Engineering is a marvelous thing. We get the joy of creating the amazing things that make life better and often more interesting, or at least more entertaining at times. We don’t live in a vacuum, though, we the engineers, and as such we need to be good communicators.
Enter Edward Tufte.
If you’ve not been to one of his presentations, I highly recommend you put one on your schedule — he is the master evangelist of the power of quality graphics. His point being that the data, no matter how good, is worthless unless you can convey the messages within.
What brings him up in my mind today, is an entertaining article from IEEE Spectrum in which the author talks about not the graphs of Tufte, but rather the words of Tufte.
Worth a read here.
Electrosmog 