Cool Technology and the Intelligent Enterprise
A Complicated Way to Simplify Things
Hey everybody. Thanks, as always, for reading my blog. I’ve begun a new investigation about the technology we use in our everyday lives. You, my loyal readers, know me — I’m a simple guy. I’m not sure where this will lead, but this stuff is cool. Read on and let’s see where this road takes us.
Leonardo da Vinci supposedly said, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” I kind of like that idea because I’m a simple guy. I grew up in the Elmwood Park neighborhood of Chicago, which is the kind of Italian neighborhood where might you still find a few old guys playing bocce in the park, but there aren’t many of them left. Unfortunately, time marches on. It’s a diverse place now, and third-generation guys like me leave the working-class neighborhood behind and go to college. We respect our parents and grandparents and we love our heritage, but we’re a little more sophisticated now. And that’s why I like the quote. Da Vinci, a brilliant Italian guy, understood what it means to be simple and sophisticated at the same time. Or did he?
A couple of weeks back, I reconnected with this girl I knew from the neighborhood. Her name is Kay Capparelli, and like me she found her way to college. Unlike me, she became an expert in the Italian Renaissance. She works at the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library, and that’s where I caught up with her.
I rounded the corner into the stacks, and there she was, re-shelving moldy volumes. “Hello,” I said in a near whisper, respecting the sanctity of the library. Her head popped up and her eyes widened behind her oversized spectacles. She’s not your typical nerdy librarian though. Kay is brains and beauty combined, and probably out of my league.
“Hey you! I can’t believe it. It’s been so long. Charlotte said you might drop by.”
“Yeah, I wanted to thank you for the ticket.”
You see, the night before I had gone to a lecture about Leonardo da Vinci at the Art Institute with a couple of old friends, Lenny Russo and Charlotte Warburton. I was best buddies with Russo growing up, and the two of us hung out with Charlotte and Kay. Charlotte isn’t Italian or anything, but she has this weird obsession with da Vinci, so the lecture was her idea. Russo went because he’s a brainiac. He could clean up on “Jeopardy” blind drunk. Kay was supposed to use the third ticket, but when she bailed, they asked me. I don’t know anything about Renaissance art. I’m just a humble blogger. But it was a chance to hang with friends, and da Vinci’s a paisan, so why not?
“So how was it?” Kay asked.
“Weird. Really weird. When we got to the auditorium, Russo and I headed for the back row. Natural instinct I guess — back row of the left field bleachers is our customary spot. Charlotte broke off and headed for the front row, so she could record the thing for her podcast.”
“So what was so weird?”
“Well, it started out like your typical academic snooze-fest, but it wasn’t long before the guy giving the lecture started saying crap people didn’t find credible. He starts going on about how da Vinci dressed and how he liked to gamble and stuff, and everybody in the room was like ‘nobody knows that stuff.’ And then I asked what da Vinci was getting at when he said, ‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,’ and the guy starts pacing around and waving his arms going, “da Vinci never said that.” Then Russo starts to get ticked off and goes, ‘How could you possibly know what happened hundreds of years ago?’ And that’s when things got really crazy. The guy starts going on about being a time-traveler who knew da Vinci personally. Then he takes Charlotte’s microphone and he’s singing Righteous Brothers songs and all this other weird stuff. At that point the whole thing turned laughable and people started leaving. I wasn’t sure if it was funny or idiotic. Obviously, this guy was some sort of bad performance artist from the School of the Art Institute, but I have no clue what the point was.”
“Did Charlotte freak out?”
“Well, you know Charlotte. I think she halfway believed the guy.”
“Well, he got one thing right. Da Vinci never said, ‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.’”
“What?”
“That quote came from a Campari liquor ad. I remember when it came across my desk, I was scrambling to figure out where it came from. I finally called the ad agency and they said they made it up. The funny thing is that people keep repeating it over and over. Now everyone thinks da Vinci said it.”
“I’m devastated. You can’t believe anything you read these days.”
“People love to make stuff up, and the mere fact that we have limited information about the Renaissance leaves plenty of room for people to connect the dots and create conspiracy theories. They’ll tell you Shakespeare didn’t write his own plays. They think Hieronymus Bosch was visited by space aliens, and lots of people believe da Vinci buried the Holy Grail at the Louvre.”
“Well, if this guy has a time machine in his garage, maybe we can go back and debunk this stuff.”
“The library won’t pay for travel expenses, but we might be able to raise some grant money. I don’t mind the conspiracies. Separating fact from fiction keeps us in business.”
“Is that what you do here?”
“Yep. We have a massive number of primary sources like books, manuscripts, maps, images, and so on. Our job is to digitize that material, catalog it, tag it, and cross-reference it with secondary sources and — via the internet — make it available to scholars all over the world. We’re churning out massive amounts of data. It’s a very sophisticated system.”
“’Sophisticated’ sounds like a nice way of saying ‘complicated’.”
“As we try to simplify our lives, things get more sophisticated — or complicated if you prefer. That’s life. I trace it all back to Guttenberg’s printing press. The Renaissance never could have happened without shared knowledge, and the wide dissemination of the written word only became possible with the invention of the movable type press. You see lots people obsess about what da Vinci wrote.”
“Like Charlotte.”
“But I’m more interested in what he what he was reading – what inspired him. Come here, I want to show you something.”
Kay then led me out of the stacks, past a poster of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and into the main reading room of the library. She showed me a large wooden box with a glass top and a crank on the side. Inside the box was a continuous belt of metal plates and attached to the plates were pieces of paper with the locations of books. “This is our Rudolph Continuous Indexer,” she said. “Four hundred years after the invention of the printing press, librarians still hadn’t come up with a system for locating materials in a large library. Then in 1893, a guy working here at the library here came up with this. All you have to do is turn the crank to find the desired listing on the belt. The problem is that only one person can access the indexer at a time, and because new texts were coming in every day, you had to constantly open it up to put in more plates and reorganize it. So, like many early inventions, it’s an overly complicated solution to a simple problem. Most libraries ended up with a card catalog system instead and as far as I know, this is the only indexer still in existence.”
“But now even the card catalog is extinct, and everything is vastly more complicated,” I said.
“Not for the researchers. They can access much of our collection from their smartphone anywhere in the world. All they have to do is enter some key words. It can be complicated for us to enter the data and maintain the system, but we’ve made it simpler for them to do sophisticated searches.”
“It seems to me, if you could simplify everything, you could do anything, but simplifying everything, is anything but simple.”
“That’s right,” she said with a delighted smile.
“Okay. I have to think about that for a while. But I was hoping to repay you for the ticket by taking you to dinner tomorrow?”
“A simple dinner or a sophisticated one?”
“I’m a simple man.”
“But I’m a sophisticated woman.”
“It was free ticket.”
“Well then, I don’t know ...,” she said with a devilish smile.
“You win. Sophisticated dinner it is.”
“How about this; Russo, Charlotte, and I are going to the Air and Water Show on Saturday. Come with us and we can do dinner next week.”
“It’s a deal.”
I had the strangest feeling when I left the library that day. Yes, I was excited about having lunch with a beautiful, intelligent, sophisticated woman, but something else was nagging at me. We live in a world where a massive amount of information is readily available, but perhaps none of it is reliable. Is it possible that we’ve built an entire society based on misinformation? The prospect was frightening. I knew someone I could ask about that, but what I didn’t realize is that I had just begun a journey that would profoundly change the way I view the world.
In my next blog, I’ll tell you about my fascinating conversation with an expert on Big Data, and much more. In the meantime, if you really want to hear what happened at the Art Institute that night, you can listen to Charlotte’s show on Apple Podcasts; it’s worth a listen.
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Tony
Blogger Extraordinaire
DISCLAIMER: The Searching for Salaì podcast and the “Cool Technology and the Intelligent Enterprise” blog series are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
[KEYWORDS]
SAP Leonardo podcast, Innovation, Digital Transformation, Intelligent Enterprise, Analytics, Big Data, Blockchain, The Cloud, Design Thinking, The Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, Data Intelligence, Digital Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Searching for Salaì, Cool Technology