Presentation Zen

Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds (2008, 2nd edition 2011) is a fairly short, very dense book about constructing your public presentations with skill and care to get your message across. Because he's studied zen, and mostly lives in Japan, he takes a very introspective view of how to develop a presentation. Reynolds certainly has some interesting ideas about how to make compelling slides --- including not using any slides at all in some cases --- and echoes some of the points I made in a Toastmasters speech I gave a couple of years ago entitled "PowerPoint PitFalls". He also introduces a trick I want to try from Japan called pecha-kucha (Japanese for "chatter") in which you do a presentation by talking through 20 slides for 20 seconds each, with slides on a timer so you have to get your talk completely keyed and timed to the images behind you.

What If?

Randall Munroe is, of course, known for the often hilarious web comic xkcd, but he's also been answering odd questions on his web site for a number of years. The questions and answers are now gathered in What If?, subtitled "Serious Scientific Answers to Absurb Hypothetical Questions." Most questions merit a several page essay considering issues such as how a longbow archer is an arrow generator with a frequency of 150 millihertz and how many archers you need to shoot enough arrows to block out the sun. Or what happens if the earth suddenly stopped spinning. Or how much Force power Yoda can output. He uses a lot of entertaining footnotes, including a number of pseudo-Wikipedia [citation needed] notes, and some more-or-less accurate calculations. His explanations sometimes take notable shortcuts on clarity, but this is, after all, in the interests of amusement, not scientific rigor. There are also some interjections of questions he chose to not answer, like: "what is the total nutritional value (calories, fat, vitiamins, minerals, etc) of the average human body?" All-in-all it's a lot of fun, but may require a certain nerd sensibility to appreciate.

In the Shadow of the Moon

Given that yesterday was the forty-fifth anniversary of the events described, it seems appropriate to post this review today:

They're old men now. Gray or balding, wrinkled, with liver spots. Their voices are still crisp and animated, with the calm of test pilots, which they all were, as they explain what it was like to be In the Shadow of the Moon. We have interviews with ten of their tiny fraternity --- it was a fraternity which only ever had twenty-four members, six of whom were dead and one of whom didn't give interviews at the time the film was made.  The interviews are intercut with archival footage from their adventures on and around a world a quarter of a million miles away. Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins talk about the seat of the pants feelings as three hundred feet of rocket below them lights off and starts to propel them upwards. Charlie Duke explains that his father barely believed he traveled to the Moon, but his son thought it wasn't a big deal. Jim Lovell explains that the let down of not walking on the Moon didn't hit him until after he'd safely returned to earth after Apollo 13. Gene Cernan says baldly "I called the Moon my home for three days of my life... That's science fiction." It's material I know well, so there are no new facts here, but it is wonderful to hear the story of their adventure in their own words, to see the expressions on their faces as they pause to gather their thoughts and realize that, yes, they were at the Moon, to sample the awe they felt, to have them tell how they were transformed by the experience, how they now regard the Earth as a precious jewel. However, this has a very high wow! factor. Certainly, my sense of wonder was actively engaged through the whole three hours it took me to watch this hour-and-a-half long documentary: I kept backing up and watching passages a second time.

"When they opened up the fuel baffles we could hear the full rumble down these huge pipes. Then it dawned on me from an emotional point of view that we're gonna go to the Moon."

     --- Jim Lovell, In the Shadow of the Moon

Where Wizards Stay Up Late

Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyons purports, from its subtitle, to be about "The Origins of the Internet." Which it is. Alas, eighty percent of the book is about the mechanics of setting up the ARPAnet --- the existence of ARPA, the history of Boston consulting house Bolt, Baranek and Newman, the exchange of talent between MIT, Lincoln Labs, and Digital Equipment Corporation, the personal histories of some of the folks involved, the development of the first Interface Message Processors, which made the ARPAnet possible. It's only in the last chapter that they cover Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn inventing TCP/IP, the protocol that made it possible to connect the various computer networks together, Bill Joy's implementation of TCP/IP for Berkeley Unix, and the true birth of the Internet. I was initially dismayed by this imbalance, until I realized that the development of the other networks --- CSnet, the regional academic networks, NEARnet, SATnet, Alohanet --- is much the same story. The connection of those networks together into the Internet is just the application of technology. The real story, the real history, is in the invention of packet switching and the visionaries who decided to put together the original ARPAnet.

The Second Machine Age

The Second Machine Age, subtitled "Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies," by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee is an unmitigated load of business school crap. I waded through the first two-thirds, which is a rehash and regurgitation of every digital trend in the past twenty years, emphasizing (again and again) the ramp up of new technologies hitting us. It's, in effect, an update of Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital, with all the awe, but none of the understanding. However, where I gave it up was in their last third, where they discuss the consequences of this brave new world. This part of the book could have been written by the American Enterprise Institute. It suggests (for examples) that companies should hire the most expensive CEO possible, because in the new digital economy it's worthwhile to pay top dollar to get marginally more economic performance out of the company. This despite constant proof that there is exactly no correlation between company performance and CEO pay.