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RE: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

• To: 'Joshua Allen' <joshuaa@m...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 13:30:31 -0600

I'd be interested in reading those 'disproofs'.
The problem with the cognitive approach is accepting 
unprovable voodoo about mental operations.

Tufte is overrated.  He makes good points that 
out bad style habits (e.g., chartjunk), but if I arranged 
music like he arranges data, it would all sound like 
bad Bach: lotsa notes in search of a backbeat and 
only one kind of instrument playing all the parts. 
Chartjunk is like giving a stretto to the tubas. 

I gave a speech for a conference in Vancouver 
some years ago where the entire screen show 
was a group of 3D animated acronyms floating 
in the soup.  The bullets were on the page 
in front of me.  The bullets kept me on track while 
the animation kept the listeners' eyes on something 
else.  Nothing is remembered of that speech 
because it wasn't memorable.

When you're hot, you're hot.
When you're not, you can't give it away.

len (a behaviorist because it's reliable)

From: Joshua Allen [mailto:joshuaa@m...]

> > Tools do affect the way we think just as languages, a tool of sort,
> > affects the way we think.  It has less to do with the audience or

Not to spiral too quickly off-topic, but I wanted to point out that
Sapir-Whorf has been thoroughly discredited, and although it makes for
good plotlines in books like "Snow Crash" and lends an air of mysterious
authority to persons like Chomsky; the thesis that language shapes
cognition is highly overrated.

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