I've enjoyed reading Edward Tufte's books about displaying information effectively and have found them immensely informative and helpful for my work. I encourage anyone, no matter what your professional background, to purchase and study any of his books (you should probably start with Envisioning Information).
Earlier today I was pointed to Style.org by Steven via a Slashdot article. Jonathan Corum, who wrote all three articles on the site, certainly understands the principles Edward Tufte expresses. Corum's illustrations of winged motion and electoral districts are refreshingly simple and effective. Note in the illustration below (see the original image) how the solid line intuitively indicates the power in the down stroke and the dotted line indicates the passive recovery. The time-distance sequence is also subtle yet informative. All together very nice.
I open my weblog with a story of woe and despair. Until a week ago I was the proud owner of beautifully small, make that tiny, digital camera. I bought a Minolta Dimage Xi three-megapixel camera about five months ago and took it with me everywhere. In its short tenure, the camera served me well.
Due to its tiny size (it’s less than an inch thick) my friends and I joked about how easy it would be to lose it. Last week I outdid our wildest expectations and put the camera through a full cycle in the washing machine and dryer in the pocket of one of sweaters. Its case is now wonderfully clean but alas the camera is dead of course. Let this be a sobering lesson to other owners of pint-sized cameras so that this event did not happen in vane.
On a brighter note, the batteries appear to remain functional, so I’ll save a bit when I and if I replace my old friend. Thanks goes out to all my colleagues and friends for refusing to ridicule my loss.