Tufte’s first chapter was deeply instructive in how many dimensions and data points can be organized and represented via the two-dimensional medium of a graphic or map. The example that stood out to me as most jarring was the map of air pollution; I think part of the reason for that was the map-like nature of the graphic and the automatic—or at least initial—reading of the conical structures as shapes in the landscape. Of course, reading the caption, that question’s cleared up and I can recognize the various axes of the graph and understand it as reflecting pollution levels, rather than graphical depictions of land. But it was interesting to me how closely the two graphic strategies appear and how different the data is that they represent. My first impression was of the representation of something physically and perceptibly occupying space, which is not true: what’s represented is in the graphic is nothing that human perception can reproduce, unlike recognizing the contours of a map. Data transformed in this way from imperceivable to scalable seems far more intriguing to me even than the sunspots example. In the case of the pollution graph, the imperceptible is made into an entirely new form that feels intuitive on first glance.