Joshua Yaffa profiles Edward Tufte for The Washington Monthly

“After the publication of Envisioning Information, Tufte decided, he told me, “to be indifferent to culture or history or time.” He became increasingly consumed with what he calls “forever knowledge,” or the idea that design is meant to guide fundamental cognitive tasks and therefore is rooted in principles that apply regardless of the material being displayed and the technology used to produce it. As Tufte explains it, basic … Read More → "Interesting profile of graphics guru Edward Tufte"

Check out the rest of the photos here.

Visual News via Neatorama 

“The High-End Computing Terascale Resource (HECToR) facility will receive an upgrade and expansion from US supercomputer manufacturer Cray, leaving 827 teraflops of processing power at the disposal of researchers.” via theEngineer UK

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I Love Charts via Geekosystem

“We’re experiencing the biggest upheaval in human-computer interaction since the first mice scurried onto the market decades ago. The rise of touchscreens — and the operating systems that make them go — has changed not just how we work with computers, but what we ask them to do.” via The Atlantic

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“About once a decade, the tech industry experiences a fundamental shift in the way software is built and delivered. From batch jobs running on mainframes to applications running on PCs, and then on to Web-based and mobile apps, we’ve all lived through these shifts firsthand.  Most are driven by disruptive changes in hardware coupled with new kinds of applications.” via GigaOM

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New York Times has a helpful writeup of seven tech tradeoffs worth making:

“Buying gadgets can sometimes be like buying a car; it requires sorting through options. Do you go for the navigation package or the rear-seat entertainment system? The faster processor or more memory?”

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Ralph Lauren has agreed to display a portion of his collection at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. 
via Wired

Read the article (and see more amazing photos of these works of art) here

“This Nov. 11 — yes, that would be 11/11/11 — the University of North Carolina and Michigan State University men’s basketball teams, two of the nation’s premier programs, will play the first-ever college basketball game on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

Dubbed the Carrier Classic, the game will be played within a makeshift, stadium-seating arena constructed on the deck of an as-yet-undetermined ship, but we do know that it will take place in the San Diego harbor.” via Wired

Useless, but cute (with attitude, even).

… Read More → "The most useless machine ever"