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Leonardo Da Vinci’s To Do List (circa 1490)
- jeremywho 10y agoThat reads more like a bucket list than a todo list.
- tomjen3 10y agoWonder how our lives would be if we did more to work on our bucket lists than our todo lists.
- jamestimmins 10y agoSome of the best (perhaps cliché) advice I've gotten is not to confuse urgency with importance. It's far too easy to constantly be busy and checking things off of a list, while letting the really high-leverage things go unaddressed. An antidote I've found is to book big things far out, because then urgency doesn't come into play (I'm not worried about the laundry I need to do in March), and I can make the decision based entirely around "importance". So while it's easy to let a random Saturday slip away to todo list chores, if I purchase plane tickets to Japan for 3 months out, by the time it comes around then I'm definitely getting on the plane, chores be damned.
- internaut 10y agoHave you considered getting rid of your mobile telephone? People's ability to prioritize is shattered with these devices or perhaps their ability to use them.
- trhway 10y agothat is the difference between a genius and an ordinary person - what is the bucket list for the latter is just a to do list for the former.
- brachi 10y ago> You can just feel Da Vinci’s voracious curiosity and intellectual restlessness. Note how many of the entries are about getting an expert to teach him something Nowadays that seems less common, with the incredibly amount of information available and readily accessible. However, I think learning from someone, even from just a short conversation, is highly valuable.
- norea-armozel 10y agoYeah I never understood why people aren't more curious. I'm always looking for articles about how things are made, the history of given locations, and whatever just seems interesting. I never see anyone else with a marginally equivalent level of curiosity especially for my age (mid-30s). Seems like people get swallowed whole by their social lives and careers.
- detritus 10y agoI completely agree — for me it was always the attraction of of hypertext, of the internet. Every term, concept or media, explorable. Practically infinitely-so. What went wrong? (well, aside from the internet becoming largely one-way and unmodifiable by the masses.. but there's no real solution for 'that' (whatever that is) yet).
- thebspatrol 10y ago> aside from the internet becoming largely one-way and unmodifiable by the masses If anything, it's as easy as ever to share knowledge. Just because the barrier to entry is now creating value on other people's websites instead of figuring out how to set up and promote your own doesn't mean its not easier.
- tpeo 10y agoWhat makes you think they aren't as curious as you? They might just be into different subjects. Plus, if there's nothing that suggests that you might be interested, they might self-censor comments about their own hobby subjects when talking to you.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- BenoitP 10y agoIt reminds of Gov Schwarzenegger recently saying he doesn't exist in a vacuum, and that mentors are key. A large part of these are not "do X"; they are in "get Y person to show me how they do X". We can be thankful of the Messer Fazio, Brera Friar, Giannino, Benedetto Potinari, Maestro Antonio, Mastro Giannetto, Maestro Giovanni and Vitolone who gave us Leonardo.
- jaclaz 10y agoJFYI, there is a typo in the linked to text, Benedetto Portinari, it's the same Florentine family of Beatrice Portinari, he was the nephew of the more famous Tommaso Portinari: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommaso_Portinari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommaso_Portinari The "graphical rendition" on the original site has it correct: http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/11/18/142467882/leonardos-to-do-list http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/11/18/142467882/le... BTW - still to be picky - the linked article is 2014, whilst the original article by NPR's Robert Krulwich is 2011. The whole Leonardo's Notebooks are available here (in a different edition/translation by Jean Paul Richter): https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Notebooks_of_Leonardo_Da_Vinci https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Notebooks_of_Leonardo_Da_... https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Notebooks_of_Leonardo_Da_Vinci/XXII https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Notebooks_of_Leonardo_Da_...
- cushychicken 10y ago>[Talk to] Giannino, the Bombardier, re. the means by which the tower of Ferrara is walled without loopholes (no one really knows what Da Vinci meant by this) I thought "loopholes" generally referred to a narrow upright window with wide angles in the interior but little room at the outside. It's designed so that you can shoot arrows out of it with a wide degree of freedom, but hard to get an arrow into.
- kencausey 10y agoOK, let's agree that that defines 'loopholes' in this context but still what is meant by the overall comment? Why ask about building a tower without loopholes?
- sdrothrock 10y agoThe loopholes were for, IIRC, scaffolding/braces used during the construction process; my guess would be that DaVinci wanted to know about the construction process that allowed for the building of a tall building WITHOUT those braces.
- jaclaz 10y agoYes, traditionally all stone/masonry buildings (particularly medieval buildings) had these "holes" (they are called "buche pontaie" in Italian, literally "scaffolding holes") to allow for both the scaffolding and lifting devices to be anchored to the walls while building them (and later for maintenance work): https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buca_pontaia https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buca_pontaia The English word for it is "putlog hole" AFAIK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putlog_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putlog_hole
- dreistdreist 10y agohttps://www.italybeyondtheobvious.com/what-are-those-holes-in-italian-buildings-and-towers https://www.italybeyondtheobvious.com/what-are-those-holes-i...
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- kstenerud 10y agoWhat the article fails to recognize is the sheer difficulty and expense involved in acquiring information in those days. You not only needed lots of money; you also needed status and political friends who could connect you through their networks to people who know things about your subject of interest. Even getting a peek into a book was an arduous affair, sometimes taking years. There's a reason why the gentry were so fond of collecting books. So yes, anyone politically, socially, and economically powerful enough, with an ounce of curiosity, would have a list such as this. I do the same for anything I can't get within a month.
- vnglst 10y agoAnd remember that paper was extremely expensive for ordinary people back then. Using it for something silly as a todo list seems as wastefull as using a JavaScript framework for just a todo app. ;)
- LHopital 10y agoYour basic assumption is todo app is not as expensive as the paper in that era. In that era paper was expensive, in this era todo app is expensive which require a smart phone (or a computer or laptop) connected to the internet.
- Nomentatus 10y agoAnd a reason why I was so keen on collecting books in 1969, too. If you didn't buy it while it was in print, or the moment you spotted it in a used bookstore, you might never see it again in your lifetime. Now I'm going through and dumping a whole lot of those books, (or should be.)
- gravypod 10y ago> Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle. What did he mean by this?
- kalid 10y agoI think he meant finding the square whose area is equal to that of a given triangle. With our "modern" understanding of algebra and geometry, we know to do Area = 1/2 * base * height Area = s^2 therefore s = sqrt(1/2 * base * height) "Squaring the circle" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaring_the_circle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaring_the_circle) was an ancient challenge, proven to be impossible with a straightedge and compass in the 1800s. He may have been trying to square the triangle with just those tools.
- theoh 10y agoSee http://www.contracosta.edu/legacycontent/math/TriangleToSquare.htm http://www.contracosta.edu/legacycontent/math/TriangleToSqua...
- orange888 10y agoIf he lived today, most items on that list would be googled and forgotten about in one morning. We take our access to endless info for granted.
- INTPenis 10y agoIf he lived today every single answer would be on stackexchange. ;)
- rivaldo 10y agoI was trying to actually read the text and then I figured out Leonardo da Vinci wrote in mirror writing (writing in the direction that is the reverse of the natural way for a given language). Apparently nobody is quite sure why he did this. weird.
- gknoy 10y agoWhen you write with a dip pen (e.g. calligraphy), writing from left to write will smudge the ink if you are left-handed. Writing the opposite direction preserves the same convenience of movement as right-handed writers have when doing calligraphy, and avoids smudging the ink. It seems an elegant solution for someone who is left-handed.
- personlurking 10y agoBefore I reached the last sentence, I looked hard at the image and opened it in a new tab, thinking I could read his writing (since I learned high-intermediate Italian). Nope, it's mirrored [1], which may have had to do with his dyslexia. Looking into it briefly, I came across a guy [2] who taught himself to write like Da Vinci (note: full-screen sign-up prompt upon clicking). Skip to to the 6th paragraph starting with "Perhaps...". Being a lefty, I think I'll give mirrored writing a go as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_writing http://michaelbalchan.com/davinciwriting/?hvid=3xsKQB http://michaelbalchan.com/davinciwriting/?hvid=3xsKQB Edit: from the Wikipedia link above: "Research suggests that the ability to do mirror writing is probably inherited and caused by atypical language organization in the brain. It is not known how many people in the population inherit the ability of mirror writing (an informal Australian newspaper experiment identified 10 true mirror-writers in a readership of 65,000). Half of the children of people with the ability inherit it. A higher proportion of left-handed people are better mirror writers than right-handed people, probably because it's more natural for a left-hander to write backwards."
- justifier 10y agomirror writing is actually easier to start doing with whatever hand you write with less often; i'd argue due to having less muscle memory to have to subvert mirror writing is only mirrored from a social standpoint all writing is just random lines we ascribe context to leonardo was a visual artist abstracting symbols from strokes is a part of the discipline and like finding your line while participating in a visual medium mirror writing is best developed through doing
- vlad 10y agoSee my post for the real reason why. You must be right-handed based on your first sentence.
- jacobolus 10y ago> due to having less muscle memory to have to subvert Actually better than that: you can more directly transfer skill from one hand to the other if you’re making exactly mirrored motions. This is why I think e.g. keyboard instruments should mirror the order of notes between the left and right hand parts. Then you can get away with learning one uniform set of finger motions, instead of two.
- DenisM 10y agoOne of my teachers wrote a book titled "The scientific method of Leonardo da Vinci". Unfortunately it's in Russian only. http://tung-sten.no-ip.com/Texts/Misc/Leonardo/Book.htm http://tung-sten.no-ip.com/Texts/Misc/Leonardo/Book.htm http://tung-sten.no-ip.com/Texts/Misc/Leonardo/Helper/ForewordByCarloPedretti.htm http://tung-sten.no-ip.com/Texts/Misc/Leonardo/Helper/Forewo...
- themodelplumber 10y agoWow, I'm actually writing a book that reads just like this list. It's meant for INTJs, it's got 300 suggested activities--similar to those on Da Vinci's list in terms of theme if not object. I'm about to hit publish and seeing this article makes me feel pretty excited. I wonder if Newton also kept to-do lists...
- INTPenis 10y agoWell... what's the ISBN, title?!
- thecupisblue 10y agoExactly, this is HN, you can't just say that kind of things and not post a link :)
- themodelplumber 10y agoHaha. Well, I've got a few more steps (graphic design being a huge one) but here's a sample. The full book has just over 300 activities to try; this one has 50. All of the content is final, so I hope to get the book to the major self-publishing outlets in the next month or two. http://www.friendlyskies.net/files/etexts/sample/300-INTJ-Strengths-Sample.html http://www.friendlyskies.net/files/etexts/sample/300-INTJ-St... Scroll way down for the meat. Love to know what you think.
- INTPenis 10y agoDo please announce the finished product on HN. I think it might be interesting to more than just me.
- skocznymroczny 10y agoHe didn't use org-mode?
- hclivess 10y agotodo: measure shit. yeah, very interesting.