O.K., perhaps disingenuous.

Quoted: It's an all too familiar refrain in our present economy: you have a family, you're clocking 60 hours a week, and you have no time to make fondue.

Get 'cher spark goin'!

Quoted: Longest manmade spark, Substation Transformer Explosion, 115kV, 230kV, and 500kV Air-Break Switches Arcing, crane tangles with power line, Massive positive lightning bolt, and 1.6 million volt Lichtenberg Figure Discharge. Also, Lichtenberg Figures, shrunken coins, rare technical books, and tesla coil information

Handy.

Schulz City.

Quoted: In the early years after the second world war, health researchers in Britain noticed a curious epidemic: people had begun dying of heart attacks in unprecedented numbers. Nobody knew why, and so a scientist in London named Jerry Morris set up a vast study to examine the heart-attack rates in people of different occupations – schoolteachers, postmen, transport workers and more.

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.