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But the idea of depicting the world accurately really began to take off when people started to realize that there was a world to depict. Then a lot of things began to happen. Look at Leonardo Da Vinci’s study of the adoration of the Magi. He made these often before he started a painting. All the lines are included to make sure he got perspective right.

It’s no accident that Leonardo was quite the engineer because perspective made it possible to think about things defiantly. Perspective got people interested in ratios and Leonardo got interested in gearing for his machines. More on all this in the next unit. But till then, it’s important to understand that this period in history gave rise to machines that dominate our world today because it also marked one of the most  significant shifts in thinking in quite a few centuries.

Why does this matter when it comes to “modern” technology? Think back to the Wayback Machine in Module 3. It’s all about how things come together. There are no real inventions. Just different ways of assembling what we know. The video on Form and Function in the module tries to pull together two ideas – beauty and functionality - into a single machine. The modern day motorcycle. At this point in the semester, we are starting to see how technology if born of this need for us to put different things together in different ways. We’ll see this in a very big way when we start talking about databases and how algorithms combine things in ways that even the people who write them can’t quite understand.