cuffs

I broke my collarbone about a week ago. I bought my eldest a cheap LEGO set to work on as one afternoon's alternative to climbing all over my broken body.

The set is nice. Police helicopter. Ten bucks. We got a bonus. The set included an extra set of handcuffs. I dodged an uncomfortable question with dishonesty and explained that they were open ended offset wrenches and that helicopters require a LOT of maintenance. That's half right anyway. Handcuffs were not part of my childhood LEGO experience.

LEGO furnishes buyers with amazing detailed inventories of each set along with part numbers for each piece. These manifests dramatically simplify the work of LEGO archivists and salvage dealers. My handcuffs, part 61482, Light Bluish Gray Minifig Utensil Handcuffs, appear in fifty LEGO sets issued between 2008 and 2013 according to the scribes at BrickLink. That seems like a lot.

LEGO handcuffs
Image credit BrickLink.com

What is going on in Denmark? Wikipedia reports a 24 percent rise in break-ins and home robberies in Denmark between 2009 and 2011. Perhaps latent Danish insecurity is playing out here for our kids. It's not our crime. US crime totals have declined every year since 2002 and in 2011 were at their lowest rate per capita since 1967. These handcuffs are not for Americans. They are a trifle small for our fatter wrists in any case.

LEGO has been building police sets for a long time. My first brush with law enforcement was at Police Headquarters -- set 588. The four included minifigs, a helicopter pilot and a motorcycle cop among them, took me down with nothing more than two handheld radios (part 3962a).

In total, LEGO had released 139 police-themed sets since 1956. 33% (46) of those sets have been issued since 2008. Overall, LEGO has released about ten thousand five hundred sets since 1956. A less frantic 23% (2385) have been issued in since 2008. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. A plastic police state is on the rise.

Is this universal? Pan-European? Is this simply a concession to emerging totalitarian markets? Across the border with Germany, Playmobil walks the thin blue line with 136 police-themed sets out of 3814 sets total since 1974 according to PlaymoDB. While Playmobil has a higher total fraction of police over its run with 3.6% versus LEGO at 1.3%, they have not tracked along with LEGO's recent explosion/crackdown. Germany's rate of home invasion has also risen in recent years though the Danish rate increase outstrips it.

Don't miss next week's double issue: The psychological impact of Somali piracy revealed in toys AND clinical use of injection molding sprue as a tactile complement to Rorschach testing.

35k

Google has a shade more than 35k permanent employees apart from Motorola. Apple has about that many full-time-equivalent employees in their retail division.

That's almost the worst way I can think of to compare the two. I mention it because much of the negativity surrounding the recently revealed Google Pixel laptop.

If you have walked into an Apple store any time in the last four years and whipped out your plastic rectangle in exchange for one of their aluminum ones, it was probably met by an Infinite Peripherals Linea Pro. The Linea Pro is a $500 sled that transforms an iPod touch into a handheld barcode scanner and credit card reader. I've never seen this particular device used anywhere but an Apple store and I was honestly surprised to find out that it wasn't a bespoke Apple gadget. I bet Apple owns ten thousand of these things.

If Apple decided tomorrow to turn the iTunes store into a Square killer and distribute a small business kit exactly along the lines of the one Square released this week, nobody would blink if it was $1300. They might blink at a 30% revenue share with Apple, but not at the idea of of professional hardware that costs money.

Google's $1300 folding Chrome terminal might not be for you. It might not be for the Gizmodo crowd or most of their readership. It's probaby not for me. Neither is a cash register, though.

If somebody told you that Google thought hard about building the perfect workstation for its thirty five thousand employees, had the guts to build it, and are now sharing it with the little folk for only $1300 then we would probably be celebrating our good fortune.

I have no idea whether the Pixel is a thoughtful machine built for a market Google cares about (its own employees) or some aluminum crap flung at a wall. I earn my living with a computer. That computer is almost never the one I'm touching. It's the AdSense computer or the Wikipedia servers or the blogspot hosting machines or a VM in the cloud or Google itself. What computer should I buy? How much should I pay? You can't buy one with even a tiny fraction of the power and capacity of the ones that bring you bread. Don't bother. Buy one that is nice to touch. Google apparenty sells one. It's $1300. Apple sells some too. Even Dell might. Perhaps even Microsoft will.

Each of these firms is large enough that it might make sense for them to build good workstations for their employees. Even Bunnie is building himself a workstation. I bet Herman Miller employees don't park on bad chairs. Google's Pixel terminal lists for about the same as an Aeron. That chair, for all its Aer, doesn't even have WiFi.

Google used to build good terminals for themselves back when they were called Bell Labs. Bell Labs took the guts of their own AT&T 5630 terminal, added a Motorola 68030 (sort of like an Intel Core i5) and their own wacky networked operating system, called it a GNOT, and saw that it was good. For them. If the Pixel is, in part, a spiritual successor to the Blit and the GNOT then I applaud it.

candy

John Broder ignited a lithium-ion-media firestorm of Dreamliner proportions earlier this month with his piece "Stalled Out on Tesla's Electric Highway". That story itself became a story as accusations flew back and forth about hidden motives and hidden charging stations. The furor is just now begun to subside among the EV conspiracy crowd.

The Times coverage split the issue right down the middle. it was critical in the text and positive in the Brendan Behan sense. Those cynical shades of Grey Lady are sometimes just a bit too much for me. For that reason, I drank deep when I pulled into a gas station this morning. If you want to get away from East Coast neuroses and so-called Green Energy coverage, you can turn to the Gas Station Radio Network for straight information about your world. I stood transfixed and let myself listen for long enough to fill a pair of large SUVs. Thank heavens for auto-shutoff at the pump. The thing that caught my ear was not the piece 'tar sands: boom or bonanza', which I thought was much thinner than the actual tar sand. It was the ad for candy. You can hear it for yourself here.

"If you're on the go, candy is a great way to power up for your next destination."

You can, apparently, just say stuff like that out loud if you're a trained voice actor. I hear that the gasoline we pump is really millions of years old. Perhaps billions of years if you roll with the abiogenic crowd. This advertising has a similar feel. It dates from a time before subtlety, before Mad Men, before even the actual 1950s.

After 'Candy', I was hooked. I cruised the gasradio.digicastnetworks.com site looking for another score. Would they? Could they? Yes! Cigarettes. That ad was pretty weak sauce. Strangest was 'Cash for Gold'. A sign of the true pre-cambrian nature of these ads can be found in the 20 second spot 'Movie Rentals'.

Perhaps Elon Musk will next re-invent advertising. I might buy an electric car just to hear it piped into a supercharger station. Major League Soccer, Nuclear Fusion, and Dippin' Dots should probably do their ad buys early.

Remember to check back with reograph several times daily for our weekly post. Only reograph offers a free PhD topic with every issue. Smoke break? reograph! Netflix buffering? reograph! Hospitalization? reograph! We've got you covered.

gauge

Isambard Kingdom Brunel stands with the greatest engineers of the industrial revolution. He remains a source of constant inspiration to me in my endeavors as a LEGO craftsman. I reject conventional wisdom about the suitability of ABS blocks for steamship hulls, railway lines, or tunnels under navigable rivers.

Modern life is littered with a thousand minor units and constants with surnames borrowed from small minds. Did Edgar Pi contribute that much? Was Alessandro Volta half the engineer that Brunel was? No.

Where is the Isambard? The Brunel? Kingdom does find some minor use as a unit in some faiths to denominate a single collective afterlife (ex: a kingdom of heaven) though this usage appears to predate Brunel's birth by several of George Millenium's finest.

An obvious remedy is to replace the meter in everyday usage with the brunel -- set at 2140mm. Most people are between zero and one brunel tall. This amazing LEGO model of Serenity is just about one brunel long. That's handy.

The best use of the brunel is probably to describe more than a thousand miles of broad gauge trackage operated by the Great Western Railway in the 19th century. That track was 1 brunel between the rails. Returning to Serenity for a moment, we note that the first locomotives designed by Daniel Gooch for the GWR were the 'Fire Fly' class.

I have been running a Gauge Commission of one at home to try to find a single style of track most suitable for my small children of two and four and their childish father. I simply cannot accomodate a full brunel gauge. We have three gauges in service at present.

The narrowest gauge is one Brio (about 20mm). We acquired a great deal of track in this gauge from IKEA. This gauge allows a tight turning radius with unarticulated cars. On the downside, so little room is available between the locomotive frames for a boiler that these trains are very slow to build steam. Most are pushed. The track itself is joined with male and female connectors. For this reason, prospective rail plans must be surveyed carefully for topology as well as grade. turnarounds are not possible without special adapters. I also find these lines to be especially susceptible to sabotage by toddlers. I would like to relegate this gauge to mule drawn mine carts.

We also have a lot of track in the proprietary DUPLO gauge (about 27mm). Like BRIO track, this track has two concave wells in which narrow road wheels ride. The wheels on typical DUPLO rolling stock are dressed with a flange. In many layouts, the flange is cosmetic only. DUPLO locomotives feature teeth in the flange relief. These teeth engage with matching teeth in a special DUPLO bridge. Powered trains can transition into cog operation nearly as seamlessly as the hybrid rack/adhesion system on the Lyon Metro Line C.

The DUPLO track is genderless and very easy for small hands to assemble without force. Typical DUPLO rolling stock is connected with post and clip fasteners that appear to typify European willful ignorance of the Janney coupler even in scale roads.

Our third gauge is the 'L' gauge used by LEGO in their trains since the 1960s. This track has been offered together with trains of several forms over the decades. Some were powered-rail systems. Some were unpowered rails designed for use with push trains. Others were unpowered and intended for use with a variety of battery-powered trains. L gauge trains have flanged road wheels. Rolling stock often have articulated trucks. The track is unisex. The rolling stock is typically built up from LEGO brick. Specialized coupler pieces are available and the most modern of these use a genderless magnetic coupler. This coupler is much nicer than the BRIO-style magnetic stud coupler.

By nearly any technical measure, the L gauge and system are the obvious choice. It is not an obvious choice for small hands, though. My children can get trains together and trains on rails, but the rails themselves are very difficult to lock together. My four year old cannot do it. For the interim, we have now adopted some LEGO rolling stock on a DUPLO road.

Most DUPLO wagons start with a base that combines couplers, axles, and a flat bed. The superintendent of locomotives at LEGO HQ worked with the early childhood education staff here at the Center for Victorian Studies to build a line of trains to teach children to stay on the rails of life and within their ticketed class. The resulting 'Thomas' locomotives all feature a small tender. This tender rides on a wagon (part 4195cXX) that is just small enough to be a truck under an L scale LEGO wagon. These parts are available from Bricklink for a few bucks each.

DUPLO road with mixed rolling stock
Photo courtesy your correspondent

This is our mode for the moment. The Great Western Railway completed the changeover from broad gauge to standard gauge in a weekend. I'm confident that I could pull off the same when LEGO track becomes the right answer.

rig

I'm an avid reader of www.diyphotography.net. Many crazy cameras and rigs available there -- just beneath the light painting and shaped bokeh stories. Valentine season is at hand so you may have to wade through rather a lot of those.

I take DIY to heart. Don't Impale Yourself is a guiding principle behind most of my projects. This mandate has taken on a new urgency in the years since I became a father. DIY is now Do It Years (from now) for the craziest schemes.

My eldest is now four and very interested in photography and stop motion cinematography. I have so far found the plains of DIY photography for children to be pretty barren.

I know next to nothing about stop motion. I know that the Apple App Store doesn't have the answer. My children use my Canon EOS 40D for their projects. I have a couple of cheap shutter release cables that they shoot with.

Use of a remote shutter alone eliminates about a third of the mechanical error that creeps into our short films. Another third is model errors. The final third is the camera mount itself. I have never found a stable camera mount that kids are comfortable with. The Joby GorillaPod line is as clever as it ever was but it usually slumps during filming. I have many tripods with a variety of ingenious quick-collapse features that surprise and terrify kids.

LEGO and DUPLO are recurring themes in our studio. They are familiar. They stick together. They are perfect for both abstract art and detailed staging.

They are repeatable. This is very important. At any moment, we may have three pictures in production and perhaps all stalled. Union, finance, and insurance issues don't simply evaporate because we're indies. Most of the production deals we have require us to insure our stars against accidental swallowing. You try talking to your underwriter about that! We simply don't have enough LEGO to support this degree of concurrency. We don't even have space for that much LEGO. We certainly don't have space for several partial sets. Models routinely come, go, and come again between shots.

For some time, I have been recording camera positions relative to models with bricks on LEGO baseplates. Only recently did I put a bolt through a DUPLO and mount the camera directly. The result is very satisfying. The mount works for the kids. They build new mounts themselves. The universe of LEGO and DUPLO rail becomes a dolly system that we all love.

Canon 40D on DUPLO plate with generic ball head
Photo courtesy your correspondent

I found that a 4x8 DUPLO plate supports my camera with a 50mm 1.4 USM lens attached. These plates have an injection molding mark right in the center that is a perfect spot to start drilling. The plates are available from brokers for less than a buck.

LEGO themselves marketed a line of movie-themed toys at the turn of the century. This line included several novel prop pieces that could be used when making LEGO movies about moviemaking. Some sets included a cheap USB webcam as well. That camera had LEGO studs. That line added no new moviemaking tools and merits no further discussion.