A pair of teenagers in Toronto constructed a homemade weather balloon that they then released into the sky with a few Lego accessories – including a Lego Minifigure. After a bit over 90 minutes up at an altitude of around 80,000 feet, their balloon came back to earth but not after taking several photos of the Lego
Over at Geek Mom, an interesting analysis of the pricing of Lego sets over the past 40 years or so. Looking at the pricing on a “price per brick” point of view, the average cost has actually been trending down.
As it turns out, after going up in the 70′s and 80′s, the average price per brick has actually been trending down. I sampled the prices of sets through the years as listed on brickset.com from across themes and set sizes. To try to make it an apples-to-apples comparison, I excluded minifigs by themselves, accessories, promotional items, games, or anything that required batteries, as well as Mindstorms, Duplo, and non-brick items.
One theory noted in the article is that the Lego sets of today are far more complex and thus have far more pieces than those of the 1970′s and 1980′s, So looking at it on a “per brick” may be skewing the numbers lower.
At the end of the day though, I think what this is telling us is that we should go out and get that epic 3,000 piece, 8 lb, 50 inch long Star Wars “Super Star Destroyer” kit for $400.
Seriously awesome Lego replicas of M.C. Escher’s gravity defying drawings. The above is a Lego depiction of his 1953 work “Relativity”. A few more are on the Daily Mail article linked below. How cool is this?!?
Some Lego builders took a project to epic proportions and built a scale mini-figure Lego model of the Lord of the Rings Last March of the Ents and the Tower of Orthanc . How big? I’m glad you asked. The tower breaks 7 feet tall and the full display is over 8 feet in diamater.
Lego Plants vs. Zombies…created by my 8 year old son.
I’m not sure what is more impressive: this Lego creation or him reeling of with 95% accuracy the names of each of the plants in the game just by looking at the images.
The tallest Lego tower has been built in Brazil. It surpasses the previous record by close to a foot.
Appropriately, it was built and displayed in the parking lot of a mall in Brazil, symbolic of the usual trek between the car and the mall’s Lego store by extremely happy kids and parents asking “Seriously? I just dropped $100 on a Lego kit depicting a horrendous movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal? Seriously?”
It would be really cool to recreate the street bending scene from Paris using Lego.
Via Amusing Planet
A video of a reporter who visits an amazing full size house made completely out of Lego.
Via Holy Kaw!
Artist Jan Vormann has traveled the world fixing old and crumbling buildings with Lego bricks. The gallery on the Telegraph’s website includes photos from buildings in NYC as well as Italy and Amsterdam.
A guy named Paul Yperman spent the past two years constructing a scale model of the Star Wars Droid Control Ship from scratch, using schematics he found in a Star Wars Cross Sections book in a bookstore.
He found a software on the Internet that helped him figure out the orb in the middle and then he continued from there. 30,000 pieces later and 2 years of building, he was finished. The God sent idea was finally done, and as a result, he constructed one of the worlds most elaborate Star Wars LEGO creations. Forget the small 200 piece builds you can buy off the shelf. This one was carefully executed and took some custom ordering to fit the purpose.
This is just another amazing example of the super cool things that can be built with Lego.
Recently, my 6 year old son acquired an old Lego set from the Star Wars line – the old Millennium Falcon set from 2004. Problem was that it was acquired from a school thrift sale, meaning the set was used, it was in a brown box and not in the original packaging, and the instructions were no where to be found. We (OK, my son) decided that we wanted to start building it today but with no instructions, this would prove to be quite the challenge. With about 5 minutes worth of searching, with relative ease we were able to find the instructions booklet online. Click, download the PDF, and we’re in business. Yet another reason why the Internet rocks.