Doing DaVinci

a nerdy math joke:

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are all staying in the same motel. One night there's a fire in the hallway, the engineer wakes up, sees a bucket of water in the hallway and pours it on the fire to put it out. The next night there's another fire in the hallway, the physicist goes out and grabs a fire extinguisher and after a few calculations aims the extinguisher at the optimal position and puts the fire out. The third night there is another fire in the hallway, the mathematician goes out, sees the bucket of water, the fire extinguisher, and the fire and says, "Ah! A solution exists!" then goes back to bed.

my entry:

There's this new show on the discovery channel called Doing DaVinci. It's about a group of craftsmen and engineers who build some machines that Leonardo DaVinci designed, which he may or may not have ever built. The machines they build are all tailored to the design and specifications in DaVinci's drawings'. They are also really, really cool. These machines that they build, that DaVinci designed, are insanely ingenious, especially for what was available in DaVinci's day.

Last week they built a "machine gun" type device. It was three rows of eleven cannons aranged in a triangle and put on wheels, so it can be hauled into battle. One row of cannons would fire then the machine would rotate forward and another row of cannons would be ready to fire again. The simplicity and practicallity of this machine makes it complete genius! I'm sure that it would have been a terrifying sight on any battlefield in the 1400's.

This week they built a self-propelling cart, which was basically a life-sized wind up car. Just thinking that DaVinci wrote the plans for something this engenious 600 years ago, before any type of modern physics, is astounding. Honestly, it's contraptions like this, and the hope that I can someday design and build something this clever, is what makes me want to be a mechanical engineer. Gears and springs and explosions, all that stuff fascinates me to no end. I would love to be on this show, just to get a chance to build some of these fascinating machines. I'm adding DaVinci to my list of engineer heroes, currently containing Archimedes and Howard Hughes (The Aviator).

It's on discovery channel on Mondays at 10 pm. Watch it it's very entertaining.

-Osvaldo Enriquez