Lego facts

Businessweek.com has an article about how LEGO bricks are made. The article contains a number of interesting facts:

• in 2000, LEGO was named "Toy of the Century" by Fortune magazine as well as by the British Toy Retailers Assn., beating out such other classics as the teddy bear and Mattel's Barbie;
• the bricks produced today can interlock with those produced back in 1958;
• the bricks are so versatile that the LEGO Group has calculated that just six eight-stud bricks can be arranged in 915,103,765 different ways;
• LEGO is the largest tire manufacturer in the world, it produces 306 million tiny rubber tires a year;
• the production process is so air tight that only 18 of 1 million pieces are considered defective; and
• in 2004, the company launched LEGOfactory.com, where anyone can download a LEGO Digital Designer and build his own LEGO model. After that, you can either save it in a gallery or buy the pieces needed and have it sent to your home to build it in real life.

To take a look at how the classic LEGO bricks are made: click here for the slide show.

Close-ups at the playground

Daylight saving (2)

As noted in my previous post there was a lot of discussion of daylight saving in Queensland a few weeks ago. Daylight saving has also been on the agenda in Perth, where the West Australian chased comments from the state’s leaders last week. Here are some of their deeper thoughts (sourced from Crickey):

Bruce Donaldson: Liberal MLC

Who will cook the tea? While everyone is prancing around the beach or running around a park kicking a football, what will happen? I have a feeling our major takeaway outlets will love daylight saving because Mum will say to Dad: 'We've had a great time in the park but I didn't put the chops or potatoes on'.

Ray Halligan: Liberal MLC:

If this legislation is passed and we have daylight saving, it will mean either that some alterations will have to be made or that people will have to accept that their wedding photographs may not be taken at sunset.

Barry House: Liberal MLC:

A lot of blokes do not turn up to work if the surf is up. They do not arrive until 11 o'clock in the morning. If we agree to daylight saving 11 o'clock will turn into 12 noon. By then it will be lunchtime, so they will take two hours off for lunch and think: 'To hell with it, it's not worth going to work at all'.

Robyn McSweeney: Liberal MLC:

The effect daylight saving will have on our circadian rhythms, which is the 24-hour cycle in the physiological process of living beings. When our circadian rhythm is upset, it puts us out of sorts. I do not want my circadian rhythm upset because I do not like being out of sorts.

The most thoughtful response, however, came from the Nationals MP for Avon, Max Trenorden – a very deep thinker indeed:

In physics there is no such thing as time. The Earth goes around the Sun and rotates on its axis, and that is pretty wobbly too. We need atomic clocks to adjust time every now and then because it is not perfect. It might be worthwhile for people to remember that.

Stoffer og Bias

Invisible

Ever wonder why young children aged between two and four years believe that you only have to cover your eyes (or head) to become invisible?  According to Nicola McGuigan and Martin Doherty this is probably because young children think of ‘seeing’ in terms of mutual engagement between people.

Here is further discussion.

Blogsite graph

Here is a site which converts data from websites into a graph resembling a molecule diagram of some sort. I ran it on this blog. The result is shown below.

The colours have the following meaning:

• blue: for links (the A tag)
• red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
• green: for the DIV tag
• violet: for images (the IMG tag)
• yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
• orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
• black: the HTML tag, the root node
• gray: all other tags

For screenshots of other sitegraphs have a look on flickr at websitesasgraphs.

Daylight saving

While New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, Australian Capital Territory and South Australia adjusted their clocks to daylight saving (adjusting the official local time forward, by one hour) a couple of weeks ago (earlier in Tasmania) we in Queensland together with Western Australia and the Northern Territory have left our clocks untouched.

In a 1992 referendum Queenslanders categorically rejected daylight saving. I am unaware of the specific arguments back then, but based on the discussions in the media this time around they seem to have revolved around beginning the day in darkness, ruining some farmers routines, disruption in sleep patterns and increased temperature at the end of the day.

Queenslanders appear to have the daylight saving discussion annually and this year was no exception with Premier Peter Beattie fronting the peculiar argument that daylight saving would have the consequence of increasing our exposure to the sun, increasing the risk of developing skin cancer (click here for a presentation of the arguments). Funny, he didn't argue for daylight saving as way of conserving power in these climate change times.

The main problem is of course that Queensland is huge in all directions. There is little seasonal variation in the tropical north, while the south has a more temperate and variable climate. For us living in Brisbane (which is the far east) the problem is also exaggerated. Sunrise here is earlier than in the west. Sunrise in summer is very early. It is light before 5am – great if you get up early to work, but not if you want to stay up past 10pm. Sunset is around 6:30pm.

Beattie has promised a vote on the issue next year to see if consensus has changed since 1992. This is a good move. Queensland should have time zones that suit the majority. The problem is that the vote is likely to reveal a very clear geographical preference, with the majority of people in the south east preferring daylight saving and the others the status quo. One way to solve this problem is to split Queensland into two time zones. The southern and eastern part would get the benefits of daylight savings and the northern and eastern parts would retain the existing system.

In any case, for us it is really not a big deal. We live more by the sun than a time zone. Tobias in particular is guided by the sun, although he gets up around 6am at the moment. However, as a consequence of the early sunrise I have shifted my morning routine and now get up at 5am.

There is a fairly detailed Wikipedia entry on daylight saving here and an Australian specific entry here.

Jellyfish

Tobias har tegnet vand- og brændmænd eller som han ynder at kalde dem jellymans.

Bugs & Frogs

Tobias var helt vild da jeg viste ham billeder af diverse insekter og froeer paa taet hold. Klik her (Click for large gallery of bug close-ups). Hans tre favoritter er nedenfor.

3 minutes

Hvis du har tre minutter saa klik her.  Den stoerste prik laver en rotation (en cirkel) paa tre minutter, den naeststoerste prik to rotationer, den tredjestoerste tre....osv.