If you are a blogger, writer, lecturer, minister, designer, or programmer, you need to sign up for the next Edward Tufte Workshop. (Only in the USA, apparently.)

I attended yesterday with high expectations and they were exceeded. What other workshop have you been at where the lecturer starts by walking around the audience with a 500 year-old copy of Euclid’s geometry?

The goal is to maximize content reasoning time and reduce content decoding time.

Cherry picking [the irresponsible selection of evidence] is the single biggest threat to discovering the truth.

Approximately right is better than exactly wrong.

The error of the modern computer interface is that it segregates information by its means of production. The user shouldn’t have to know what an operating system is, or even an application. The first GUI’s at Xerox PARC were just a desktop and documents.

What are the cognitive consequences of design decisions?

Paper: A high-resolution display device.

London Ruby on Rails Workshop

Needless to say, I’ll be putting the things I learned into effect at a few events in the next month:

• FOSCON, Portland—I’ll be giving a short speech on Power Tools: Shortcuts for customizing your development environment (July 26, Free).
• London Ruby User Group—Power Tools, slightly longer (August 8, Free).
• Two Day Ruby on Rails Workshop, London—The basics of Ruby on Rails, hands-on. You’ll learn how to develop plugins, develop in an agile manner with test-driven development, and produce quality Rails applications. (August 10-11) → Sign up!

Also, check out the Carson Workshops Summit in San Francisco. Two days in September, and only US$295! Hear from Jimmy Wales, Jeffery Veen, and others. I will be on vacation, but it looks like a fantastic event.

UPDATE: My proposal has been accepted for RubyConf in Denver this October. I’ll be speaking on Advanced Dynamically Generated Graphics with Ruby!