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LEGO celebrated the 50th anniversary of its first Danish patent on Monday. I grew up playing with a few tubs of LEGO – the basic blocks and some trays, no kits!

BusinessWeek posted a nice slideshow of LEGO’s manufacturing process. The company produces 19 billion LEGO bricks each year with very high quality standards: only 18 of every 1 million bricks is defective.

That’s 36,000 bricks each minute, and  more than 2 million an hour, according to Neatorama.

PopAndCo.com has a cute flash animation of the process. The audio track is loud, however.
LEGO is moving most of its brick manufacturing from Denmark to Mexico and the Czech Republic, according to the New York Times. US manufacturing and distribution is being moved to Mexican outsourcing firm Flextronics, according to this report.

In September 2007, SupplyChainDigest published a good report about how LEGO management came to this decision. Earlier attempts to fix the company’s value chain had helped, but outsourcing was a step the company was reluctant to take. LEGO toys are an important symbol in European lives.

On BoingBoing, an editor created a timelapse video while he built a 5000-piece, US$500 kit of the Millennium Falcon.

As a final note, the Wikipedia entry for LEGO closes with a brief discussion of the trademark.

USA: Yahoo! News - Wanted: Good Job in Exchange for U.S. Election Vote. Here’s a follow-up to yesterday’s post about poor job quality. Dodge this, W.

USA: “Why don’t they get new jobs if they’re unhappy — or go on Prozac?” said Susan Sheybani, an assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt. A reporter overheard the remark, but Sheybani later said that she was talking to a colleague, and making a joke about the deteriorating quality of American jobs. I think Susan will be looking for a new job next week!

Let’s look at the numbers: 1.1 million jobs have been lost since W was named president. In 2002, 41 million Americans didn’t have health insurance. Prozac won’t fix the economy. My prescription: Cheney, W and the GOP need to lose in November. It’s that simple. The story is also on MSNBC.

Tech: New Scientist: “Brighter, clearer beer could be on the way thanks to a superfine filter that owes its existence to the failure of a decade-old recording technology. In the early 1990s, Philips of the Netherlands developed the Digital Compact Cassette tape format, which was designed to give CD-quality sound on standard magnetic tapes.”

Sports: Rays Extend Streak To 10 - from Tampa Bay Online: “Dewon Brazelton didn’t give the Rays a quality outing by the starting pitcher. And Tino Martinez had to leave the game with an injury. These kinds of plot twists the Rays can live without. But the franchise-record win streak still stretched to 10 games Saturday with an 11-4 victory against the Diamondbacks. It matches the longest win streak in the majors this season (the Giants also won 10 in a row) and leaves the Rays with their best record after 65 games, 31-34. ”