Those scatter-graphs in the lengthy CAIB page are just devastating, when you contrast that with with the sentence nope, we don't need any pictures.

Love Tufte; have had his (repro of Minard's) Napoleon *masterpiece on a wall for years - and his pithy remarks indicate he speaks as well as he magnificently illustrates data.

* A visual Strunk & White.. per the Boston Globe (nice!)

I ordered both the PowerPunt and the "Decision to Launch Challenger"- Thanks, Scott!
Damn.. where was Dick Feynman when we needed him (again) to smack NASA upside-head. Dead, like our 'honor' and apparently, our remaining smarts too.

After seeing my second Power Point show, I thought it to be just the kind of blunt tool one should not allow the dull to injure others with - a catalyst for further language destruction. Seems I was way optimistic. Tufte's analysis finds vastly more mischief is done with those trillions of slides.. (Chortle: the annotated Stalin slide.)

What a devastating autopsy of the Boeing slide 'bullet-ing' and Bush-speak evasive PHB terminology. Even worse: Now we hear of the legions of experts lost when threatened by Boeing with a move from CA to HellHouston. Now! it emerges that the source of the no-sweat eval. was virgins! at this entire analytical problem. 2nd degree murder indictments, anyone?

{Sheesh}\ufffd WTF Can One Say. YAN Murican fuck-up in spades. And why would anyone go up in any next shuttle crap shoot? (And wouldn't Shrub love to divert any funds for a redesign.. to budgets for his more aggressive evangelical pursuits. Rhetorical Q.)

Well, the shuttle matter isn't as bad as I imagined. It seems far worse with every new factoid. Shit, can't we do Anything right since Shrub began turning out all the lights? (especially the mental ones)


Ashton

Nice find. It's wonderful to read something brilliant amidst the daily churn of coprophagic excess.

May this small gem see widespread dissemination -- a Knight riding out to Slay the Murderers of Language! ..that's one small step for a man -

. . .

My point here is not that I\ufffdm God\ufffds gift to public speaking, but that what I do is PUBLIC SPEAKING, not public posturing or bustier ripping. I have nothing to sell. My goal is actual communication. How quaint.

But wait, there\ufffds more! I keep getting e-mail messages from people that I literally can\ufffdt understand. These people went to good schools and presumably know how to write in complete sentences, but instead they send me gibberish. This week, I called a practitioner of this gibberish, and he explained it was \ufffdconversational e-mailese.\ufffd

What?

Conversational e-mailese is a way to shout without speaking, to draw attention without informing. It is no way to get chicks. But for a PowerPoint, SMS, ICQ generation, I guess it will have to do. No wonder we\ufffdre making such bad decisions.

\ufffdHere, you see, it takes all the running you can do just to stay in one place,\ufffd said the Red Queen.

Or does it?

We are none of us that important, and if we think we are, then we are wrong. It doesn\ufffdt have to be this way. People often send me e-mail not expecting a reply, and certainly not expecting a reply actually from me. But what they get is not only me (I have no assistants but that is counterbalanced by my lack of a life), but LOTS of me -\ufffd words and words and words and words. People are amazed, but they shouldn\ufffdt be, because I am dedicated to sharing ideas, and the major way I learn is from you.

Which brings me to the most amazing event that happened to me this week. I called Warren Buffett, head of Berkshire Hathaway, and after Bill Gates, the richest man in the world. And he answered his own phone.

I\ufffdm only glad I didn\ufffdt send him a stack.