Leonardo Da Vinci's Personal Notebook

IZ Reloaded writes "The British Library has made available 14 great books on its website. One of them is a 1508 notebook by Leonardo Da Vinci containing short treatises, notes and drawings of a wide range of subjects from mechanics to the moon. The site allows you to view the original manuscript written in Leonardo's own handwriting."

Comments

Backward handwriting

[mr100percent]

Will I have to flip my display to read Leonardo Da Vinci's backwards handwriting?

Re:Backward handwriting

[kalidasa]

Ready for this one - they actually have a "mirror" button to flip it over for you! Now that's nice.

Re:Backward handwriting

[legirons]

Apparently, he only wrote "click here to download plugin" lots of times... very neat handwriting, although I can't see how it could be interpreted as the design for a helicopter

Clues!

[Eugene Webby]

Bet it has clues about jesus and coverups.

i'm sure...

[tehwebguy]

it was probably a powerbook. those artsy types are all the same.

Re:i'm sure...

[nganju]

Using Moore's Law and assuming today's fastest notebook is roughly 3GHz:

3 000 000 000 * ((1/2)^((2005 - 1508) / 1.5)) = 5.44313816 × 10-91 Hz ...was the clock speed of Davinci's powerbook. And you think YOUR notebook loads Adobe slowly...

British surgeon cracks da Vinci code

[$exyNerdie]

In other news today, a British surgeon cracks the Da Vinci code:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4289204.stm

Another version here:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_ page/0,5744,16753065%255E2703,00.html

At last

[squoozer]

Of course they are only allowed to do this because the copyright period has just expired.

Needs Shockwave

[pipacs]

Needs Shockwave. Thank you, goodbye.

Re:Needs Shockwave

[the_unknown_soldier]

from their site:

There are also alternative non-Shockwave versions of three of the volumes. More will be added soon.

Re:Needs Shockwave

[Seehund]

"Accessible version of the British Library's Turning the Pages system for viewing our great books."

So they do understand that the proprietary-plugin-dependent version is inaccessible! :)
Well, that's a start, I guess. Soon they might find out that it's unnecessary and pointless too.

Re:Needs Shockwave

[Reality Master 101]

Not being a luddite, I of course used the Shockwave version. If you had tried it also, you would've noted that there was a good reason for it: it includes a cool magnifier to view the pages, as well as some other neat features.

Thank god we have people out there that aren't afraid to use technology to make things better, even if a small number of people whine about it. If people like you ran the world, we'd still be stuck using 80x25 column green screens.

And, as other people have pointed out, there is an alternative link. Nice of them.

Re:Needs Shockwave

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it seems a bit close-minded to get up in arms about what is less then 1% of the people viewing websites. The fact that they provided a rich environment to view these works is good. As in all business models trying to sort out the final 10% of a probelm is always dispraportinatly expensive.

You can always get the text from project guttenburg, but then that's not a rich environment.

Stop whinging, you made a choice for a small platform and so that has consiquences. It's people who criticise these projects because they are not inclusive of a tiny minority of users that are vastly short sighted. Afterall they did not have to do anything other then show the books once every 20 years under glass in the British Library. The fact that they have done so and provided commentries and the ability to magnify etc should be applauded.

Re:Needs Shockwave

[Omniscientist]

Well, instead of complaining, does anyone have any tips for running Shockwave on Linux? Is it possible to use Wine or Cedega, or do we have to use something like Crossover?

This is why...

[zegebbers]

the internet is amazing. To be able to view this sort of document almost instantly is fantastic. Thank you British Library.

For those who would otherwise not view these, please do, in addition to the items mtneioned int he summary, there are also originals from Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll and the first atlas of Europe. Amazing.

Great, but only the beginning....

[dr. loser]

This is a wonderful start to providing mass access to rare manuscripts.

Now if only they would post the complete papers of Milo Rambaldi....

Re:Great, but only the beginning....

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps a better site provides more information. Hope you didn't get suckered into believing it.

Not the only treasure

[Junior J. Junior III]

There's the original manuscript of Alice in Wonderland on there, too. Very cool!

A design document without use cases ?

[Anonymous Coward]

...with crappy graphics and in a unreadable language...

Bad Leonard !!
I'm sure this guy is a kernel developer

Re:Shockwave

[imsabbel]

Well, if they were available as pfds, they werent accessible at all for anybody besides schoolars that are intimate in his language and calligraphy.

The explaining texts and voiceovers are the real meat of this thing.

pdf

[rhyd]

godDamn motherfucking flash. If ever there was content perfect for pdf format it would be these books. I'd love to know the justification - probably to stop printing or something. No matter how lavishly illustrated a 14th century Hebrew manuscript might be, I am dubious that its going to contain any animated images, background music, or annoying soundeffects, or blinking text or any of the myriad of shiny accesibility-blocking nonsense that justifies macromedias devil-spawn. Personally i would have preferred plain html translated text and annotations with thumnailed pngs linking to the original scanned image - too simple? Although close the limited accesibility subset provided requires realplayer - rediculous.

Re:pdf

[ScentCone]

rediculous

So it's not only diculous, it's re-diculous? That's twice as diculous!

Not to ridicule your spelling or anything, since your larger point feels about right. Plain HTML and simple images seem so much more sensible, and platform agnostic. But then, I'm an old-fashioned guy. I don't like tags, either.

Re:pdf

[Declarent]

I wasn't aware you could put voice commentary, the magnifier, and the text reversing mirror in a PDF document.

This is where we, as technophiles go wrong. The only thing that matters to us is the technology used to deliver the content, and we want the content to conform.

Everyone else wants the content to look and feel a certain way, and just select a tool out of the toolbox to make it so.

I think movies should be in PDF, too! One frame per page, that way everyone can see them without having to download a different tool!

It's not about the glass, it's about the water.

Re:MY NOTEBOOK SAYS:

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, show of hands:

Who thinks Slashdot need to give a breathalyzer test to users before they let you press the Submit button?

available via project gutenberg

[rillopy]

The complete notebooks have been available from project gutenberg for a year and a half (without the pictures) at: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5000 It's also been on the top 100 list for a long time.

If he was supposed to be so smart

[Mr. Neutron]

how come he didn't write in English?

What about Paul?

[writermike]

Why is "Paul is dead" written backwards on page three?

Does anyone know? [[shrugs]]

Notation in margin...

[TFGeditor]

...that Mona Lisa is such a bitch!

In fascist italy...

[cached]

in Italia fascista, i taccuini li pubblicano

Awesome!

[Dirtside]

I hope there's something in there about the making of Titanic. I loved that movie.

Re:Great.. Shockwave.. Grrr

[PornMaster]

Why do you feel the need to announce this?

You're a proud rebel?

Plenty of people had already mentioned that it was Shockwave. And I'm sure that the reason that you can't view Shockwave is one of choice...

Sure, but...

[hummassa]

seek & search times are a bitch on those.

what about the Necronomicon ?

[tyroneking]

I can't wait until that comes on-line; I'm booking my trip to the Arctic right now...

Da Vinci's Notebook

[Mr2001]

Most people remember Leonardo Da Vinci for his paintings and inventions, but did you know Da Vinci's Notebook also has history's first recorded biography of The Sneak?

Important draft work

[hotspotbloc]

It's amazing that atleast one of his earlier drafts of his work at the Sistine Chapel survived.

Let us give thanks to the FSM for this miracle.

Re:Important draft work

[dedioste]

"It's amazing that at least one of his earlier drafts of his work at the Sistine Chapel survived."

It's even more amazing when you think that Michelangelo did the Decorations of the Sistine Chapel!

you know why?

[spectrokid]

It is often said he was using this to encrypt his writings, but this is BS. Da Vinci was left-handed and in order not to wipe out his own writing he just wrote right to left. When he had to write to others, he simply switched back to normal.

Re:you know why?

[Anonymous Coward]

During art history class when the professor mentioned da Vinci's "code" a student at the university I attended commented "perhaps he was dyslexic". While the student made this comment he was writing class notes with his left hand from right to left at the same time he was writing an essay for another class with his right hand from left to right and yes, this was a frequent habit of that particular dyslexic student.

www.bl.uk

[rkww]

Notice how they've got a whole second level domain to themselves - not www.bl.co.uk or www.bl.gov.uk, just www.bl.uk.

The other notebook

[Naomi_the_butterfly]

I prefer the other Da Vinci's Notebook... (Get the MP3 here).

Is it mirrored?

[NaveNosnave]

Ha ha! Get it? Da Vinci...handwriting...mirrored? Ah ha ha! I kill myself!

It's Leonardo, not da Vinci

[Cerdic]

da Vinci the name of the area where he lived. His name was simply Leonardo (this was before last names were used). Very common mistake almost everyone makes.