I'd be a bit disappointed if I went to an Edward Tufte lecture series and this flowchart of the lyrics from 'hey Jude' didn't show up at some point.

I think fondly of the professor's Good Fight every time I find myself sitting in another 'PowerPoint engineering' meeting. Doesn't anybody communicate in complete sentences anymore?

History lesson from Edward Luttwak, an expert in Byzantine history.

The Byzantine empire went on and on and on, using rules of statecraft whose wisdom resonates today. The article picks a baker's half-dozen of the author's favorites.

Essay by Derrick Jensen on the Orion Magazine website titled, "Forget Shorter Showers. Why personal change is not a substitute for political change".

Quoted: We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

Brief essay by Caterina Fake (formerly of Flickr) on the difference between "working hard" and "freaking out", working on the "right problem", etc. The essay is simple in that she assumes that the reader doesn't take her for a fool (i.e. "work smarter not harder!") but that's her message.

The best illustration I've ever seen of how the ISS has come together, and what all of the components are & how they fit together and what they do.

It's even better in the details. If you click on the right-hand tabs, you get a description of each module: even cooler, each description includes a 360" rotation animation for the module.

USATODAY.com

From the online issue of The Atlantic, introduction to a whole 'nother type of haute cuisine.

Quoted: The non-Japanese-speaking traveler lucky enough to wind up in a really good kaiseki restaurant thus faces a twofold problem: not only does he lack the words to understand what the food is, he lacks the words to understand what the food means.

Go ho, go shiki, go mi. Not quite "lather, rinse, repeat" but not bad.

Quoted: Michael Pollan shares 20 of his favorite food rules sent in by Times readers.

Fun reading from The Boston Globe website.

Quoted: (...) The first thing to know is that the mind isn't a mirror, or even a passive observer of reality. Much of what we think of as being out there actually comes from in here, and is a byproduct of how the brain processes sensation. In recent years scientists have come up with a number of simple tricks that expose the artifice of our senses, so that we end up perceiving what we know isn't real - tweaking the cortex to produce something uncannily like hallucinations.

The content is worth reading but the writing (by a University of Illinois grad student) is absolutely first-rate. It's so good, that I started re-reading the article, just to look for errors!

From the webzine: The Ethicurean

Quoted: (...) I truly believe that humane slaughter is important and possible, but, as I have been learning, here’s the truth about any slaughter: it is both morally difficult and really gross. (...) With a public unwilling to acknowledge the living nature of their food source, the meat industry has been free to institute practices that no compassionate person can countenance.