Heh, actually you can take the word scientific out of that sentence and it would still be true. - Scoble, Alex Scoble

I feel the same way about the synthesis of sugar, butter, eggs and flour and their proper ratios and the final result: pound cake. - Derrick

The best designs are too rarely identified as great design. How often does Tufte laud the Periodic Table? - Kevin Fox

Actually, you can thank God for the elegance of how the number of valence electrons affects the interactions between elements and how their number is limited to 8 :) - Kevin L

Some of the alternate tables are interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Otto

I've always been partial to Minard's map of Napoleon's march. First saw it in Tufte's book (it came with the book, as a poster). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... and http://www.csiss.org/classic... - Betsy #TeamMonique

Yeah, an attorney at the law firm that I worked at a few years back had that on his wall. It's a good thing that Hitler didn't have it on his wall during WWII. - Scoble, Alex Scoble

How much of the elegance is pure design, and how much of it is the fact that it maps physical reality really well? - Victor Ganata

I don't think you can separate out the two, Victor. Avogadro's number is the height of elegance defined, in my opinion. 6.022 x 10 to the 23 FTW! - Scoble, Alex Scoble

Minard is literally the poster child for information visualization, but for practical purposes the Periodic Table is used by tens of thousands pf people every day to understand the world around us. Minard's chart of Napoleon's march is a nice piece for understanding a historical event, but its scope is so limited that it's used far more as a design example than it is for the purpose it was designed for. - Kevin Fox

What about The Standard Model? - Roberto Bonini from iPhone

I don't know enough about it to make an opinion, Roberto, but there's plenty of room at the top. - Scoble, Alex Scoble

To be fair, as elegant as it is, the Standard Model of particle physics probably isn't used as much as the periodic table by non-specialists. - Victor Ganata

Alex: You're so periodic and you don't know it ;) - Jim Connolly