Slashdot Mirror
Da Vinci's Purposeful Mistakes
puppetman writes "According to a story out today, Leonardo Da Vinci deliberately introduced mistakes in his inventions. The series, Leonardo, produced by the BBC, claims that simple mistakes were introduced; mistakes that would not become apparent until after the contraption was built. The series hypothesizes that this was either a form of patent protection, or a way of ensuring his work did not end up being used for military purposes (Da Vinci was a gay, vegetarian pacifist)."
Da Vinci would have made a great programmer. Just look at his beard!
hackers many time release slightly broken code when it comes to exploits so that if someone wants to actually compile the code they will have to have some knowledge of programming.
That explains why Microsoft puts all those bugs in their software. To protect their intellectual property and prevent their software from being used for military implementations.
Oh wait... it didn't work.
I think many programmers have a lot to learn from this tale. We now have two useful phrases:
"It's not a bug, it's a feature."
"It's there to protect my intellectual property and keep my program from being exploited by the military."
The fact that Da Vinci was a "...gay, vegetarian..." really helps drive home the point that he was a pacifist. Thanks for the wonderful insight.
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
IIRC, he also wrote in boustrophedon, and in italian, which is just crazy paranoid.
It'd be like double encrypting your entire HDD because you're the world's finest pornographer.
I should know, I'm a medical doctor.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
HAH! More like he'd be praised by mass media and loved by everyone in Hollywood!
Geez, what society are you living in???
And not all pacificts are vegetarian, and being vegetarian (or gay) doesn't make you more of a pacifist.
Da Vinci designed a tank, an assault chariot armed with whirling scythes, and numerous pieces of Artillery. Not very pacifist.
Adolph Hitler sometimes considered himself to be a vegetarian, (A loose definition by today's standards: He ate some pork and fowl, but also ate alot of vegetables, spoke of the benefits of vegetarianism. Pretty radical in those days in Germany, the Pork Capital), and did not consider himself a pacifist.
This certainly supports the point that not all pacifists are vegetarian.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
The fact that Da Vinci was a "...gay, vegetarian..." really helps drive home the point that he was a pacifist. Thanks for the wonderful insight.
I assume you're being sarcastic here. Yeah, I had to chuckle when I read the post too. Being gay or vegetarian really has nothing to do with being a pacifist. It's just to poster slipping his personal stereotypes into a slashdot article. People become vegetarian for a variety of reasons, mostly independent of whether they agree with whether wars are a necessary part of humanity or not. As for being gay, well, I'd like to see some stats that prove that gays are more likely to be pacifists than heteros. You'd think that with all the hub-bub about Trent Lott these days that people would be a bit more careful to let slips of the tongue (or keys, in this matter) say more than they really should but, oh well...
GMD
watch this
In that case he probably would have befriended a monkey and lived on a theme-ranch.
Not only that, but he would be asked to teach in several Ivy League schools and be interviewed as an expert on everything from the War on Iraq to interior design ideas, to his ways of cooking tofu (sp?). Not only that, but he would be harrolded as an expert in all of these fields.
Indeed.
Even geniuses mess up.
And if they were intentional bugs, why not introduce more subtle, complex ones? Simple flaws are more likely to be found by engineers reading over his plans.
http://josephgrossberg.blogspot.comJoe
http://www.joegrossberg.com
Babbage supposedly did the same thing in case spies got ahold of his work.
Babbage printer
No such thing, all the gay people I know Take Meat! :>
Generalizations aren't bad. In order to be able to convey a single thought in less than a millenium, they are quite necessary.
What is bad is the human who doesn't understand that all things are generalizations.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
They do this on printed maps sometimes. Rand McNally, or whoever, will purposely misspell the name of a river or something mundane so that if anyone ever just reuses their material, it will be patently obvious, if their lawyers decide to check it out.
In Soviet Russia, everyone is a gay, vegetarian, pacifist!
No wait, that's California.
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
Or both.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
Da Vinci, like not a few Florintines, was also what was what we now call (loaded term) a paedophile. He began living with Gaicomo Caprotti (Salai) - to whom he left half his vineyard, when the boy was ten. Da Vinci's final companion, Francesco Melzi, was bequeathed his drawings and papers.
The denial of homosexuality by many historians is worthy of a study in itself. For for instance, Rictor Norton's excellent site:
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/
...Obscurely Referenced At.
That's a line from Slacker.
After having several of his discoveries published by unscrupulous collegues as their own, he began introducing flaws and leaving out the proofs when discussing his ideas. On one occasion, he passed off something completely false for one such plagiarist to filch.
-Rick
Adolph Hitler sometimes considered himself to be a vegetarian [micahbooks.com], (A loose definition by today's standards: He ate some pork and fowl, but also ate alot of vegetables, spoke of the benefits of vegetarianism. Pretty radical in those days in Germany, the Pork Capital), and did not consider himself a pacifist.
This certainly supports the point that not all pacifists are vegetarian.
not really. your first point was valid, he did design weapons and that counters the claim that he was a pacifist. but your analogy to hitler would seem to support the argument that aggressors are (loose) vegetarians, which does not bolster your claim that "not all pacifists are vegetarians," not to mention he wasn't even a pacifist!
Fear not, his story would be all over the television, a pity law against attacking homer-sexuals would be enacted, the thought police would monitor the populace. Meanwhile, the 100 non-homosexual people this happens to for every 1 homosexual person would receive no coverage at all, no special laws to protect them, no pity.
The alternate world they visited didn't have the nuclear bomb (they were going to try to use it stop an asteroid), and they didn't have the bomb because Einstein was "wrong" (so they thought) but it turned out that their Einstein had purposely introduced errors so that a bomb would not be created. In the end, Professor Arturo helped them build the bomb, saving them from the asteroid, but starting a nuclear arms race.
That Da Vinci was a pacificist..and yet was also the first sniper. Using a rifle of his own design, he shot and killed a french commander at over 300 yards. At the time, this was considered an impossible task.
IMHO It could also be a life insurance policy. Think about it, although Machiavelli's insights onto how to run a kingdom were not widely availible (The Prince wasn't written until 1513 the same year that Da Vinci died) there was enough backstabbing and evil to go around in DaVinci's day. What's to stop the local prince (or would-be prince) from killing or torturing the man himself and stealing all his books and papers. Only the fact that without him the designs are useless. If you want the weapons then you'll need the man, alive, well, and on your side not in your dungeon.
Don't know if this is relevant, but to make his notes harder for others to read DaVinci often wrote backwards. Is is possible that some gearing and other things are reversed because he was also drawing backward and just made a few mistakes?
There's actually no GWB Sr. Dubya's dad is George Herbert Walker Bush, so it'd be GHWB.
Lot's of excellent insight into him and the Bush dynasty is available in an on-line unauthorized biography, available here.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
Oddly enough, the misspelled or incorrect information in question is considered a form of expression, and is therefore copyrightable. So, if you copy the map with the errors intact on it, you have violated the copyright. This is also done with phone books AFAIK.
Without errors, maps and phone books could be copied verbatim and the publishers wouldn't be able to do anything about it because, without the errors, the published content is considered purely factual and is therefore not copyrightable.
Strange but true....
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Cmdr, you are a genius the likes of which the world hath not seen since DaVinci!
and the duplicates!
Hmm, is RMS that guy promoting open sores?
;) ...)
(come on guys there are a few more lame ones left for you
Plenty of vegetarians there. So you'd have a better chance of finding a vegetarian who isn't a pacifist.
For a start you could check among the militant Hindu types - a few might actually be vegetarian. That could save some time.
Some famous vegetarians
Charles Manson
Adolph Hitler (primarily a veg, but not totally)
David Koresh
the Kikuyu tribe in Kenya (gave us the Mau Mau massacre)
Jeffrey Dalmer (when he wasn't eating people)
and the Spice Girls
Clearly some very disturbed people in this group
..........FULL STOP.
i cook using a camping kit that includes a stuff sack. put the following ingredients in the pot, cover and bring to boil:
- 1C red (best) or green (ok) lentils
- 0.5C rice
- 2.75 C water
- chopped onion
- crushed garlic
- ginger
- oil (olive, butter, ghee...)
- curry (i make my own)
- salt
when the water boils wrap the pot (with its lid on and hot water inside) in a thick t-shirt and put it in the stuff bag -- the ingredients will be cooked by lunch and still be warm. i find it more satisfing than a sandwich and one of the cheapest things to eat (i bring some fruit for later in the afternoon). try it with some vegetables -- i suggest tomato, cilantro (corriander), celery, and broccoli. it's not gourmet but very tasty and you can make enough changes that you don't get tired of it.fear is the mind killer
your evidence is buried in a lot of text and i happen to know of another site that has a brief write up on the accusation:
A remarkable event happened on 8. April 1476. At this time it was usual to put anonymous accusations in a wooden box (called tamburo), which was put up in front of the Palazzo Vecchio
On 8. April Leonardo and four others were accused. The anonymous person accused Leonardo to have a homosexual affair with Jacopo Saltarelli, who was a model. The procedure ended for all participants with an acquittal of the charge. This story is an indication of the supposed homosexuality of Leonardo da Vinci.
fear is the mind killer