The Gettysburg address in PowerPoint | Hacker News Reader

The Gettysburg address in PowerPoint

norvig.com

On the subject of PowerPoint humor, quite possibly my favorite complaint letter of all time: Yours Is A Very Bad Hotel.

http://www.slideshare.net/whatidiscover/yours-is-a-very-bad-...

A few years ago I saw David Byrne do a great presentation entitled "I ♥ PowerPoint". I don't think his slides are available online (at least not that I can find), but one of the high points was when he borrowed some slides from this: http://www.artofoffice.com/PowerPoint/The-PowerPoint-Antholo...

I highly recommend this: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp

It's too bad he hasn't released it for free, but it's highly worth reading if you do presentations.

In particular, see the "Making Of" link at the bottom.

http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/making.html

On that page it is stated that 1,5 mio. people see that presentation every year. Lincoln had a crowd of just 15.000 at Gettyburg. Surely, PowerPoint is a superior medium by many orders of magnitude.

  > On that page it is stated that 1,5 mio. people
  > see that presentation every year.

Are you sure? It seems to me to say that from 2000 to 2006 a total of 1.5 million saw it, not 1.5m/year. If I'm wrong please let me know ...

Yeah, you're right, it's accumulative. But it doesn't change the fact that the PowerPoint version obviously have a significantly larger impact than old dudes speech. He didn't even use a microphone, go figure.

Depends. Makes 1.5 million of random internet visitors more impact than 15 thousand of quite enthusiastic listeners? Well. I don't think so :o)

A bit like an old chestnut I remember: the woman says that her son is smarter than Lincoln: the boy could recite the Gettysburg address at age 8, while it took Lincoln until he was over 40.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com