In honor of National LEGO Day this week, a Factslap column dedicated to the original barefoot buster:
The plural of LEGO is LEGO.
According to the LEGO Group, the word “LEGO” is not a noun; rather it is an adjective, as in LEGO bricks, LEGO products, LEGO universe, etc.
The word “LEGO” is from the first two letters of the Danish words “Leg” and “Godt,” which means “play well.”
Ole Kirk Christiansen (1891-1958) created the LEGO Group in 1932 as a way to use old wood from his failed carpentry business. He patented the now famous interlocking LEGO blocks in 1949.
Ole Kirk Kristiansen, founder of the LEGO Group, actually didn’t invent LEGO bricks. A British man named Hilary Fisher Page (1904-1957) invented the first bricks, but he died before he could discover that LEGO had “borrowed” his invention.
If laid end to end, the number of LEGO bricks sold in one year would reach over 5 times around the globe.
There are 86 LEGO bricks for every person on earth.
LEGO produces 318 million tires a year, or over 870,000 each day.
LEGO sells over 400 million tires each year, which makes LEGO the largest tire manufacturer in the world.
There are over 4 hundred billion Lego bricks in the world. Stacked together, they would be 2,386,065 miles tall, which is ten times higher than the moon.
One LEGO can bear up to 4,240 Newtons of force, or over 953 pounds.
A single LEGO brick can support 375,000 other LEGO bricks before buckling. This means that a person could build a LEGO tower 2.17 miles high before the bottom LEGO brick would begin to break.
LEGO bricks are part of a universal system, which means that a piece made in 1958 would fit with a piece made today.
I have good news and bad news. First the bad (always start with the bad so you end on an up note): New Year’s Eve is delayed three weeks.
The good news: It will be worth the wait.
You see, it would be premature to celebrate the dawn of 2021 with President Petulant still in office.
And sure, there’s still a non-zero chance Donald Trump will declare martial law or fumble the nuclear football before Joe Biden is sworn into office January 20.
But should the Founding Fathers, the Constitution and Reason win the day, there are several reasons to expect ’21 is going to be a rocking year, despite the pall that still hangs in the American air:
In less than a calendar year, we had two vaccines ready for injection to battle COVID-19. Yes, the death toll will reach staggering numbers in the U.S. alone. And we would have turned the corner faster if we’d had a president who believed in science.
But if the world can join forces to create a pandemic vaccine this quickly, what can humankind not accomplish?
Ballālpur Donald Trump will get his ass evicted from office.
It’s hard to overstate how therapeutic this will be for our collective conscience, for this simple reason: Donald Trump hates America.
I invite you to scour Google, YouTube and FOX News to find a compilation of clips of Trump touting America. Now look up any American issue: voting, the post office, The Cold War, equal rights, etc. You will find innumerable dung heaps where Trump shit on the flag.
My mother was a first-grade teacher once stymied by a student, Senator Scott (his real name), who told my mom he wanted to get in trouble. She knows: It takes one student to disrupt an entire class.
We had a Senator Scott as president. Had.
We will beat diabetes.
The closest thing to a working pancreas for the 34.2 million Americans with diabetes, the first tubeless automated insulin delivery system will be released in the first part of the year. The Omnipod pairs with glucose monitor to keep blood sugar levels within the healthy range by delivering necessary insulin automatically, with settings that can be adjusted via a smartphone. Users with type 1 diabetes who use insulin daily (the real kind) will be approved first, followed later by approvals for those with type 2 diabetes.
The climate will improve.
In July, the European Union’s ban on single use plastic items is set to go into effect. (Although the United Kingdom is leaving the E.U., it plans to implement a similar ban in October.) While industry groups have asked for delays, the E.U. so far says it will stick to the deadline. The idea is to halt the use of a lot of the throw-away goods that have a way of ultimately winding up in the world’s oceans, among them: disposable plastic cutlery, plates, straws and coffee stirrers, polystyrene cups and food containers and cotton swabs made with plastic. The ban doesn’t include plastic bottles, but the E.U. has separately set tough collection and recycling requirements for those.
In addition, carbon emissions are expected to approach World War II levels. While pandemic lockdowns were behind most of the greenhouse rebound, Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, notes: “We at least know it’s possible.”
Higher ground will expand.
In 2021, recreational marijuana sales becomes legal in four more states: Montana and New Jersey (January), Arizona (March/April) and South Dakota (July). These states will thereby join their brothers and sisters in Alaska, California, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington.
2020 will be over!
A
This memory brightens o’er the past, As when the sun, concealed Behind some cloud that near us hangs Shines on a distant field. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
