[tel]

This has been Tufte's point since long before iPhones and iPads made touch screens so popular. He wrote a whole book called "Escaping Flatland" after all.

It's not at all that he doesn't appreciate the potential of pixels---he's been a long advocate of pushing them to perform at the levels he desires---but instead that he believes that the information lost in graphs, charts, interfaces is incredible. He is constantly studying methods to attain significant data density in graphic representation.

His argument here is that we have so many sensory signals we pay attention to naturally and garner great amounts of information from. Touch screens manage to interact with just one or two of them.

It ends quaintly, too. Not with a call to arms to improve touchscreens, but more like Brett Victor's essay, with a call to remember to appreciate the physicality of the world.