
Poster: Napoleon's March - Tomte
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters
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pjc50
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.

~~~
cafard
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.

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

~~~
DanBC
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Minard)

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bamie9l
I'm not sure I'd be comfortable displaying such a harrowing death toll on my
wall

~~~
buro9
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.

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MikeNomad
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.)

~~~
jrochkind1
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.

~~~
viggity
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.

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toothbrush
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.

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bane
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.

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dpb000
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.

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

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rrrazdan
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.

~~~
bensandcastle
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...](http://theorysend.com/uploads/bdcffe08190411f5095eabcc8860d3431a6c7ac8)
from:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2niljz/human_spacefl...](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2niljz/human_spaceflight_everything_is_to_scale/)

Tree of Life, over time:
[http://e.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/codesign/slideshow/...](http://e.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/codesign/slideshow/2012/09/1670898-slide-0-evo-
large.jpg)

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

