LEGO Ideas

I wanted to talk a bit about LEGO Ideas If you don't know, LEGO Ideas (formerly known as LEGO Cuusoo) is a crowdsourcing site where anyone can submit a LEGO creation, and if enough people vote for it, LEGO will consider making it into a set. LEGO Ideas has been very good to science fans like me, and presumably you, bringing us science-themed sets like Shinkai 6500 Submarine, Hayabusa, NASA Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover, and Research Institute, and you could probably include Birds and Big Bang Theory in the mix. So I can't really hate Ideas, but I kind of hate Ideas. The reason is that it's largely a false hope. Yes, they have chosen to make 13 really cool sets. But they've also rejected tens of thousands in the process (a little over a year ago they noted there were 60,000+ projects, and it's only grown since then). So the bad news about Ideas is, well, your set isn't going to be made. Not that it's not possible, but it's kind of like buying a lottery ticket. You're not going to win. Sure, somebody is going to win, but I can say with a high degree of certainty that it's not you. But LEGO Ideas has essentially tricked people into thinking that they have a shot at having their MOC turned into a set.
That might not be so bad, but I think that the whole project has hurt the online LEGO community. If people just kept on doing what they were doing before, building MOCs, posting them on community sites, and discussing them, but occasionally put a nice MOC up on Ideas, that would be fine (I should note, the people who have had MOCs turned into sets mostly are like this). But there are a certain number of people who have disengaged from the community, instead turning themselves into promotion machines for their Ideas submissions. As someone with LEGO themed blogs and who administers a LEGO community forum, I can't tell you how many requests I've gotten to push someone's Ideas submission. And these are mostly from people who seemingly have no interest whatsoever in those blogs or that forum. And there are people who spend a lot of time in the comment threads of the Ideas projects, but that's time they don't spend in real community forums (largely anonymous linear comment threads just cannot be the same).
In addition to the actions of a portion of the submitters, my even bigger frustration with Ideas is that the larger public just doesn't get it at all. I can't tell you how many news stories I've seen that say "____ is going to be a LEGO set", and then when you go to the link it basically comes down to "some random person posted something on the internet". And then, of course, things get repeated in the echo chamber of the internet, as one news source just repeats what another said and no one fact-checks (because, hey, in the world of internet news, there's no need for actual fact checking). Even in the rare case that a submission gets the 10000 votes, it still has about a 10-20% chance of being a set, which of course it means it has about a 90% chance of NOT being a set. But still, every time something gets to 10000 there are stories all over the internet about how that is going to be the next LEGO set. That's actually what prompted this rant, seeing story after story about what the 'next LEGO set' was going to be, and getting excited about blogging it here.
So, I go back and forth about posting Ideas submissions here. I don't really want to be a shill, either for those individuals (as worthy as they might be), or more importantly for the whole Ideas enterprise, which I am very skeptical of. I would much rather those people had posted their MOCs to Flickr, MOCpages, Brickshelf, or some other LEGO photo-sharing site. That said, if someone only posted their MOC on Ideas, I don't want to not share it if it is a really nice MOC. So I'm basically conflicted.
All that said, I want to repeat again that Ideas has been very good to the science LEGO builder. Almost half of the sets that have come out have been science-themed to a greater or lesser extent. So to get over my grumpyness, let's check those out:

Formaldehyde

You might have noticed that I'm making some slight changes to the look of this blog, including the graphics added to the banner at the top of this page. I tried to choose some models from a few (but by no means all) of the major disciplines covered on this blog - chemistry, math, biology and astronomy. Let's take a few blog posts to look at the models I used. Starting at the left end with one of my own, here is my model of formaldehyde (shown next to a standard organic chemistry model kit version). Formaldehyde is made up of one atom of carbon (shown in black), with a double bond to an atom of oxygen (red) and two bonds to hydrogen atoms (white). One thing that is demonstrated by this model is the shape of formaldehyde. Molecular shape is driven by VSEPR - Valence Shell Electron Pair Repulsion theory. The bonds (gray lines) are made up of negatively chaged electrons, and, since like charges repel, those bonds push each other away. VSEPR says that the best (lowest energy) arrangement of bonds will maximize the distance between the bonds. Here we have three sets of bonds around carbon, and the furthest they can get from each other is 120 degree angles (360 / 3).

Hayabusa

In 2003, Japan launched the Hayabusa probe towards asteroid 25143 Itokawa. After studying the asteroid for a few months, the probe collected physical samples from the surface of the asteroid. Then the probe returned to the earth, where the samples were collected last year, and they are now being studied. In81212 made this LEGO model of the Hayabusa probe.



Incidentally, I should note that this model is what led to this blog. I've considered doing a blog along the lines of real science for a while now, but when I saw this I thought it deserved some notice. So many people make LEGO creations (called MOCs) of fictional space ships, but it's cool to see some real ones as well.

Welcome to SciBricks

Hi all,

Welcome to SciBricks. In my professional life, I'm a chemist; specifically I teach organic chemistry. For fun I like to collect LEGO sets. This blog will try to bring together those two aspects of my world. Instead of simply showing cool LEGO models (there are lots of blogs that do that), I'm going to try to teach something about science along the way. My goal is to show that science can be fun. Hopefully I will encourage some kids to pursue further studies in the sciences, and even inspire adults to think about some subjects that they haven't pursued since they were students.