Poster: Napoleon's March | Hacker News Reader

Poster: Napoleon's March

edwardtufte.com

43 pointsTomte17 comments

For a little background, Clausewitz writes about this in his famous book. When wondering how the enourmous losses came about, remember:

- the Grande Armee was walking from Paris to Moscow, and quartering in the field along the way.

- the army was fed (as routine for all pre-railway armies) by local looting.

- the Russian response to this was to burn everything in the path of the advancing army that they might capture or make use of. This rendered the original plan to spend the winter in Moscow impossible.

A large fraction of the army starved, as was to happen later to the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. Or froze due to lack of available fuel. Or slipped away in the night to forage and never came back.

Tufte points out that a large fraction of the losses occurred before the really bad weather set in. I also wonder how far there was an "original plan". Napoleon may have expected Alexander to ask for terms well before he captured Moscow; or he may have imagined wintering in Smolensk or marching on St. Petersburg.

Not reflected in the graphic: French supply was heavily compromised due to the Peninsular War.

I cant' read anything on the thumbnail. How seeing the poster a bit larger? Paywalls again...

It's a pretty famous example of a great chart. "Napoleon's march" in Google image search returns a bunch of results, eg this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Minard

I'm not sure I'd be comfortable displaying such a harrowing death toll on my wall

The best thing you can do is to never have posters that document any aspect of the human race.

Spoiler: We all die. So it goes.

At least with history we're detached from the instant of death and can perhaps learn how to avoid prematurely bringing on death.

If you like this type of thing... Having taken his one-day "class," I highly recommend it. A wonderful, saturated experience on how to structure data, and allowing it to become maximum-useful information. And no, he does not like PowerPoint. Ticket price includes his four hardbound books.

(I don't work for him, get a kickback, etc.)

I did not find his one-day lecture nearly as useful as MikeNomad did, I wouldn't recommend it myself.

I do like the books I got to take home though.

me too. he kinda seemed like a jackass. and the class was huge and he mostly rambled about powerpoint sucking and didn't spend a lot of time on visualization. he also took 45 minutes to show a slideshow of his sculptures. Dude. I didn't spend $400 on an 8 hour class so you could show me your welding skills.

I found his class very ho-hum -- it's mostly Tufte quietly rambling over a number of examples and promoting some of his ideas (artistic and otherwise).

I went with a small group and many had never heard of Tufte before. They were so turned off by the class that they swore him off before it was over.

Later, many of them came around after they read one of his books, which are excellent and his work has slowly become very influential with my group.

I think what Tufte does very well, is to bring a well reasoned critical eye to deconstructing other people's information displays. I don't think he's as good at synthesizing information displays -- his major work being the sparkline and his books. As a result he can come across as dismissive of other people's hard work.

The people who got the most out of his class seemed to be those that were already quite familiar with his method of critical review. I don't think I would bring people to his class who weren't already quite familiar with his methods.

If you like this type of thing, you should probably take a look at Tufte's book ‘Beautiful Evidence’. It contains these images too, along with a whole lot of opinions.

This is that classic infographic that you see everywhere. It's kind of an amazing synthesis of several dimensions of data and thousands of datapoints. It's the best of the best.

It's also highly specialized to telling this particular story, it's very hard to adapt the techniques used in the graphic to more general uses, thus limiting in many ways what we can learn from it.

This might be of interest to HN readers in the New England area - once a year Tufte opens up his 200+ acre farm/sculpture park in western CT to the public for a day. I found out about this purely by accident this year, and it's a nice way to spend an afternoon. Google Tufte Hogpen Hill Farms for a sample of what he has there.

I have this poster (from Tufte) - it's an extremely high quality print for the price.

Any other visualization/art posters I can buy online? To me it makes more sense to hang one of these than a cheap painting from an artist and embodies more of what I really believe in.

xkcd store has some good ones,

Here's a few I've been planning to have printed:

Human Spaceflight, everything to scale http://theorysend.com/uploads/bdcffe08190411f5095eabcc8860d3... from: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2niljz/human_spacefl...

Tree of Life, over time: http://e.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/codesign/slideshow/...

Evolution of US politics: http://xkcd.com/1127/large/

I was planning to get most of these printed on a board of some kind, so they be more durable than posters, although I haven't chosen a supplier yet.

Depending on your use of the poster and the printer you go with you may need a rights release from the artist, so often it's easier to find a commercial print and get it framed, if you are willing to have all that glass.

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