ShaydDeGrai

Very interesting graphs. Have you tried just a plate-tile combination to see the effect (if any) of short (plate) side walls v. tall (brick) ones? I suppose the next questions would be whether particular color dyes impact material strength and whether long term UV exposure degrades plasticity. Another interesting test would be to see what trans-clear parts do, I _think_ those are polycarb elements rather than ABS. If you test that though, keep your distance. From my ( limited and unintended ) experience, clear parts tend to snap/shatter rather than deform when over stressed.

My answers to both volume and value in the past three months were heavily skewed by the VIP Brick Friday Invite-only sale. I spent a good deal of money at the event, had the luxury of paying North American prices AND got 20% off so I really can't complain. In latter questions, though, it was interesting to discover that there was such a thing as the Maine Coast LUG. Despite living in New England for decades, I'd never heard of them. As it turns out web-wise, they only have a Facebook presence so I shouldn't be surprised that they never pinged on my radar (my personal goal is to be the last person in North America to NOT have a Facebook account).

Resistance is futile, give in to temptation. The 1x2 plate construction of the Robie House gets a little tedious at times, but the finished model is one of my favorites of the Architecture line, at 40% off it's hard to go wrong.

Were I TLG, I'd just negotiate a one-time promotional package run with Purdue (not unlike what they've done with special promotion kits for major outlets or highly localized events/venues). Make 10,000 of them and sell them ALL, in bulk, to the university and let them assume the risk. The Alumni Relations office can sell them at homecoming events or give them away as "Thank You" gifts for major donors, or award them as gag gifts at fund raiser receptions. The designer can get the promised 1% kickback on the bulk sale price and TLG gets a one time revenue bump for the price of printing instructions and packaging bricks they already have the molds for. The only one assuming any risk is Purdue, but even if they gave the kits away for free, they'd probably recoup the money in good will donations over time. Purdue has 30,000+ undergrads and about 9,000 grad students. That translates to about 10,000 graduates per year - or about half a million living alumni who, at some point, might have developed a fondness for LEGO. With that sort of audience to draw from, I'm sure they can find homes for 10,000 Purdue Pete sculptures with a single ad in an alumni newsletter. I don't have a problem Purdue Pete never showing up on a shelf at Toys R Us or the prospect of having to give money to Purdue to get one (I, personally, wouldn't, but _in theory_ if I wanted 'Pete I'd be okay with Purdue as my vendor). If the production run were limited to a one-time batch of 10,000 copies (like the support votes themselves) and then retired, I'd be fine with that too - it makes the few 'Petes produced more collectable/desirable. If negotiations were handled well, and all parties were realistic in their expectations, this could be win-win all around; perhaps it is not the scenario most people think of when they're submitting their idea to CuuSoo or supporting a project, but it is well within the ground rules as defined by the site itself.

Well, I certainly spent more than I was planning on this year, and the year's not over yet. I still have have all The Hobbit sets on my radar and I'm expecting my first purchase of 2013 to be a couple of the new TGV train sets when they come out. On the building front, I've got a backlog of kits that is getting a little ridiculous (thank you LEGO for that special VIP Brick Friday event, I now have a three foot high pile of kits taunting me in my office) I think I've built about the same number of kits as I have in prior years, I just bought a lot more, creating a bit of an assembly queue. The one place I have been better about was MOC'ing. I've been telling myself for years that I should make more time for it and my wife's been telling me that I should share my creations on the internet rather than just sticking them on a shelf to gather dust. Well, here I am, and I've done more and bigger MOCs this past year than in the previous two combined, including two I'm rather proud of, my Argonath and my Minas Tirith. As the year drew on I had less time to both build and post things, but, in general I think I got moving in the right direction.

When I was getting married (unknown to me at the time) my fiancee called the customer service number for LEGO (the one based, at the time, in Enfield, Conn, USA), explained that she was marrying a major AFOL and asked if they made a cake topper (this was before there was anything official along those lines). The girl on the line said she wasn't aware of anything but would "look into things" and took her contact information. A couple weeks later, a plain padded envelope arrived in the mail with two minifigures (with three different hair colors for the bride) flower parts and parts to build an arch along with a photo of what the assemble "kit" should look like and a note from LEGO congratulating us on our upcoming wedding. One more reason why LEGO is a great company. Anyway, the arch design they they sent us was made from two curved fence parts and four straight fence parts held together with some 1xX plates plates on the bottom/backside and 1xX tiles on the top/front. The whole thing was then flipped on end to get the arch shape and held to a plate with some 1x1 clips. I think it's nicer than the commercial one they eventually produced but your milage may vary. In any case, congratulations!

Personally, I'd never pay that, partly because, as a collectable, Minecraft means nothing to me and, as parts, I could recreate the set contents on Bricklink for less than the MSRP, but clearly I'm in the minority (at least with respect to your bidders). Having gone to _real_ collectables auctions, however, the one insight I can offer it that it is important to remember that a "fair price" is not a number, it's common ground defined by a seller and a buyer where each walks away from the transaction feeling that they've gotten something of greater value (to them) than what they had to trade to get it. If you've been candid and complete in your description of the item and made an honest effort to inform potential bidders as to what is really for sale, I think most people would agree that you've kept up your end of the bargain. If someone is willing to pay a ridiculous price for a small box of bricks, hopefully it indicates that having that _particular_ box of bricks means more to them than whatever they had to do to get the money to pay for it and they should have no reason to complain.

Given the way the brick pancaked, I wonder if building with plates would be better or worse. Plates should take a lot more to crush because the voids between interlocking plates are much smaller and the shorter side walls should only translate about 1/6 as much torque to the corners. On the other hand, you'd need three times as many plates to build to the same height as you would with bricks, so although you're able to support more weight, you also need to add a lot more weight to get the height. It's an interesting problem. If I had to guess, I'd suspect that the tallest possible tower wound consist of stacked plates at the base, giving way to stacked bricks further up once the remaining height of the tower dropped below the crush load of the bricks. I'd test it out but I seem to have left my hydraulic press in my other pants...

There is some truth to this, but it is more of a symptom than a cause. There's been a fair bit of research linking short attention spans and poor spacial reasoning skills to video games, TV and other minimally interactive, predictable, short term distractions. Part of the problem is that, even in a pseudo-3D first person shooter, the world is flat and is using forced perspective to trick/confuse the mind. Another problem is that other than holding a remote or pressing a button, there is very little haptic (tactile) feedback and, what few interactions there exist, are drawn from very limited palette compared to say, building a model or playing a team sport. There ARE benefits that a child can get from playing CERTAIN video games, the problem arises from over exposure to (what from a cognitive development standpoint would be poorly designed) video games at the expense of other experiences. Another major contributor to conditioning kids for short attentions spans comes from the basic design of most video games and television broadcast practices. In general, one does not "win" a video game (yes there are strategy games that take hours to play and you can actually win, but they are in the minority and played mostly by late teens and adults). In the interest of repeat play, most games redefine "win" as "what can you achieve before losing" (high score, mission objectives, whatever) and, to keep the player interested rather than frustrated, games dole out small rewards for small actions. Few offer any rewards for long term planning and many have little tolerance for "creativity" on the part of the player. Likewise, television broadcasts, unlike going to the cinema where you get a two hour unbroken narrative (hopefully) building to a rewarding conclusion, are broken into short attention span chunks no more than 10 minutes in length where each commercial interruption is a reminder to the writers to break the narrative. To an adult, it's a chance to run to the kitchen for a snack, to a kid, it's a subliminal signal that life happens a few minutes at a time and anything that takes longer to resolve, probably isn't worth the effort. LEGO kits aren't a magic cure for these issues, but there is research correlating exposing children to construction toys (and following wordless instruction books) with improved attention spans and spacial reasoning skills. I remember reading one long term study that found (statistically speaking) children that regularly played with LEGO in their formative 6-13 age range were significantly less likely to get in a car accident within the first five years of getting their licenses compare to kids that never played with LEGO growing up (could just be a fluke of statistics but it makes for nice trivia) I hear you. Licensed themes are a double edged sword. If you think of them as a gateway drug to draw people to LEGO, I think they're great. Likewise, I'm sure they have a positive impact on TLG bottom line and that cash flow helps keep the company profitable so we can get fantastic sets like the Emerald Night, Medieval Market Village, modulars, etc. _in addition to_ yet another version of the Millenium Falcon or an Orc battle pack, etc. I sincerely hope that most kids are more like my nephew than like me. If I buy a licensed kit, I put it together, put it on a shelf and it gathers dust for a few years before I get bored with it or need to reclaim the space. My nephew builds the model, plays with it, and then takes it apart and mixes the pieces in with all his other LEGO and builds something else. In my mind, that's exactly what a kid SHOULD be doing. A directed model can be a great learning experience, but it shouldn't stifle the kids own creativity. I think there have been some awesome Star Wars kits and I've got the ships from PotC proudly displayed in my office, but for a kid, I think the 2-in-1 and 3-in-1 Creator series are really the best bets. Enough parts and instructions to get you started; alternate models to get you thinking; and generic enough models that you don't mind breaking them down to build something else. You just don't get that with a licensed theme set. "Inspired" theme sets (like Monster Hunters or Atlantis), I think, are more open ended than licensed kits, which is a good thing, but with the club magazine and marketing videos, etc. there's always that question of who owns the narrative. Where do you draw the line between directed play and creative play? When are you selling a story versus inspiring the child to invent their own story? When do you take the training wheels off the bike? Would you be a better cyclist today if you'd never relied on training wheels to begin with? I first really noticed this with the Harry Potter line and it has since spread into a general (negative) trend. One of my litmus tests for a "successful" set is to take away all the minifigures, minifig accessories and stickers (but that's a different issue) and look at what's left. Does the "build" really serve a purpose, or is it there to up the piece count so that TLG doesn't get accused of violating a license agreement and selling "action figures" instead of a construction toy? I'm not a fan of minifigure backdrop play sets. I'm not opposed to minifigures (I certainly have quite a few of them kicking around) but I think the figures should be there to enhance and bring life to the model, not the other way 'round. As for big sets being the exception, I think that really varies with the set. The Death Star, the Haunted Mansion and the Modulars are great examples of high end kits that I'd buy even if they didn't have any figures with them, the figures are icing on the cake for those guys. On the other hand, lately TLG has been marketing more small builds in big boxes, which I find a little disappointing. Look at the Mines of Moria, it's a big kit, but not a big build. That kit could be broken up into several small kits in the 15-25USD range each and be none the worse for wear. And in each case the structure is really just a movie set for the figures, it doesn't build to anything other than more scenery if you have all the sub-kits. In some ways, I also think the trend to small builds in big boxes contributes to that attention span issue of your first point. Too many kits today pander to the "commercial interruption" mentality of "build something quickly, get a reward, take a break" as opposed to a really big kit that you don't expect to finish in one sitting. It's nice to have clean break points so you know where you left off, but I think (for kids) it also important that each construction session builds toward a greater whole, if you leave something unfinished, it should look unfinished and motivate you to want to come back and do it properly. Diagon Alley is one offender on this front, three modest builds in one big box. Once you build Gringott's you could declare yourself done and play with it, come back to build Borgen and Burke's once you get bored with Gringott's; that's nice for marketing, not so great for a child's cognitive development compared with, say assembling one story of a modular building - yes there's a reward to see some stage of it complete, but there's also motivation to see the _whole thing_ through, to return to a task left unfinished, to see yesterday's output as a foundation for todays' achievements. Even a personal favorite of mine, Medieval Market Village, fails when it comes to sending this sort of important message. It could have been two separate kits (akin to the blacksmith shop of a few years back) and maybe a polybag for the tree without impacting the net build experience (assuming you got all the kits). The bundling of small related builds into a big box might make for good marketing, but psychologically it dilutes one of the strength's of LEGO as an educational toy. I don't really know when the "golden age" of LEGO was/is. I've lived with it for nearly 50 years and grown to appreciate and criticize it on all different levels for all different reasons. I've played with it on my living room floor and taught with it in a classroom. I've gone years without buying any kits because they just had no appeal and I've spend an entire paycheck in a single purchase while leaving kits I still wanted on the shelf. I remember my first "expert builder" (now Technic) kit and how delighted I was when I got a Statue of Liberty and Yoda sculptures (sand green and tan bricks, and oh so many new colors to follow). UCS sets rocked my world and emptied my wallet. Trains, then and now, (9v, PF, RC, I don't care) have always been objects of lust even when I couldn't come close to affording them. I think the golden age of LEGO has nothing to do with how profitable TLG is, whether or not there are originals or licensed kits, how much the sets appreciate in value or how old the consumer is; the golden age is that time when LEGO is most precious to _you_, the time when happiness assumes the shape of little plastic bricks, everything else is just marketing.

I really can't speak to the "play" factor very well, but from all I heard the Death Star is a great set in that regard (mine mostly gathers dust, but I have no kids). Still, I've heard good things about the City and Friends sets you mention as well, so I doubt a child would be disappointed in any case (lord knows when _I_ was that age I'd be over the moon to get any _one_ of the kits you're considering). As a former professor with a background in both engineering and psychology, as well as a one-time researcher into child cognitive development and constructive (as opposed to instructive) learning, I will mention one other factor you might want to consider. Research (in some cases actually done with LEGO-based experiments) has suggested that the process/discipline of following a graphical instruction book to build something big enough such that the finished product really doesn't resemble its constituent parts is very beneficial. Children who get exposed to "building big" from a plan at a young age tend to score higher in spacial reasoning tests, have longer attention spans, and generally perform better in visualization, math and science by the time they get to high school. Likewise, some have found a correlation that the bigger the build (more parts, more instructions to follow, and most importantly, longer time between starting with a pile of parts to producing a finished model) the more benefit the child's brain realizes from the experience. If you trust the research (and I assure you _all_ researchers have _some_ sort of agenda so take everything with a grain of salt), this latter result would argue that the Death Star is a "better" cognitive development experience for your child than several small kits of net equal price because, during the building process, the brain works harder and gratification is delayed longer, than it would with several smaller kits. That longer process of going from many, many generic small pieces to something big and specific, combined with "reward" of the finished product is suspected to imprint strongly on the brain with long term positive effects. I wouldn't expect one kit to turn your kid into a rocket scientist, but everyone's got to come from somewhere and it's never too early to start. The trick is just not to over do it with a task beyond the child's physical and mental abilities as this will just build up a negative association with problem solving and lead to frustration (this is where building with parental assistance can be a very good thing). Of course, if you're planning on building it yourself and giving it your kid as an assembled play set, I'm afraid the research says you won't get the same cognitive benefit. There's benefits to be had, certainly, but once you hit puberty, your brain just doesn't seem to work the same way. They see the same thing with learning foreign languages, kids can pick them up with simple immersion, the rest of us have to work at it.

Wonderful contest! I've been meaning to add a train station to my annual winter village set-up for some time now, perhaps this will be just the thing to get me to sit down and actually build it.

I picked up a second MMV when they announced it was being discontinued soon, but mostly for the extra cows. I'm not a big mini-figure person so prior to my first MMV it just never dawned me be that I didn't have any cows. Then, not being a mini-figure collector type, I couldn't see myself buying _just_ cows from bricklink (that would be silly) so, logically, my _only_ alternative was to pick up another MMV As a general rule of thumb, when I buy _a_ set it's to build that particular model and the model will stay intact for years. When I go back and buy multiples of a given set it's to scrap the extra copies it for parts. Most often this happens with Technic kits, but in the recent past I've also "bulked" The Black Pearl, The Fire House and Town Hall Modulars, and used three copies of Big Ben to produce a better looking Architecture-style tower where the clock faces don't stick out. With the discontinuation of "Grab Bags" at the Lego Store, I suppose I'll probably be buying more kits for just parts in the future.

There are some things (comics, coins, toys, commemorative plates, etc.) that I _do_ collect as investments. In these cases, I always buy three: one for myself; one to sell once the asking price has tripled to recoup my original investment; and one to sell for clear profit. That said, I NEVER treat Lego this way. I have a fair number of sets that are still mint in box (more now that I just spent the better part of a paycheck on that VIP event last Saturday) but I don't consider them investments to be hoarded away waiting for something to appreciate. (I appreciate them right now) They are more a sort of insurance; insurance against a having a bad day and not having a Lego set to come home to; insurance against shipping delays or limited store inventory when the mood to build strikes; insurance against getting stuck in a blizzard and having the power go out (yes I have built by candlelight wrapped blanket with no heat); insurance against having to disassemble an older kit to build something new. There's a sort of comfort to be found in knowing that 365 days a year, I can open a closet door and it's virtually Christmas right down to the satisfying "slllttt" sound of slicing through the seals with an X-Acto knife and the creaking of the cardboard as the flaps open for the first time since the box was packed at the factory. I can understand wanting to keep a kit sealed. I got the new holiday sleigh set this weekend and it's taunting me with its little "Limited Edition 2012" logo in the corner. The collector in me keeps saying "Oh, this is special, keep it sealed it will be worth something some day. On the other hand, the engineer (read that as "creative big kid with expensive toys") in me says it already worth something and it's true value comes from opening it up and building it, not stowing it in a closet. I know I won't be selling the kit, so it really just a question of when I chose to open it; I know how things will end for _my_ copy of the set, but I can understand the anguish of the debate, especially when you hear about what set scalpers are making on things like the Green Grocer, Imperial Flagship or the Emerald Night these days (not to mention genuinely vintage sets that really _are_ hard to come by in mint condition). I say, if you love LEGO bits, set them free. There may be profit in "mint condition" dust collectors, but there is very little joy.

Maybe, in my case, I bought so much stuff that they just assumed there was a B-Wing somewhere in the pile and threw in the TC-14 by accident, I didn't even realize it was in one of the bags until I got home (I actually bought the B Wing separately about two weeks ago.) But hey, who am I to argue with free Minifigures

Christmas Came Early This Year! I just got back from this mornings VIP event. I usually enjoy a trip to the LEGO Store, but man, I REALLY enjoyed the concierge shopping service I got this morning. The Freebie Swag included: A Lego Shop poster VIP badge and lanyard A Lego Tote A Pick-a-brick box to fill today A Pick-a-brick box to fill after Christmas A Chrome TC-14 polybag -and- The 2012 limited edition Holiday set (3300014) An then there's the haul: 7345 Transport Chopper 9396 Helicopter 9397 Logging Truck 9398 4x4 Crawler 9474 Helm's Deep 9476 Orc Forge 10188 Death Star 10193 Medieval Market Village 10197 Fire Brigade 10223 Kingdom's Joust 10225 R2D2 10229 Winter Village Cottage 21014 Villa Savoye 21016 Sungnyemun And the best part I scored 20% off so between that and redeeming some VIP points the whole thing was about $1200 AND they even helped me load it all into my car. I'm a happy puppy right now

Although I haven't managed to get my hands on the last wave of kits for the year (sorry, Hobbits...) I'd say my year to date favorites include (in no particular order): 9474 Helm's Deep 10224 Town Hall 10228 Haunted House 10227 B-Wing Fighter 10225 R2-D2 10226 Sopwith Camel 10223 Kingdom's Joust 9398 4x4 Crawler 6869 Quinjet Aerial Battle 9396 Helicopter

I think this is terribly ingenious and a brilliant bit of engineering, though the building instructions at the end (combined with character glyphs I'm not familiar with) kinda reminded me of the movie Contact where an alien intelligence transmits an advanced engineering codex to the people of Earth.

"film the builders in action" ??? I won't speak for anyone but myself, but I'd have to imagine that watching me MOC would be about as exciting as watching James Joyce write. You'd need time lapse photography just to convince yourself that I was still breathing - not exactly the sort of spectator sport that would really back 'em in.

I have to side with Aanchir on the creativity issue. Licensing issues are orthogonal to creativity, just look at the incredible LotR MOCs people have been producing for years before Peter Jackson's films came out or TLG licensed things officially. Creativity lies in the hands and mind of the creator, all you're proposing is restricting where they can find inspiration. Further, we have no insight into what licenses may currently be in talks or when existing licenses may expire. A certain college mascot project aside, it usually takes a long time (if ever) to get to 10,000 supporters. If Glen Bricker's forecasts on the top projects on CuuSoo are at all accurate, the bulk of the _most popular_ projects on CuuSoo will still take YEARS to make it to the review stage. Will TLG even still have a valid Pirates of the Caribbean or Harry Potter license by the time projects related to those themes make it through the pipeline? That said, I do support, and have proposed to CuuSoo, a top level sorting of projects such that instead of one big pool of projects there are three core tracts: Licensed IP; Creator; and New Parts. Each tract would get its own tab for most recent additions and activity streams and the main page could report the top 3-5 proposals for each in a rotating banner instead of alternating "most commented", "most supported", "newest" for the whole database the way it does now. This would even give them an excuse to announce review results separately so if licensed IP takes longer, so be it; announce the creator kits in one batch and the licensed ideas later. Recognizing a part proposal is easy enough; the problem is, many proposers might not even realize when IP questions may come into play, so this might be a question best left up to TLG to figure out when the project is first being approved. If you (as the designer) flag it as existing IP, fine - but if you think it belongs in a Creator line or that the intellectual property you've based it on has reverted to the public domain, it would be best to have a lawyer check into it just to be sure. I think there's a lot of shades of gray here (no pun on my screen name intended) that your statement overlooks. I'm okay with virtual models so long as they reflect a realistic expectation as to how an idea might be realized. As has been pointed out, sometimes the parts needed to build something just don't exist in the right color or are prohibitively rare - in such cases I think a virtual model is fine for illustrating a concept (and really that's the only reason there are images at all on the site - if you're looking for cool models to be accepted or rejected as is, go to reBrick). Where _I_ have a problem with (and withhold my support from) projects that don't have a physical build is when it's clear that they haven't thought the idea through. I see this a lot less these days since they started screening new projects more closely, but there used to be a lot of projects where people would do something like post a picture of a real car and a Confederate flag, call it the 'Dukes of Hazard' tack on some inane text like "This would be cool" and call it a day. I also don't have a much respect for a "bad" virtual model. I can forgive a physical model for having the wrong color parts or other compromises based on a limited supply of parts, but in a virtual space, if you can't build it with an unlimited assortment of parts in exactly the colors of your choice, maybe you should be rethinking your design. Then, even if LDD has the right parts in the right quantity to build something, it doesn't become a "plausible" model to me unless it has the potential to obey the laws of physics. I've seen plenty of virtual builds that would collapse under their own weight in the real world. The tool might let you ignore gravity, moments, torque and give every stud connection an infinite coefficient of friction, but the real world (and the play habits of 8 year olds) is far less forgiving. When I see a virtual model at CuuSoo, I think about these things and if the the virtual model doesn't hold water, I'm less disposed to support the idea in general because I think it reflects (poorly) on the maturity of the proposal. It doesn't mean it's a bad idea or not a creative idea, it just needs to be thought through more carefully (and updated) before I'll back it. As for involving construction, other than new part proposals and LEGO branded merchandise (lunch tins, storage boxes, t-Shirt designs, etc.), I generally agree with you. LEGO is a _construction_ toy, kits should be about genuinely _building_ things, not just unpacking them - "some assembly required". TLG almost went bankrupt the last time they forgot that.

I have to agree that it's smart marketing on TLG's part. If they know they're stopping production on something and let the AFOL community know that once existing inventories are gone, that's it, people end up buying those existing sets on TLG's schedule rather than their own. They want cash for their existing inventory, we don't want to miss out on our last chance to get something. Yes, kit scalpers are going to use it as an excuse to stock up on things (like MMV) that will command great resale prices for years to come, but from TLG's perspective, a sale is a sale and it moves the kits out of their inventory and, in the case of kit scalpers, into someone else's precious storage space. At least by selling these kits, even to scalpers, it gives them more revenue to introduce NEW kits and design NEW molds.

I don't really want to think about what I spent to get the invite (or what I'll probably end up spending on Saturday) I'm just looking forward to going. I didn't go last year (didn't realize it was that big a deal actually, I guess that's what I get for not paying attention) but now that I have a better idea of what to expect, I'm actually kinda psyched.

It's not just a question of product quality. I think there is also an image problem of guilt by association connected with China. Some people will protest their labor practices, some will protest their environmental policies, others will cite their track record of human rights abuses, and still others - particularly in America - resent them for "taking away" jobs, violating IP and trade treaties and "owning" so much of our national debt. Any one of these issues has the potential to translate into bad press for TLG somewhere down the line. I remember years ago when protesting apartheid was the crusade of choice on American college campuses in the 1980's. Several major American companies that were doing business in South Africa came under fire with crowds of people screaming for product boycotts and total divestment of their stock to punish the companies for promoting racism and exploiting blacks when, in reality these same companies were drawing fire from the government of South Africa because they _weren't_ (fully) following the proscribed policy. They were guilty of things like offering equal pay, being "lax" on enforcing segregation and offering educational opportunities that, at the time, were otherwise being denied to large segments of the population. This is not to say that ALL U.S. companies had such noble practices by any means (there were plenty that deserved every sit-in and boycott they got), but there were a few that, by third party standards, did a lot to raise the standard of living for a marginalized people and worked hard at social engineering within the system to try to change the system. The self-righteous mob didn't care, in their minds apartheid was wrong and every company or government that had anything to do with South Africa was equally guilty. If anything, the socially conscious companies got hit harder than the abusers because they weren't as profitable to begin with and yet were economically punished just as severely by the well-intended but under educated crowd. If the choice is inflating the cost of sets slightly in order to avoid a similar indiscriminate protests and controversies, be they over human rights, quality, safety, politics, whatever, I think it's just cheap insurance for TLG. Sooner or later, something is going to hit the fan and it's best not to be standing next to it when things start to splatter. The recent presidential election in the U.S. was already running attack adds that were very anti-China. Republicans aired ads against Obama and his dealings with China focusing on the national debt, trade practices, and treaty violations; the Democrats attacked Romney by associating him with job outsourcing and turning a blind eye to environmental and human rights issues in the name of profit. Whichever side you favored, the one message both sides agreed on was that being associated with China was bad. It may not be fair or logical, but it is what it is. Marketing drives headlines, headlines drive perception, perception drives reality; facts are lucky to get a word in edgewise. In that context, supposedly low quality Chinese plastic is just the tip of a very large iceberg.

Very good review. I agree that it's no Emerald Night, but it's a great model of the TGV. I guess I know where my next batch of VIP points is going.

I can appreciate that, when I was in grad school I knew this one Russian kid that could solve any formula you dropped in front of him, he'd just chew through the ugliest, most cryptic multidimensional formulae you could imagine but if you asked him what any of it actually meant he'd just shrug; he loved the math but couldn't explain it or related it to the real world. I was just the opposite, loved the concepts, new how to set things up in a computer to get practical results, by my eyes rapidly glazed over once the equations started looking like Sanskrit tablets. Anyway, there's a few things you can try to play with that goes a little beyond looking at the "pretty pictures": In an FFT magnitude plot, play with thresholding, that is to say above a cetain value is white, below it turns black. This gets rid of a lot of the noise in cross pattern and in many cases (depending on what the original image was) may reduce to a cross made out of distinct dots - one row vertical, one row horizontal. The longer row will give you the dominate axis for the part (you can do this by finding the actual dots, or since everything that isn't a dot is black, just up the threshold level until all the dots fit in the image area and find the bounding rectangle of the dots. Also, if the original part is rotated by say 30 degrees, you'll be able to see this in the rotation of the dotted cross. If you write a program to play connect the dots (basically placing two lines on the image such that every dot in the thresholded image is touched by at least one of the lines) you can reverse engineer a rotation matrix to digitally "undo" the rotation of the original image. Apply the rotation matrix to the (unadulterated) FFT then take and inverse FFT you should see (more or less) the subject in the original image "straightened" to align with the frame of the image. This can be useful pre-processing to make your sample images line up with your reference photos as much as possible. A good starting point for something more complex is "convolution." Conceptually it's a little easier to understand in two dimensions (time magnitude) like a line chart than three (x,y,magnitude) like a gray scale image, but if you "get" the 2D case you're on the right track for coding up the 3D one. The idea is that one function (curve) is a fixed plot, say a simple square step function: f(t) =1 if 0<=t<=1, 0 otherwise and that another curve has a fixed shape, but can slide along the 't' axis, ideally starting from negative infinity to positive infinity. The correlation between the two functions is the plot of the the two functions common area under the curves with respect to time. For argument's sake let's say both waves have the square form shape described above. So if you can imagine one 1x1 box fixed on an axis while another 1x1 box comes sliding along, initially they don't overlap at all, for the convolution plot is zero, then, as the move over each other, the convolution ramps up linearly as overlapping area is strictly a function of the horizontal position of the sliding box, the correlation plot will peak then the two shapes exactly overlap, and then decline linearly as the sliding box moves off to infinity eventually bottoming out at zero again as the two curves no longer share any area. The same concept extends to three dimensions but now you have to move one array across another array (or if you're really lucky, just calling the correlate function of your library and letting it do the heavy lifting) Once you're comfortable with this, one "locator" operation you might want to explore is the "Phase Correlation" function. This take s the FFT of two images and finds the peak energy (max value) of the cross correlation between them, in English what this means is that it finds the offset from the upper left hand corner of the second image where, if the two images are laid on top of one another, they are most similar. Like the example of the two square functions sliding on the axis, it's looking for the point where the common area (magnitude) between two plots is maximized. Since you're looking for a maximum not an exact value, this allows you minimize the impact of a lot of issues like differences of scale, translation, shading, etc. that you'd normally have to deal with in the normal spatial domain. Another interesting exercise is to compare the "Cross correlation" of two images with the "Auto-Correlation" (an image crossed with itself) of one of the two sources. At the risk of resorting to formulae: If I have a reference image R(x,y) and a sample image S(x,y) I can compare the convolution(*) of R*S over all of x,y and compare it with R*R. The closer R*S is to R*R the more the inverse FFT of S resembles the inverse FFT of R. So if I have, say, five reference images and one sample one, by minimizing the magnitude of the difference between the cross-correlations between each reference an the sample with the autocorrelation of each reference I can pick the reference image that best matches the sample without actually identifying any elements with the images themselves (it's a sort of "all pairs" comparison, computationally expensive, but easy to set up with the right numerical methods cookbook.) If you want to get fancier, you can start to combine the techniques. For example, you can synthesize a picture of a LEGO stud (no brick just the stud) get it's FFT and then correlate that with the FFT of the sample, instead of a single peak value (like we had when the square waves exactly overlapped) we now get peaks each time the cross correlation finds a stud in the sample image. If we use a threshold function on this, we should be able to get one dot for every stud detected and (depending on the inner workings of your 3D correlation method) there should be a linear relationship between the locations of those dots in the thresholded image and the positions of the studs in the original picture. You could do the same thing, looking for rectangles (brick sides) or triangles (gear teeth) but since FFT are based on modeling things with sine waves, the biggest bang for your buck will come from looking for things that are round. (Use spatial edge detection to look for sharp lines, temporal correlation to look for curves). Have fun.

I think it would all boil down to legalese, lawyers and perceptions. This whole discussion is based on random supposition in that we don't know the details of the deal that TLG has with Disney, but some possible scenarios are: A) a clause that says don't release anything that _might be construed_ as competing with Lone Ranger Sets (it's not a question of who the target audience is, it's a question of whether a 6 year old might nag his father for the "wrong" set when they were "supposed" to be buying the Disney kit); B) a clause that says Disney gets X% off the top of any set _perceived_ to be related to Lone Ranger (in which case they'd need to price it like a licensed set to give both Disney and Marshall their cuts, which might make the whole thing less viable for them); or, C) in the CuuSoo redesign, they _DO_ make it look like sets from the movie and brand it/price it as Lone Ranger (at which point why pay MB anything, as they can claim it isn't HIS western town anymore it was patterned after the movie) Now maybe we're just too quick to think the worst of things; maybe TLG thinks both lines are independent and financially viable, maybe Disney doesn't care what else TLG has on the shelves next to Lone Ranger kits. Then again, as I recall, Disney was a major player/spender in having US intellectual property law rewritten to prevent Mickey Mouse from reverting into the public domain and, after buying the Muppets tried to sue Columbia university over an open source file transfer program called Kermit claiming that use of the name (which predated their ownership of the Muppets by years) diluted their trademark. I suppose it also, technically, possible that Modular Western Town could fail to pass muster for (stated) reasons entirely unrelated to Disney or the upcoming Lone Ranger theme, but if that is the case I think a lot of people with really start to lose faith in the whole CuuSoo concept. A lot of people have spent a lot of time putting together proposals, promoting projects and, in general, sending slews of web traffic in Lego's direction at very little (by comparison) expense to them and to date, the AFOL community's return on investment has been token offerings at best (Minecraft doesn't count as it ws _this_ close to being licensed to begin with, Shinkai 6500 only had to get to 1,000 votes not 10,000 and that leaves us with one 359 piece kit or roughly one marketed brick for every ten projects proposed to date.) Again this is all based on a lot of supposition, but if the Modular Western Town doesn't make it, I think TLG is going to have to give the AFOL community a very good very good reason as to why, and an even better explanation as to why we should continue to care about CuuSoo in general.