victory! lady scientist lego minifig arrives

After the pleas (1, 2, 3) and the tease, we will finally have, beginning next month, an official female scientist LEGO minifigure! The "Scientist" fig will appear as part of Series 11, which is set to hit shelves on September 1st in the United States.

Here is the description from the LEGO website:

SCIENTIST: I wonder what will happen if I put THIS together with THAT... The brilliant Scientist’s specialty is finding new and interesting ways to combine things together. She’ll spend all night in her lab analyzing how to connect bricks of different sizes and shapes (she won the coveted Nobrick Prize for her discovery of the theoretical System/DUPLO® Interface!), or how to mix two colors in one element. Thanks to the Scientist’s tireless research, Minifigures that have misplaced their legs can now attach new pieces to let them swim like fish, slither like snakes, and stomp around like robots. Her studies of a certain outer dimension have even perfected a method for swapping body parts at will!

Kudos to LEGO for making her official name "Scientist" instead of adding "Lady" or "Woman" as it has done for certain other female figures (for example, "Lady Robot" in the same series). I must admit, I'm a little disappointed with the stereotypical glasses... But suffice it to say, this fig is a major step in the right direction.

In other female scientist minifig news, the CUUSOO Female Minifigure Set petition has racked up the requisite 10,000 upvotes for an official review by the folks at LEGO. Fingers crossed that these mini-sets will also eventually see the light of day! ∞

Photo by hermipad on Flickr

lady minifigs need your vote

As readers of this blog are well aware, I've been pushing for LEGO to ramp up its offerings of female minifigures in sets and the official minifig series. Last year, after the brouhaha surrounding the introduction of LEGO's Friends series, I noted the clear divide in male-female representation within the company and gave some concrete suggestions for the addition of female figures in stereotype-breaking careers. More recently, I lamented LEGO's changing course on apparent plans for a female scientist fig (though the librarian that came out in the end is actually quite nice).

I now want to share a wonderful proposal I discovered recently that conveys my vision completely—and which needs your support. The minifigures above and below were mocked up by Alatariel, a Dutch geochemist and LEGO fan, for Cuusoo, an officially-sanctioned LEGO crowdsourcing project. Users on Cuusoo (which means "wish" in Japanese) submit their ideas and solicit upvotes for their projects. Proposals with more than 10,000 votes are reviewed by a team at LEGO and may ultimately be created for sale in limited editions. (Examples of winning designs so far include the Hayabusa spacecraft and a Back to the Future set featuring Marty, Doc, and the DeLorean.)


Alatariel's full Female Minifigure Set is beautiful, and exactly what the doctor ordered. It features 13 new minifigures, plus accessories, in roles that include engineer, court judge, chemist, firefighter, astronomer, and paleontologist. Explaining her motivation, Alatariel writes:

Although recently LEGO® has started to design and add more female figures to their sets, they are still a minority. A small set of minifigures, which LEGO® has made in the past for different themes, would provide a great opportunity to add women to our LEGO® town or city communities. I have designed some professional female minifigures that also show that girls can become anything they want, including a fire fighter or a paleontologist (main picture). Being a geochemist myself the geologist and chemist figures are based on me:-) Due to the limitations of LDD the heads and hairstyles I used here are a bit limited. Ideally, Lego would produce some new face and hair designs, but at least I would like to see some 'rare' ones included.

So far the minifig set is about a quarter of the way toward its 10,000-vote goal. Please add your support! ∞

Post was corrected to fix the spelling of "Alatariel" and the fact that she is Dutch, not Swedish.

do the right thing

My Dear Lego,

Now you're just messing with me. A few months ago, prototype designs for the upcoming Series 10 minifigures were released leaked to the public. I was happy as a clam to find out there would not only be a Maia-the-Bee lookalike but we'd also finally get a female scientist! All was right in Lego-land.


In the end, however, you turned the scientist into a librarian. To be sure, librarians are awesome. But............


You *might* be able to redeem yourselves. Numerous sources suggest you will be releasing a scientist, for real, in Series 11. (Gender as yet unspecified.)

For the love of the FSM, please do the right thing.

yours very truly,
20tauri

where no toy has gone before

The folks at NASA threw a cute little curveball at the pre-launch briefing for the Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft today: They announced that three specially made LEGO minifigures would be flying to the outer solar system along with the spacecraft, which is scheduled to lift off Friday from the Kennedy Space Center. The three figures represent Galileo Galilei, who used his early telescopes to study Jupiter and its moons some four centuries ago; the Roman goddess Juno, namesake of the Juno craft; and the Roman god Jupiter. (In case you've forgotten your ancient mythology, Juno is the equivalent of the Greek Hera, and Jupiter is the same as Zeus.) Unlike normal plastic LEGOs, these figs were molded out of a special aluminum blend that should withstand the harsh launch and interplanetary environments the figs will experience in the upcoming days and years on their journey to the Jovian system.

If you follow along with my blog or Twitter feed, you know that I'm a big LEGO fan, especially when brick creations help folks get excited about science and technology. It's heartening to know that LEGO and NASA have made a strong commitment to one another within the past year, since our nation's future rests on our inspiring today's children to become tomorrow's mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. Can't wait to see what's next! ∞

carolyn in wonderland: a little video about big things

It's early March, 2007, and planetary scientist Carolyn Porco has just opened the TED conference—a high-profile gathering of the world's brightest thinkers, movers, and shakers—with a bang. Her stirring presentation on the exploits of Cassini-Huygens, a space mission that's been investigating Saturn and its cornucopia of moons since July of 2004, is so inspiring that it goes on to become one of the top-voted talks on all of TED.com. It is, as they say, fantabulous.

Zoom ahead two and a half years to the waning days of 2009. I'm sitting at my desk, furiously scanning Google for a decent photograph of computer pioneer Ada Lovelace for a short piece I'm writing about her life. Before long, I stumble upon an image that makes me smile from ear-to-ear; it's a portrait of a small LEGO person with garments and hair just as Lady Lovelace would have worn them back in 1850. Almost immediately, my synapses start firing. How cool would it be to make minifigs (as these characters are known in the Legophile vernacular) of current well-known scientists and science popularizers? My first thought is to do one of Carolyn, whom I've been getting to know over the previous months. But I envision mini plastic versions of a number of other scientists and personalities as well . . . and thus, an idea is hatched.

Carolyn's minifig, the prototype for what will become an ever-growing collection of "LEGO scitweeps," is finished a few weeks later. But my creative juices are just getting started, and I find myself longing for a greater challenge: a stop-motion movie. I've never done one of these before and wouldn't even know where to begin. Yet it soon becomes my mission to recreate, in as much detail as possible, Carolyn's 2007 TED talk.

Many hours, quite a few moons (including one total eclipse!), and somewhere around 2,500 photographs later, my project is finally complete. The more vigilant among you might notice a few minor goofs (ahemupsidedownshorelineahem). But otherwise, I’m proud to say that this stop-action replica holds pretty true to the original, even down to the faces in the audience! So if you're as excited as I am about planetary exploration, I hope you'll set aside 18 minutes of your day and allow Carolyn's yellow Doppelgänger to, as she so eloquently enchants, take you on a journey . . . And why not check out these behind-the-scenes pics, while you're at it? ∞