Flashes of Panic

I’ve made comments before about my belief that Powerpoint slides are like crack for presenters; it seems like everyone who even comments on the ubiquity of .ppt files is complaining about some presenter who just reads from their slides, or the impossibility of reducing everything to bullet points. I have professors who exhibit degrees of reading-from-the-slides-ness, some who build their own presentations following their own outline (which is also printed and handed out to us—I use them to take my notes on,) and others who blithely page through the chapter presentations supplied by the book publisher.

We had a guest lecture in one of my Thursday classes from Mudge, a net.personality who briefly (and understatedly) introduced himself as, “I’m the guy who testified to Congress that I could take down the entire internet in half an hour. Things have improved; it would probably take an hour and a half, now.” I’m paging through the printout of his presentation now. It’s pretty obscure; if you weren’t there for the talk, it’s not easy to see what these diagrams are all about. On the other hand, when you were in the talk, the slides actually did illustrate what he was talking about.

Why am I not surprised that someone who figured out how easy it is to crack Windows passwords would have figured out an effective way to use Powerpoint?

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