monkinetic the blog

New column by Jonathon Peterson: Amateur Hour.

Dave writes eloquently about the Columbia accident, the reality of death in our lives, and how we go forward. It’s a good read.

Thanks to two loal Libraries, I am now in possession of three of Edward Tufte’s masterful tomes. His books are as interesting as I’d thought they’d be, though still different than I expected. So far I’m most interested in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, the earliest of the three (1983). It may be that this book contains informaiton useful to the understanding and assimilation of the other two. We’ll see.

Graphical summary of patient status (1994): Very cool article from the Lancet (medical journal) reproduced on Tufte’s site, in which Tufte and a collaborator define a simple graphical representation of patient status information. Brilliant. Tufte packs more information and meaning into a two-dimensionsal space than anyone I’ve seen.

So I’m at lunch with my buddy J.P., and we’re discussing VCRs, DVDs, and PVRs, and he says to me “What I need is someone who can tell me how to use all my electronic gadgets to make my life better.”