Only in MS Windows...

Only Microsoft could misconstrue "extended" to mean "show me less information than standard."

The trouble with simplicity...

Image via WikipediaThe trouble with simplicity is… it conceals so much difficulty.
Take for example, Leonardo da Vinci, he’s a complex guy. But how do you look him up? Under “D” for “Da Vinci,” or is it “V” because the “da” is lower case? Turns out, neither. You look under “L” because he’s only got one name, like Cher or Prince, and that’s Leonardo. He was the bastard son of a guy named Piero, who also came from the town of Vinci in the region of Florence. I guess the town was so small everyone only had one name, so you could say “Yeah, that’s Leonardo from Vinci,” just like one might be called “Alexander from Mosier.”

Another tricky thing about Leonardo is that he died almost 500 years ago, and was born just about the time Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press. That’s a blink of an eye in geologic time, and only twenty five generations of humans, but it's the dawn of history's mass-produced written records. Considering that only single copies of the notebooks existed for a while, it’s a wonder Leonardo's words have survived through history at all.

So when I was reading this review of a book by Christine Romans called "Smart Is the New Rich," and she wrote “I think it was Leonardo da Vinci who said, ‘The ultimate luxury is simplicity,’” it felt incongruous to me. Something about the quote didn’t ring true – I couldn’t picture Leonardo da Vinci equating luxury with simplicity. Here’s the guy who painted the Mona Lisa ("la Gioconda") and “The Last Supper.” Both of those paintings have a hidden complexity executed in a simple style, but I don’t detect any luxury in either of the works.

At that point I wondered two things: did Leonardo da Vinci really write this, and if not then who? So, I did the obvious thing for the 21st century: I googled the quote. Interestingly enough, the internet came back with an immediate clear and obvious answer: the quote attributed to Leonardo da Vinci should actually be "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." So the answer is that Romans had incorrectly quoted the original Renaissance man. Case closed, right?

Wrong. Although the quote “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” was consistently attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, none of the web pages listed a source. Google returned 96,400 results for the phrase while Bing found 560,000 hits. I have to admit I didn’t check each and every web site, but the first 60 sites I visited failed to mention which of Leonardo da Vinci’s works contained this aesthetic opinion. If I wanted to answer my two questions I realized I was going to have to investigate in more depth.

Since Leonardo was Italian, I figured the original text was probably in Italian. I used the google language tools to translate the words ‘simple’, ‘simplicity’, ‘luxury’, and ‘sophistication’ into ‘semplice’, ‘semplicità’, ‘lusso’ and ‘raffinatezza’. I plugged these words into the search engines along with Leonardo da Vinci’s name to see if I could uncover an untranslated version of the text. To my surprise all the results were simply translated Italian versions of the English phrase “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” (“La semplicità è l'ultima sofisticazione”). It was almost as if the Internet was trying to obscure its tracks, producing translations and retranslations of the same phrase, consistently absent any original source.

By the way, the internet is great machine for providing tangents. I can tell you this from experience. One path I had to follow was this odd link, an Italian shotgun called the Vinci, named after Leonardo in honor of his purported aesthetic.

The gun is named for the great Italian Renaissance artist and inventor Leonardo Da Vinci, who once said, “Simplicity is the highest form of sophistication.” Benelli has taken their shared Italian heritage with Da Vinci and sought to create a high performing gun built on a platform that is efficient, reliable and simple. Most notable is the modular design of the Vinci, which makes it a snap to assemble and reassemble for cleaning, maintenance, storage and transportation.

I was just about to give up on the Internet when I thought of Project Gutenberg. Like Gutenberg’s moveable type printing press Project Gutenberg is attempting to disseminate books far and wide using the latest technology – in this case it’s the Internet. The Project library consists mostly of royalty-free books digitized by volunteers, but I figured Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks would be found there. Seconds later I was skimming through both volumes of the notebooks, using the browser to search for my key phrases either in Italian or English. Unfortunately, no luck. Zip.

I found, however, Leonardo wrote on a wide range of topics. Here’s what he has to say about “continence” from a section titled “Humorous Writings”: “The camel is the most lustful animal there is, and will follow the female for a thousand miles. But if you keep it constantly with its mother or sister it will leave them alone, so temperate is its nature.” And this from the section discussing chiaroscuro: “First I will treat of light falling through windows which I will call Restricted [Light] and then I will treat of light in the open country, to which I will give the name of diffused Light. Then I will treat of the light of luminous bodies.” I liked this comment in the section on sculpture: “Sculptured figures which appear in motion, will, in their standing position, actually look as if they were falling forward.”

So, I was left with a puzzler. The way the phrase “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” is written, it’s possible that Leonardo wrote it, it's likely to have had a different translator than the person who did the version of the notebooks that I read. It’s also impossible to tell whether the sentence is about sculpture, painting, architecture, or even advice on how to tell a joke. At this point I felt I’d reached the limit of the internet.

So, I got drastic and walked to the branch library. You know the great thing about the library? It’s all the books. They’ve got walls of ‘em, and most of books have been edited and checked for accuracy. I made a beeline for the reference desk and found Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations as well as the Encarta Book of Quotations. I also grabbed two biographies of Leonardo da Vinci and found a table to do some reading. Bartlett’s is arranged by author and also has an index by subject. I scanned through but there weren’t any quotes from Leonardo da Vinci on simplicity or luxury in either book. In fact, of all the quotes on simplicity this one by Richard Austin Freeman from the book “The Eye of Osiris” is the closest to the original quote: "simplicity is the soul of efficiency." I also flipped through the biographies of Leonardo da Vinci, but most of the quotes they contained were from other people talking about him.

So, what did I learn? For one, I got to review my facts on Leonardo and he’s much more interesting than people give him credit for. If all you know of him are the codex (the naked guy in the circle), the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, then scroll up and click on the links to his notebooks. He’s like a 16th century Stephen Hawking crossed with Pablo Picasso and Frank Lloyd Wright. Secondly, I wonder if this is the limit of the Internet: a collection of misinformation and ill-informed comments, pointing in on itself time and again, slowly collapsing into mush unless people get out into the real world and explore new ideas. And finally, the number one takeaway from my little exercise is that simplicity can often hide complexity. When it’s put to good use, such as in a computer program or a skyscraper, this information hiding can create small wonders, almost like magic. But when it becomes sloppy or completely wrong the simplicity turns into the fog of ignorance, obscuring the quality of light for everyone.

I leave you this quote, which may or may not have been written by H.L.Mencken: “Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

Related articles

• Leonardo da Vinci's Human-Powered Flying Machine Flies! [VIDEO] (cleantechnica.com)
• Why Not Da Vinci Day ? (themoderatevoice.com)
• Be the first to hear Leonardo da Vinci's Harpsichord-Viola (timeoutny.com)

"Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now?"

Any number of Ted Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, books can be read as allegories. The Lorax has an obvious environmental theme, as does Bartholomew and the Oobleck. The Butter Battle Book echoes the arms race of the 1960s, while Yertle the Turtle deals with anti-fascism and anti-authoritarianism. Ask any schoolkid about "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" and although they won't express it as an anti-materialism polemic, they'll tell you "It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags."
More recently anti-abortion proponents have locked on to "Horton Hears a Who" as a clear argument for their side, although Wikipedia says Geisel wrote it as "an allegory for the American post-war occupation of Japan."
But what about some of Dr. Seuss' Early Reader books, do they have hidden meanings? For years I've believed that "The Cat In The Hat Comes Back" is an allegory for oil spills. This book has a theme similar to "Oobleck," but the Cat seems to rejoice in the technology used to clean up the pink bathtub ring. The fact that Geisel used to work for Standard Insurance, and probably had a twinge of conscience about that, adds to my opinion.
Which brings me to "Marvin K Mooney Will You Please Go Now?"
When my kids were young we'd read this story together, exploring all the ways for Marvin to go, as long as he did it "now." The text is simple and repetitive with only 78 unique words. A giant hand appears and repeatedly asks Marvin to go, and he finally does. On the ultimate pages, when Marvin goes, the question my kids always asked was "where did he go?"

After years of reading the book, I've had an epiphany: This book is a metaphor for death and dying.

Not suicide, mind you. Because Marvin decides to go in the end, this raises the question of whether Marvin decided to end it all, but I say it's simply that Marvin has acknowledged his mortality and come to the acceptance of death. Acceptance since at the end of the book, when his time has come, he has a smile on his face.
Framing the story this way explains many things. Why do we never see that face of the hands? Why do the hands decree "The time has come, and the time is now!" Because these are the hands of god, little 'g'. God wears the wristwatch to both symbolize the time that will come to all mortals, and also to portray the impersonality of the universe... a tick-tock god.
When I read the ways Marvin can go, by skis, in a crunk car, or in a bureau drawer, I hear in my head Leonard Cohen's "Who by fire?" Even the title of the book "...will you please go now?" evokes Robert Frost's "Do not go gentle into that good night."

What I like most about this book is the simplicity of the text, which can be a truism for any art: The simpler the story the more the reader must fill in the gaps with his or her own history. Admittedly, Dr. Seuss dealt with big issues in his later books, and his estate produced a handful of "teachable moment" stories posthumously, but those were only poorly edited half-ideas. It's only when you get down to a 240 word text that the gaps shine through. Take for example the opening line: "The time has come..." This could have been written by Dickens or Poe, or even Hemingway.
When I first had my insight I didn't realize "Marvin K Mooney" had already been used for another allegory: the downfall of Richard M Nixon via the Watergate scandal. After some research on the book I found that Art Buchwald had published a tweaked version of "Marvin K Mooney" in 1974 for the Washington Post. He substituted "Richard M Nixon" for "Marvin K Mooney."

The time has come.
The time has come.
The time is now.
Just go.
Go.
Go!
I don't care how.
You can go by foot.
You can go by cow.
Richard M. Nixon will you please go now!

and so on.
Is that the test of great art, that it reflects peoples lives and times without aging? In this case Richard M met the same fate as Marvin K, and they both went. Regardless, I'll also bring the personal memories of hours of time spent together with my kids reading this and other books. Maybe tonight we'll take a second look at Eric Carle's "The Very Hungry Caterpillar."