Why walking on Legos hurts more than walking on fire or ice (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Why walking on Legos hurts more than walking on fire or ice (2018)

smithsonianmag.com

101 pointspr0zac101 comments

As a child i never got why adults stand on Lego, especially as i knew they found it painful (and if it were my Lego i found the risk of broken pieces concerning!) Obviously I appreciated that it was an accident but to me it seemed like the most easily avoided accident - just look at the floor and pick a route that doesn't involve stepping on it.

What's a suprise is, as an adult, i still feel the same way. Sure, I've larger feet now and I'm perhaps a shade less precise, but unless it's approaching total floor covering there would usually be routes. Some commenters below implied that people might enjoy the pain but that doesn't seem like it's the case: people really complain about this happening, but irrationally it doesn't seem to bother them enough to avoid it.

No idea what the solution is. Perhaps one could go all-in and make it even more dangerous: spread drawing pins on the floor too, it's sort of the nuclear option, but that would get attention, in turn resulting in less pain.

Thankfully it's not a problem i need to solve, but I'd love to hear if someone had a better idea (besides something like insisting kids clear it up, which is no fun!)

> (besides something like insisting kids clear it up, which is no fun!)

Instructing kids to clean up their mess isn't just wholesome fun, but it also teaches a valuable life skill! Might not be much "fun" for them to start, but kids actually benefit from having responsibilities. And, if you make it a precondition for something they want to do, they'll be motivated!

> but kids actually benefit from having responsibilities.

Do they? I’m not sure what I learned from my parents insisting that I “clean” my room.

Maybe it teaches a recognition of pointless overhead and a healthy distrust of people who would fit in too well in Compliance departments?

Mission accomplished.

Presumably you learnt that people will be unhappy if they're in a position of power over you and you don't do what they say.

Most people, eventually, learn the value of cleaning their domicile (there are exceptions, of course).

I think parents live in hope that their kids can learn that value earlier than they themselves have, or at least help share their lessons learned with their kids - this is true of many things in parent/child relationship -> we want/hope better for our kids.

And let's not minimize the "I'm tired, I had to clean your room every night for the past 3 days/weeks/months/years/decades, you need to put some effort too!" aspect of course :->

It works various degrees of well or poorly with various kids, parents, and circumstances - like virtually anything else in parenting.

I make my 3 year old participate in cleaning up her toys. I always volunteer to help her, and we do it together. We do it consistently enough so that it's a habit, and she rarely complains. She visited her cousins recently and said, "those boys are very messy. They should clean up their toys!"

And you desire this to continue? Isn’t she just mindlessly parroting what you say?

You sound like you enjoy your freedom to live in squalor. Did you know that clutter leads to stress and anxiety? I teach my kid to fight for worthy causes, you're describing self-defeating pettiness.

She's mindlessly parroting what I say, anyway.

Might as well be something that's appreciated even as an adult :-)

Then what happens if you ask her why she is saying the stuff she says?

I just asked my daughter why it's important to clean up her toys. She said it's a good thing to do. I asked her why it's a good thing to do. She said it's a good idea to clean up before nap time so that there isn't stuff all over the floor for people to trip on and get owies.

Okay cool, imo the desire to avoid hurting her feet is a good justification. What does she say if you ask her, “Are there good reasons for not cleaning up the toys?”

You should try interacting with kids, that is how they learn :)

No, she has a mind with her own thoughts and emotions. Most children aren't zombies.

And you know this how?

It was always easier to find the toy you wanted in a clean and tidy room.

Same thing applies as adults and non-toy items too.

I don't expect spic&span. The alternative is my kid can never find anything, because everything is in a pile on the floor. That's how you get ants (or worse).

Yes, I know it's time to clean up the playroom when they stop playing with toys and start doing constant mischief instead.

Toys become a lot more attractive once there's space to play and the pieces that belong together are not mixed up with a bunch of random junk.

Learning to clean. If you never did it as a child you would find that horribly annoying as an adult.

> And, if you make it a precondition for something they want to do, they'll be motivated!

For me, this was rather the beginning of my insanely deep hate for authorities and the power that they (ab)use.

There are thousands of ways how to sell it to the kid, obviously the driest factual ones won't get much sympathy.

But yes kids are hard, I would love to see comparison of 19th century 10-kid family and now... I feel like we are doing something wrong to have raising kids well so hard, but maybe its just that circumstances and expectations have changed completely

> But yes kids are hard, I would love to see comparison of 19th century 10-kid family and now... I feel like we are doing something wrong to have raising kids well so hard, but maybe its just that circumstances and expectations have changed completely

Families with 10 kids basically abandon most of them, after the first 1-2 and probably except for the last 1-2. Bigger kids take care of smaller ones, they become surrogate teenage parents.

Humans are quite smart and so kids manage to survive, but it doesn't mean being a kid in such a family is a good life comparatively to being a kid today, in your regular family with 1-2-3 kids.

I had a girlfriend who was 1 out of 14 (2 large families moving together) she was basically a mother at 10-12 years old doing chores washing clothes etc. they had 0 grown up time since both was working, needless to say alot of fuckery went on there..

Or keep your floor free of sharp things and relax, even stumbling around in the middle of the night. It’s not hard - the kids legos things being an exception.

Lego all over the floor is easy to avoid.

It's when a single piece, of similar color to the floor, is left out. If you don't see that lego is present, it's much harder to avoid.

Yes, this is an excellent point i had overlooked. The colour ranges now are far wider so this could come up quite easily now. The stealth Lego piece risk!

I see you didn't have a red, black, and yellow carpet in your house growing up. Not sure what decade that was from, but was still around when I was growing up in the 80s.

Yes these are the unexpected one that hurt you. When you are taking a step back, or when your kid is crying in the middle of the night and you walk to his room all lights off and step into one that was left somewhere in the house (not necessarily in his room).

"There would usually be routes"

ah; I believe you are mentally imagining a kids' room floor full of Lego, and adult inexplicable inability to avoid them :)

For me at least, that's not the threat vector.

It's when you go to your office or living room, a seemingly safe place at a safe time and your mind is not running "Obstacle avoidance program", and unexpectedly there's a single sharp piece of lego hidden in the patterns of the carpet or underneath your office work chair, or even when it's in the middle of the bathroom floor in the pitch dark at 3am when you're running to the toilet --> let me tell you, THAT one REALLY hurts, and usually results in secondary or even tertiary damage :P

The only thing worse than stepping on legos are protruding rusty nails --just thinking about it makes me recoil.

Hah, core memory triggered.

As a kid I jumped off of a swing onto a rusty nail. Yes, I was barefoot. I seem to remember it went in pretty smooth, and barely felt it, but then I had to pull it out.

I actually think Lego has been more uncomfortable.

Ugh, why did I have to read that? >.< I had a similar experience walking through mud and finding an old rustic tin can with its lid sticking out. Sliced up a wide shallow flap of skin, I think I still have the scar…

Haha i remember doing halloween and we had to hit a pinata thing which was essentially a barrel with candy in it, when it was down i walked over it just to get a rusty nail in my foot, i swear the lego still hurts more than that.

I'd add UK mains plugs[1] to that category. I've seen multiple people compare them to caltrops, and for good reason.

[1] Photo for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moulded_and_rewireable_BS...

I've stepped on rusty nails twice in my life. The nails maybe went into my foot each time by about half a centimeter. They didn't really hurt. The very small area felt mildly sore.

I've heard that getting stabbed feels like being punched. I imagine it's similar mechanism, just on a smaller scale.

The other one is when there's some urgent problem in the lego-strewn area - when you need to remove the block from the hand of the kid who's whacking the window or the toddler, there's no time or attention to spare for walking carefully.

I stepped on Bluey's friend Indy [0] yesterday. She was laying on the floor under a blanket with holes in it. I stepped directly on that stupid cartoon character's sharp long nose and thought I was going to die.

[0] https://blueypedia.fandom.com/wiki/Indy

Yowch! I stepped on a fox minifig (not sure it’s technically Lego) with pointy ears and it drew quite a lot of blood. The thing was basically a caltrop. >.<

It's about salience and paying attention - most people don't do it most of the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow#Two_sy...

To most people, walking around is a type 1 task - they aren't really thinking about it, it just happens automatically. Having to pay attention to avoid things is a negative experience.

I'm with you, I actively pay attention when I'm walking around, but I suspect we're significant outliers in the general population.

One can’t help but wonder why people would make mistakes when they could simply choose not to.

Because paying attention to not make mistakes costs time and time is valuable.

We only really pay attention for the big decisions.

Do you ever stub your toes? I’ve been known to do that on furniture that I positioned and haven’t moved in over a year, with the lights on.

Nobody intentionally steps on LEGOs, so why does it happen? Because it’s unintentional. Either they didn’t see it or they did and simply misused their foot placement. Not very puzzling.

Haven’t you even done something accidentally that you didn’t mean to do? Maybe bumped your head on something?

Its not the obvious dangers that lurk in every room where the kids reside, its those hidden fuckers, the one that is on the end of the stair you first see when you actually stepped on it and fall over screaming, those are the murder lego's.

It is easily preventable get a huge box for all legos, legos are only played with on a carpet thats easy to pick up and put back in the box, at that point most of it is around that area.

These people have never experienced the pain of stepping on a UK 3 pin mains plug

Ring binder with the clasps opened.

I have never stepped on a UK variant, but I have stepped on a South African 3 pin plug (our prongs look the same, bigger one in front but they're all round).

Stepping on Lego hurts; stepping on a 3 pin plug with for example the middle of your foot destroys a part of your soul.

At the very least the Lego just cuts you, but the plug feels as if it destroys some of your nerve endings.

Calling them Legos is torture enough

I get making an effort to use the right words and expressions, like using the correct plural for criteria, or not abusing “begging the question”.

But should we really spend mental energy to protect trademarked brands from becoming generic terms ?

"begging the question" is only wrong when you apply it to the wrong logical fallacy.

Otherwise, it is just a descriptive phrase that really makes more sense than "raises the question", IMO. There really is no official book of phrases where anything outside that usage is wrong -- otherwise the first use of "begging the question" itself would have been wrong. Or, if we insist that there is some notion of official phrases amongst the population, the logical meaning of the phrase would have long been with the descriptive one.

Also, whether you call building blocks lego or legos it is bad for the trademark.

I also don't get why someone gets to sell naming rights to a building and we're suddenly supposed to call it something else like it hasn't been there for 100 years.

So yes, I've visited the Sears Tower. I play with legos. I've played ultimate frisbee, etc... If they want me to change what I'm calling things, they can start paying me.

> But should we really spend mental energy to protect trademarked brands from becoming generic terms ?

It's not a case of that, IMO. I certainly say 'a hoover' or 'hoovering' sometimes, when it isn't one and I've never owned one. I do balk at 'legos' though, and it's simply because I'm British.

For whatever reason we just decided differently across the Atlantic how to refer to the items: here, 'lego bricks'; there 'legos'. (In the singular too, 'a lego brick', not 'a lego', it just sounds weird to me.)

It's not the trademark becoming generic thing, because even when it is 'a Lego' we don't call it that. It's a lego brick.

From the official source:

https://twitter.com/lego_group/status/842115345280294912?lan...

'LEGO is always an adjective. So LEGO bricks, LEGO elements, LEGO sets, etc. Never, ever "legos."'

Singular "Lego" is revisionist history.

https://books.google.com/books?id=VCwEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA39&dq=%2...

I don't get it. Don't people have feeling in their feet and reflexes? I don't think I remember stepping on anything significantly painful barefoot. When I'm in the process of stepping on something sharp I just rebalance and adjust the way I'm placing my foot mid-stomp. It would have to be a nail to dig into my foot before I can react. In case of anything else I would have sooner fallen in controlled manner or do a weird squat before allowing any significant pain in my foot. I walk barefoot all the time I'm at home since forever. Maybe it's just practice?

Are other adults stampeding around their houses like elephants?

I behave the same way, but I have a feeling that most people do not.

Wow, great read. The author, Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, is someone to pay attention to.

https://www.lindarodriguezmcrobbie.com/aboutlinda

nice to see we're still calling them 'legos' not LEGO BRAND TOY LEGO BLOCKS or whatever that meme was

Only monsters say legos. The plural of Lego is Lego.

Or LEGO...

Personally I tend to prefer to use the form "LEGO®" in written text. It's a little trickier in spoken word, but I find that if I append some boilerplate trademark text it sounds surprisingly natural:

"Timmy, that's the third time this week I've stood on your LEGO® in the hallway! Clean it up or we're going to confiscate it! LEGO® is a registered trademark of LEGO System A/S, DK-7190 Billund, Denmark."

I think it’s worse to get worked up over the use of “Legos.”

Reminds me of the quote from the guy who designed Comic Sans.

“If you love Comic Sans, you don’t know anything about typography. But if you hate Comic Sans, then you don’t know anything about typography either…and you should get another hobby.”

>>I think it’s worse to get worked up over the use of “Legos.”

Agreed! I think we should gather all such datas together and see what informations we can gather; if we present our common knowledges, and lots of lucks, I'm sure we can present convincing evidences for all the peoples to stop fussing!

<watches HN implode:>

I'm surprised to read this. I'm pretty sure the norm in English is to add "s" even to proper names (like most European languages I think? but unlike French) so Legos would be logical.

In French it would depend on whether you write "des Lego" (capitalised, keeping is as a proper noun) or "des legos" (as a genericised trademark). Both are correct.

Yeah but remember that English is pretty irregular, so even though appending "-s" turns many words into their plural form there are many counterexamples. Like:

- one fish, two fish

- one sheep, two sheep

- one child, two children

- one mouse, two mice

- one knife, two knives

In this case many of us grew up using "lego" as the plural, so "legos" sounds to us a bit like "sheeps", "mouses" or "childs". Not a huge deal - nobody's losing any sleep over this, but it's definitely worth explaining why it sounds weird to some of us :)

I think Lego is used in the same way as "milk". You have to arbitrarily divide it and has no natural division. You don't have some milks and you don't have some Legos. A Lego set is like a glass of milk. But sooner or later you just end up with a mess of hundreds of random pieces spread across children's lives like grains of sand. You hope they stay in the sand pit, but they will get everywhere.

Lego is the brand name, so it's more like calling two Nike store Nikes rather than Nike stores. Outside of North America it's more usual to refer to many Lego bricks as, well, Lego bricks or Lego pieces. If we're playing with a lego set etc, we'd just say that we're playing with Lego.

That's not exactly right; in British English and other dialects that don't say "legos", we don't have a plural of "lego" because we treat it grammatically as a "mass noun" just like "furniture", "spaghetti" and "advice".

"Legos" sounds wrong to us not because we care about the brand identity, but for the same reason that it sounds dopey to say "I love your furnitures", "These spaghettis are tasty" or "let me give you two advices".

Huh. Wonder what kinds of forces drive the pluralization (or lack thereof) of nouns in English dialects? Your comment reminded me of another one that sounds odd to my American ears: "maths," as in "Tommy's always been very sharp at maths."

Oh yeah, Americans saying maths wrong really grinds my gears. Why use a singular? It's not short for mathamatic!

FWIW, the current world record holder for barefoot lego walk is [0]. Funny enough though, nothing on the text says that the legos can't be pieced together so it's all flat.

[0] https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/469467-fa...

Aaaargh.

Lego. Not Legos

Lego is sheer agony, the pieces have no give to them, and the pain is delivered damn near instantly. No chance for weight distribution.

They are expensive too.

Really, I think they are overrated.

I think this misses an important factor in that the sensation from walking on lego is unpredictable because the corners stick in random parts of your feet, which means you can't brace yourself or get used to the sensation.

Glad to see the tide has finally turned. All but one person in this thread has used Lego (officially LEGO) in favour of Legos. We'll get there yet!

This is igNobel prize winning material

Leg-Ows.

(Sorry).

74 comments, and not a single one about slippers?

try treading on a British plug, then a Lego brick seems like nothing

yeah but no one has gotten 2nd degree hurns walking on legos. legos may be more painful but more potentially safe

> walked an unbelievable 2,737 feet on a square circuit of red, four-by-two Lego bricks at Philly Brickfest, in front of a cheering crowd

And the crowd well knows it's painful. So they are cheering self-inflicted public torture. But it's all good because it's a common experience with a children's toy? It's a bit gross. A small reminder of our large capacity to be entertained by other people's misery.

I think its all good because Cassevah is a willing percipient! If we forced someone to do this against their will I don't think there would be much excitement... He is going for the world record so I don't think there is much misery involved.

Why is it misery? Some people like the pain. Others like the challenge and are indiferent to the pain. No need to moralize or push your view onto people. It was a consensual act, it's OK.

And people who watch football and cheer are in fact simply salivating at the thought of people getting concussions.

People who clap when someone blows out the candles at a birthday party are in fact gleefully exclaiming over that person being a year closer to death, celebrating the impending end of their life, picturing coffins in their heads.

People who cheer when someone gets up after some incident are reveling in overpopulation and the increase of entropy, excited for the certain end of the universe.

> people who watch football

Concussions are rare in the beautiful game. American football (which doesn't have it's own name) on the other hand, not so much...

I get that you were trying to be clever but there’s research that says you are also wrong about soccer.

> Soccer is a sport not traditionally identified as high-risk for concussions, yet several studies have shown that concussion rates in soccer are comparable to, and often exceed those of, other contact sports. As many as 22% of all soccer injuries are concussions.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22120567/

> People who clap when someone blows out the candles at a birthday party are in fact gleefully exclaiming over that person being a year closer to death, celebrating the impending end of their life, picturing coffins in their heads.

You say this like a joke, but I have trouble understanding the inexplicably popular Beach Boys song "Wouldn't It Be Nice" any other way.

Wouldn't it be nice if we were older

Then we wouldn't have to wait so long

What are we supposed to be waiting for? All of the consequences of being older are bad.

Wouldn't it be nice if we were older

Then we wouldn't have to wait so long

It's a song about teenage love, about wishing they were old enough to marry.

It's not about wishing they were old enough to retire; teenagers don't think that far ahead.

Teenagers already are old enough to marry.

That's objectively false. Some are, some aren't.

Depends. There is a minimum age of marriage in Delaware, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.

But in general, all teenagers are old enough to marry.

That's not true at all. In some states a 13 year old can get married if the have court approval (vanishingly unlikely but besides the point), but that contradicts your original flagrantly ridiculous claim that "all teenagers are old enough to marry". All 18 year olds are old enough to get married, they don't need any permission. Some 16 year olds are if they have permission, but 16 year olds are not in general old enough to get married if they need permission. So your claim was wrong I am afraid to have to break to you.

> All 18 year olds are old enough to get married, they don't need any permission.

That's not how marriage works. If I didn't need any permission to get married, I'd be married.

Who is stopping you from getting married then? Unless you're being so obnoxious as to say, you ackshully need the permission of the person you're getting married to, which if you're remotely sensible is a given in this conversation?

I thought the lyrics were "Wouldn't It Be Nice" perfectly clear. The very next line "And wouldn't it be nice to live together" emphasizes that it isn't age that is being desired, but the social roles that come with being older. The singer is resenting that saying good night is followed by leaving to separate houses, that they then wake up in separate locations. That those are moments they could be sharing together, but due to the narrator's age, they aren't allowed to.

They aren’t cheering because he’s in pain, they’re cheering because he’s trying to break a world record and they want to encourage him to power through, despite said pain. Yours is a very cynical reading of the situation, I think :)

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