Some LEGO stats

LEGO crawled out of the primordial ooze a half century ago. The studded plastic block was created in 1949, but it wasn't until 1958 that the familiar stud-and-tube coupling system we all know and love was developed. Before that, the blocks were apparently prone to catastrophic collapse without warning.

Here are some silly LEGO stats for your amusement:

More than 400,000,000 children (and adults) will play with LEGO this year, spending five billion hours at their play.

On average, every person on Earth has 52 LEGO bricks.

The LEGO Group is the world's largest tire producer, with an annual production of 306,000,000.

You'd need a column of approximately 40,000,000,000 LEGO bricks to reach the moon.

The first LEGO wheel arrived in 1961, predating the evolution of LEGO people by 13 years.

LEGO MINDSTORM robotic products were a joint venture between the MIT Media Lab and LEGO.

Lego is not waterproof. I learned this the hard way as a 10 year-old home aqueduct builder.