Just LEGO already...

Throughout the Muslim world, calls have gone out to boycott Danish products, including the company that brings hours of joy to children everywhere, LEGO.

With a few puckered plastic pieces and pictorial instructions, a child indirectly learns to interpret graphical models in 3D, appreciate the principles of structural stability, and can let his creativity spark in him/her a passion for architecture and engineering.

That at least was my experience.
And so, apparently, it was for a man by the name of Andrew Carol, who used the simple LEGO bricks to create a Babbage Difference Engine. In brief, this is a mechanical machine designed in 1822 by a Charles Babbage made to compute values of polynomial functions.

Sadly, the difference between our attitude and Andrew's is all too clear.