Lego Minifigs
As a kid, my brother and I loved playing with Lego. Best toy ever, in my opinion. It’s been ages since I played with them last, which is perhaps why I missed this trend wrt Lego “minifigures” (that’s the term used to refer to those toy figures of Legoland; popularly shortened to “minifigs”). Apparently, the trend started in 1989 as per some study at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand: the minifigs shifted more and more to “scowling, frowning or snarling rather than smiling” . Have a look at this pic to see what they mean: Wait, did I just say university study? Yup, that’s not a typo. Apparently, play is too important to be left to the kids (to paraphrase that famous saying about wars and generals). As this Telegraph article put it: “The report is full of scatter graphs and tables that show the “results of the linear curve estimations across the six emotion categories” and a comically obtuse k-cluster analysis of spacemen versus cavemen characters… I kid...