An underutilized, very efficient data visualization technique originally from Edward Tufte, explained with illustrations by Charlie Park. (Via John Gruber.)
Author Archives: morgan
“Whatever Works”
In his New York Times blog David Pogue writes about about low tech solutions to the problem of keeping track of his Keynote slides when they are being run by someone else backstage rather than by him from his own laptop onstage. This bit made me smile…
Anyway, every now and then, though, this system goes off the tracks. A few months ago, I showed up for the technical setup and met the projection tech. “O.K., I’ll go ahead and take your laptop backstage,” he said. “We’ll be running the slides from there.”
“Oh,” I responded. It was a new talk. “I was sort of hoping to be able to control the slides from the podium myself.”
“You will,” he said. “I’m going to give you a clicker. It’s like a remote control. When you press the button, the slide advances.”
“Ah,” I said. “So it’s a USB transmitter?”
“Uh, no,” he said sheepishly. “The clicker just makes a light go on backstage. My buddy will advance the slide manually when he sees the light go on.”
I couldn’t believe that that was the arrangement he had in mind. So much for split-second timing. The bigger problem, though, was the slide previews and notes that I wouldn’t be able to see.
I’m often the “buddy” backstage advancing the slides manually. The solutions he mentions are ones we often use. It’s also possible to have the remote transmitters directly operate the presentation, which for a presenter like Mr. Pogue makes perfect sense.
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Once upon a time they called them “e-books”
Google’s new Twenty Things I Learned About the Internet is both a great illustrated reference of how the Internet works, and also a good example of how to build beautiful documents that live online. Delightfully illustrated by Christoph Nieman.
More than an app for that
I’ve been very impressed with the quality of the camera on the iPhone 4. I no longer carry my excellent Panasonic LX-3 for snapshots while traveling. The iPhone is good enough. And of course, it’s always with me. But one thing I’ve been really missing is a way to properly hold it steady for long exposures, or video, or even multiple exposures to produce HDR photos. I wish I had some sort of pocketable tripod for it. So did two guys in New York. And they went so far as to prototype the whole thing. They’ve designed something called a Glif which clips onto the iPhone and provides a tripod mount, but also acts as a little tabletop stand for it as well.
Instead of finding some company to manufacture and market it for them, they are using the power of the internet to create and fund the project through Kickstarter. I kicked in fifty bucks. I first heard about it through John Gruber’s website. Now The Economist describes the story in detail.
Word of the day
Elegiac. It’s strange that I’ve gone all these years without learning that word. It was used in a very old New York Times article about the film Lost in Translation.
Self-reference
Fitting illustration in Wikipedia’s entry for webpage.
Peru’s Lovely Bones
Gregory Dicum has written a great account of our second trip to the Ocucaje desert with Roberto Penny Cabrera. The article first appeared in the July/August edition of AFAR magazine. It is being reprinted in the September edition of the Utne Reader and can be read online there.
Yo sé que tú sabes que yo sé
Leading the most emailed articles in the books section of the The Times: a story in about the emerging study of the relation of human evolution to literature.
“It’s not that evolution gives us insight into fiction,” Mr. Flesch said, “but that fiction gives us insight into evolution.”
“Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.”
If depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.
Great article in the New York Times, titled “Depression’s Upside”, on a developing theory that human depression may have evolved as a biological advantage.