Presentation (anti?)guru: Don Mcmillan

Remember chicken chicken? Well, let engineer and comedian (his words, not mine) Don McMillan break it down for you. Enjoy!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to crop images with circles in Keynote

Image
Here is a way to deal with images that come in different sizes and/or orientations: mask them with circles.  Here is what I mean You have probably already seen this with Google and Apple productions. Circles are fun, dynamic, harmonious, and they are also points. Now, there is a whole visual grammar behind points, but that's not the topic of this post. Let's do the before-after thing. Consider this fake slide By the way, also Featured pictures from Wiki Commons. The images are very good, but we can take them to the next level.  Their sizes are around 700px, so I'll mask them with circles with a diameter of 300px. This is the result Certainly better, but how did I do it? Most Slideware packages allow you to crop an image with a shape .  Google it and you'll get the technical know-how. I'll demo with Keynote 6.   Select a Circle: Insert > Shape > Cicle. Make it the size that you want.  We'll rescale all images at the end, so don...
Read more

How to do math slides with LaTeX and Scribus – and not with Beamer

Image
Yeah, I keep (really) hating  LaTeX/Beamer. Thankfully, there is a better way to make slides with LaTeX on a WYSIWYG software. It is Scribus running LaTeX as a external tool. Here is how to get started. Yesterday I got a comment from wipeout on a remix of a math presentation I did in 2011. He asked if it could be done all in Beamer. I did research and ended writing this post. I have been using LaTeX for more than 10 years. It is a beautiful tool to typeset beautiful math. But LaTeX is neither a word processor, a desktop publishing tool, nor slideware. In words of its creator Producing good slides requires visual formatting, which means LaTeX is not well suited for the task.                                                                        – Leslie Lamport LaTeX/Beamer doesn't create the v...
Read more

On why I hate LaTeX/Beamer

Image
Continuing with a last's year post, I make a case in point about how using LaTeX/Beamer is bad for scientific presentations.   Last year I wrote about LaTeX/Beamer and how it was worse than bad PowerPoint. One or two weeks ago I found a presentation on Slideshare done in Beamer, by people I know. They are excellent scientists at Germany's best research center. It is partly not their fault, they are applied mathematicians, and in mathematics LaTeX and, to a lesser degree Beamer,  are industry standards. The problem of using Beamer for scientific talks is that it employs the same narrative of a written essay: Title, introduction, first section, second subsection, conclusion. Another problem is that Beamer enforces the use of off-the-shelf templates, and the command-line nature of Beamer makes its customization very time consuming. The use of predefined templates one of the causes of  the death by PowerPoint. The creation of a math talk using Beamer is a soporific bomb. ...
Read more