Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a The Notebooks Of Leonardo Da Vinci
I’ve been reading Da Vinci’s notebooks, one page per day, for the last 385 days. This is thanks to Matt Webb’s clever repurposing of Project Gutenburg’s freely available translation of the books.
The pages are odd texts, mostly observations about how the world works, both dull and fascinating at the same time. By way of an example, here is today’s entry on shooting arrows:
A man who wants to send an arrow very far from the bow must be standing entirely on one foot and raising the other so far from the foot he stands on as to afford the requisite counterpoise to his body which is thrown on the front foot. And he must not hold his arm fully extended, and in order that he may be more able to bear the strain he must hold a piece of wood which there is in all crossbows, extending from the hand to the breast, and when he wishes to shoot he suddenly leaps forward at the same instant and extends his arm with the bow and releases the string. And if he dexterously does every thing at once it will go a very long way.
You can subscribe to two RSS feeds, the first begins at page one, the second begins, for today at least, at page 385, so you can read along with Matt, and me, and, presumably, a huge number of other folk. I suggest the latter - there’s something rather comforting about knowing we’re all on the same page.
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