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ted.com

13

Oct

2008

Geek Mondays: LEGO Time

How to relive childhood geekdom without the bullies, from the safety of your own computer.

LEGO TIME

Nathan Sawaya: Yellow ManWe’ve decided to start a little something called Geek Mondays, where we explore the coolest, most fascinating, most diverse facets of geekdom.

So, fittingly, we start out with a wired version of a geek stand-by: LEGO, only digital design edition.

LEGO Digital Designer is a nifty little piece of free desktop software that lets you build 3D LEGO models right on your computer. We’re talking serious stuff — you can even go all Nathan Sawaya on it…except, of course, you’d have to eventually shell out some cash for the pieces. Which is actually another neat LDD feature: You can buy the pieces with the click of a mouse directly from the LEGO store once your model is complete, so you can start laying it out on your dining room floor, to your girlfriend’s utter horror.

So download this bad boy and find yourself a new favorite timesuck that puts your Second-Life-and-Digg diet to shame.

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  • Geek Mondays: The Gray Areas of Invention A lesson in entrepreneurship from history’s little-known scandals. By common knowledge, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. It’s in the history books. There’s a medal in his name honoring outstanding contributions in telecommunications. The man even has a museum. It may be, however, that Bell’s claim to the invention could...
  • Geek Mondays: Unlimited Solar Power Why MIT geeks are throwing the best dinner party ever. After the extremely popular Blue Planet Run post last Friday, we’re still on a sustainable solutions high. And the good guys at MIT are right there with us. In a breakthrough discovery last week, they’ve found a new way of...
  • Geek Wednesdays: The Ephemeral Web A modern time machine for data and what we can learn about the web from Victorian toys. With the constant proliferation of data and its spread across the social web, we’re closer than we think to what Kevin Kelly has dubbed the One Machine. The final leap in information systems...
  • Geek Tuesday: Data Immersion Gone Wild Making sense of the world one dataset at a time, or what Mahnattan men and the poverty line have in common. ...

One Response

  1. Geek Mondays! That’s just… just… BRILLIANT! Sign me up :)
    But I thought everybody loved LEGO? Not just geeks…

    Kris on October 17th, 2008 at 2:12 am

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