This was an interesting read that I felt had very strong ties to our previous Tufte reading on escaping the flatland. For example, the section on schedules tied back very well to the train/rail schedules we discussed in the previous reading. Tufte makes a great point about how schedules are designed for the needs of a variety of audiences and are very rarely multipurposeful – this was something that I definitely thought about in the last reading regarding the complex railway map that would’ve been useful for an operator but less so for a passenger. I liked that Tufte dove deeper into a criticism of the original New England train table, and I agree with his criticisms. The variety of ways to arrange train schedules is really interesting – I didn’t like the ones with the diagonal lines because it ended up being too cluttered and not exact enough for me to read, but I think the idea is very solid and depending on the complexities it could look really good.

I thought the astrological mapping was an interesting case study, particularly looking at the development from a day-to-day mapping of Jupiter and its satellites to the continuous motion of its waves. From an educational standpoint, we can also see that mapping occurrences in different ways can change a lot about how they are perceived.