Leonardo Da Vinci to-do list reveals his insatiable curiosity about the world

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/31/leonardo-da-vinci-to-do-list-r.html

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Eh, pretty typical stuff, those are on everyone’s to-do list amirite?

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Here’s another good to-do list, with slightly more relatable items, written in 1940 or so by a 15-year-old who accomplished all but 15 of 127 items.

https://www.johngoddard.info/life_list.htm

Two of the items he didn’t check off were “visit the moon” and “become a ham radio operator”

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Or did he? </DANBROWN>

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Funny, my To-Do list is exclusively things like “Call my health insurance company to figure out why they’ve started denying all of my claims” and “Read up on the policies of the company that just bought out my mortgage”. I guess I just lack the spirit of genius.

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Well duh, ham radio licensing is tough…

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Damn!  

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This could be about corbel arches.

But it’s hard to tell, as
(1) the source is medieval Italian written by a man who sometimes used his own shorthand and may or may not have used the usual technical term or a word he used to use, transcribed and translated probably by a linguist or historian who may or may not know about medieval engineering, then probably translated again at least once. Anyone who has ever translated a technical text knows that being proficient in the language will only get you halfway to a useful translation if you have no idea what the text is about. (See any operating instructions for cheap consumer electronics ever.)
(2) there is more than one “tower of Ferrara”.

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In those days you had to know Morse code and how vacuum tubes worked.

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Could be. But corbel arches are very old (the galleries of Tiryns, for example), and I think Mister L would have known about them.

My guess…

Brick and masonry walls used to be built using scaffolding where the scaffold poles went into the wall between the blocks. When the tower was finished, the poles pulled out, and the holes were filled as the scaffolding was taken down. If there was a tower with particularly neat and uniform brickwork with no sign of these filled holes, it suggests some scaffold that rises as the tower is built. That would have intrigued him.

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A loophole is another name for an arrow-slit, and Da Vinci was planning to talk to a Bombardier about the tower… Perhaps “walled” means something other than “constructed”?

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So perhaps the question was how soldiers inside the tower would defend it against attack if they could not fire arrows.

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Funny, I accomplished my entire do-list from when I was 15, too. The list looked like this:

  • Get laid.
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there was a later to-do list where he listed invent the internet, and make these notebooks accessible thereupon.

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“Punch Michelangelo in the nuts, repeatedly.”

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  • Invent PDA to keep my to-do lists.
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That seems like a low bar for Goddard.

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My problem with to-do lists is that I never look at them in time to plan anything. I mean, I look at BB BBS more often than I look at those. And when I’m working, I’m usually to occupied getting the immediate tasks done, and put things on my to-do list instead of crossing them off.

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This was apparently his last handwritten list. Nobody knows how he kept his notes thereafter.

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“Light a match with .22 rifle”

Oooooh, I’m stealing that one.