Re: The Columbia

[SteveFJong -at- aol -dot- com]

Edward Tufte, in his book _The Visual Display of Quantitative Information_, devotes nearly a chapter to his interpretation of the Challenger accident. The engineers who tried unsuccessfully to persuade NASA management to postpone the Challenger launch due to cold weather presented their data on launch damage as a function of launch temperature in chronological order, from the first shuttle launch to the last. The relationship they saw was buried in the data.

Tufte plotted the data not by date, but by launch temperature. Presented that way, the problem leaps off the page.

Indeed, Challenger was a sad example of poor technical communication.

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