VizWorld.com

If you’ve ever been to one of Edward Tufte’s seminars, you were probably caught off guard when the whitecoats begin moving through the aisles, carrying ancient manuscripts from the likes of Galileo and Playfair that are the original books of what he’s showing on overhead slides.  It’s a powerful experience that amazing everyone in the room.

However, on December 2nd, Edward Tufte put his impressive collection of historical books and art up for auction at Christies.  Bioephemera describes the auction:

There appear to be 160 lots; Tufte’s website describes it as “200 rare books, including major works in the history of science, statistical graphics, 20th-century artists books, ET artworks, Sidereus Nuncius (1610), Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499).” Apparently Tufte intends to use the proceeds to fund his gallery ET Modern, among other art projects.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know about this earlier.  You can view the “Catalog” of the auction at this link.

ET went on his own website to discuss why he put these masterpieces up for auction:

Great books foster, transmit, and preserve forever knowledge. The books in my research library were always meant to be used: read, skimmed, read aloud, exhibited, photographed, scanned, shared, treasured. And thus my library, which I thought of as The Museum of Cognitive Art, participated intensely in my research, scholarship, writing, teaching, design, artwork. For 30 years, the workaday presence of these wonderful books in my life was inspiring and challenging.

If you want to know what they went for, hit this link at Christies.  In total, it looks like he made a smooth $1.8Mil, with Galileo’s ‘Sidereus nuncius magna, longeque admirabilia’ bringing in $662,500.

via Edward Tufte auctions off his library : bioephemera.

Science auction, books, historic, tufte

NVidia has constructed what they call the “Ultimate Gaming PC” and is auctioning it off on EBay.  Current bidding price is just over $3k and the final auction price will be donated 100% to the Luekemia and Lymphoma society.  The specs:

• 2 x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 Graphics Card in SLI ($1,050)
• NVIDIA 3D Vision Glasses ($200)
• 22” Samsung 2233RZ 3d Monitor ($400)
• Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Edition CPU ($1,000)
• ASUS Rampage II Gene X58 Motherboard ($250)
• 12GB Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR3 Memory ($400)
• 2 x 256GB Crucial Solid-State Hard Drives ($1600)
• 2 x 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black Hard Drives ($200)
• Danger Den Double Wide Tower Case ($400)
• Complete Danger Den Water-cooling system ($750)
• Custom Smooth Creations Paint Job ($1000)
• Silverstone DA1000 Power Supply ($300)
• Case Accessories by Performance PCs ($350)
• Custom Sleeving by Performance PCs / Out of the Box Mods ($150)
• Case LED Lighting by Oznium ($100)
• Logitech G19 Gaming Keyboard ($200)
• Custom NVIDIA Themed Razer Boomslang Mouse ($150)
• Microsoft Windows 7 x64 Ultimate Edition provided by TigerDirect ($300)
• 13 of the hottest The Way It’s Meant to Be Played PC Gaming Titles ($650)
• Billeted Aluminum Feet from mnpctech.com ($50)
• Custom Built by OutoftheBoxMods ($750)
• Estimated Value of Complete System: $10,25

via Specifications « Charity Case Mod.

Hardware auction, nvidia