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Greeble

Greeble or greeblie illustration: showing a panel of buttons on a wall and a ship in a spaceport rather like the Millenium Falcom full of small elements that give detail and scale

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A greeble, greeblie or greebly, is the name for the small elements that add detail and scale to models and, often, help make them look more advanced and realistic. Greeble can be both a verb and a noun.

Greeble or greeblie, George Lucas' term, originated on the early Star Wars sets when creating the impressively detailed and realistic models. You can take a simple ship, wall or rooftop, and by adding switches, boxes, cabling, lights and buttons, hey presto, there's a whole lot more technology involved. You can add greebles, or greeblies, to something, or you can greeble it.

A common modelmaking technique for adding elements and greebles to make a design look realistic and sophisticated is to scavenge from existing model kits. Borrowing other parts and repurposing them on a new model is called kit-bashing. Speaking personally, it's also very satisfying making up greebles to add to a LEGO build (MOC—My-Own-Creation)—sometimes the most fun part.

Here's Adam Savage, an ex-Star Wars modelmaker discussing greeblies and kit-bashing (video) or an ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) model shop greeblie (video) used on Star Wars Episode 2. Greebles also make an appearance in the fascinating documentaries about the making of the Star Wars films, Empire of Dreams , and the making of episode 9, The Skywalker Legacy. Sometimes, the making-of is more interesting than what was made. I remember the same feeling watching the making of the Lord of the Rings films, too.

Published 12 Nov 2023

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The coastline paradox is the fascinating observation that it’s not straightforward to say how long a coastline is. If you were to measure the coastline of a country by using a ruler on a globe, you would come out with a vastly different number than if you were to pace around the edge. The closer you look, the more wiggles and squiggliness you come across, and instead of converging to a more accurate length, the coastline just keeps getting longer. The smaller your ruler, the longer it gets. This was originally spotted, incredibly, in the 1950s by an Englishman, Lewis Richardson, when trying to check a theory he had that the likelihood of war between countries depended on the length of their shared borders. Remarkably, he found that the quoted lengths of borders varied significantly. While measuring on maps at different scales, he saw that the smaller scale map he used, or the smaller the width of his callipers he measured with, the length systematically increased. When looking at coastlines, instead of borders, some countries had wigglier coasts, and so the length increased at a faster rate with the scale — for instance, Norway’s coastline, with it’s crinkly fjords, increases faster than Britain’s, which in turn increases faster than South Africa’s, as he zoomed in. The rate of this increase later became known as its fractal dimension. Long after Richardson’s research, Benoit Mandelbrot published a paper How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension that discussed how the wiggliness of something like a coastline at one scale can be repeated at smaller and smaller scales. The work led to the later term fractals. Many other things exhibit fractal-like behaviour, such as river networks, borders, brains, frequencies, lightning, and even the stock market. There’s a super section on this in Scale, by Geoffrey West. Also see: The Mercator Projection The difference between Great Britain, the UK and the British Isles…The coastline paradox is the fascinating observation that it’s not straightforward to say how long a coastline is. If you were to measure the coastline of a country by using a ruler on a globe, you would come out with a vastly different number than if you were to pace around the edge. The closer you look, the more wiggles and squiggliness you come across, and instead of converging to a more accurate length, the coastline just keeps getting longer. The smaller your ruler, the longer it gets. This was originally spotted, incredibly, in the 1950s by an Englishman, Lewis Richardson, when trying to check a theory he had that the likelihood of war between countries depended on the length of their shared borders. Remarkably, he found that the quoted lengths of borders varied significantly. While measuring on maps at different scales, he saw that the smaller scale map he used, or the smaller the width of his callipers he measured with, the length systematically increased. When looking at coastlines, instead of borders, some countries had wigglier coasts, and so the length increased at a faster rate with the scale — for instance, Norway’s coastline, with it’s crinkly fjords, increases faster than Britain’s, which in turn increases faster than South Africa’s, as he zoomed in. The rate of this increase later became known as its fractal dimension. Long after Richardson’s research, Benoit Mandelbrot published a paper How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension that discussed how the wiggliness of something like a coastline at one scale can be repeated at smaller and smaller scales. The work led to the later term fractals. Many other things exhibit fractal-like behaviour, such as river networks, borders, brains, frequencies, lightning, and even the stock market. There’s a super section on this in Scale, by Geoffrey West. Also see: The Mercator Projection The difference between Great Britain, the UK and the British Isles

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