Theater, Edward Tufte, and half a $20 bill
Sunday Jim and I were at the theater again, for Australian playwright Andrew Bowell's work "When the Rain Stops Falling". The playwright is new to me (only one other play of his was produced in New York), and it's nice to see serious drama tackled by a new generation of writers. Where "Equivocation" used the same actor in several roles, this play uses several actors for the same role at different times in their lives. Another excellent cast, with Victoria Clark, Mary Beth Hurt and Rod McLachlan especially wonderful.
While I liked the play very much, I had some irreverent thoughts. First, just how hard was it for Mr. Bowell to get through his early years with a name like that? And just how did Mary Beth Hurt end up in two plays where cremains are ingested???? I had to hold back an especially inappropriate laugh.
On Thursday, I took a deep breath and attended a seminar with Edward Tufte. He's not exactly a household name unless you're a statistician (which I definitely am not!) or graphic artist with the responsibility of making complex data intuitively understandable (also not me). I came across a flyer for this seminar a while back, and I know the books he has published are beautiful, and the topic in general interesting to me, so I took the chance that I wouldn't understand a word of it and went.
He's a terrific speaker, and statistics themselves didn't raise their nasty heads once. He is all about how to make your visual communication intuitive, clear and easy to comprehend. Also how to make websites the same. We each got all four of his books: 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information', 'Envisioning Information', 'Visual Explanations', and 'Beautiful Evidence'. He self-publishes because he wants his books to be beautiful, and oh, they are. As dry as the first title sounds, the books are fascinating. To add to the pleasure, he had with him to show us two truly rare books, the first English language translation of Euclid's work on geometry (complete with pop-up paste-ins of three-dimensional models) and Galileo's major work on sunspots and other stuff that got him into trouble. Beautiful books printed in the 16th century! That, along with terrific examples of such moving charts as one showing the size of Napoleon's army as it began its invasion of Russia (at 422,000) and how it dwindled viciously over time to just 10,000 survivors of Russia's coldest winter on record. All this done in 1869 by Charles Joseph Minard, as a protest against war.
Look Tufte up on the web. On top of all this statistics-as-pictures stuff, he's a sculptor of monumental outdoor works! Something to amuse himself as Professor Emeritus of both Yale and Princeton. He has a wicked indictment of PowerPoint too.
So there I am with four heavy hardcover books at 4PM in the heart of midtown Manhattan, with an appointment at 5:30 uptown. I'm chugging up on foot (it was a gorgeous spring day), and a woman comes up to me, rather breathless, and asks if I've dropped half a $20 bill on the sidewalk! Well, not being in the habit of cutting up US currency, I say 'oh no', since I knew that all my bills were new from the ATM. After some moments, the man she was with pulled her away and I walked on.
When I got to my destination, I took my iPod out of my pocket to put in my purse - and there was half a $20 bill! Clearly, it had been cut and then torn. So I had been the target of a street scam. After 35 years in New York! What Jim and I can't quite figure out is what the scam would have been. I turned them down at the first approach, so how would it have gone down? We'll never know.
And as if that weren't enough, four blocks from my destination, a man crosses Central Park West calling my name. It turns out we had worked together on a play 15 years ago! I knew his face but not his name, alas, but we reacquainted ourselves for the time it took to walk the four blocks. It's very rare for me to meet people from my acting days - so it was a rare day all around.
While I liked the play very much, I had some irreverent thoughts. First, just how hard was it for Mr. Bowell to get through his early years with a name like that? And just how did Mary Beth Hurt end up in two plays where cremains are ingested???? I had to hold back an especially inappropriate laugh.
On Thursday, I took a deep breath and attended a seminar with Edward Tufte. He's not exactly a household name unless you're a statistician (which I definitely am not!) or graphic artist with the responsibility of making complex data intuitively understandable (also not me). I came across a flyer for this seminar a while back, and I know the books he has published are beautiful, and the topic in general interesting to me, so I took the chance that I wouldn't understand a word of it and went.
He's a terrific speaker, and statistics themselves didn't raise their nasty heads once. He is all about how to make your visual communication intuitive, clear and easy to comprehend. Also how to make websites the same. We each got all four of his books: 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information', 'Envisioning Information', 'Visual Explanations', and 'Beautiful Evidence'. He self-publishes because he wants his books to be beautiful, and oh, they are. As dry as the first title sounds, the books are fascinating. To add to the pleasure, he had with him to show us two truly rare books, the first English language translation of Euclid's work on geometry (complete with pop-up paste-ins of three-dimensional models) and Galileo's major work on sunspots and other stuff that got him into trouble. Beautiful books printed in the 16th century! That, along with terrific examples of such moving charts as one showing the size of Napoleon's army as it began its invasion of Russia (at 422,000) and how it dwindled viciously over time to just 10,000 survivors of Russia's coldest winter on record. All this done in 1869 by Charles Joseph Minard, as a protest against war.
Look Tufte up on the web. On top of all this statistics-as-pictures stuff, he's a sculptor of monumental outdoor works! Something to amuse himself as Professor Emeritus of both Yale and Princeton. He has a wicked indictment of PowerPoint too.
So there I am with four heavy hardcover books at 4PM in the heart of midtown Manhattan, with an appointment at 5:30 uptown. I'm chugging up on foot (it was a gorgeous spring day), and a woman comes up to me, rather breathless, and asks if I've dropped half a $20 bill on the sidewalk! Well, not being in the habit of cutting up US currency, I say 'oh no', since I knew that all my bills were new from the ATM. After some moments, the man she was with pulled her away and I walked on.
When I got to my destination, I took my iPod out of my pocket to put in my purse - and there was half a $20 bill! Clearly, it had been cut and then torn. So I had been the target of a street scam. After 35 years in New York! What Jim and I can't quite figure out is what the scam would have been. I turned them down at the first approach, so how would it have gone down? We'll never know.
And as if that weren't enough, four blocks from my destination, a man crosses Central Park West calling my name. It turns out we had worked together on a play 15 years ago! I knew his face but not his name, alas, but we reacquainted ourselves for the time it took to walk the four blocks. It's very rare for me to meet people from my acting days - so it was a rare day all around.