Tufte Seminar

Today I went to a lecture given by Edward Tufte thanks to John. The lecture was in Universal City and to my surprise the commute wasn’t bad. I even got to the Hilton before Eric did and he lives closer. w00t.

I seriously didn’t know what to expect, I did some research on the topic of Presenting Data and Information from his website. So I went in really ignorant. Go figure right? When the lecture started I thought his message was decent then it got really good. To the point I was actually enjoying myself, at a lecture. Right? WTF? He made a lot of sense when presenting data to people; that it is good to have information that isn’t presented in a stacked form but should be presented in an open space form where it is accessible by the person you are presenting it to at any time. I was also impressed with his collection of books, especially two that he shared with us. One being Euclid’s book of Geometry (First English Translation) and the other being Galileo’s first book he ever wrote. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has the first Bible written.

We took a lunch break so Eric and I took the shuttle from the Hotel to City Walk. We had a quick lunch since we only had an hour and the shuttle was running slow. We rushed back to the lecture where it started to go down a bit in my opinion.

Tufte started to talk about computers and there was a lot of Apple propaganda I could go without and I think I differ from his views of technology when it comes to operating systems and applications. He concluded the lecture by showing us a video he shot at the sculpture garden near his home which was great.

I think the lecture was beneficial and I recommend it to people who have to present a lot of data to people. I think the message he conveys is important and comes in handy for project managers, sales engineers and financial folks. He goes to New York next and does the rest of the east coast but he comes back to California where he is speaking at San Francisco and San Jose.

I do not recommend this workshop however for slimy sales guys. They wouldn’t grasp the concept of pushing good content and data to their audience since they are low life POS and should punch themselves in the face.