The answer wasn't blowing in the wind

MLCad, a popular modeler

(fair use claimed)

Image via Wikipedia
I found a nifty gadget, and I have a rather intractable problem to thank.

Many LEGO fans do it virtually, and have since 1995 when James Jessiman released the first software and parts library for LDraw. Since that time the LEGO Community has modeled almost all the parts LEGO has ever developed as part of the LEGO System, and there have been quite a few freeware or shareware tools developed, addressing parts modeling/authoring, model capture and development, rendering, instruction generation, animation and other aspects of virtual LEGO. The parts themselves are licensed under an open license (although getting there has been a bit of a struggle, perhaps a story for another blog post)

The LEGO company was a bit late to the game with their offering, Lego Digital Designer (or LDD), designed to be more kid friendly but widely derided as far harder to use by most serious modelers. It has the very significant advantage of being tied to official parts, and of being tied to the sales apparatus, things designed in it, if designed using a subset, can be bought from the factory.

So anyway... LDraw is great at modeling LEGO elements and constructions. These tend to be rigid or at least solid for the most part, and amorphous elements are rare... While there is a string generator out there, one thing that hasn't been addressed by this community is cloth. String at least is essentially a two dimensional problem, as most strings can be modeled as combinations of shape adhering sections, and catenary or parabolic curves that lie in a plane. But cloth has no such strictures.

Recently, there was a thread about modeling cloth. Don Heyse, long involeved in the LDraw community, was writing about the difficulties of modeling cloth in the LUGNET newsgroup lugnet.cad ... as part of explaining why it was so hard to model cloth he presented this little gadget. It lets you model cloth, and see the effect of wind and gravity on drapings, in real time. I found it quite enjoyable, and educational. Just a nifty little time waster. Hope you like it too!

So that is my serendipity story of the day, I guess.

Got any good serendipity stories?

From the what were they thinking department

The iconic LEGO brick.
Image via Wikimedia CommonsThe LEGO company continues to confound and confuse adult train fans.

Their latest move, apparently, is to replace the current magnetic coupling scheme, which uses magnets free to rotate around a horizontal axis, in a way that finesses which end is which polarity issues, mounted in a holder that is free to swivel from side to side (to allow the train cars to go around curves) and then mounted on a buffer, with a new scheme in which the magnet is apparently encased inside the buffer.

Why?

No one yet knows for sure. Speculation in the online LEGO community has it that this is to address safety concerns that might arise if young children swallow magnets... there have been reports in the media of children suffering problems when two magnets join adjacent stomach or intestinal walls and cause blockages.

How do we know this?

Seems that the new part libraries just refreshed into LDD show some new parts. You can see the images at this LUGNET post.

All in one and presumably harder to swallow by kids.

Oddly, these will probably be harder to swallow by adults too, as they make it harder to build things compared to what they replace.

Well, one more old style part to hoard, I guess, along with 9V motors and track.


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