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by James Gosling.
Original Post: Leonardo thought of it first...
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Feed Description: I've been inescapably tagged as "the Java guy", despite the fact that I havn't worked in the Java product organization for a couple of years (I do still kibbitz). These days I work at Sun's research lab about two thirds of the time, and do customer visits and talks the other third. For more detail...
I was reading through the enormous (and enormously wonderful) Leonardo
Da Vinci: The Complete Paintings and Drawings by Frank Zollar and
Johannes Nathan. There is a large section on fascinating catapult-like
devices that would make great ideas for the t-shirt hurling contest. In
particular, the rotary device in this picture bears a certain resemblance
to the gizmo that the Australians put together. There's nothing in the
picture that looks like a credible release mechanism. It would be awfully
hard to aim. I doubt that it was ever actually built. Maybe the
Australians can go back in time and give Leonardo some solinoids?
There was also this interesting variation
on the trebuchet. Rather than having the counterweight mounted
pendulum-like on the end of the arm, it is dangling from a wheel. The
interesting effect this has is that the force accellerating the rotation
of the arm does not diminish as the arm approaches vertical. Could be a
fascinating tweak to explore. [ a note about the movie: I copied the
drawing from The Complete Paintings and Drawings, Photoshoped
it into layers, built a little model using Lightwave
]
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I was reading through the enormous (and enormously wonderful)