PowerPhluff

There's something remarkably perverse about taking study breaks from composing a PowerPoint presentation of a paper, to read a book where the author tells you how PowerPoint makes presenters stupid, holds audiences captive, sucks for technical data in general, and was responsible in part for the deaths of 7 astronauts on the Columbia shuttle.

I'm not kidding. Read Edward Tufte's Beautiful Evidence. It's a great book, spurring me to think about what I'll need to do to best present my work in the future, and its publication is responsible for the resurrection of Minard's map of Napoleon's Russia campaign that's being bandied around by the mass media. But I think it's sort of funny that he hates PowerPoint so much that he devoted an entire chapter to it, but I can see his - 'scuse me - points very well. I've had some professors who, when their laptop won't talk to the projector, can't flipping remember what that big whiteboard hiding behind the screen is for.

Minard's map: