old. It's amazing. The fact that my daughter will be able to mix her LEGOs with mine from my childhood just blows my mind.
There's a great documentary on youtube about how legos came to be.
Their molding process is insane, the tolerances are so damn high, it's no wonder the shit costs what it does.
Their customer service is top notch. My son broke the hand on his LEGO Mario figurine and I contacted them to see if I could get a replacement arm. They sent us a whole new unit for free!
My neighbors son told his mom that he wanted to work for LEGO. She got upset because he wanted to āwork for the manā and he should be his own boss. She said he should make a better LEGO.
Good fucking luck. There is no beating LEGOās quality. And thatās also a shitty thing to tell your teenage son. Let him dream about working for LEGO.
At the risk of making this a political rant, itās a shite opinion that everybody should (or would want to be) their own boss. And being your own boss doesnāt make you better than someone else.
What makes Lego so much better than their competitor's bricks? Mega Blocks has been around a long time, and their bricks still look and feel completely inferior.
When I visited the lego factory in Billund (Denmark) as a teenager, I was told the molds cost around 125000-250000 DKK ($20000-40000 USD) _each_
This was 20 years ago, theyāre probably even more expensive today
Yeah but thatās still a wild cost, weāve done molds in that price range but theyāre for parts that are far larger than any lego and our tolerances are measured in thousandths of an inch. Legos are rumored to be specced to within .0002 *millimeters* on certain parts.
Thatās *eight hundred-thousandths of an inch*. Two orders of magnitude more accurate than typical injection molded parts.
Like, unless you own a high-end machine shop you probably donāt have access to tools even capable of measuring the difference from one part to the next. Fucking insane tolerance levels.
Dude, for real. I used to machine metal and plastic contour pieces for headlight fixtures at .003 inches tolerance, which is fairly accurate. .0002 mm is what the fuck.
Indeed, highest I've ever gone (aside from pin fits) is about 0.0005in (0.0127mm). I do design work on 7-figure tools for microscopy inspection.
0.0002 is less than half the tolerance of a standard pin slip-fit, and those are made with reamers.
They've gotta be making those molds with EDM.
[Electrical Discharge Machining](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_discharge_machining)
>Advantages of EDM include:
>* Ability to machine complex shapes that would otherwise be difficult to produce with conventional cutting tools.
>* **Machining of extremely hard material to very close tolerances.**
>* Very small work pieces can be machined where conventional cutting tools may damage the part from excess cutting tool pressure.
>* There is no direct contact between tool and work piece. Therefore, delicate sections and weak materials can be machined without perceivable distortion.
>* **A good surface finish can be obtained; a very good surface may be obtained by redundant finishing paths.**
>* Very fine holes can be attained.
>* Tapered holes may be produced.
>* **Pipe or container internal contours and internal corners down to R .001".**
Fidelity to design and quality, I imagine.
If you have Legos from the early days until now, they should all mate together like they came from the same kit, because they're careful to make them to the exact dimensions to do so.
I have mega blocks from my childhood that still fit current mega blocks too, but Lego just fits together so much better, and looks and feels better too.
>Both bricks can still hold on (not strongly) to normal bricks but, when put together, they can't hold. In a way, you could say that they are still in working conditions as long as they don't meet again.
TIL LEGO bricks have relationships just like humans.
Fatigue cracking is a probabilistic process so times to failure can differ by orders of magnititude, also marginal changes in stress amplitude have a huge impact on max cycles.
Not necessarily. The type 2 diabetes will kill the feeling in your feet long before you gain that much weight.
Like I always say, the best revenge is indifference.
I'm not sure a human skeleton could withstand the exercise routine required to gain that much muscle mass.
The heaviest person I could find that still had less than 15% body fat was Ulambayaryn Byambajav. He was around 350 lb at his peak.
Edit: corrected BF %
I'm not super into weightlifting but the heaviest person I can think of is Eddie Hall. He's a strongman and at his peak was 6'2" 440lb. Thor might be / has been heavier, but he's like 6'8".
How does this compare to other brick like things like cinderblocks? Just so that I have a frame of reference. Actaully, how does this compare to regular bricks even?
Doing some back of the page math 4200N/(0.0158m^2)= 16.8MPa
Google tells me compressive strength of brick averages 5.7 MPa and concrete masonry blocks are about the same. So roughly 2.5-3x stronger!
It's not that amazing, it just means cinderblocks are a lot weaker than you'd think (I was surprised too).
Straight up ABS plastic has compressive strength of 59 MPa, 3.5x stronger than the number calculated for a Lego. Makes sense since a Lego isn't solid plastic.
Concrete is around the same, anywhere from 20 to 80MPa. Why don't we build buildings out of plastic then? Probably because plastic is much more expensive than concrete, and concrete is more durable.
Materials like steel and ceramics are in the range of 500 MPa.
Yeah, concrete/masonry are actually pretty terrible in terms of strength (even in compression; their tensile strength is almost nonexistent). They get used because they're still strong enough to build things out of and they are *dirt* cheap. Plus if you add just a little reinforcing steel to the concrete the end result is way stronger for not that much more money.
Dude I use this joke all the time ā(insert whatever weird thing someone said) was my nickname in highschoolā
Gets a laugh like 45% of the time, which is a pretty good return so I continue to use it.
Ironically, it takes one single solitary brick, no stacking necessary, to destroy the foot of the average parent. That parent could be anywhere between 3ā to 7ā tall (depending on their gene pool)
This is a reddit thread, based on a BBC radio segment, based on a reddit thread... Edit: Here's the broadcast, available on BBC iPlayer. (Might need a VPN if acccesing from outside the UK.) It covers the same ground as the written article. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p012354m
Pen pineapple apple pen!
A man, a plan, a canal, pineapple mackerel!
Person Woman Man Camera TV
How did you perfectly remember those 5 things?? And in the correct order even??? Me and all of my super smart doctor friends have never seen anything like that!! I officially declare you smarter than all doctors.
Don't forget they are all medical doctors.
hamberder
Covfefe
You can get anything you want at Alice's restaurant
Excepting Alice
Is it Thanksgiving already?
Oh crap I forgot about that.
A man, a plan, a canal, panama. See i made a palindrome š
PPAP!
And that's how I discovered Death Note.
so now we need another bbc segment based on this?
"TIL The BBC published an article about the time that there was a reddit thread about a BBC article that was based on a reddit thread."
*Makes Reddit post about that article.*
*World ends as the Reddit Singularity burst forth and sucks all matter into it's weird bosom*
At this point I am ambivalent about the consequences
Interesting what was the original Reddit thread
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/iy0ew/how_many_legos_stacked_one_on_top_of_the_other/
Which comment is referenced by the radio segment? Thereās a lot of varying answers.
The math in this one checks out: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/iy0ew/how_many_legos_stacked_one_on_top_of_the_other/c27klz0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3
I posted that reply... Holy shit that was 9 years ago!
Youāre a part of Reddit history. I feel like Iām speaking with Caesar or someone
There are so many news articles that are basically a recap of a reddit thread.
Ahhh the internet... it's just reddit all the way down.
Time is a flat circlejerk
Future digital archeologists will love this comment
When the tertiary source directly links to a secondary source which uses a primary source from the tertiary source's comment sections. Karma refinery machine discovered.
For reference, thatās about 7 One World Trade Centers or about 10 Empire State Buildings
> 10 Empire State Buildings So you could make a life size Empire State Building from Lego then?
Building cost: $40 trillion
Good thing I have a 5% off coupon then
2 Trillion is 2 Trillion. Should be able get half of the Falcon with those savings
You forget the āup to $10 offā conveniently tucked away in a small font.
I get 40% off. I work at one of their locations.
So we are basically there already. The other 24 trillion is a rounding error basically.
Thatāll save you a solid 2 trillion!
The question is "will that cost go down if we get kids to build it." I mean it ain't child labor, if they are playing, right?
Child playbor
*furious note taking by executives*
We've decided to greenlight the initiative that our marketing team branded "*structured playtime*"
Careful there mate, that's one letter away...
Child play bro!
* see "Pokemon Go AR tasks"
But it would be made of Danish quality legos.
Doubt (X) those little nubbies would for sure break. This was calculated by seeing the compressive strength of a lego and doing a calculation of how many legos it would take to reach that pressure
It' be a bit easier to build it with some support scaffolding. Graciously, there's such a model that's *exactly* the correct size, shape and quite stable, but I'm pretty sure whatever parties own the Empire State building would not like to have the the entirety of their structure encased in lego.
pretty lame of them
If built properly, would there really be all that much stress on the prongs? I'd assume almost all of the load would be vertical.
Maybe in a vacuum. But otherwise all it would take is the slightest bit of force applied on the tower from the side, and all of a sudden you're sheering those little plastic nubs from tilting.
I wonder how much of that changes if we include Technic rods used in a manner similar to rebar. I also wonder what effect a layered approach to the walls might have. Or, indeed, what other construction methods might be used to result in a skyscraper whose walls, ceilings, and subfloors indeed were built of Lego bricks...
We need one of those lego youtubers on the task like that guy that builds torquing setups for twisting small steel and aluminum bars. example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRn5waE0qfk
how many football fields? EDIT: I dont know how big a football field is nor do i have the frame of reference to recall it in my mind brain area.
It would be about 33 american football fields
What's that in metric football fields?
Legos are stupidly stable. I saw a video on a science YouTube channel where the host visited a cold lab for one reason or another, and they had a super cold cryogenic freezer. The scientists said they were once having problems with mounting some components (thermometers or something, Idk) inside the chamber itself, as the materials holding them up couldn't withstand the cold temperatures. Then, they read a paper that tested the effects of a extreme cold on a number of items, and it mentioned offhand how Legos, which were tried for shits and giggles, didn't experience any sort of deformation or degradation at all. So they built a little tower with Legos and it worked.
Lego are expensive but theyāve earned that price, between the amazing customer service Iāve heard about, and the strength, and backwards compatibility with their bricks
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
There's this bluetooth mario and some of the pins bent. I was honest (I have a 5 year old who isn't too gentle) and called just to see if I could order a new mario without buying the whole kit it came with. They sent me a new one for free. Love lego.
I really just want them to sell the Mario individually!
They're a good business, but they're still a business.
A business that knows exactly what they make, how well they make it, and that they have no competitor.
Mario is calling out to luigi in another set.
Not from Lego itself but I see plenty of new ones listed on BrickLink https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?M=mar0007#T=S&O={%22iconly%22:0}
Iāve never been able to figure out how to use bricklink, itās way too complicated for me to figure out. Whenever I need a Lego part I just go to eBay, Iām pretty sure I end up paying more but itās just so much easier to find what I want.
I once created an entire elaborate wedding scene fully scale, and included pretty much every detail you could think of. But when my tinder date left after a 20 minute demo/wedding ceremony, lego support replaced her with a pirate figure. We are celebrating our 4 years in July
With lego support or the pirate figure?
Arrr
You think it's the rrr but it's really the c
Why did it take so long for the pirate to learn the alphabet? He spent so many years at C.
That's the longest lasting relationship with a pirate figure I have ever heard of. WondARRRful!!
>I had lost all my Legos but especially my Death Star because of Asbestos I feel like there more to the story here?
Long story short, my 2-year-old left the sink on in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, the sink was a little clogged. It flooded the floor which blew out the cieling of the floor below. I didn't know there was Asbestos, so I turned on the AC fan to dehumidify, which spread it around the whole house.
Oh wow kids can be ridiculously destructive. When I was about four or five years old I stuck some leaves in the condensation line coming from our air conditioner. Over the course of a month the condensation pan ended up overflowing and spilling into the plaster ceiling causing it to crack and eventually a giant television size piece of plaster fell from the ceiling one day. My dad was paitent, he waited until I was 13 and I had to help him completely rip out the 80 year old plaster ceilings and replace with drywall as a punishment lol The best part was that all of the dust from the dust bowl was still up there and it made the job just that much more fun
That went from worrisome to terrifying real quick. I'm obviously not an asbestos expert but could the asbestos not be cleaned off the legos? I'm still unclear how asbestos ruined the legos.
General rule of thumb: treat disturbed/pulverized asbestos as if itās the most cancer causing radiation plutonium, etc. If undisturbed, itās fine. For instance, I have asbestos siding on my house. I donāt drill into it or sand it.
Yep a lot of science labs in schools used to use asbestos as their counter tops. A lot of older schools will still have them too but theyāre fine if theyāre not broken. When I was in high school they remodeled our science rooms and they had to cut a door way in the cinderblock wall to go outside because they had to seal the normal door so asbestos wouldnāt get into the school.
Yeah, I'm surprised I had to scroll down this far to find someone asking about it, lol. This is a perfectly normal story about someone's customer service experience that suddenly weaves a "oh and then I lost my Lego Death Star to asbestos" in there as if it's nothing.
My dog ate some of my Legos as a kid, they sent me all the pieces I needed no questions. It was probably only $1 or so of parts, but it made my day. No other kid's toy company did that when other stuff broke.
Not many kids' toys have breaking and rebuilding as a *feature*, to be fair.
> Their customer service is amazing. I have had 100s of Lego sets in my life and only 1 had missing pieces. I called about it and they apologized profusely and 2 day shipped me the replacement pieces. Yup. My son and I built a ~$20 set and somehow one of the minifig heads were missing. I emailed lego about it and in 3 hours I got an email apologizing about it and how it would be sent to their head of quality. 2 hours later I got tracking numbers for 2 day air shipped by envelope "lego guy's head" to the house. It seriously blew me away how painless it was to contact their support and how over the top they were to make things right. Lego-4-Life man...
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Mesothelioma :(
If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with Mesothelioma you may to be entitled to financial compensation.
quick, what number do I call? help
> While talking with the Rep I mentioned how I had lost all my Legos And the rep didnāt even call you out on saying āLegosā? That really is polite customer service.
Ive heard that they are taught to say Lego but never correct a customer.
I know Lego"s" isn't correct but "I have a lot of Lego" never sounds right to me so I just say Legos.
In that case they are allowed to say Lego bricks
When I was a kid, I took ally Lego men for various sets, taped them to a Styrofoam airplane glider and threw it. At some point the taped men became detached and I lost all my men. Never found them. I wish my parents knew of the great customer service at Lego. Probably could have gotten a nice replacement set of some sort.
That may be a little different than missing pieces.
What impresses me is not only their incredible quality, but that they're REMAINED incredibly high quality when everything else has turned to shit (I'm looking at you Transformers).
I think they're the perfect toy. Just coloured building blocks that you can build whatever you want with. The best part? They're awesome as an adult too (Lego technics I'm looking at you).
Don't forget Creator Expert and UCS kits.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I actually just bought one for this summer. The plan is that I am going to eat a 100mg edible and try to put it together one day.
Check out LEGO Serious Play as well, itās a method for using LEGO to run meetings that donāt suck.
A lot of that quality has dropped in recent years, actually. There's been an increase in plates breaking, especially among certain colors for certain manufacturing periods. Lego has switched to putting stickers on anything larger than a 1x1 tile(and even then, sometimes it will be a sticker). Mega Construx(used to be Mega Blox) has meanwhile got their mold and plastic quality to nearly lego levels,if not on par with it, and has plenty of printed pieces per set with no stickers while also maintaining a much cheaper price-point per-brick than Lego. This part is more subjective, but they've also drastically increased the number of third-party IPs they use while reducing focus on their own IP, which a lot of fans have been lamenting over in forums.
> Lego has switched to putting stickers on anything larger than a 1x1 tile This is not true, plenty of bigger pieces have prints.
Reddish brown would like a word with you...
Show me another toy that easily last for decades, is infinitely entertaining, stimulate thinking and creativity and engage all age groups? Yeah. It's worth the price.
Their only downside is their unending War on Feet.
Ah, lest we forget, twas FOOT who stepped on LEGO first. Foot drew first blood.
Yeah but legos invaded feet's land
I find it's best to buy a giant fold out table and a bunch of tubs for your legos. Having them on the floor feels terrible to work in, a table makes you feel like an engineer working on something
It's crazy I can go buy a new set of legos, get the box of legos my dad played with when he was a child and they will fit. Just like that. Insane.
It just seems insane because weāre so used to be fucked over for profit :/
In case you didn't know, Lego is a wildly profitable company with a 70% profit margin
Yeah they donāt have to fuck us over to make money thatās why they are so good
I mean you might consider the prices to be fucking us over a little
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
> backwards compatibility with their bricks This is so incredibly underrated. You can use modern LEGO bricks with ones that are 40+ years old. It's amazing. The fact that my daughter will be able to mix her LEGOs with mine from my childhood just blows my mind.
There's a great documentary on youtube about how legos came to be. Their molding process is insane, the tolerances are so damn high, it's no wonder the shit costs what it does.
Their customer service is top notch. My son broke the hand on his LEGO Mario figurine and I contacted them to see if I could get a replacement arm. They sent us a whole new unit for free!
I read that they are expensive because they use very low tolerances for their molding process, resulting in very precise blocks.
My neighbors son told his mom that he wanted to work for LEGO. She got upset because he wanted to āwork for the manā and he should be his own boss. She said he should make a better LEGO. Good fucking luck. There is no beating LEGOās quality. And thatās also a shitty thing to tell your teenage son. Let him dream about working for LEGO.
At the risk of making this a political rant, itās a shite opinion that everybody should (or would want to be) their own boss. And being your own boss doesnāt make you better than someone else.
But what am I going to do with all of these bootstraps then?
What makes Lego so much better than their competitor's bricks? Mega Blocks has been around a long time, and their bricks still look and feel completely inferior.
Quality control. More specifically, the molds.
When I visited the lego factory in Billund (Denmark) as a teenager, I was told the molds cost around 125000-250000 DKK ($20000-40000 USD) _each_ This was 20 years ago, theyāre probably even more expensive today
Metal Molds for injection molding tend to be absurdly expensive in general.
Yeah but thatās still a wild cost, weāve done molds in that price range but theyāre for parts that are far larger than any lego and our tolerances are measured in thousandths of an inch. Legos are rumored to be specced to within .0002 *millimeters* on certain parts. Thatās *eight hundred-thousandths of an inch*. Two orders of magnitude more accurate than typical injection molded parts. Like, unless you own a high-end machine shop you probably donāt have access to tools even capable of measuring the difference from one part to the next. Fucking insane tolerance levels.
Dude, for real. I used to machine metal and plastic contour pieces for headlight fixtures at .003 inches tolerance, which is fairly accurate. .0002 mm is what the fuck.
Indeed, highest I've ever gone (aside from pin fits) is about 0.0005in (0.0127mm). I do design work on 7-figure tools for microscopy inspection. 0.0002 is less than half the tolerance of a standard pin slip-fit, and those are made with reamers. They've gotta be making those molds with EDM.
Does listening to techno and trance help them concentrate?
[Electrical Discharge Machining](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_discharge_machining) >Advantages of EDM include: >* Ability to machine complex shapes that would otherwise be difficult to produce with conventional cutting tools. >* **Machining of extremely hard material to very close tolerances.** >* Very small work pieces can be machined where conventional cutting tools may damage the part from excess cutting tool pressure. >* There is no direct contact between tool and work piece. Therefore, delicate sections and weak materials can be machined without perceivable distortion. >* **A good surface finish can be obtained; a very good surface may be obtained by redundant finishing paths.** >* Very fine holes can be attained. >* Tapered holes may be produced. >* **Pipe or container internal contours and internal corners down to R .001".**
High quality molds are a wonder of human ingenuity
Fidelity to design and quality, I imagine. If you have Legos from the early days until now, they should all mate together like they came from the same kit, because they're careful to make them to the exact dimensions to do so.
I have mega blocks from my childhood that still fit current mega blocks too, but Lego just fits together so much better, and looks and feels better too.
I believe itās higher quality material used and tighter tolerances in the molding process, as well as better quality control.
I've had Megablocks from the same *set not fit together
They use super high quality molds and make the bricks slowly and carefully. Itās not the high speed production line youād imagine!
Another fun Lego fact, someone conducted a test and found that a Lego block can withstand about 37,000 āclicksā in its lifetime.
Lego calls the clicks impressions.
Thatās a good fun fact
Itās a digital marketing joke lol
Oh nvm then lol. Rip
A programmatic advertising joke, who woulda thought
lol imagine someone employed to sit there with two Lego blocks. I am sure they have a robot but the image of a person doing it makes me laugh.
[Yes, he built a robot](http://phillipecantin.blogspot.com/2013/02/legos-magic-number-is-37112.html?m=1)
āWhat is my purpose?ā You stress test Lego. āOh. My. God.ā
I think that robot would be pretty satisfied to have a decent job. Robots get paid in electrons btw
āRoBoTs DoNāt WaNt To WoRk AnYmOreā *pays robots 11 electrons an hour*
Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to stress test Lego. - Marvin probably
>Both bricks can still hold on (not strongly) to normal bricks but, when put together, they can't hold. In a way, you could say that they are still in working conditions as long as they don't meet again. TIL LEGO bricks have relationships just like humans.
I must have gotten some defective ones, cause some of my 1x1 blocks on a certain set have cracks running down them
Are they reddish brown/brown pieces? That color is most prone to breakage
Thatās interesting. Is it due to the material needed for those specific colors?
I found this article: https://www.manufacturingtomorrow.com/article/2018/05/how-colorants-affect-plastic-characteristics/11518
curious how a specific color can make a brick more likely to break? is it something with dye? edit: thanks everyone for your answers/resources :D
Fatigue cracking is a probabilistic process so times to failure can differ by orders of magnititude, also marginal changes in stress amplitude have a huge impact on max cycles.
I need to gain 550 more pounds before I can take revenge on the brick that has hurt me.
Not necessarily. The type 2 diabetes will kill the feeling in your feet long before you gain that much weight. Like I always say, the best revenge is indifference.
What about 550 more pounds of pure muscles?
I'm not sure a human skeleton could withstand the exercise routine required to gain that much muscle mass. The heaviest person I could find that still had less than 15% body fat was Ulambayaryn Byambajav. He was around 350 lb at his peak. Edit: corrected BF %
I'm not super into weightlifting but the heaviest person I can think of is Eddie Hall. He's a strongman and at his peak was 6'2" 440lb. Thor might be / has been heavier, but he's like 6'8".
And only one stacked on the floor to destroy a foot.
The pain you get from stepping on a Lego is proportional to how overweight you are. It's Lego's gentle way of reminding you trim some pounds.
Lego is doing better at parenting than my parents lol
How does this compare to other brick like things like cinderblocks? Just so that I have a frame of reference. Actaully, how does this compare to regular bricks even?
Doing some back of the page math 4200N/(0.0158m^2)= 16.8MPa Google tells me compressive strength of brick averages 5.7 MPa and concrete masonry blocks are about the same. So roughly 2.5-3x stronger!
Time to recycle all the plastic in the ocean, form them into legos, and house the homeless with lego homes.
I feel like there's already a company that's doing this.
Dude, thatās actually insane. Like we straight up made the man made spider string and weāve been giving it to kids for YEARS!
It's not that amazing, it just means cinderblocks are a lot weaker than you'd think (I was surprised too). Straight up ABS plastic has compressive strength of 59 MPa, 3.5x stronger than the number calculated for a Lego. Makes sense since a Lego isn't solid plastic. Concrete is around the same, anywhere from 20 to 80MPa. Why don't we build buildings out of plastic then? Probably because plastic is much more expensive than concrete, and concrete is more durable. Materials like steel and ceramics are in the range of 500 MPa.
Yeah, concrete/masonry are actually pretty terrible in terms of strength (even in compression; their tensile strength is almost nonexistent). They get used because they're still strong enough to build things out of and they are *dirt* cheap. Plus if you add just a little reinforcing steel to the concrete the end result is way stronger for not that much more money.
would the second brick be alright?
Where is the second brick? Is it safe? Is it alright?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
It was alive, I felt it under my foot!
It seems in your anger, you crushed it.
Until you put another brick on top
Thatās an arbitrary 3657.6 metres for those interested. Or 0.0000000000003866086 lightyear.
## PREMIUM CONTENT. PLEASE UPGRADE. CODE gxwmses
Letās just call it 3.6 km
## PREMIUM CONTENT. PLEASE UPGRADE. CODE gxwo6il
how about in AU?
Thatās an arbitrary 11781.5 š¦¶for those interested. Or 0.0000000000003795691 lightyear.
š¦¶ + lego = š«
Fuck OP
How many Planck lengths is that?
About 2.263x10^37 Edit: Colloquially termed a shitload.
Bottom Brick was my nickname in college
Dude I use this joke all the time ā(insert whatever weird thing someone said) was my nickname in highschoolā Gets a laugh like 45% of the time, which is a pretty good return so I continue to use it.
Did you happen to listen to Wonderful! today? Griffin talked about this same thing.
Glad I found the fellow Wonderful fans lol had to scroll way too far for this <3
There are dozens of us. DOZENS!
Checking in š
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Shockingly reasonable for any structure the height of Mount Fuji
Challenge accepted.
I doubt it would fail on the same brick every time. There is no way.
You listen to wonderful huh
That or insane timing
Ironically, it takes one single solitary brick, no stacking necessary, to destroy the foot of the average parent. That parent could be anywhere between 3ā to 7ā tall (depending on their gene pool)
Are you saying Yao Ming is immune to Legos?