The Da Vinci Alarm -- 21-Hour Days Await

Inventor/artist/madman Leonardo Da Vinci was an early proponent of polyphasic sleep. For the uninitiated sleeper, that's when you take frequent naps instead of conventional eight-hour slumbers. Da Vinci's schedule was 3 1/2 hours of awake followed by a 30-minute nap, giving him solid 21-hour days.

For the industrious (perhaps obsessive) folks who want to attempt this schedule, Yanko Design has developed the DaVinci alarm clock. Designer Marc Owens explains it this way: "The Da Vinci Alarm Clock works on a very basic system. The Dot Matrix display will always show either Sleep or Awake. When the product is first switched on the display will immediately show the word Awake. This will continue to be displayed for 3 hours at 30 minutes. At this point the clock display will change to show the word Sleep and a high-pitched alarm will signal this change in state."

Considering the technology necessary to coordinate a dot matrix display with a basic digital alarm, we're guessing Da Vinci died only a few years before he could've invented this himself.