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Driving away the cloud

October 5, 2006

I am on vacation this week, indulging in various pleasures of the body and mind. 

Yesterday I went driving on progressively smaller roads around the county, reveling in the beautiful connection between Earth’s angle of axis and the seasonal rhythm of life. 

For as long as it pleased me,  I motored slowly down one-lane gravel, my 39-year-old car like a tiny blue motorboat in an illimitable sea of harvest-ready soybeans and corn.

This morning it was cold and rainy, so I holed up in a coffee shop, consuming large amounts of a popular neurostimulant and wading into Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence.  In the first three chapters, Tufte throws brilliant light on data mapping integration with images, on an elegant new type of data graph called ‘sparklines’, and the use of links and causal arrows in diagrams. 

Tufte’s language is as fine as his graphics: “Velocity squared is like shipping and handling: it will get you every time.”

He collects historical examples of finely integrated presentation, including original first editions from Newton and Galileo, who threw open the foundational distinction between science and myth:

What was observed by us in the third place is the nature or matter of the Milky Way itself, which, with the aid of the spyglass, may be observed so well that all the disputes that for so many generations have vexed philosophers are destroyed by visible certainty, and we are liberated from wordy arguents.  For the Galaxy is nothing else than a congeries of innumerable stars distributed in clusters.  To whatever region you direct your spyglass, an immense number of stars immediately offer themselves to view, of which very many appear rather large and very conspicuous but the multitude of small ones is truly unfathomable.

And since that milky luster, like whitish clouds, is seen not only in the Milky Way, but dispersed through the ether, many similarly colored patches shine weakly; if you direct a glass to any of them, you will meet with a dense crowd of stars.
- Gallileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius, translated by Albert Van Helden

And this:

[the Moon is] not smooth, even, and perfectly spherical, as the great crowd of philosophers have believed about this and other heavenly bodies, but, on the contrary, [is] uneven, rough, and crowded with depressions and bulges.  And it is like the face of the Earth itself, which is marked here and there with chains of mountains and depths of valleys.

And this from Edmund Halley…

The things that so often vexed the minds of the ancient philosophers
And fruitlessly disturb the schools with noisy debate
We see right before our eyes, since mathematics drives away the cloud.

 

 

Categories: Personal
  1. Stephanie Wiman Myers
    October 5, 2006 at 21:23 | #1

    Did you take the photgraph of the flying dog, George?

    Why is it such a surprise that the moon is not smooth, spherical or void of mountains and valleys? 

    And WHY does the full moon inevitably bring bad luck to my life?  It is too consistant an event to ignore.  I want to hide under the bed.

    Good luck in jogging off your wife’s good cooking, apple crisp, indeed!

  2. October 5, 2006 at 22:11 | #2

    Flying dog is the cover of Tufte’s book, Beautiful Evidence.  I took the prairie picture and drew the little illustration of Earth’s axis and its relation to the seasons in ballpoint pen, then scanned and touched up a bit with Photoshop.

    Actually the scale of that illustration is wrong.  Using the Sun as a scale reference, then the Earth would be too small to see and its orbit would extend about three feet past the edge of your screen.  And the tilt of the Earth’s axis is off too, so it is purely for explanatory purposes.

    Aristotle thought that the heavenly bodies must be perfect spheres and this was later incorporated into medaeval church theology.  It fit well with the notion that the Earth was both the center of the universe and that the Earth itself was a corrupt place.  If the Moon had mountains and valleys, then it was like the Earth and so might other heavenly bodies be like the Earth – implications too horrible to think about thus Galileo’s persecution.  250 years later the Church was up to its neck in Darwin and got nostalgic for the good old days of persecuting Galileo.

    I’ll need luck!  Her cooking is my downfall (don’t stop, honey) Unfortunately I have never been able to jog – my shins just rebel.  There is a ski trainer machine I can use at the gym, though, and I lift weights too.

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