A bunch of the sets (I think the whole first wave) have been at 30% - 40% off for the last few weeks, and appear to still be available if you’re interested.

Absolutely hilarious. A friend of mine has been resisting the urge to get into LEGO for quite a while now. We were talking about it this morning and he mentioned that one of the things that would cause him to give in is the existence of UCS Start Trek sets. 😛

Thanks for reminding me of this one. It was a really good read.

Yup. Got the mini Agrabah palace, 3-in-1 birdhouse, and the Ideas tree house set. The Walmart near my in-laws had a bunch of sets at 40%-50% off, as well, so we indulged a bit there, too. 😛

I NEED IT!!!

Wait… But what buttons are missing that you actually use?! Maybe I’ve just gotten too used to my remote, but I don’t think I’ve ever wanted for another button on the remote, aside from maybe a source button.

I’m not super sure. If I recall correctly, we’ve known for a while that something was going on, because surface hearing alone couldn’t account for all of the water evaporating from oceans, but we couldn’t tell what. In defense of humanity here, the concept of photons interacting with something as comparably massive as molecules is kinda wild. We were caught way off guard when the photoelectric effect was announced, and that’s photons interacting with whole atoms instead of just elementary particles. The idea of the photomolecular effect is thus even wilder.

If you read the article, it’s pretty clear. Instead of the energy of the photons being used to heat the water molecules to state change, that energy is used to break the molecular bonds between small groups of water molecules, and those groups are small enough to then be picked up by the air and evaporate. This way, the energy contained in a photon is converting much more liquid water to water vapor than if that same amount of energy was actually used to excite the water molecules, as in a microwave.

That’s pretty much what I expected, which is really cool to see. The next number I would love to see is some sort of price per weight comparison. As @edgemaster72@lemmy.world pointed out, the next common argument is that LEGO sets have a lot more smaller pieces now, so if the PPP has stayed roughly the same, the price per weight should have gone up.

I buy for myself only sporadically - most of my stuff comes from Christmas presents. It probably comes out to about $200 a year, maybe $300. Admittedly, if we lived closer to a LEGO store, it would probably be a fair bit more…