Bloomberg reports that privately-held Lego Group is poised to report record growth in U.S. sales for 2008.

The head of the company's U.S. Business, Soren Torp Laursen, said that "We braced ourselves for fairly tough conditions because the macro-economic picture was not looking very good. Much to our surprise, our demand actually started to accelerate as the market conditions became powerful."

There are a few possible explanations, according to experts: Because new Lego toys can be added to existing sets, they can present a good value proposition because they can, in effect, make old toys new again. In addition, parents may be drawn to the toys in a tough economy because they last a long time.

This is good news: Lego's inspire creativity and learning in a way that Bratz dolls (whose sales are tanking) and video games don't. What is good for Lego is good for America.

Imagine my satisfaction when reading the recent issue of Motion Systems Design and find yet another industrial reference to the LEGO Group, Billund, Denmark. Being that my first real engineering projects were built using LEGOS as a boy, it is very pleasing to me that it's kept pace with the baby boomer generation and has followed us to work.

Mindstorms NXT by the LEGO Group provides a toolkit interface for LabView users, allowing them to use drag and drop graphical programing by National Instruments Corp (NASDAQ:NATI) out of Austin, Texas, to create virtual instrumentation for utilization in operating and controlling the Mindstorms NXT robotics platform. While the toolkit is intended to facilitate advanced user's interaction with NXT robotics, the maker states that its design may be successfully utilized by children as young as ten years old.

National Instruments states in a press release issued in December: "Once users download a LabVIEW program to the NXT, they can use the toolkit to interact with the NXT robot while a program is running." The toolkit is designed and intended for use with LabVIEW versions 7.1, 8.0 and 8.20.

National Instruments is a designer and manufacturer of hardware and programming environments for utilization in the testing, observation and control of a wide variety of physical attributes such as pressure, heat and electrical current flow. Additionally, N.I. provides test management software applications for use in industrial systems analysis. National Instruments may be considered for the custom design of testing regimens to best capture and exploit any manner of in house, statistical process control (SPC) testing and functionality programs.

National Instruments stock closed at $26.67 on 02-16-07 at about double its average volume. NATI's 52-week high of $34.14 was set on 04-21-06, and its 52-week low of $24.41 was set on 07-18-06. National Instruments recorded EPS of $1.06 for fiscal 2006 and pays a quarterly dividend of 7 cents.