Perhaps most accurately described as a world-class dilettante, p_mouse has been a cowboy, the bartender at two of the top five people-like-us bars per the Preppy Handbook, and the Archivist of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, to name just three of the more reputable of his many occupations. He reads a lot and works as little as possible.
A good joke well told is a thing of beauty, even when it keeps piling outrage upon the obscene upon the inconceivably lewd, as anyone who has seen The Aristocrats will attest. This crazed masterpiece of comedy showcases both a classic joke and the many ways its various retelllers embroider it. If your head doesn’t explode in the first fifteen minutes or so, you will be transported to a world of funny you never even suspected.
It’s my experience that most of the very best and funniest jokes aren’t really appropriate to tell at Thankgiving dinner; they’re irreverent, or raunchy, or so totally over-the-top you’ll never be invited back. But here’s one that really isn’t. Your grandmother — or even a Mother Superior — is unlikely to take umbrage … but everyone will laugh.
Les Trois Freres Francais
Bon, bien alors: we ‘ave three little French boys, zey are brozzers. Zere is Jean – he is ze tout petit, il n’a que sept ans … he has only seven years of age. Zen come Louis, who has eight years; and finalement zere is Pierre, ze ainé — zis is in English I think, ze “eldest”. Pierre has nine years.
Jean, Louis, and Pierre
So, ze three young garcons are walkeen down ze street, and le petit Jean, he is liking to peep in ze windows as zey pass by. And at one window, he look in and zen shout to his brozzers: “Ey, Louis, Pierre, come look!! Ze lady and gentleman, zey are fighteen.”
Alors, Louis look also in ze window, and he say, “Jean, you are still a bebé, and per’aps not even French; zis lady and gentleman, zey are not fighteen, zey are makeen love.”
So, Pierre – he has nine years – he peep in ze window also, zen turn to Jean et Louis, and say wiz utter Gallic scorn, “And very badly, too”
Now, we ‘ave skip 70 years to see again Jean, Louis, et Pierre, who are now debonair boulevardiers of long standing . And when we find zem at the Café Royale, zey are discussing savoir-faire.
“Oh”, says Jean (he is, souvenez-vous, the youngest brozzer), “Oh,” he says, “I have not for nozzing spent 73 years as a Frenchman: of course I know what is savoire-faire. It is when you come home, find your wife in bed wiz anozzer man, and you say, ‘Oh, pardonnez-moi!”
“Ahh, Jean, mon p’tit frangin,” replied Louis, “‘ave you learned nozzing whatever since that day so long ago when you sought ze lady and gentleman were fighteen?? Once more, you are incorrect; allow me.”
“Savoire-faire,” Louis said, “is when you come home and find your wife in bed wiz anozzer man, and you say ‘Oh pardonnez-moi, please continue.’
“Helas, mes frères,” says Pierre, “I fear our papa et maman must have adopted you two in Belgique; surely you cannot truly be French. So I shall explain to you yet again:
“Savoir-faire is when you come home and find your wife in bed wiz anozzer man, and you say ‘Oh, excuse me, please continue – and he continues …
Simple to present yet not so easy to solve, this elegant exchange between Voltaire and his friend and patron Frederick the Great of Prussia is one of the cleverest surviving puzzles borne of a playful and philosophical friendship between a King and a commoner.
Frederick the Great of Prussia who admired above all the Enlightenment's greatest thinker, Voltaire.
… At Sanssouci Frederick entertained his most privileged guests, especially the French philosopher Voltaire, whom he asked in 1750 to come to live with him. The correspondence between Frederick and Voltaire, which spanned almost 50 years, was marked by mutual intellectual fascination. In person, however, their friendship was often contentious, as Voltaire abhorred Frederick’s militarism. Voltaire’s angry attack on Maupertuis, the President of Frederick’s academy, provoked Frederick to burn the pamphlet publicly and put Voltaire under house arrest. Voltaire was accused by some of anonymously publishing The Private Life of the King of Prussia, wittily claiming Frederick’s homosexuality and parade of male lovers, after he’d left Prussia. Frederick neither admitted nor denied the contents of the book, nor ever accused Voltaire of having written it. Some years later, Voltaire and Frederick resumed their correspondence and eventually aired their mutual recriminations, to end as friends once more.”
“There is no proof that Voltaire ever had a homosexual experience. Most of the evidence for his occasional homosexuality in the four-volume biography by Roger Peyrefitte is fabricated. The story that Voltaire once had sexual relations with a Prussian soldier as an experiment, only to decline a second experience with the quip ‘Once a philosopher, twice a sodomite,’ is certainly apocryphal. He attended the Jesuit college of Louis-le-Grand as a boy, and while visiting England years later reportedly remarked, ‘Oh! those damned Jesuits… ar**d me to such a degree that I shall never get over it as long as I live,’ but he was probably being facetious.”
In any case, getting back to our puzzle, der Grosse Freddy and his philosophically-minded homey exchanged quips, puns, and invitation frequently—unless they were squabbling—and this is one of the cleverer among them.
In the first box, Frederick’s invitation:
In the second, Voltaire’s reply:
So have at it, my friends and commenters. It remains unclear what the winner, if there is a winner, will win. But it will be somehow appropriate.
“In the well-planned dinner for ten, there should be (taking out the host and hostess): two sparklies from different fields, four solid listeners and contributors from assorted professions, one charity case and one mystery guest whose classification will not be clear until after being auditioned at this dinner.” Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior by Judith Martin
As usual, Miss Manners’ prescription is firmly delivered, but is it definitive?? Many experts on entertaining suggest that six rather than eight guests is the ideal number for a perfect dinner party. Some assert that the number of men and women should be balanced (and seated boy-girl-boy-girl); a subset of this group even continues to assume that all the guests are actually couples.
Others have a more free-form approach, encompassing, say, singleton invitees (of whom, clearly, there must be two unless you include a ménage a trois among your guests as well) or gay couples (who make the boy-girl alternation infinitely more complicated to carry off). In short, who knows? Well, for purposes of this post, you do. Six guests or eight guests, it’s up to you.
A “mystery guest”? Your choice. Do you dare make every guest an A-list “sparkly” who is used to being the center of attention? Can you pick a group whose conversation will sizzle and pop without turning your dining room into an inferno of disagreement and angry discord?
This little game is your chance to show off your party-planning skillz and indulge your own Inner Miss Manners. Your task is to pick a guest list of six (or eight, but no more) whom you believe would make for an unforgettable dinner party. You may select anyone, real or fictional, from any period in history. Mixing the real and the imaginary is allowed, although true purists will pick one or the other.
If you’re a stickler for the proprieties you can further increase the degree of difficulty by balancing the female/male ratio, specifying a seating chart, or applying Miss Manners’ rules to the letter. More to the point is your brief explanation of: why this person? As a foil for another guest, or a gadfly whose inclusion will liven things up, or just because you personally would like to ask him or her a particular question (and if so, what is that question)? Is your goal to solve the problems of the world by putting Socrates and Thomas Jefferson on either side of Jane Austen, or would you rather foment World War 3 by setting a place for Michael Moore between Jan Brewer and Sarah Palin?? The possibilities are endless.
I’ll begin (though, full disclosure, this is not my Be-All-End-All guest list but simply an example.
1. Alexander the Great – Did Aristotle grade on a curve?
2. Pamela Churchill Hayward Harriman – “Greatest courtesan of the century” (W. Paley).
3. Giacomo Casanova – Will he prefer to romance Pam or Betty?
4. Betty Boop – A toss-up between her and Daria Morgendorffer.
5. Marquis de Sade – Will he prefer to torture Betty or Mary.
6. The Virgin Mary — Well, was she?? And what does she make of the Marquis?
7. Daffy Duck – Exactly when will he blow his top?
8. Emily Dickinson – What will she say at dinner? What will she write afterward?
The epicenter of more than 50 institutions of higher learning with a population of over 150,000 college and grad students, Boston has been inspiring and incubating musicians and bands ever since the early days of rock ’n’ roll, starting with the Standells, who weren’t even really a Boston band but a Cali group who recorded what’s probably still the most emblematic Boston song of all, the 1966 classic “Dirty Water”
I’ll get the ball rolling with half-dozen of my favorites (in some cases I actually was lucky enough to meet a few of these people) but if you don’t have at least one favorite Band in Boston, you must be brain-dead. So crank up the volume, blast that first power chord. And “One two three four five six seven …”
“Roadrunner” by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers: an iconic Boston tune, replete with shout-outs to Stop’n’Shop and Route 128. This is perfect highway music, simple yet driving rhythms overlaid with Richman’s unmistakable stuffed-sinus voice – it’s also one of very few JR&ML songs that’s not flat-out off-the-wall: “Abominable Snowman in the Supermarket,” “I’m a Little Dinosaur,” and “Dodge Veg-o-Matic” are much more characteristic. (I met Richman a few times; to call him “fey” is to understate the effect by several orders of magnitude, but his band’s music was and remains more seminal than many people recognize.)
Interestingly, “Roadrunner” is basically lifted from the Velvets’ “Sister Ray” though in place of Lou Reed’s typically Warholian, debauched detachment, Richman achieves a weird earnestness in his paean to the Turnpike. Joan Jett, the Sex Pistols, and Yo La Tengo are among other rockers who’ve covered this propulsive song.
“Funk (All Over the Place)” by Duke and the Drivers: a legendary BU party band with a tight-knit following, DatD coalesced in the early 70’s and still play the occasional reunion concert. If you like blues, r&b, and irresistibly danceable roadhouse music and get one of the ever-rarer opportunities to catch Duke, jump at the chance. Back in the day they toured with the likes of Lou Reed, Steely Dan, the NY Dolls, and ZZ Top, among others. (I’ve had the unlikely pleasure of meeting the shadowy Duke, whose doppelgänger in life and onstage alike is a longtime friend of your humble correspondent. The Duke is also known as André Marine, plutocrat, philosopher and bon vivant.
“Voice of America’s Sons” by the Beaver Brown Band: Fronted by John Cafferty, later the eminence grise of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Beaver Brown isn’t strictly speaking a Boston band – they actually hailed from nearby Narragansett, Rhode Island. If you’ve ever heard of them you’re probably a fan of 1983’s cult sleeper Eddie and the Cruisers, for which Cafferty and Beaver Brown wrote the music. This particular song was used on the soundtrack of a Stallone cheesefest called Cobra — I like it for its bombast … naturally mixed with anti-war sentiments: this is New England, after all.
“My Best Friend’s Girlfriend” by The Cars: One of yours truly’s all-time favorite songs, from one of the great New Wave bands ever, Ric Ocasek’s Cars (a name suggested by former Modern Lover David Robinson, also a member of The Cars’ original lineup.) What Abba was to disco, so were The Cars to late-70s and early-80s guitar-synth garage-bands, a juggernaut of catchy, hooky, quirky songs that became hits one after another, from “Just What I Needed” to “You Are the Girl,” their last real blockbuster, in 1987. Ocasek and guitarist Benjamin Orr first met in Ohio but moved to Boston to break into the music business … by the time they were done, Cobain and Nirvana had covered this very song. Weezer too.
“Walkin’ Blues“ by Bonnie Raitt: Back in the days of which I write, Bonnie Raitt had just dropped out of Radcliffe to play blues guitar round Boston’s clubs; her father was a Broadway star, and she herself would become a pioneering woman in the boys’ club of top-flight traditional slide and bottleneck bluesmen. “Walkin’ Blues” dates from her eponymous first album (1971); this song was written and first performed by the legendary Robert Johnson , who sold his soul to the Devil at the “Crossroads” in return for the meteoric musical career that blazed across the blues firmament for scarcely six years in the 1930’s – and made him the guitar gods’ guitar god. The second of these videos captures not one but two guitar goddesses — Bonnie and EmmyLou Harris — singing backup for Lowell George and Little Feat.
“Centerfold” by J. Geils Band: When I tended bar in a local saloon, Peter Wolf used to come in fairly often and hang out. Many people believe that Peter is J. Geils but he’s not – Peter was the front man, for sure, but J. Geils is actually the guitarist. [insert: JPeter.jpg] Amazingly, the band’s first sign of life was as a mid-Sixties combo called “Snoopy and the Sopwith Camels;” they hit their stride when Peter joined, and “Centerfold” is probably their biggest hit — six weeks at #1 on the Billboard Top 100. The video rocks, too.
Peter was (still is, I’m sure) a very interesting guy: a renowned, very accomplished painter who studied under Norman Rockwell as a kid; when I rubbed shoulders with him he hadn’t yet married Faye Dunaway, but at that time he had not long before been roommates with surrealist filmmaker David Lynch at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Lynch threw him out for “being too weird,” which has gotta tell you something if David Lynch thinks that about you.
“Digging for Fire” by The Pixies: This song, especially, could be mistaken for David Byrne in the early days of Talking Heads, but the Pixies are figuratively speaking the Boston-based younger sibs of the New York New-Wave crew who made second homes at CBGB and the Mudd Club. Formed in 1986, the Pixies are a bit after my time, but no list however brief of Boston bands could omit them. Critics award them substantial influence over the alternative-rock world of the 1990s, Kurt Cobain was a fan, and … and …
Black Francis (or Frank Black or his actual original name Charles Thompson IV) is the lead singer and main songwriter. Radiohead, U2, and the Strokes cite the Pixies with admiration, and no less a figure than David Bowie declared that the Pixies made “just about the most compelling music of the entire 80s”. Since then the Pixies have broken up and reformed several times.
So there you have it, boys and girls. Let’s give it up for Boston. Or, as Jonathan Richman put it:
Herewith, p_mouse, raconteur extraordinaire, presents his candidate for “The Most Literate Joke in the World.”
His entry is fully prepared to take on all comers, of which he hopes there will be many.
One bibulous evening in the ’20s, not long before they were all sent down for one transgression or another, four young Oxonians were strolling through Christ Church Meadow lost in idle discussion of collective nouns: a pod of whales, a murder of crows, an exaltation of larks, et cetera et cetera and so forth.
As they left that bucolic Arcadia behind and reentered the streets of Oxford Town, they were approached and propositioned by a quartet of ladies of the night. Being of another persuasion altogether, the lads politely declined the offer and went on their way.
“A propos collectives,” said the first, Sebastian, a charming youth for whom the world was his oyster, “I think I should describe those wenches as ‘a bed of trollops’.”
“Bravo,” said the second, by birth Aloysius but known to all and sundry as Pooh-Bear, “Yet dare I say my whimsical taste runs more to ‘a jam of tarts.'”
“Of course,” said the third, blanching at the very idea of heterosex but determined to outdo his peers, “the correct terminology must needs be ‘a flourish of strumpets.'”
“Oh bugger it, Anthony,” said Charles, the last, a quietly observant sort of chap who had never in life come less than Double-First, “what else could they possibly be but An Anthology of English Pros??
Most cookbooks spend a life of solitude on a dusty shelf only pulled down to have sauces splashed on them for special occasions. The following two cookbooks deserve to be enjoyed in front of a fireplace with a glass of wine just like your torrid romance novels.
As Henry Fielding was to the English novel, so was Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin to the literature of gastronomy. It was Brillat Savarin who first said, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.”
If you’re a serious cook, this unusual volume will be old toque to you. But I’m surprised again and again at how often Brillat-Savarin slips below the radar of so many readers, even some who, like your humble servant, read cookbooks just because!
Jean Anthelme Brillat Savarin's Frontispiece and Title Page
His peerless masterpiece (title translated from the original French) was The Physiology of Taste, or Transcendental Meditations on Gastronomy, theoretical work, history and agenda, dedicated to Parisian gastronomy, by a professor, a member of several scholarly literary societies.
Originally published in December 1825, two months before Brillat-Savarin died, it’s a wonderful mix of 19th century French gourmandise, Enlightenment curiosity, and high spirits – this is a man with whom one might dine every day for a year and he’d never run out of food lore and opinion … or aphorisms and wit.
According to Wikipedia, remarkably, The Physiology of Taste
“… has not been out of print since it first appeared, shortly before Brillat-Savarin’s death. Its most notable English translation was done by food writer and critic M. F. K. Fisher, who remarked “I hold myself blessed among translators.” Her translation was first published in 1949.” — (Wikipedia)
There are recipes, though they’re more like vivid descriptions of a dish than precise, detailed directions as we know them. There are stories such as one might have heard over port a few years after Waterloo, expansive and entertaining table talk, part fabliau, part restaurant review, and part philosophy, scientific and spiritual alike.
Let’s consider Chapter VI: On Food In General. After a brief essay on bouillon and boulli, the boiled meat whence bouillon comes, Brillat-Savarin moves on to poultry, with particular fascination for the North American wild turkey; this leads in turn to the tale of a 1794 American turkeyshoot in which he participated. Next he strides in seven-league boots through the categories of game, from thrushes, snipe, partridge, quail, and rabbit, to wild boar and roebuck. Finally he turns to the piscine world and explains why fish is less nourishing than meat but a far more potent aphrodisiac.
Then he pauses to recount the story of a crustacean-mad colleague with whom he shared a dinner: both men consumed three dozen raw oysters apiece, at which point Brillat-Savarin called a halt while his dining companion feasted on, consuming no fewer than thirty-two dozen oysters before the two tucked into the main course. All of which leads to the following marvelous Philosophical Reflection:
“Fish, by which I indicate all species of it considered as a whole, is for a philosopher an endless source of meditation and of astonishment.
“The varied forms of these strange creatures, the senses which they lack and the restrictions of those they possess, their different means of existence, the influence upon this of the places in which they must live and breathe and move about: all these things extend the world of our ideas and the limitless modifications which spring from matter, from movement, from life itself.
“As for myself, I feel something like a real respect for fish, which comes from my profound persuasion that they are plainly antediluvian creature; for the great Flood, which drowned our grand-uncles toward the eighteenth century of the creation of the world, was for the fishes no more nor less than a period of joy, conquest, and festivity.”
The Physiology of Taste abounds in such passages, as well as stories, scientific speculation, ecclesiastical and military history, not to mention a thorough primer on dangerously stimulating foods like the highly erotic truffle, and coffee, widely regarded as the crystal meth of its day. Brillat-Savarin explains why apothecaries prescribed and concocted various mixtures of chocolate as medications, and offers expert advice on how to hang, age, and stuff a pheasant with a pair of woodcock to make a gamy but unforgettable hunters’ meal. Not merely a book about food, this surprising, wide-ranging work is a treatise on late 18th- and early 19th century European life and world view, gathering into its capacious apron everything from natural philosophy to Napoleon’s various appetites to a vignette of a pretty demoiselle gourmande feasting at a groaning board; it’s a truly delicious book, fascinating, irresistible, and shot through with the profoundest pleasure at nature’s bounty. Even if it doesn’t seduce you into full-blown foodie-hood it will give you a new understanding of why the people who are passionate about food and cooking are the way they are.
At a list price of $625 (but knocked down at Amazon.com to a frugal $460 and change) the new cookbook from former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myrhvold is described by Tim Zagat as “The most important book in the culinary arts since Escoffier.”
Even to describe Modernist Cuisine as a “book,” while true, is nevertheless rather misleading, something like comparing the US Army Official History of World War II with Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Myrhvold and his co-authors spent a substantial Microsoft-generated fortune to create a no-expenses-spared Cooking Lab where a staff of 20 have created entirely new and astonishing flavors and extraordinary textures using equipment more suited to a chem lab than to a kitchen: autoclaves, water baths, homogenizers, vacuum chambers and even centrifuges, to work postmillennial magic on scary-sounding ingredients like hydrocolloids, gels, emulsifiers, enzymes, and foams.
Futurist Food is Now
The package itself is military-industrial in scale: six oversized volumes totaling 2,400 pages and weighing 50 pounds, illustrated with thousands of photographs and diagrams. The authors, scientists all as well as accomplished chefs in their own rights, have followed the path blazed by such pioneers of ‘molecular gastronomy’ as the Adrìa brothers at the Catalonian restaurant elBulli, named five times since 2000 as the best in the world, or Heston Blumenthal, who has led the Fat Duck, 25 miles from London, to its own 2005 Best Restaurant title.
The exotic gizmos and the bizarre though wonderfully tasty foodstuffs they produce tend to get the lion’s share of the food-critical attention (and not a little skepticism from much of the high-end gourmet world) but Myrhvold, Young, and Bilet haven’t limited themselves to cool futurist cuisine; their ambition is nothing less than to provide an encyclopedic reference to cooking in all its myriad aspects. There’s an entire chapter devoted to water, and your trusty old wok gets the same respect and attention as the latest in sous-vide technology. If you’re not so sure about splots and splashes of Day-Glo sauce deployed with a casual yet utterly calculated flick over a frothy confection that might have started out as a scoop of bone marrow, you should know that one reviewer declared the Modernist Cuisine‘s version of Mac’n’Cheese the best ever created. The book examines and explains everything: you’ll get all the usual methods (and some all-but-unheard-of techniques too) but you’ll also get detailed explanations not only what will come out of any given beaker, Klein bottle, or cast-iron kettle but also what is happening at every stage of the cooking process, whether a time-honored roast or a day-after-tomorrow centrifuged smoothie.
Meats alone get more than 250 pages of comprehensive coverage, and over 300 more present recipes created by many of the world’s most accomplished chefs. And while some of the more recherché machines and elaborately futuristic processed creations are sure to daunt all but the truly stout of heart, this encyclopedic reference to the culinary arts and sciences is a book that gets about as close as it’s possible to get to being all things to all cooks.
We began this week’s reading with one of the earliest literary endeavors that could in some way be described as a cookbook — written by a bon vivant who was also, by the lights of his age, a scientist. It seems, then, entirely fitting to close with the admiring words of David Chang (of Momofuku fame ) who described Modernist Cuisine as “the cookbook to end all cookbooks.”
This is the first installment of what I hope will become a regular feature about obscure (yet fascinating and useful) books that most people don’t really know much about.
Okay, if you’re an architect, you know all about AGS and have a copy of one of the ten earlier editions of this book within reach of your desk. But based on my admittedly anecdotal surveys hardly anyone else seems to know anything about it: maybe it’s that the title is so dry. Plus, the latest edition will set you back $250, which — I can hear you thinking – better buy a whole lot of book.
Well, it does.
More realistically, you can get a used copy for as little as $50 if you’re willing to settle for a slightly dog-eared older edition, but since the volume’s heart essentially took final shape many decades ago it would be worth it at twice the price IMHO. Architects, architectural firms, and other professionals who need to stay up to date with the most recent edition will write it off as a business expense. The result for the rest of us is a steady supply of slightly outdated editions — but “outdated” is in the eye of the beholder.
Even if you’re completely broke, do yourself a favor and at least find it in the big library downtown (there are more than 20 in the New York Public Library collection, not to mention every architectural-school library anywhere). I guarantee you’ll still be there flipping from page to page an hour later; it really is that cool.
Have you ever wondered what the standard height of a tabletop should be – and how about the chairs? How steep is too steep for a staircase? AGS not only has the answers but quite literally draws you a picture. If you ever wondered how to build a stone fence using repurposed slate flooring tiles, AGS will show you; if you’re looking for door or window styles, AGS takes a systematic approach to the subject. It’s so comprehensive it blows your mind.
If you’re the sort of person who loved browsing the encyclopedia as a child, you’ll find this a book you’ll return to again and again. If you’re thinking about buying or building a home, this book can answer just about any question as to the pros and cons of different materials, designs, and construction considerations. And if you’re an armchair architect however casual, you’ll find that this book rewards its price many times over in sheer daydreaming bliss.
Read Wikipedia’s page on Edward Tufte, this guy is a modern-day Marshall McLuhan if you ask me. Better yet, visit his website and make up your mind for yourself.
To swipe almost wholesale the words of Graphics Press’s own catalog description (both because I am lazy and because it is true):
The classic on statistical graphics, charts, tables.
Theory and practice in the design of data graphics
250 illustrations of the best (and a few of the worst) statistical graphics
Detailed analysis of how to display data for precise, effective, quick assimilation.
Techniques for editing and improving graphics.
A fundamental yardstick: the data-ink ratio.
How to identify deceptive graphical representations
Spotting sources and tell-tale signs of deception
Design variation vs. data variation
Aesthetics and effective graphical displays.
This is the second edition of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. and provides excellent color reproductions of the many graphics of William Playfair, adds color to other images, and includes all the emendations accumulated during 17 printings of the first edition.
Tufte self-published this amazing book about thirty years ago, and advertised it in The New Yorker; I used to see the blurbs and yearn for it. Eventually when I was feeling flush I bought it and it was everything I hoped it would be. Scientific American calls The Visual Display … “original, beautifully presented, sharp and learned, this book is a work of art. The art here is cognitive art, the graphic display of relations and empirical data.” They’re spot on.
Like the AGS also discussed here for architectural professionals, this book won’t be a revelation to quants and graph-makers – it’s a foundation text in its field. Tufte’s formulation of “the data-ink ratio” has entered the professional lexicon as an encapsulation of graphic elegance and efficiency, with the goal of conveying the maximum meaning using the simplest of possible designs (the “least ink”).
But for ordinary readers with a taste for bushwhacking the wilderness of books out there, this is a wonderful side trip that will inform you as well as fascinate you with the many ways we’ve developed to acquire new perspectives and visualizations of what we know already, what we propose, and what we predict.
ago when you sought ze lady and gentleman were fighteen?? Once more, you are incorrect; allow me.”
