gettysburg.ppt

In the fullness of time, even I will finally trip over some otherblog's pointer to a must-see corner of the Web that everyone else has known about for years.* But finally, finally I did: Lincoln's "Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation", brought to us since 2000 by Peter Norvig.
I won't excerpt any of it, since 1) the presentation is predictably short — this is the Gettysburg Presentation, after all; and 2) there is such perfection in its gestalt that I refuse to violate it.
After viewing the presentation and pondering its message, don't neglect to read Mr. Norvig's fascinating essay, "The Making of the Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation", filled with fascinating tidbits like:

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!

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*Another way I know I'm becoming an old fart: just today I read where someone had written "people have for years done …", where the author was referring to something that had started in 2002! "Years!" I thought. For me, "years" means, oh, since the early 80s at least.

Posted on June 20, 2005 at 16.08 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Such Language!, The Art of Conversation

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  1. Written by S.W. Anderson
    on Wednesday, 22 June 2005 at 21.16
    Permalink

    A copy editor will tell you that if the reference is to two or more, then "years" works.

    Reference to "many years" is vague, but if what's meant by that is anything less than a dozen, you'd pretty clearly mislead.

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