Stumbled across this gem via Naughton. I just about wet myself laughing during the presentation, and I thought I’d rupture something when he got to the bell sound effect during the graph presentation. I also had to go find the actual PowerPoint file so I could see the small print that got lost in the video. Stay through to the end – there’s an easter egg worth waiting for :-).
Yeah, I love PowerPoint. And this guy’s got it pegged, even down to the semi-embarrassed, slightly rushed clicking through some of the adornments on the graphs. A perfect example of what Dijkstra used to scathingly call “Panchromatic Concept Animation”.
More and more of our students assume that they must use PP if they’re going to present more than three sentences in front of more than two people. Worse, I fear that more than a few have never explicitly considered the possibility that there might be an alternative! Given that the vast majority of their models are a fright, it’s no surprise that their slides often make me want to cry.
Happily, our CSci majors tend to make very nice slides for their senior sem presentations (in part, of course, because we work closely with them), and the slides for all five presentations at our CSci senior seminar conference two weeks were clean and focussed. Nothing blinked, flew, faded or fiddled. No one had to click backwards through a 37 part incremental reveal to get to a previous slide. In short, they did a great job!
I seem to be on a weird chicken/egg theme here recently. I’ll try to stop soon.
2 Comments
Phi, that was one of the most insightful PowerPoint presentations I’ve ever seen. Thanks for posting that.
Did you happen to read his paper as well? He goes into a lot more detail in the paper than he did in his four-minute talk. I think he’s theorizing world domination by poultry.
I’m still trying to dissect his equations and graphs.
Joey
Thanks a ton for posting the link to the paper – I’d missed that, and it really is a classic in its (very small) field.
Wow.
I wish I had something half that cool on my resume!