Tufte has been a hero of mine for quite some time and has been done tremendous work for decades on exploring the the world of clear graphics and "chartjunk" (his term) for decades. The NYTimes caught up with him yesterday and caught up with what he's been up to (a lot). He's helping the Federal Government help communicate what they're upto with their website recovery.gov.
Rather than define himself on the conservative-liberal political continuum, Mr. Tufte, a professor emeritus of political science, statistics and computer science at Yale, said that he longed for cause-and-effect reasoning to take hold in Washington.
“Political practice today too often skips right by evidence,” he said by e-mail. “When I listen to True Believers (left or right) talk about the problems that governments are seeking to solve, I keep muttering to myself, ‘How boring, it’s more complicated than that.’ And those who best know that it’s more complicated than that are public servants.” [more]
I can highly recommend all of his books, but his first one,
