centrifugal force

Bond: Come now, do you really expect me to do coordinate substitution in my head while strapped to a centrifuge?

Villain: No, Mister Bond. I expect you to die.

From this issue of xkcd, which I got introduced to recently at work.

The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation

Brilliant. If you too believe that PowerPoint is able to sap the life out of any speech or presentation, take a look at Peter Norvig’s Gettysburg PowerPoint presentation (Norvig is Director of Research at Google Inc., formerly of NASA).

He discusses the making of the presentation as well:

I selected the “Company Meeting (Online)” template, and figured from there I’d be creative in adding bad design wherever possible. I was surprised that the Autocontent Wizard had anticipated my desires so well that I had to make very few changes. Four of the slide titles were taken directly from the template; I only had to delete a few I didn’t need, and add “Not on the Agenda” after “Agenda”. I wasn’t a professional designer, so I thought I’d be in for a late night doing some serious research: in color science to find a truely garish color scheme; in typography to find the worst fonts; and in overall design to find a really bad layout. But fortunately for me, the labor-saving Autocontent Wizard took care of all this for me!