ShaydDeGrai

Growing up, Lego was one of those really special toys that, frankly, my folks couldn't afford to buy me. My dad emigrated to the U.S. with a duffle bag full of old work clothes, a few pounds in his pocket and an accent so thick that most Americans assumed he wasn't speaking English. We did okay, but there wasn't a lot of room in the family budget for things one couldn't either eat, wear or take shelter within. Lego was a luxury item, like dental care, hot water, haircuts that don't involve a relative, a pair of dull scissors and a bowl, etc. In the early years, what few kits I got both arrived and easily fit in my Christmas stocking (like the 363 Antique Car). I had friends who were better off financially and got the really big stuff, but for me just saving up my paper route money to get something like the 371 Sea Plane or the 485 Fire Truck was a really big deal. I was really torn when what is now classic space launched (no pun intended) in the late '70's and early 80's and Technic (or I think it was originally called expert builder) showed up in 1977 - so many kits, and so many _big_ kits (at least from my perspective). I saved pretty much every penny I earned/found in the street/whatever and I bought what I could afford when I could afford it. It was my money, still, when my dad would catch me with a new kit, even a really small one, he'd sit me down and give me a lecture about sound financial planning. He'd remind me that I should really be saving for university because, you know, every responsible twelve-year-old on the planet is going to be expected to cover their own tuition, room and board in just a few short years and I can't seriously expect to be mooching free food and shelter off my folks forever, now could I? Well, financial reality was what really drove my Dark Age. I still swung by toy stores to check out the Lego aisle and I watched the boxes get bigger and the models grow more complex, all the while thinking about bank balances and tuition bills and knowing I'd be lucky to get a 20 piece stocking-stuffer kit for Christmas. Years passed. My last undergrad tuition bill came and went and I started getting paychecks that weren't already 110% overcommitted to bills looming on the horizon, but old habits died hard; I was saving for retirement, a house, a car, tuition again in the form of grad-school. There was always some excuse I could think of for why my visits to the Lego Aisle were on a strictly browsing basis; some future need (imagined or otherwise) for why I should keep my wallet tightly closed and my latent dream of owning a really big Lego kit strictly a childhood fantasy. Then one day I was in TRU and they were stocking the shelves with the brand new 8480 Space Shuttle, a giant kit in a giant box with motors and lights! I fell off the wagon and landed hard. I picked up the box to get a better look and just couldn't bring myself to put it down. I forgot my frugal Scots' upbringing and went straight to the register. I don't think I even noticed the price until I was signing the credit card slip. I took the kit home and dumped the contents out on my bed because I didn't have a big enough table to work at. I finished the kit sometime after midnight that same day (of course with a bed full of pokey little technic parts, it's not like I had a choice in the matter…). Since then, I've been something of a moth hopelessly drawn to the "big box" flame. I remember when the 3450 Statute of Liberty showed up on my doorstep, that was probably the last time I was genuinely "wow"-ed by the size of a box. I cracked open the big box only to find four smaller, but each bigger than anything I'd dare dream about as a kid, inside. After that, modern kits like the modulars, Ewok Village, USC MF, Sydney Opera House don't really "surprise" me anymore, they just make me want to take out my credit card and be grateful that, thanks to my dad's sound (but sometimes infuriating) financial advice growing up, I'm now in a position to afford these wonderful big-box treasures.

I don't think it's a question "pride" or "control" over a single factory or subcontractor. China, as an industrial production environment is an environmental nightmare and cross-contamination is a serious problem that, shy of white rooms, air scrubbers and complete control over one's supply lines is very difficult to overcome. Certainly there is an aspect of community reaction driven by paranoia, ignorance and/or prejudice but if we confine ourselves to just the facts, it's still not particularly comforting: 1) According to the Chinese Ministry of Health the leading cause of death in China is cancer and that in industrial areas the average life expectancy has gone down by 5.5 years in the past decade. 2) On average, a quarter of a million people die due to acute asthma related respiratory failure on during "high smog alert" days annually 3) Heavy metal poisoning (lead, arsenic, cadmium, etc.) is the leading cause of child death in China. 4) By EPA (US) and European Standards half a billion Chinese do not have "safe" drinking water; by Chinese standards that number goes down to 100 million but that probably says more about the "standards" than the actual water quality at that point. 5) By EPA and European Standards less than 1% of the urban population breathes "safe" air on a regular basis. Economically, according to Jun Ma, director of the Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), in the rush to become more industrialized, many local governments in China have defied national policies and 'cut corners'. Ma described government oversight of the plastics, chemical, electronics industries as "weak" and "failed" and characterized overall environmental management efforts saying "mere formalities" to mislead people into not looking any deeper. From 2006 to 2010 China dealt with 912 industrial accidents with serious environmental impacts such as the Apple factory's noted n-hexane leak. In 2011, alone, they had 542 incidents. January of 2012 started with a massive 40 ton cadmium spill that tainted the water supply for tens of millions of people and (to date) has resulted in 3.7 million cases of heavy metal poison - with symptoms ranging from blue urine and migraines to death. Nationally, this has prompted policy changes on paper, but according to watchdog groups, both internal and international, enforcement of the policies is still woefully lacking and (remarkably - for a country often vilified for human rights abuses) the consequences for violators has been historically mild for the scale of the damage caused. It is further estimated that fewer than 1 in 5 chemical spills are actually reported either through corporate or government channels - most are "handled" locally to avoid fines or public embarrassment. Going back to the IPE and world bank findings, the "lack of transparency" and "at best nominal" enforcement of "lax regulations" calls into question the "integrity of products and exports". Like rice, beef and fish where ground water contamination has caused them to test positive for lead, cadmium, arsenic and cesium, many products hailing from China in recent years have tested positive for environmental contaminants. This is not to say the Chinese don't take pride in their work or that there's some evil communist plot afoot to poison capitalists by deliberately putting cadmium in the plastics our decadent western PEZ Dispensers are made from. It just means these exports are products of their environment and that environment is one where heavy metals, formaldehyde, sulfur dioxide, and all manner of hydrocarbons are (unfortunately) a part of daily life. I'd like to think that, in a poorly regulated part of the world where too many people get away with cutting corners, a generally responsible company like TLG would be pulling up the standards rather than exploiting the loopholes, but there's also only so much one company can do when pollution up and down the industrial pipeline is so rampant in that part of the world.

I'm not quite with you yet - I'm older than Star Trek, but not Doctor Who (or dirt) I'll be "celebrating"(?) yet another anniversary of my (now vaguely remembered) 39th birthday this weekend so I may not be in the club, but I can definitely see you guys on the horizon drawing closer every year...

Welcome! It sounds like you hail from my neck of the woods (globally speaking). I live just outside of Boston, an expensively convenient distance from 4 Lego Stores and about an hour's drive from the venue for BrickFair New England. I look forward to seeing what you do with all those Pick-a-Brick harvests.

Welcome! I, too, was helped out of my dark age by Technic kits (in my case it was the space shuttle #8480 back in the mid-90's) but I quickly diversified my taste in themes and before I knew it I was making up for all those kits from my childhood that I lusted after but could never afford. Now I buy bulk bricks by the case, but only because I want to. Really, I'm not an addict... I could quit anytime I want, I just don't want to… Anyway, welcome aboard and happy building!

When I first came out of my dark age, I paid attention to themes and mostly focused on Technic and Star Wars but as Technic kits became more "build redundant" over the years and Lego Star Wars started going revamp, prequel and Clone War crazy (to the point of nearly coming out with models of the napkin George Lucas wiped his mouth with the day he came up with Jar-Jar just because it was that or yet another snowspeeder/Millenuim Falcon/Tie fighter/etc.) I really started paying far less attention to theme and focused more on what was in the box rather than what inspired the box in the first place. These days, I tend to go more on a kit by kit basis than a theme-based one. I haven't even seen the Lone Ranger and don't really have that much "western" stuff in my collection, but I knew I wanted the stagecoach the moment I saw it. I got the Constitution Train because, well, it's a train, I like trains. Monster Fighters, overall, did little for me, but I think the Haunted House was fantastic. I haven't found a Galaxy Patrol or Chima set that really clicks (no pun intended) with me yet, but I always check out what's there, just in case. I even have my eye on a couple of Friends sets (mostly for parts, but still…) and, trust me, if you saw me in person, you'd think I was about as far removed from the Friends target audience as one can get while remaining in the same species... Still, there are some themes I do regularly consume, Architecture comes to mind. I didn't think much of the early offerings. I picked up the Empire State Building and the Space Needle on a lark; they were nice little models, but not nice enough to get me to run out and buy the others (actually, I did download the instructions and built the Sears/Willis tower and Rockefeller Center out of parts I had on hand, didn't even have to bricklink anything (and didn't bother with the custom printed nameplate)). Later kits, though, like Falling Water, The White House and the Robie House won me over.

After a bit of counting, apparently I have amassed 43 orange and 3 green plus whatever's in the sets I haven't opened yet. Ironically, when I actually use a brick separator, I prefer the old dark gray design. The old design doesn't have an axle pusher or a narrow edge for prying up tiles, but it fits my hands better.

I'll second what Faefrost said (above) about the LR stagecoach. For a kit of its size it's a neat little, complete build whether you have any interest in LR or not. Between parts, horses, figures, an interesting built, and a playable and displayable end product, I think it's a hard value to beat. I still haven't seen the film but have had the stagecoach on display since the day I bought it.

It's not really "buying" (unless you count paying the sales taxes) but my birthday is in January so I have a modern tradition of saving up my VIP points throughout the year and cashing them in after New Year's as a present for myself. This weekend I got: 10243 Parisian Restaurant 10233 (another) Horizon Express 79013 Lake Town Chase 21019 Eiffel Tower and a K-box of parts for a large MOC I'm working on Not a bad haul for "freebies" (let's just not mention to my wife how much I spent last year to get all those VIP points )

I managed to swing by the mall yesterday and cashed in some VIP points. Overall, I thought the PR fantastic. Easily one of the best Modulars ever, I loved the overall form and the layers of detail - really top notch design work. To TLG: more like this please... The icing on the cake, though, was that I had enough points to get it for free.

While I own all but the most recent wave of Hobbit sets in the Middle Earth themes but haven't really bought much Castle stuff recently, I think is is a mistake for people (both within TLG and elsewhere) to see Castle as "competing" LOTR - they do, but they shouldn't. Personally, I bought the LOTR because of the LOTR tie-in, and I've avoided the recent castle offerings because, frankly, I didn't find them very compelling. I, for one, have been a big fan of Tolkien's works since I first read them back in 1970. I enjoyed (and own and re-watch) the films _AS_ films, but Peter Jackson's vision of things, while epic and visually stunning, isn't really _MY_ vision of MIddle Earth. I've been doing MIddle Earth MOCs in Lego for decades and when Lego Star Wars came out, I _hoped_ some day there'd be a Lego LOTR as well. When TLG finally announced it had gotten a LOTR license I was very excited. That said, other than Orthanc and Helm's Deep, I've been rather disappointed with what they've done with the line. It isn't a suitable substitute for the classic castle theme and, as a big fan of the books, the offering to date aren't really that memorable. I bought them anyway because I am a LOTR fan and hoped that they'd get better with later waves which, marginally, came true. Still, I think they're too fixated on the minifigures and most of the kits are built around some tiny context build rather than capturing the real scope of the saga. The Harry potter theme had the same problem too many mini-figures packaged with vignettes, not enough complete builds. My usual litmus test is to build a set, skip the stickers, and take away the minifigures and all their accessories. If what's left doesn't immediately and uniquely bring to mind the source material, I think there's a problem. There were a lot of problems with the first wave of LOTR sets. Of course, recent non-LOTR castle offerings haven't had me rushing out to buy them either. I really liked MMV; Kingdon's Joust was okay, but the most recent waves really haven't been that compelling. The builds are either too small or, for the larger sets, the parts are too big, too bland, and (yes I realize LEGO is supposed to the be a kids toy but) too juvenile. I like the new parts and color palette that have come from the LOTR sets, but as "castle" themes go give me Black Falcons or Forestmen any day. I'm a fan of the new posable horses and LOTR is one of the few themes of minifigures I actually collect but I spent nearly a quarter of a century populating my castles with classic yellow dudes and I'd be perfectly happy to go on doing that for another 25 years. In an ideal world, I like to see Castle get more sets like MMV or the old Blacksmith's Shop. At the high end, I'd like to see the theme get a true Modular Building treatment: big buildings made from small parts with lots of details not big wall panels with stickers. At the low end, they could borrow a page from the Urukai Army pack and offer battle packs with modular (detailed) battlements designed to snap together to build massive castle walls $20 at a time while also offering a good, generic parts part for MOCer's

5. dr_spock - 2 17. kristel - 1 20. gazumpty - 1 42. CarsonBrick - 1

I finally got around to breaking the seals on this one over the holidays (it's been sitting in my to-do pile for a while now). From a subject matter standpoint, I could take it or leave it, but I found the construction techniques used to make the shell roofs rather interesting. The end product looks better from some viewing angles than from others (the gaps in the roof are quite noticeable). Otherwise, it's a pretty good Lego abstraction of the original. That said, it's a lot of dark tan and does for that color what Architecture Studio does for white and Orthanc does for black - if you need wide variety of parts in mostly one color, it's an impressive parts pack for people without the patience to split a BrickLink order over two dozen vendors. At first I was on the fence as to whether this could be a cost effective parts pack because a simple part count divided by MSRP calculation breaks the 10 cents/part "magic" boundary, but if you factor in the three late blue baseplates (the largest of which sells for 15USD all by itself) and the fact that (unlike, say, the Tower Bridge which teemed with cheese slopes) the part count isn't inflated by an over abundance of tiny "one-stud-ish" parts and you're actually getting a fair number of bricks and larger plates, I find the overall price palatable. I enjoyed this one and may yet pick up another just for parts( it all depends on whether I can figure out what to do with all those extra white roof curves if I got the parts route…)

Very true, I'd like to think that the people in those photos were glad to see their jobs taken over by robots so that they could move on to less mind numbing activities, but I know that's rarely the case when factories automate. On a lighter note, I'm sure you're old enough to remember the classic "I love Lucy" bit with Lucille Ball working as a packer in a candy factory trying to keep up with a conveyor belt and the chaos that ensued - just imagine what she could have done in a LEGO factory... But back to topic, if the set had been hand-packed like they were 50 years ago, we wouldn't be debating the question of why use two parts when one larger one will do, we'd probably be complaining that Lego simply couldn't make big detailed sets like that in the first place because they'd be too labor intensive to package anywhere outside of a North Korean forced labor camp or some third world sweatshop.

With respect to the question of set scalpers/speculators, I think that concern may have been one part of the motivation behind the "no discount" policy but I don't know how well that's really worked out in that regard. Supply, demand and cost recovery theory says that the market will just simply adjust to new levels of asking price, timing and profitability. It might dissuade a few people looking to "flip" sets in the short term (right after a set it retired) but won't really impact serious resellers. I suppose if they really wanted to stick it to the speculators, TLG could establish an annual "Set Revival" kit tradition where they look at the most ridiculously over-priced eBay MSIB retired kits that sold in the past year and reissue a set at its original price, destroying the aftermarket price gouging. I'd think after a few years of seeing TLG flood the market with new Green Grocers, Emerald Knights and UCS MIllenium Falcons, to the point where AFOL collectors were waiting to see what next year's revival will be rather than paying top dollar for kit that could well be readily available in a few months time, a lot of speculators would think twice about making a storage locker full of retired sets the crux of their retirement planing. Then again, TLG would probably really tick off a lot of people who already own 20 Ewok Villages under the assumption that a decade from now they're going to double in value - even more than they did when they declared that they couldn't use their 10% off coupons... But I don't think set scalping is the real issue here. The greater "issue" TLG has to figure out from a marketing strategy is how to position its own storefronts without disrupting its relationships with major retail channels like TRU and Target. It's not a problem unique to LEGO; I can go to the mall, get an informed product demo from the guy at the Apple Store to figure out exactly which model iPod I want to buy, pop over to the Sony Store and pick out my new TV and then walk down to Best Buy and actually buy both items for less than what I would have spent at the "Factory Direct" single-brand stores. Sony and Apple, as corporations, still got my money, but the physical stores themselves incurred the expenses of maintaining a physical presence in the mall and of training qualified sales people to answer my questions in ways the holiday part-time help at Best Buy never could, but Best Buy got the sale because they had better discounts and promotional give-aways. I think things like the PAB wall, VIP cards and poly-bag promotions are all attempts by TLG to show some value added to actually buying from a Lego Store rather than treating it as a showroom to figure out which kit you want and then going to Walmart or buying on-line from someone else. I suppose treating it as a showroom is fine if you're only looking at the total sales for the company, but in a rough economy, I don't think the physical store fronts can afford to be loosing sales (particularly at the high end) because 5% of a future purchase (VIP) and a tiny polybag set can't compete with 30% at Amazon. Some companies factor lost "local" sales right into the business model, (I think I read somewhere that Microsoft Stores are't actually expected to break even and fall under their advertising budget as a marketing expense rather than a direct revenue source) but I doubt that's the case with LEGO. Now if there were just _a_ physical Lego Store (or just the gift shops at a Lego theme parks) TLG could probably offer _real_ discounts that Amazon and Walmart couldn't match without selling things below cost; TLG could probably get away with that on a limited basis without endangering major retail channels. A trip to LegoLand is made extra special by getting a great price on some souvenirs, but such a scenario is no real threat to Amazon because 99% of their customers can't or won't be able to take advance of it and those that do probably won't be doing it very often. But back in the real world, TLG is opening more stores every year. There are four in Massachusetts (population 6.6M, median age 39.1 years, median family income 101,000 USD, average price of a cup of coffee $2.63 ) alone, so if TLG did too much to entice sales at its storefronts, I'd bet they tick off more than a few business partners in their overall distribution chain. On the flip side, there a huge swarths of the US where the nearest Lego Store may as well be in Denmark, where Walmart and on-line ordering are the only game in town. So where do you draw the line between supporting your own stores and cannibalizing your partners' sales? I think this is a question TLG has yet to figure out for themselves. Things like the changing face of Brick Friday and special VIP invite only events, as well as "exclusive set" price fixing are just symptoms of them trying to explore the solution space. Personally, I think the store fronts need to do more to attract actual sales (better incentives, truly exclusive "exclusives", etc.) but I certainly don't know enough of the big picture to know what the answer is, I can just sympathize with the complexity of the problem.

Logistically, the most likely reason for the part substitution has to do with "filling stations" on the production line. IF the Lego factory is like most packaging assembly lines (and I have no inside knowledge to confirm this but it's probably a safer assumption than many), there's a series of filling stations that each add one type of part to a container (polybag) that moves from station to station. Each filling station "understands" the part it is adding so it can count how many parts it contributes before allowing the container to move on. Most systems in use today do this by weight, though optical and haptic (touch) sensing is also viable. In a weight/mass system, a container comes in, is weighted and items are added until the weight of the container is increased by at least the combined weight of the pieces the given station was supposed to add. This is why each station only does one type of part - the weight of the parts needs to be uniform or it won't know if it filled the bag accurately - it would also explain why you sometimes get extra parts but almost never are missing one. The scales themselves have ranges of sensitivity and while you _could_ have a machine that's equally capable of accurately counting a single cheese slope or 1x1 round plate as it is two dozen 1x12 Technic beams, it's cheaper to have some filling station that specialize in tiny weights and others that work on a more macro level. I suspect this is what TLG does as it would explain why we often see a small bag of tiny parts nested in a larger one of heavier/more redundant parts - a production line of high sensitivity scales produces the inner bag and the bag itself becomes a single "fill item" on the larger assembly line because now the combined weight of all its contents is enough for the higher weight class machines to count it accurately. So what does this mean for Orthanc and multiple 1x4's versus 1x8's? It could mean that somewhere in the development cycle, someone was trying to figure out what parts were going to go in which bags and realized the contents of the bags themselves were getting too diverse for the packaging lines. Packaging something as complex as a Lego set is an interesting optimization problem and somewhere out there I'm sure TLG has a program that knows exactly what the capacity of each filling station and packaging line is and has optimization software to ensure that, when a given line is active, it is being used effectively. If a bag contains ten different types/colors of parts, obviously you need at least 10 filling stations that know how to process those parts. If you only need 10 classes of parts in a given bag, you don't want that bag being filled on a line with 50 filling stations because the other 40 stations are sitting idle when they could have been filling a more complicated bag (possibly for a different set). This creates a situation where, even though a given set may make use of two particular types of parts overall, there the limitations of the packing line may dictate that a given poly-bag many only hold X classes of parts and, for multiples of a given part in a given bag, the total weight of those parts must be between Y and Z. It's the sort of thing I'm sure the original designer never even considers in the prototype, but I can easily see the engineers coming back to him/her two months laters saying "at this point in the build, could you possibly eliminate the need for these 2 1x8 plates and substitute 4 1x4's instead? It will let us put all the parts in one poly-bag on a line running at 90% capacity, otherwise we'll have to break things up into two bags and run each line at less than half capacity - that's a high production cost to absorb for a couple of plates." This is all pure supposition on my part, but it's based on real-world constraints that I know other companies have to face in the long cycle of product design, refinement and packing; I don't see any reason why TLG would be the exception to the rule.

While I won't argue the likelihood of eventual failure for most of these projects, there are three cases where this new ruleset does constitutes a "moving goalpost" - one more dramatic than the others. One-proposal-one-kit: In the early days of Cuusoo, they did _allow_ theme proposals - but through practice they strongly suggested that promising themes focus on just one pilot set. Most people saw the writing on the wall, but banning theme proposals is actually an official reversal of course, albeit one we've been easing into for a while now Brick-only: Again the early days of Cuusoo saw official blessing being given to CMF display cases, LEGO logo tie-ins, video games, 2.5 to 3 aspect ratio graph paper for planning MOCs, etc. so deleting these and banning future things along this line is another actual reversal of position. Granted most people didn't even know these proposals where there let alone supported them and none ever came anywhere close to even being debated in a review cycle. Still, taking them off the table as "potential" Cuusoo products is definitely not simply a "clarification" of the existing rules. No-Part-Proposals: Sets that incorporate new parts are a different beast, but proposals for actual new parts has (up until now) been an entire sub-genre of Cuusoo with its own legalese disclaimers and a different compensation structure in the unlikely event that a given proposal were ever developed. In my mind, this is really where the "new rules" are not just codifying what we were all gleaning from review outcomes or clarifying an ambiguous situation but really changing the game. I don't think the way Cuusoo is run that it was ever well-suited to crowd-source something as un-sexy as a SNOT plate or new Technic gear, but it was always saying that such proposals were welcome and they even gave out the perfunctory 1000+ support congratulations letter when a lowly part proposal limping over the line (after having been left in the dust by things like Serenity, The Winchester, My Little Pony, Dark Bucket, etc.) So while I agree it's fair to say most of the stuff that's now gone would never have passed review, it's not correct to characterize the new rules as clarifications and that the projects submitted under the "old rules" were somehow doomed from day one for non-compliance. TLG genuinely reversed itself on several key points where things that were previously acknowledged/encouraged in both the house rules and related blogs. I think TLG were within their rights _to_ move the goal posts, but they did, definitely, move. Actually, it seems there were two variations on a form letter sent out - One for sets that someone thought could be "salvaged" (such as replacing a specific company logo with a generic term - Ford Dealer becomes Car Dealer, Apple Store becomes Electronics Store, etc) and one for projects where the primary reason for support to date was something that is now forbidden (like new parts (with out without context builds) or sets that become pretty pointless without some new _key_ element (like Duplo Batman)) If you fell into the former bucket and had over 1k supporters you were told the date when they would look at your project again, and if you were still non-compliant you would be removed. If you had less than 1K, you had until you reached 1K or you would be removed as part of the "normal" 1K review and comment process (So I suppose someone on the verge of hitting 1K could, in theory, have less time to react than someone over the line if they were to get a sudden surge of support.) If you fell into the latter bucket, your project was removed and then you were sent a notification - or at least that's the order I experienced, first I noticed one of my projects was gone, then I got an email later that day several hours after I observed the change on the website itself. Maybe the email was just slow getting to me (my Cuusoo account is linked to one of my lesser email accounts - one that is no stranger to delivery delays and unexpected down times) but the letter wasn't a "you have X weeks to revise your project" letter it was a 'your project "no longer qualifies" and "has been deleted"' letter sent after the fact.

Back when I was a professor, I knew a research group with a big grant from General Motors to improve the efficiency of REAL cars, looking at everything from electro-magnetic bearings, regenerative braking systems, thermo- and piezoelectric transducer recovery systems, new engine designs, and hybrid engines to new alloys, body designs, battery technologies and adaptive computer AI to optimize shifting in transmission. They even looked at thin-film coatings for windshields to cut down the increased drag from driving in rain from the micro turbulence that forms around water droplets when the bead on glass. Their goal was to someday get a real car to 30% total energy efficiency (assuming conservation of matter). That's not a typo. Commercial passenger cars waste more than two thirds of the energy that goes into them (usually chemical potential energy in the form of gasoline) mostly in the forms of heat, useless vibration, friction and deformation of the tires. The engine itself usually maxes out at 30-35% and the system as a whole goes down from there. As the research improves (and market forces will allow) cars get better, but they are no where near 80%. In that context, I don't think LEGO beams that can bend, warp and otherwise deform with load and changes of heat and humidity, LEGO gears that - for a toy are pretty good but - really don't mesh all that tightly, and axles, bearings and pins that allow for local wobble and uneven wear stand much of a chance to come anywhere close to that goal. We might be able to exploit _a_ neat trick here or there in a Great Ball Contraption, but LEGO is hardly the ideal medium for a seemingly perpetual motion sculpture. Somewhere along the line you need to keep putting energy in to get motion out and the base nature of LEGO parts exacts a high "handling fee" in the middle. As for the "art installation" in the video it does look like a high efficiency gizmo (and a neat sculpture) but I'm sure the moment you tried to tap into it to generate electricity, it would grind to a halt. The design itself reminds me of late 18th century clockwork designs that tried using pendulums to keep better time on ships (for longitude calculations) and makes me want to see if that guy's PMM functions differently at the equator than it does as a fixed installation in Scandinavia. Early pendulum clock makers discovered that their devices were "more energetic" in northern latitudes than they were near the Equator and modern research suggests that this was a function of the Earth's rotation and the gravitational tides of the moon. If it _is_ the case where this guy has built a giant desk toy that is so sensitive that it can tap into the momentum of planetary bodies for noticeable extra energy (say through a forth, heavier pendulum hidden in the thick post in the middle), well, that's _really_ cool but it's still not perpetual motion, it's just hiding the energy transfer. In principle, it's really no different that a tidal generation station that uses the extreme high-low tide swings at high latitudes to generate "free" electricity - it wasn't really free, you slowed down the whole planet to get it, most people just didn't notice.

Well if you're talking about licensed themes, don't forget: Clair Kent Alexis Luthor Victoria Von Doom Octavia Octopus Gandalfa the ("I refuse to go gray and I'm a wizard damn it so I don't have to" ) Brunette and Charleen Xavier I'm sure no one would notice let alone object to the change... But more seriously, where the heck is Galadriel and Eowyn and why won't they put Arwen in riding leathers and give her a sword? (Okay, just needed to squeeze in a rant… better now)

Hmm, an odd combination. It that like R2-D2 serving drinks on Jabba's Sail Barge?

Yeah, that was my concern with it from the beginning. I actually have the original Discovery series lander in my desk and they're both sufficiently accurate models that, at first glance, you could mistake the Cuusoo project for a straight build of the official kit ( I don't mean to diminish the work of the designer, when two people are building models of the same real-life object at the same scale it's only natural to expect them to resemble each other.) Perhaps they could modify the proposal to give the mission commander a golf club, custom print "Shepard" on his torso and call it Apollo 14 - It wasn't the first lunar landing, but it was the most accurate (according to mission plans) and included two of the longest golf drives ever performed by a human (thanks to the lower gravity, Alan Shepard beat the Earth based record of 515 yards by about 3000) yards. From everything I've read about the guy, something tells me he wouldn't have objected to being immortalized in Lego.

I _hope_ the next offering will be another steam engine. The TGV and Maersk are great, but the Emerald Night is by far my favorite to date (side note, my grandfather was an engineer on the real Flying Scotsman, so I have extra affinity for that one). I think something like the California Western 45 would be a good choice. Although it's an early 20th century 2-8-2 locomotive, it's got the feel and character of a classic "old west" American train. To a kid, it wouldn't look too out of place pulling rolling stock from the EN or any of the old Hogwarts Express revisions. To an adult, it would be a chance to see the old (oversimplified) steam engines from the long defunct "My Own Train" line all "grown up." Diesels and electrics are nice (and wonders of modern engineering) but (once you romanticize away all the down-sides) a classic steam engine just has so much more character and (in my opinion) are much more interesting to build.

This is actually the first offering from Cuusoo that I really feel like going out and getting. A decade ago, I gobbled up the whole Discovery Channel theme and this would have fit right in. I just wish it came with the Skycrane module shown in Stephen Pakbaz' original proposal as well.

I have to second this. I really didn't care about the Lone Ranger aspects of the set at all, I just like trains and this kit offers a nice little steam engine, track and (if you're not into the Lone Ranger) plenty of "spare parts" and extra minifirgures. The rolling stock didn't do that much for me, but that's the beauty of trains, decouple the cars you don't want, build and hook up the ones you do. At 50% off, if you like trains, it's hard to go wrong here.

Perhaps this explains why I've been averaging 2-3 emails PER DAY from Shop-a-Home for the past few weeks - lately it's been getting a bit excessive. I've even gotten direct (personal) emails from people at my local store reminding me of new kits now becoming available since the last time I dropped by. I appreciate the personal touch, but I also I got the feeling they were trying to make a sales quota or something.