Travis Corcoran reports:

With Lego on the brain, and Google on the fingertips, I’ve learned a few things. Like: the planet’s children spent 5 billion child-hours last year playing with Legos. And that when Lego, Inc. (or, perhaps GmbH . . . I don’t know) discards a set of moulds, they throw them into the concrete foundations of a new Lego, Inc. building. And that there are 102,981,500 different ways to combine six eight-stud Lego-blocks. And that a block’s height is 6/5 the length of a SLU (Standard Lego Unit). And that there’s a word “SLU”. And that some adults design new lego kits, buy the parts, print up instructions, then repackage and sell them to each other (no one-off artsy Lego deathcamps for these guys!). And that my kludgey looking design for a clock’s gear-train (60:1 stepdown, then a 12:1 stepdown) is in fact the best theoretically possible given the constraints of the gears available.

Hooray for Designer Babies!

The ‘bioethicists’ seem to be worried that desirable diversity could be wiped out by fads, which would make sense if a majority of parents for thirty years were to fall for the same fad. Am I missing something?

(Where do ‘bioethicists’ come from, anyway? What are the roots of the discipline? Do bioethicists say anything falsifiable?)

Which side of the road do they drive on? With lots of history, theory and anecdotes.

DNA yields dodo family secrets. (Link from Vicki Rosenzweig.)

The newest contributor to my hit-count is a link from Andrea and Friedrich Lohmueller, whose image galleries are worth the visit.

JPL continues to keep track of both Voyagers.

Will Wilkinson has a sensible and interesting take on libertarianism, morality and culture.

Because libertarianism defends markets, markets produce consumer culture, and consumer culture undermines traditional morality, libertarianism and traditional morality really are at odds. Most conservatives understand this, and that’s why they are antagonistic to libertarianism.

(Link from Patrick Nielsen Hayden.)