Evolution of Lego brick colors

Lego started with five brick colors: red, yellow, blue, white, and clear. The selection peaked in 2004 but then surprisingly decreased to cut costs. For The Washington Post, Kati Perry shows the evolution.

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Switching to electric school buses

For Bloomberg, Zahra Hirji and Denise Lu on the electrification of the national school bus fleet:

Most school buses today run on diesel. The climate footprint of a diesel school bus is about 3.3 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per mile, more than double the per-mile footprint (roughly 1.5 pounds of CO2e) for a bus powered on the average US electric grid, according to Argonne National Laboratory. If a large share of the American school bus fleet — the largest mass transportation system in the country — electrifies, that would translate to a significant emissions cut.

They used a LEGO school bus to show how a diesel school bus is retrofitted as an electric one, which is a plus in my book.

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Official LEGO world map set

We’ve seen maps made out of LEGO bricks before, but LEGO is about to release an official world map set. And cartographers everywhere rejoiced.

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Posted by in Lego, maps, world

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Turn images into LEGO builds in R

The brickr package in R by Ryan Timpe takes an image, converts it to a mosaic, and then provides a piece list and instructions for the build. While not officially affiliated with the LEGO group, Timpe is a data scientist for LEGO, so it’s probably as close as you’re going to get to real deal.

Timpe made a package a couple of years back, but when I went to use it, the link was broken and I assumed it was defunct. This is a nice surprise.

My kids are deep into LEGO these days. We just finished watching the LEGO Masters show. I have LEGO minifigures on my office wall. I’m definitely making use of this.

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LEGO relief map

Cameron Bennett made a relief map of Idaho, completely out of LEGO bricks:

In March, the COVID-induced quarantine sent me home, but more importantly, to my childhood Legos. What resulted was too much time, money, and effort spent entertaining some combination of my childhood and young adult self. By building a map. Out of Legos.

What have I even been doing with my time.

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LEGO normal distribution animation

Let’s just animate all statistical concepts with LEGO from now on:

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Convert an image to LEGO brick shopping list in R

Every day you wish you could convert a picture of your family or a group of friends into a LEGO palette. Well wish no more. Ryan Timpe wrote a package that lets you input an image in R and get back a LEGO-ized version of it, along with an optimized, money-saving brick list.

Dreams come true. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

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Posted by in Data Art, Image, Lego, R

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LEGO world map

Check out this five-foot long LEGO world map.

[W]e wanted to have a big picture for our living room but couldn’t agree on a motive. At the end of 2015 my wife gave me some blue LEGO baseplates and said, I could build a big world map out of LEGO for the living room. So the idea was born and the starting point for countless evenings of planning was there.

Color represents depth and elevation for oceans and land, respectively. Just 6,090 pieces and 22 hours of building time.

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Posted by in Lego, maps

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LEGO color scheme classifications

Nathanael Aff poked at LEGO brickset data with some text mining methods in search for recurring color schemes in LEGO sets. This is what he got.

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Kingfisher

"Kingfisher" by 'rolli (All Rights Reserved; Used with Permission)

“Kingfisher” by ‘rolli (All Rights Reserved; Used with Permission)

Sure, Legos are way too heavy as a building material to make a bird that could actually fly, but I feel like physics might give this kingfisher a pass. The techniques and creativity used to craft a visually compelling bird using these building blocks always impress me. I have the birds from Thomas Poulson’s collection sitting on my office shelf right now. My favorite of those is the hummingbird, because it is crafted to not only represent the bird, but also to convey the dynamic, kinetic energy of the bird in motion. Builder ‘rolli’s Kingfisher similarly calls to mind that actually animal moving and living in its environment taking this build beyond the recreation of a snapshot to a representation of the thing itself.


Filed under: The Art of Science Tagged: Bird, kingfisher, Lego