"PowerPoint makes you dumb"

Nice little item about Edward Tufte's anti-PowerPoint paper, "The cognitive style of PowerPoint". I haven't yet read the original pamphlet, but I imagine much of the sentiment was covered in Tufte's Wired piece, "PowerPoint is evil". The latter is worth a read if only for the wonderful standfirst, "Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely". Anyway, in the NYT Clive Thompson observes that, following the Shuttle Columbia tragedy, NASA found itself to be too reliant on PowerPoint slideware presentations to get complex information across -- including risk assessments of possible Shuttle wing damage. Thompson also reckons that PowerPoint helped Colin Powell make his case to the UN that Iraq possessed WMDs -- and concludes: "Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of obfuscation -- where manipulating facts is as important as presenting them clearly. If you have nothing to say, maybe you need just the right tool to help you not say it." Meanwhile David Byrne makes art with PowerPoint (Yahoo! News).
(From New York Times)