Word: leonardo
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Readers of the current Scientific American are informed of several shattering discoveries. Among them: a fatal flaw in Einstein's special theory of relativity, a motor that runs on psychic energy, and a page from Leonardo Da Vinci's newly discovered notebooks, the Madrid Codices, which conclusively prove that the Renaissance man invented the flush toilet 500 years ago. Respondents who are bombarding the magazine with telephone inquiries and letters are being advised to take a second look at the article. It is sprinkled with names like Ms. Henrietta Birdbrain and Robert Ripoff-as befits an April Fools...
...peas in a pod. Here is the early Christian theologian-and heretic-Origen, who castrated himself, and the American Benjamin Franklin, who did not. Here is Pythagoras, who denounced beans, and Horace Greeley, who renounced coffee. Here are the diverse saints and satans of human history: Gandhi and Hitler, Leonardo da Vinci and Martin Bormann, Albert Schweitzer and Richard Wagner. In The Vegetable Passion, such celebrities are always less notable for their deeds than for their dinners. "Byron," observes Barkas, "noted poet and lover, practiced a meatless diet sporadically throughout his life, not because of deep ethical or political ideas...
...Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed--they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce...? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly...
...Life of Leonardo da Vinci. An Italian TV crew came to the Crimson a couple of months ago to film a documentary on university politics ten years after the Berkeley Free Speech movement. The crew thrust mikes in editors' faces, banged clapboards shut with overblown bravado, and generally looked like characters from a Keystone-Cops-Meet-C.B. Demille short. All of which made me doubt that this Italian TV documentary on da Vinci's life would be any good. I was wrong. This has so far been an excellent series, and even the dubbing (by suave Ben Gazzara) doesn...
...What Leonardo had in mind, apparently, was to produce a handbook on the operating principles of machinery, and not - as an earlier guild mechanic might have done it - simply a compendium of useful gadgets. This, as Art Historian Ludwig Heydenreich argues, was a turning point in the history of engineering itself. If Leonardo's designs had been made public instead of resting in his notebooks, they would certainly have transformed the extremely crude face of Renaissance mechanics, bringing it to the pitch of sophistication the Chinese had reached four centuries earlier. That did not happen...