You’ve read all the front-page head­lines so you know by now that it’s the 50^th anniver­sary of Lego (give or take a few days). Oh man, hurray! Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, Joel has a list of the 9 lego sets he lusted over most. I remember pining over 7 to 9 too, but I totally had num­bers 1 and 2! For a while my folks had a Christmas tra­di­tion of tag­ging the biggest gift as being “from Santa” and parking it in plain sight in front of the tree. I remember coming down to find the #375 castle awaiting me. I also remember my par­ents reflecting on being up all christmas-eve-night putting the 779 pieces together. I don’t think either they or I really took the santa con­cept very seriously.

I’m also pretty stoked that this year (give or take a year) is the 40^th anniver­sary of Logo. Logo is a pro­gram­ming language–in fact a legit­mate deriv­a­tive of Lisp, the most revered of com­puter lan­guages–but they didn’t tell us ele­men­tary school stu­dents that when we used it. They clev­erly told us it was an art tool. I used it exten­sively for my art-ucation on our family’s Franklin Ace 1000, the Icons at school, and one heady summer when my dad brought an Icon back from his shcool and let me keep it in my bed­room. A com­puter in my bed­room! It sat next to my lego bins. I don’t use lego very much in my daily life, but I’m still using a ver­sion of logo for my grad­uate research today. I like that.

This video from the Logothings web­site is great:

Hey look, them kids are hacking in lisp!