Tufte has a new book. I browsed it over the weekend. It is beautiful, as usual.

Edward Tufte has been described by The New York Times as "The Leonardo da Vinci of Data." Since 1993, thousands have attended his day-long seminars on Information Design. That might sound like a dry subject, but with Tufte, information becomes art.

Tufte's most recent book, Beautiful Evidence, is filled with hundreds of illustrations from the worlds of art and science. It contains historical maps and diagrams as well as contemporary charts and graphs. In one chapter alone, there's an 18th-century depiction of how to do a cross-section drawing of how a bird's wing works, and photos from a 1940s instruction book for skiing.

They all demonstrate one concept: Good design is timeless, while bad design can be a matter of life and death.

"If you look after truth and goodness, beauty looks after herself."

NPR : Edward Tufte, Offering 'Beautiful Evidence'

How could I not meme this article?

"We've seen through his permanent expression of ecstasy, which has curdled into a mask."

Nothing about these comments was extreme or exceptional, but what followed was an over-reaction of cosmic proportions. Overnight, newspapers flourished friendly profiles along with testimonials to Rattle's genius.

Rattle's friends went after one unknown uncritic, who turned out to be a prominent polemicist, writing under a pseudonym. Another critic was made to resign and was last seen editing a CD magazine for a record store.

Seven years after being elected and four after his triumphal entry with his portrait plastered on bus stops, Rattle is facing an ocean of troubles that cannot be held back by lashings of charm and spin control. The question being asked is whether he has the intellect, the emotional strength and the clarity of purpose to face a very different age of media dissemination.

You and your permanent expression of ecstasy! No more!

Rattle has a battle on his hands

America is at war with a transnational terrorist movement fueled by a radical ideology of hatred, oppression, and murder.

Through the freedom agenda, we have promoted the best long-term answer to al–Qaida's agenda: the freedom and dignity that comes when human liberty is protected by effective democratic institutions.

It occurs to me that this point is rarely emphasized enough:

There is a broad and growing global consensus that the deliberate targeting of innocents is never justified by any calling or cause.

Even though few of you re-recommended it, you may recall this post from April:

According to one who was present, Churchill suddenly blurted out: "Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?"

Back to the document:

Challenges

* Terrorist networks today are more dispersed and less centralized. They are more reliant on smaller cells inspired by a common ideology and less directed by a central command structure.

In other words, al Qaeda is a scene. Note that this is the #1 challenge cited in the document.

You'll also note that the "Successes" section does not boast about the fact that there have been no successful attacks within the US since 9/11.

Does the strategy go astray here?

The long-term solution for winning the War on Terror is the advancement of freedom and human dignity through effective democracy. In effective democracies, freedom is indivisible. They are the long-term antidote to the ideology of terrorism today. This is the battle of ideas.

National Strategy For Combating Terrorism

1. SHOULD ALTERNATIVES TO EVOLUTION BE TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS?

Think how much it would improve our politics if students leaving high school had some understanding of the reasons why a deeply devout person might nevertheless prefer a tolerant secular state to a tolerant religious state, or why an atheist might think that public celebrations of religion were appropriate in a nation the vast majority of whose members were religious. Or if those students had been asked to consider what differences were morally permissible in a state's treatment of citizens and aliens who are arrested as terrorist suspects. Or if they had actually read and debated the opinions of Justice Margaret Marshall and Chief Judge Judith Kaye in the Massachusetts and New York gay marriage cases and, if they disagreed with those opinions, had been challenged to say why. Or if they had been invited to consider what made a theory scientific and whether the intelligent design theory of creation met whatever standard for classification as science they considered appropriate.

2. THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE

As the Supreme Court has come to recognize in a series of awkwardly expressed opinions, there is precious little endorsement of religion in these public displays and nonbelievers can comfortably enjoy their secular significance with no more sense of inauthenticity than they feel when they spend a quarter.

3. GAY MARRIAGE

The cultural argument against gay marriage is therefore inconsistent with the instincts and insight captured in the shared idea of human dignity. The argument supposes that the culture that shapes our values is the property only of some of us—those who happen to enjoy political power for the moment —to sculpt and protect in the shape they admire. That is a deep mistake: in a genuinely free society the world of ideas and values belongs to no one and to everyone. Who will argue—not just declare—that I am wrong?

And when you're done:

Skinner: Uh oh. Two independent thought alarms in one day. The students are overstimulated. Willie! Remove all the colored chalk from the classrooms.

Willie: I warned ya! Didn't I warn ya?! That colored chalk was forged by Lucifer himself!

Three Questions for America

There are many ways to read the latest war in Lebanon.

Many Lebanese remain puzzled by the strategic thinking behind a month-long aerial campaign ... One goal was nearly achieved by the last days of fighting. The bombing did succeed in displacing some nine tenths of Lebanon's estimated 1.2 million Shias.

This Israeli campaign appears to have had two purposes. One was psychological: underlining the fact that Hezbollah had failed to fulfill its role as a protector of even its own people, the Shia, let alone of Lebanon as a whole. The other was military: to clear the south Lebanon "fighting box" of civilians, so as to allow the Israeli army to make use of its heaviest antipersonnel weaponry without fear of bad publicity.

Hezbollah's offensive weapons were not especially effective. The four thousand or so rockets it fired killed just forty-one civilians, a third of them "Israeli Arabs." But the guerrillas' skillful use of light field weapons ... appears to have rendered Israel's lumbering Merkava ("Chariot") tanks pretty useless.

At this writing, most Lebanese who do not share Hezbollah's triumphalism, and they are many, remain pessimistic about the chances of taming the party. "Lebanon is finished" is a refrain often heard in private.

I disagree with the author's claim that Katyusha rockets were ineffective. If the purpose was terror, rather than mass casualties, then one could conclude they were reasonably effective, as the north of Israel was essentially shut down for the duration of the conflict, with Israelis trapped in their secure bunkers.

War Within War

For Israel, the war has been a rude awakening. This was not just another tit-for-tat. It was a tipping point.

For Israel, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah, the most costly blow is the one to which they will be seen as having surrendered. The conflict is no longer about achieving a specific objective—releasing a soldier, say, or capturing defined territory. It is about something more intangible, and so more serious: establishing one's power of deterrence, defining the rules of the game, showing who is boss. Such confrontations may subside, and they may even pause. They will not end.

A New Middle East

Netflix, the world's largest online DVD rental service, today introduced a new Web site feature called "Previews" that enables Netflix members to instantly watch movie trailers that have been personalized for them based on their movie tastes.

Netflix Launches 'Previews' Feature for Instant Viewing of Movie Trailers

Go inside a Netflix shipping center.

Shortly before sunrise on a summer Tuesday, a truck left a warehouse in Rockville, Maryland. It travelled a mile to a post office. The driver backed up to a loading dock, where fifteen mail carts awaited him. The carts were stacked with boxes of those ubiquitous red pre-paid envelopes, containing DVDs addressed to Netflix. Before 1998, the only option for renting videos was a local store with a few thousand titles. Today, Netflix, as a delivery system, is almost as ingrained as the mail itself. Five million subscribers select movies online, watch them at home, send them back, and pay monthly fees: $17.99 a month for the most popular plan (three at a time, at home or in transit).

TEAR, SLAP, CLACK | The New Yorker

Google Google’s Alan Davidson and you won’t locate him readily in his current post as the search giant’s recently installed point man in Washington. Davidson keeps a low profile, at least online, but he is a presence in those circles shaping internet policy.

With a background in computer science, Davidson is an unabashed enthusiast of Google’s core mission: search. “A complex algorithm is our secret sauce,” says Davidson, for producing answers in 1/5th of a second. “As an engineer who’s fallen from grace, I marvel at it,” he says. He’s protective of the world’s largest information index --tens of billions of web pages -- and in particular, the “long tail” of a search index: the many individual, quirky sites that draw interest from relatively few users. “20% of searches that we see in a given month are those we’ve never seen before,” he says. “I find this heartwarming. People are weird and want to see strange stuff.”

Embracing the long tail figures large in Google’s “policy space.” Helping people access information and innovate requires vigilance, believes Davidson. Politicians around the world are pushing for internet regulations to control content. Davidson approves removal of certain kinds of “vile, evil” content from search indexes, like child pornography sites. But pressure on internet services like Google to act as policemen must be resisted. He describes the “hard case” of China,” which demands Google provide a filter for queries the government deems threatening. “We angst about it, but executives feel being there is better for openness than not being there.”

Other pressing issues for Davidson include net neutrality, the attempt to retain uniform fees for data transmission in the face of demands by broadband and DSL line owners to be paid more for higher speed lines. Davidson sees this demand leading to a two-tier internet, one that discriminates economically against the next MySpace or YouTube. Admits Davidson, “As a lobbyist, we’re getting our butts kicked in Washington.”

There’s also the thorny problem of intellectual property raised by Google’s book search: a “modest project….to digitize all books in all languages and create a virtual card catalog.” Davidson is convinced that Google is not violating copyright law, and is actually helping authors and publishers sell more books.

Internet Regulation and Design: A View from the Front Lines

A few years ago, the government of Singapore summoned Mitch Resnick to help crack a problem. Although thousands of schoolchildren in that country were designing and building robots using the Lego Mindstorm kits Resnick helped invent, Singapore businesses complained that when these same students hit the workplace, they lacked creativity and initiative. Resnick discovered, in conversations with teachers, that robot building was an after-school activity, and classroom time was devoted to math and science drills.

This is Resnick’s issue in a nutshell, he explains. “The way technology is getting out there is limited.” If the “richest learning experience happens when people are actively designing, experimenting and exploring,” then why can’t we extend this approach into the school curriculum? Computers and technology should not be used merely to impart information, but to engage kids to design, create and invent – much as little kids do with blocks and paint in kindergarten.

Resnick demonstrates the creations of children who participated in special engineering and software designing courses. He had posed the challenge of inventing something that could be useful to them in everyday life. The results included such unique items as an odometer for roller blades, a diary security system, an automatic toilet paper dispenser and a mobile, wearable juke box. Resnick has launched Computer Clubhouses in locations around the world where kids often have no access to computers. He believes that “success for an individual or a country as a whole will depend on acting creatively.”

Sowing the Seeds for a More Creative Society