I am certainly not an intellectual relativist, nor a moral relativist.
Science and art have in common intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information.
There are many true statements about complex topics that are too long to fit on a PowerPoint slide.
I hope that I am generous and tolerant, but certainly on the intellectual side I think that there are discoverable truths, and some things that are closer approximations to the truth than others.
I was writing a chapter of Beautiful Evidence on the subject of the sculptural pedestal, which led to my thinking about what's up on the pedestal - the great leader.
What gets left out is the narrative between the bullets, which would tell us who's going to do what and how we're going to achieve the generic goals on the list.
The idea of trying to create things that last-forever knowledge-has guided my work for a long time now.
The leading edge in evidence presentation is in science; the leading edge in beauty is in high art.
A curious consequence is that I have become a minor celebrity.
My father worked for governments all his life as an engineer and public works director.
Public discussions are part of what it takes to make changes in the trillions of graphics published each year.
If you like overheads, you'll love PowerPoint.
Allowing artist-illustrators to control the design and content of statistical graphics is almost like allowing typographers to control the content, style, and editing of prose.
Clutter is not an attribute of information, clutter is a failure of design...fix the design rather than stripping all the detail out of the map.
I do believe that there are some universal cognitive tasks that are deep and profound - indeed, so deep and profound that it is worthwhile to understand them in order to design our displays in accord with those tasks.
