Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Rolls-Royce’s Latest Jet Engine is Made Out of Legos (defensetech.org)
31 points by bcl on July 12, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 23 comments


I think the think that annoys me the most about American English is the use of the word Lego. Saying I have lots of Legos sounds as stupid as saying I have lots of Pokemons.


Well, I guess they do have an 's' left over from from their way of saying "Maths".


When we dropped the "ematic" we decided to drop the "s" as well. I know, I was there when we voted. By the way "Z" is pronounced "Z" :-P


Which they use to misspell defencetech


So... I'm guessing that no one here is actually interested in the engine, just in being pedantic about localized usage of a word?

FWIW, my 11 year-old amazes me with his Lego/Legos/whatever constructions and I'm definitely going to show him this. Anything to offer more inspiration.


Lego is the best toy anyone can buy their kids. Seriously, forget about teaching them programming until later. Buy them lots of lego as soon as you can. It'll teach them maths, art, problem solving, engineering, following instructions, creativity etc etc.

The /lego and /afol subreddits are quite good.


Avoid the Lego aimed at girl-children, though. It's rubbish compared to the good stuff.


Untrue. My daughter loves the 'Lego friends' range. She still loves all the other ranges, but they have done the range extremely well for people who love flowers, animals, etc etc.


That's nice that she likes it. What makes it rubbish is that it's generally far less intricate, with far fewer separate pieces and far fewer assembly steps. These things are what makes lego so neat. What you have here is rubbish lego, with a picture of a flower on. Great.


Pokemon already stands for something plural though (Pocket Monsters). According to Wikipedia, LEGO's a shortening of "leg godt", meaning "play well", so it seems acceptable to make it plural. (Granted, I don't speak Danish, so maybe not?)

The proper name would be "LEGO Bricks", anyway.


Lego also stands for something plural. That's how it has always been used, and hearing/reading it the other way is just as jarring as talk of sheeps or rices would be. Please stop.


I've always used Legos. Not that it matters since you understand it either way. Do you routinely struggle with minor usage differences?


It jumps out at me, the same consistent misspellings or grammar errors do. Os I wouldn't say I struggle with them, but they are certainly an annoying distraction.


We're already diverging from the official version, so I don't think one could be more correct than the other. This is like arguing over whether "octopuses" or "octopi" is correct when the etymologically correct form is "octopodes." Only pedants and etymologists worry about it.


I like etymology, and I'm fine with being a pedant too.


I made an igloo with some snows last winter!


Huh, for some weird reason I always thought iglii were built out of ices. Never really looked into it until now.


Did you see any Mooses while you were out there?


That's "meese," you pedant.


Technically, it's LEGO brand building blocks. Now if you'll pardon me, I have some Pythons code to write.


It's pokemans, the Q is silent

Joke, about the lego engine what can I say? it's very cool but it pales in comparison to the bleak situation of engineers in other industries.

It's like the old man in Primer said: You know what they do with engineers when they turn forty? They take them out and shoot them.


I got really distracted by the edit at 0:44 where you can see the spiral skip.

But, on a more serious note, it's great to see companies encouraging the youth to get into science/tech/eng/math.


Wicked. A guy at my company made a large space shuttle[1] to demo the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT, and although not as impressive as the Trent 1000, it's still cool to see "toys" being used to get kids interested in STEM.

1: https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-16534




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: