Powerpoint really is dreadful. But I like Illustrator, and dragging AI files into Apple's Keynote is easy. For equations, Latex output can be rasterized and used in either; slow but effective.

But powerpoint is intended for about 32 bits of information per slide. Apparently that is the proper amount of information for the business community.

We still have and use solid wood furniture that my wife's parents bought in the 1950's

-- Aycharaych

...And the rest of the post. I'm with you on that. As I am on other things. Truce.

Tho your many 'infractions' throughout life, and tho you have crimson cheeks, you will get some marsh mellows ear rings to stick on your earlobes...

That's what a pope may say for saying coon?

I was censored one day on Salon's Garrosin Reefer piece for use of the saying, '...O, coon'...

It was the Springtime.

I'd seen some black and white bandit looking rauk'coons up in a cherry tree stealing crimson fruit.

Birds eat cherries and spit out the white seed pits. I have seen a groundhog up in a peach tree.

Mea Culpa to all and to all have some yellow mashed sweet yams with white marsh mellows.

Yam. The joy of "sin" is enjoyment in the forgiveness too. You can sin-good and still sing..

forgive me everyday....

Hooray for the mighty Euro! The importation of better standards and practices at conferences here in the States just might trickle down...

Are you familiar with the work of Edward Tufte? He thinks of PowerPoint as a kind of poison for the brain, especially for critical thinking skills.

Wikipedia has a very short piece on him, but if you google enough, you can find some other sites with more info about him.

As for that merger, I also heard that Google offered to help Yahoo beat of MicroSoft. I don't know if that's true, but I hope it is.

My apologies, I did not think either of you would react so strongly. But I enjoyed your replies, so thank you both.

Ondelette, I am a bit puzzled by the beat frequencies. Are you saying that it is necessary to have the frequencies above, say 20 KHz, in the playback system because these tones can beat in the ear and thus non-linearly generate lower frequency tones that are audible? Do you have a reference?

Funny you should mention that. I just got done with a scientific conference, and it was an amazing shift from several years ago. First off, it was dominated by Europeans. It seems it is more expensive for an American to travel across the U.S. and stay for a week in a hotel than for a European to travel from Europe and do so. The Europeans, after all, are paying in euros, and the dollar is cheap, cheap, cheap. Lots of conferencees from East Asia too. Lots of research euros, won, and yen.

So with that reworking the averages on displays, the slides were packed with information, full of formulas, interesting animations, and embedded video and standardized colors and effects. When Americans got up with their PowerPoint presentations, it looked a bit, well...third world. Avoiding formulas because they're so hard to set, crappy drawings using PowerPoint's lousy primitives, dumb cartoon clip art. Science written in the 8 legged essay format of a business plan.

The influence of 7 years of loss of pre-eminence in American research to too much business focus, even the phony entrepreneurship of the academic community trying to suck up to corporate funding, the antique interfaces that an unpunished monopoly gets away with selling to our market, the inability to pay to go to a conference due to high travel costs and a collapsed dollar. We look tawdry. Lucky for me I used beamer because for once I had a choice. But I also used Illustrator, the god of illustration packages here, and the piss poor help functions and lack of technical drawing support that Adobe gets away with is just shocking -- they never upgrade the lowly Illustrator when Photoshop and Premiere are the hot items for CG. And they last thought about competition or trying to excel in the 1990s, it seems.

But for a contrasting viewpoint go look at the NYT. They think that Microsoft-Yahoo will create competition that will be good for Google's search engine market. Apparently, competition is when monopoly behemoths divide a market in two.

Planned obsolescence is overall a huge negative both for the environment and for the consumer. We still have and use solid wood furniture that my wife's parents bought in the 1950's and it is demonstrably superior to almost anything you can get in a furniture store today, the great majority of which falls apart well within a decade and then must be replaced with yet more cheaply made, formaldehyde emitting particle board crap.

America has become the land of waste and we shall eventually pay dearly for our profligate ways.

I've been reading Taylor Marsh's posts on both Clinton and Obama. In fact, there was one particularly lengthy one on Obama (and Rezko) a little while ago. I think I posted that link before, but here it is again:

http://taylormarsh.com/archives_view.php?id=26871

Taylor has some pretty good posts up now, too, about Feb 5th's results.

Don't do a column on Obama and Tony Rezko without talking with Jane Hamsher first.

Truly, I feel your pain. Then again, there was that professor who said that Muhammad didn't shave his armpits, because it wasn't the custom in his time, and he hadn't yet become the Prophet. The professor wound up on death row, courtesy of the local zealots. You, my dear, were lucky.

Yes, I did.

True story.

Some years ago I was helping a non-profit (that provides services to mentally retarded adults) write grants -- one of the bigger fish denied us, and at a meeting of the board I sniped that the grant-denier was an outfit of "niggardly jerks."

OMG. Jaws dropped. Eyes went all round. An uncomfortable silence ensued.

So...I began to explain what the word means, and more importantly, to what it holds no relationship. And could tell I was in an "to excuse is to accuse" situation and so then shut up.

Jebbie: My sins are many and the deepest crimson, but for what am I forgiven this time?