Edward Tufte Talk

A few weeks ago Edward Tufte came by Stanford to give a talk, so naturally after reading all his books I jumped at the chance. I didn’t realize he had actually done his bachelor’s in statistics at Stanford back in the 60′s. Among the highlights of the talk:

Med school students kept asking him how to get statistical significance out of their results…
Was interested in PoliSci and took a number of classes
Most of his learning was outside of pro-forma classes
Studied under Paul Eckman (behavior) at the Center for Adv Studies & Behavior
Claimed to have invented the ‘blue box’ in 1962, before Captain Crunch, and was raided by AT&T
A friend once had a file on ‘how 2 write review of bad books by good friends’
‘forever knowledge’ changed career
With publishers you always lose, the question is how graciously.
Believed that one’s life & works should be self-exemplifying.
He took out a 2nd mortgage to print his book on his own.
Always designed with 2-page spreads as that’s how it looks in reality.
Ironically took early retirement from Yale to do research.

If you could find the data, a map would be great for visualizing
arbitrage opportunities between different points on the globe, such as
the disparities in the costs of international phone calls (which became
the basis for callback systems and internet telephony).

the Last Great Interview of the Century

Brother Number One = Saloth Sar = Pol Pot. a while back I wrote a paper on the Cambodian genocide and got a chance to interview Noam Chomsky about why the western world didn’t know about what was going on at the time. At the time I came accross an interview by Nate Thayer, a reporter from the Far Eastern Economic Review, of Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge’s “killing fields” responsible for the deaths of millions of Cambodians, but only recently got a chance to get my hands on the article.
Turns out not only was this the last interview ever given by Pol Pot, it was the first – no westerner had seen him since he took power decades ago. Nate doggedly pursued what he called “the last great interview of the century” and finally got his story right before Pol Pot’s death.

the trial: page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4 page 5
the interview: page 2-1 page 2-2 page 2-3 page 2-4 page 2-5 page 2-6

a History Lesson on Oliver Cromwell

After i heard his name mentioned for the second time the other day, i decided to look him up. Apparently he’s one of the few people despised enough by some of his successors to have warranted the dubious honor of a posthumous execution. That’s right; not content with his convenient death from a bout of malaria, as soon as the Royalists regained power in Britain they decided that he had to be made an example of; they dug up his grave, beheaded him and mounted his head on a pole outside Westminster Abbey, after which it “changed hands” numerous times and eventually ended up on the grounds of Cambridge University.

Reminds me of the funeral traditions of the Zoroastrians that a friend mentioned the other day: their dead are placed on top of ‘Towers of Silence’ and left there for the vultures to feast on, and its still practiced to this day in some parts.