Tsaiberspace

San Francisco parking meters are free on Labor Day.

We drove downtown intending to see the Cartoon Art Museum, and then to the Metreon to see Da Vinci – An Exhibition of Genius. However, it turned out the Cartoon Art Museum was closed on Mondays (as are many of the museums around that area), so we walked around the Market Street area, then went to see the Da Vinci exhibit.

The exhibit was actually very good ($20/person). It is a traveling exhibit intended to showcase replicas of many of Da Vinci’s writings and mechanical designs. The exhibit has a no-photography policy, so I have no pictures. The codices weren’t that interesting to look at – they are just replicas of the little notebooks Da Vinci kept. Some trivia about the codices:

• Da Vinci kept his notes in a “secret” code – mirror writing. I can’t read Italian, but I think the exhibit would have been more interesting if there were little mirrors next to the books, just to see what non-mirror writing would have looked like.
• Bill Gates owns the only codex currently kept in a private collection; the rest are all in museums and such.

The more interesting part of the exhibit is the collection of recreations of many of Da Vinci’s mechanical civil- and military engineering notes. There are interactive wooden models demonstrating gears, flying machines, machine guns, and submarines.

The coolest thing was Da Vinci’s “safety bridge” – it was a bridge designed to be buildable by soldiers in times of emergency using only pieces of lumber as might be found near a river, without requiring nails or rope. I wish I could have taken a photograph to describe what I saw. This is all I could find (picture links to some random website). In some ways it’s the perfect photo because it was also apparently taken at the Da Vinci exhibit:

The other neat thing I learned today had to do with The Last Supper. Christ was painted non-traditionally, without a halo surrounding his head. Instead, Da Vinci used lighting and perspective to make all the lines from the doors and windows radiate out from Christ’s head, to suggest a halo (the photo links to Wikipedia, which contains lots of other interesting Da Vinci Code-like trivia about the painting):

Finally, on our way back to the car, we passed by the carousel outside Yerba Buena Gardens. I hate making these kinds of observations, but the carousel very locked down. It’s hard to see from the photo, but the carousel is completely surrounded by pedophile-proof glass windows and emergency doors, with only one entrance and one exit. The eerie effect is that you have a completely silent merry-go-round where one can observe laughing kids and such, but not hear them: