Today was the 50th anniversary of the obligatory children’s toy – LEGOs! The official LEGO site has information about it: LEGO. Also, a LEGO Timeline, which has these interesting facts:



 • There are about 62 LEGO bricks for every one of the world’s 6 billion inhabitants.


• Children around the world spend 5 billion hours a year playing with LEGO bricks.


• More than 400 million people around the world have played with LEGO bricks.


• LEGO bricks are available in 53 different colors.


• 19 billion LEGO elements are produced every year.


• 2.16 million LEGO elements are molded every hour, or 36,000 per minute.


• More than 400 billion LEGO bricks have been produced since 1949.


• Two eight-stud LEGO bricks of the same color can be combined in 24 different ways.


• Three eight-stud bricks can be combined in 1,060 ways.


• There are more than 915 million combinations possible for six 2 x 4 LEGO bricks of the same color.


• 7 LEGO sets are sold by retailers every second around the world.


• The LEGO bricks sold in one year would circle the world 5 times.


• 40 billion LEGO bricks stacked on top of one another would connect the earth with the moon.


• LEGO bricks are so much more than just toys. They are used in classrooms from preschool to university level to teach everything from math, language skills and science to engineering and technology principles.


• The LEGO brick has inspired generations of innovators, like Jonathan Gay, inventor of Flash.


• World-renowned author Douglas Coupland believes the LEGO brick represents a “language in itself.”






Google had this awesome main page all day:


Google Lego Logo


LEGOs were my favorite toy as a child — there are a number of those rubbermaid tubs in my parent’s basement full of LEGOs.  My brothers and I spend a lot of time build lego cities with those road base plates, and it was the greatest toy of my childhood.  The best part was — we had a lot of parts, and it’s not like parts go obsolete.  I think most of my LEGOs were passes down, save for a few technics sets — I should find one of my cousins, or my nephew, who would enjoy getting our old LEGOs.


But I am always jealous that they didn’t have the Mindstorms LEGO sets when I was little — with those sets you can program microprocessors into your LEGO projects…