{"id":244,"date":"2010-11-14T12:12:35","date_gmt":"2010-11-14T17:12:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2010\/11\/14\/in-which-i-earn-the-contempt-of-my-peers\/"},"modified":"2010-11-14T12:16:18","modified_gmt":"2010-11-14T17:16:18","slug":"in-which-i-earn-the-contempt-of-my-peers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2010\/11\/14\/in-which-i-earn-the-contempt-of-my-peers\/","title":{"rendered":"In which I earn the contempt of my peers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Edward Tufte<\/a> is auctioning off<\/a> a bunch of rare old manuscripts from his library at Christies in New York.\u00a0 There’s a Galileo first edition going for a mere $5000-$7000, which sounds like a steal to me (not that I know anything about this stuff.)\u00a0 I love old manuscripts like this.\u00a0 I were in the area, I’d love to go.<\/p>\n

But here comes my shameful confession: I’ve tried to like Edward Tufte’s sensibility, and I just can’t do it.\u00a0 I look at the Minard<\/a> map of Napoleon’s Russian campaign, which Tufte says “may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn,”and I just find it confusing and cluttered.\u00a0 Just because you can layer seven (or however many it is) dimensions of data on one graphic doesn’t mean you should.<\/p>\n

Even when he aims at the low-lying fruit of anti-PowerPoint<\/a> ranting, I can’t really get behind him.\u00a0 Yes, lots of PowerPoint presentations (including some I’ve perpetrated) are deadly, but I don’t think it’s because of the “cognitive style of PowerPoint.”\u00a0 It’s because, no matter what tools you use, creating a bad presentation is much easier than creating a good presentation<\/em>. Take it from me, young folks: even before PowerPoint, most talks were bad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Edward Tufte is auctioning off a bunch of rare old manuscripts from his library at Christies in New York.\u00a0 There’s a Galileo first edition going for a mere $5000-$7000, which sounds like a steal to me (not that I know anything about this stuff.)\u00a0 I love old manuscripts like this.\u00a0 I were in the area, … Continue reading In which I earn the contempt of my peers<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}