Obsessed with perspective

By -
This condition was characteristic of Renaissance paintings: "The stable at Bethlehem often boasts a decorative floor, and St. John finds a small area of tile paving to stand on in the wilderness." -- Quoted in Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations

Comments

  1. Anonymous1:53 AM

    Tufte is a gold mine. I had to pull it off the shelf, and I noticed that you omitted Lawrence Wright as the writer whom Tufte was quoting.

    I was reading a book* the other day, when I thought of Tufte and I realized just how awful the note system was. Notes were numbered by chapter, and collected in a section at the back of the book. so in order to read the note the process is...

    1. look at the note number, and then to the top of the right hand page, where the chapter name appears.

    2. off to the table of contents, where the chapter numbers are given next to the chapter name. This step is necessary because the chapters are identified only by number in the notes section.

    3. back to the end notes.

    4. back to the text to verify the note number

    5. read the note.

    Whereas in Tufte's books, you just move your eye to the left and read the note! I suppose not everyone gets the luxury of such large pages.

    *hard to believe, I'm sure.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more