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<   No. 3669   2017-06-01   >

Comic #3669

1 Scottish mining engineer: Och! Whae be ye doin'?!
2 Adam: We're digging a scale model of Loch Ness.
2 Scottish mining engineer: Ye furriners cannae do tha'!
3 Scottish mining engineer: Only Scottish citizens registered tae vote hae the right tae excavate around the Loch!
4 Jamie: Can't you make an exception for television?
4 Scottish mining engineer: Ye cannae change the laws o' civics!

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Some years ago I was absolutely convinced that the scale model of Mount Rushmore which exists at Legoland in Billund, Denmark, was larger than the original. I recalled reading somewhere the fact that the Lego model was built twice as large as the original sculpture on Mount Rushmore, and sort of absorbed it as an undisputed fact into my mental model of the world.

It wasn't until relatively recently that I discovered that, of course, the Lego model is nowhere near that big. Each of the Presidents' faces on Mount Rushmore is 18 metres high - about the height of a 6-storey building. To replicate this twice as large using Lego bricks would result in a Lego sculpture 36 metres high (a 12-storey building), and use approximately 100 billion bricks. This is a sizeable fraction of all the Lego bricks that have ever been produced (since the first ones in 1958). As of 2015, about 600 billion Lego bricks had been produced, and by 2017 we're probably closing in on 700 billion.

As it turns out, the Lego Mount Rushmore is actually a 1:20 scale model, with each face under a metre tall, and using a mere 1.5 million bricks.

Which now sounds pretty lame compared to what it could have been...

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My comics: Irregular Webcomic! | Darths & Droids | Eavesdropper | Planet of Hats | The Dinosaur Whiteboard | mezzacotta
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