Category: Otaku

Lego Technician

May 9, 2015

I bought this kit several months ago, and it was time to make it:

A licensed Technic kit is a bit weird, but it’s another construction vehicle, and I’m a sucker for those. Although to be honest I would have preferred it without the ‘power functions’, which sadly have become more than just an option in recent years. More on that later.

The box is suitable massive, but strangely empty when opened. I guess they make it bigger to make it seem like it has more pieces than it does! Unlike other kits, the bags aren’t labelled and you need to open them all before starting. If you don’t like sorting pieces in advance (and I don’t) this sort of packaging leads to longer build times due to the time digging through the pile to find a particular piece.

The instruction book is massive – over 300 pages in total. As usual for Lego kits, it’s wonderful designed and makes the kit very easy to assemble. Things start off complex from the get go. I’m only a few pages in and you can see already how complicated the gearing for the wheels is. It also becomes quickly apparent just how large the finished kit is:

That’s a shot from much later in assembly, showing the massive bulk of the main engine compartment. You can see how dense the construction is here, and you can see how the ‘power function’ elements (such as the motors) are structural. Even if you wanted to build the kit without them, you would be in for some serious customization and deviation from the manual. I’m not a big fan of this approach.

It’s an extremely sturdily build model, and I know if I’m ever going to take it apart it’ll be a hell of a job. Good thing I didn’t make any mistakes during construction…

…except that I did! It’s hard to see in the photo, but I used the incorrect axle on one rear wheel, all the way back at the start of assembly. I didn’t notice this until the 11.99th hour (long after the above shot was taken) and it was a real chore disassembling half the underside of the rear wheels to fix the problem. Had I made an error somewhere internal in the model, I may have had to put it away somewhere for a while out of frustration!

All told the construction took me maybe 6 or 7 hours over a few weeks. Here’s the gigantic (and heavy!) finished kit:

A better shot:

And one for scale:

Since many of you know just how big Yossie is, you can clearly see that this is a monster of a Technic kit. It’s heavy and long enough that you need two hands to carry it!

And how does it work? Here’s a quick video I shot of the ‘power functions’:

A bit slow perhaps, but impressive given the size of the model. I don’t show it too well in the video, but it moves along quite speedily for it’s size!

Verdict: massive, impressive, complex and fun-to-build technic kit that I believe would have been even better without the motors.

Stamp Otaku

April 30, 2015

I like postage stamps. Always have, always will. I still buy them a lot, especially when I’m in Australia. They are also one of the reasons I love sending postcards, and I enjoy sending (or receiving!) cards with exotic or particularly pretty stamps on them. I wonder if any of my recipients notice?

That’s a screen grab from yesterdays lecture, which was about the atomic structure. Rutherford is a real character, and I’ve always found it humorous that he’s been on so many postage stamps considering his (in)famous quote about science. Other slides in yesterdays lecture were peppered with stamps as well, and it’s actually quite easy to find stamps to use as illustrations in physics lectures.

In searching for such examples, I couldn’t help but notice that the masters of honoring their scientists on postage stamps are unquestionably the Germans. There are many and varied examples of beautiful stamps showcasing very famous scientists from German history.

Take for example this one:

What a beautiful stamp! Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves, and this stamp displays the oscillations of the electric force due to a magnetic dipole (ie. EM waves) in the background. I love that the lines are superimposed over Hertz’s portrait, as if to put the science before the man.

This stamp of Bessel is magnificent! The portrait is wonderful, and the fact the stamp prominently displays a plot of a ‘Bessel function’ (important mathematical tools required to solve complex partial differential equations) is just icing on the cake! How I’d love to stick this on a postcard!

Here are some other wonderful examples of Germany’s science stamps:

That last one (Gauss) is sublime! Gauss is one of the titans of mathematics, and is one of the few men to have multiple identities or equations named after him. One may imagine that they would have shown a Gaussian distribution on the stamp, but whoever designed it chose the 17-sided polygon that he created using compass and straightedge when he was only 19. I love it!

Lovely stamps these all are. The woodcut portraits add to the appeal, and the fact the stamps embrace the science only make them more appealing.

Of course Germany isn’t alone in recognizing science in their stamps. Here are a few other wonderful examples I found (and in some cases have inserted into lectures):

From the top, we have Roentgen (x-ray), Babbage (computers), Fermi (atomic physics), Bohr (atomic structure), Mendelev (chemistry), Democritus (coined the word ‘atom’ in 450BC) and Ramanujan (Indian mathematics prodigy). I love them all. I wish I had them all in a big frame. I’d display it proudly in my office.

You’re all wondering “What about Einstein?” He’s on more stamps than any other scientist, and they run the entire range of design and theme, since his fame moved into celebrity as well. I think this is perhaps my favourite Einstein stamp of all those I found:

It’s simple, subtle (note the background) and a lovely portrait of Einstein when he wasn’t much older than when he presented his most important theories. This stamp would look beautiful on the back of a postcard of a surfing koala or kangaroo drinking a beer 😉

Sniper Girl

April 26, 2015

I’m a big fan of the Etrian Odyssey game series. Not only are the games fine examples of the first-person dungeon crawl genre, but they have wonderful graphics, due in no small part to the character designs of artist Yuji Himukai.

Here is his design for the female ‘sniper’ character from the first game in the series:

Therefore you can imagine my delight when Kotobukiya released this model kit:

Figure kits are rare, so I eagerly bought this one when it came out. Last week I assembled it. Here’s what was in the box:

So many colors of plastic! So much detail on the pieces! Even before I pulled the runners out of the bags I was impressed.

Very quickly it was clear this was a god-tier kit. The engineering of the pieces was superb, and almost no trimming or sanding was required. Everything snapped together tightly, but articulation of the joints was perfect. The balance was also incredible, quite an achievement considering her tiny feet!

She was very easy to put together, and on top of the ease was a lot of fun. It took me maybe 2 hours only to finish her. Although she’s on the base in these shots, she can actually stand unsupported:

There is some customization decisions to be made. She can have her goggles on or around her neck, she can hold the bow by her side or in a firing position with arrow cocked, and she can have one of four faces: