{"id":186296,"date":"2014-03-07T20:58:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-08T01:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/03\/07\/this-is-the-best-news-ever\/"},"modified":"2014-03-07T20:58:00","modified_gmt":"2014-03-08T01:58:00","slug":"this-is-the-best-news-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/03\/07\/this-is-the-best-news-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"This is the Best News Ever!!!!!!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m an engineer, and I have seen <b>way<\/b> too many PowerPoint slides.<\/p>\n<p>So I exult in the fact that the forum for the Large Hadron Collider at Fermilabs has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.symmetrymagazine.org\/article\/march-2014\/physics-by-hand\">banned PowerPoint slides in their presentations<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">A physicist is more than the sum of his or her slides.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">That&#8217;s why, about six months ago, organizers of a biweekly forum on Large Hadron Collider physics at Fermilab banned PowerPoint presentations in favor of old-fashioned, chalkboard-style talks. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cWithout slides, the participants go further off-script, with more interaction and curiosity,\u201d says Andrew Askew, an assistant professor of physics at Florida State University and a co-organizer of the forum. \u201cWe wanted to draw out the importance of the audience.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">In one recent meeting, physics professor John Paul Chou of Rutgers University (pictured above) presented to a full room holding a single page of handwritten notes and a marker. The talk became more dialogue than monologue as members of the audience, freed from their usual need to follow a series of information-stuffed slides flying by at top speed, managed to interrupt with questions and comments.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cWe all feel inundated by PowerPoint,&#8221; Askew says. &#8220;With only a whiteboard, you have your ideas and a pen in your hand.&#8221;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If Zombie Osama bin Laden were to were to wage Jihad against PowerPoint, I would gladly join his evil minions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m an engineer, and I have seen way too many PowerPoint slides. So I exult in the fact that the forum for the Large Hadron Collider at Fermilabs has banned PowerPoint slides in their presentations: A physicist is more than the sum of his or her slides.That&#8217;s why, about six months ago, organizers of a &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1069,1058,989],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","category-sociology","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186296"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}