I am strangely fascinated by the philosophical debates about PowerPoint. Edward Tufte, who’s a hero of ours, is virulently opposed to PowerPoint. I’m someone who uses it constantly, so it would be a bit hypocritical for me to rant against it. True, I think it enables a lot of our worst tendencies (being verbose, summarizing rather than […]
Archive for June, 2007
PowerPoint inventors on the suckiness of PowerPoint
Published by June 22nd, 2007 in General, Simplicity, Concreteness, Emotion, Story and Curse of Knowledge. 10 CommentsWhen Sand Attacks
Published by June 22nd, 2007 in General, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotion and Teachers. 1 CommentIn the book we discuss how to combat mistaken perceptions, such as people’s inflated sense of the danger of shark attacks — the attacks are so rare as to be mathematically soothing, and in fact the danger of shark attacks is dwarfed by the danger of deer attacks (aka those little furries who dart mindlessly in front of your […]
Making a yucky idea stick
Published by June 8th, 2007 in General, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotion and Teachers. 3 CommentsFrom a story in the Eugene, OR Register-Guard (thanks to Len H for the link):
Kyleray Katherman, 13, thought something was funny about the water coming from the drinking fountains at his school. So, being far more intelligent and resourceful than I was at 13, he conducted an experiment. He used a Q-tip to swab the spigots of […]
The value of concrete details
Published by June 4th, 2007 in General, Concreteness and Credibility. 1 CommentIn the book, we talk about how vivid details can make ideas more credible. Here’s an example from the annals of advertising, plucked from an article on the copywriter Claude Hopkins:
Back in 1919, Schlitz beer approached Claude Hopkins. Their beer sales were in 15th place. They asked Hopkins if he could help them sell more […]
SlideShare Contest
Published by June 1st, 2007 in General, Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness and Emotion. 5 CommentsI forgot to blog this when it happened, but consider it a historical pointer. SlideShare ran the “World’s Best Presentation Contest.” Winners are here. My primary comment is that I hope these are not, in fact, the world’s best presentations. Not to be a downer.
The winners are all extremely strong as examples of graphic design and layout. And that’s great, […]
Recent Comments