Have You Met Edward (Tufte)?

For those of you regulars, this is probably getting old, but Edward Tufte changed my life.  Way back in the dawn of time when the woolly mammoth roamed the earth and I worked as a COBOL programmer for the Pepsi-Cola Company in Northern Westchester County NY, I came across a book review in a copy of a computer magazine.  The book being reviewed was Tufte's (then) new book "Envisioning Information".  The review was so positive and complimentary that I had to know more. 

It turned out that Tufte published his own books and so I went to the source, called his office number, and spoke to him directly.  Although, I don't remember the exact conversation we had, he actually talked me out of buying the book, but rather attending his (now legendary) one day seminar, where, for the price of admission, I'd get a copy of both of his books (the other, his first, entitled "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information") and he'd autograph them as well. I was very curious, and ended up convincing my manager that this was a worthwhile seminar, and the company should pay.  Which they did.

The seminar was a revelation.  Tufte was then a professor of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University.  But unlike so many other "5 dollar" academics, he never buried you with jargon, or arcane terminology.  He brought his subject matter to brilliant and immediate life.  His subject matter? Telling stories, providing facts, giving instruction, presenting history all through the use of visuals.  These visuals could be maps, charts, graphs, tables, phone books, science journals, and on and on.  It wasn't so much that he designed them himself, but rather he gave fantastic, sometimes historic examples, of the best and worst ever done.

Part of his live seminar presentation features him walking around with a near priceless original print of one of Galileo's journals "The Starry Messenger", in order to see how Galileo fretted over the illustrations of Saturn's rings and Jupiter's moons.  I was blown away. 

He then went on to tell us, and provide damning evidence, that the cause of the NASA Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and the deaths of it's crew was hidden within a poorly constructed PowerPoint deck for the world to see.  Tufte hates PowerPoint.

Lately Tufte is semi retired from academia, and becoming more of a full-time sculptor.  His artwork is always fresh and fun to me.  Oh, and the White House gave him a call, not to long ago, to provide advice on better ways to visually tell the story of our (slow) recovery.

Yes, I have autographed Tufte books, so what? I'm geeky that way.