It would be extremely difficult to make sense on the web without them.

update 2

Mr. Tufte butters his bread by analyzing, among other things, the contexts under which information is presented. He is likely correct in his critique of Powerpoint as a tool for information sharing.

For anyone, even the TIMES, to suggest or insinuate that this technology was responsible for seven deaths is, I think, irresponsible.

I agree, and I certainly don't want to be seen to be blaming PowerPoint for 7 deaths.

I'll also add that the 'PowerPoint makes you stupid' heading is a joke! (That's the heading used by the blog I mentioned.) I don't remotely feel that bulleted points make people stupid, and as a matter of fact I do feel that bulleted points frequently make people much more clear.

More on that later, too.

update

And a blog called The Talent Show has a lengthy excerpt from the TIMES article on PowerPoint's role in the Columbia disaster that's worth quoting in full here, too:

In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship's foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft's well-known ''slideware'' program.

PowerPoint is the world's most popular tool for presenting information. There are 400 million copies in circulation, and almost no corporate decision takes place without it. But what if PowerPoint is actually making us stupider?

This year, Edward Tufte -- the famous theorist of information presentation -- made precisely that argument in a blistering screed called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. In his slim 28-page pamphlet, Tufte claimed that Microsoft's ubiquitous software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension. For example, the low resolution of a PowerPoint slide means that it usually contains only about 40 words, or barely eight seconds of reading. PowerPoint also encourages users to rely on bulleted lists, a ''faux analytical'' technique, Tufte wrote, that dodges the speaker's responsibility to tie his information together. And perhaps worst of all is how PowerPoint renders charts. Charts in newspapers like The Wall Street Journal contain up to 120 elements on average, allowing readers to compare large groupings of data. But, as Tufte found, PowerPoint users typically produce charts with only 12 elements. Ultimately, Tufte concluded, PowerPoint is infused with ''an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.''

(btw, these problems also inhere in writing for the web....

screenplays are structure, fyi

Wrong.

SCREENPLAYS ARE STRUCTURE," shouts William Goldman in Adventures in the Screen Trade. "The essential opening labor a screenwriter must execute is, of course, deciding what the proper structure should be for the particular screenplay you are writing."

This, he believes, is "the single most important lesson to be learned about writing for films... Yes, nifty dialog helps one hell of a lot; sure, it's nice if you can bring your characters to life. But you can have terrific characters spouting just swell talk to each other, and if the structure is unsound, forget it."

J.D. Fisher of MathandText left a comment today that reminded me I'd wanted to point people to his posts on textbook fragmentation, which is a HUGE, documented factor in bad math ed here in the U.S.

One reason publishers maintain a great deal of fragmentation in elementary basal mathematics texts, for instance, is that such a structure allows adoption committees and other, similar decision-making bodies, to quickly judge, with great confidence, that a text has indeed covered all of the requisite state standards.

But this structure also has the effect of 'un-prioritizing' content. Simple ideas and less relevant topics are given the same priority and the same space as more robust, more relevant topics.

1 Place Value Through Hundred Thousands
2 Place Value and Exponents
3 Place Value Through Hundred Billions
4 Compare, Order, and Round Whole Numbers
5 Place Value Through Thousandths
6 Problem-Solving Strategy: Find a Pattern
7 Compare, Order, and Round Decimals

The blue lessons (with the possible exception of Lesson 2) represent the exact same concept applied to larger and larger--and then much smaller--numbers. The red lessons are also closely related, but are separated by two somewhat unrelated lessons.