19 May 2006

Why is Lego the best toy in the world?

With the above question, 14-year-old Sophie Amundsen (protagonist in the teenage best seller Sophie's World) is invited to consider the atomic nature of matter as the first step in a journey beyond the limits of her imagination. Lego (or Meccano, or any similar construction toy) can be an equally powerful metaphor for other ideas, scientific and otherwise, leading the way to other journeys. Modular reusability has always been a virtue and a refuge from insanity, at least as far back as we can peer into human history and probably long before that. And if some of the bits can be left assembled into higher level substructures, reusable later, so much the better.

Way back in the days when a large organisation paid me good money to sit in a windowless room modelling sociomilitary scenarios...

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