This work by Jason M. Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
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Well, it’s been a long wait, but David Firth has released the eighth installment of the delightfully twisted and demented Salad Fingers series. We meet a new friend, Roger, and welcome back Hubert Cumberdale.
Warning: If you are easily offended or freaked out, then maybe you shouldn’t click that link.
I hate presentations. I hate making them, I hate giving them. Well, sorta. I actually liked making this presentation for my German class. Rather, I liked the end result. I got a decent grade on it, losing points mostly for not having much to say aside from what was on the slides. My problem was that I couldn’t think of anything else to say about him during the presentation. I could have rehearsed it better, but then I hate rehearsing ten times as much as I hate making the presentation. The thought of rehearsing is anathema to me.
So recently I came across Pecha Kucha, which I think is about the best idea to hit presentations since their inception. I wrote about it in an earlier post. To recap, it’s a presentation style invented in Japan by two Western architects. The idea is simple: 20 slides at 20 seconds each. Total running time is 6 minutes 40 seconds. You have to keep the pace going or you’ll fail. You have to plan the presentation properly or you’ll fail. It’s awesome. The primary benefit of course is that your audience doesn’t fall asleep.
Today I saw an article on Presentation Zen comparing the different presentation styles of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. There was another article two years ago that I stumbled on and forgot about until this post reminded me. Basically, Bill Gates gives crappy, average presentations while Jobs is memorable (and for the record, crappy = average for presentations). One particular thing stood out to me: the six key features of sticky messages. Stickiness is the quality of an idea or message sticking in people’s minds. To be sticky, a presentation must have these attributes:
That’s actually a great blog if you find yourself having to give presentations (as I do).
Currently the features I want Google to add:
Note: This is a very incomplete list, just what’s pressing at the moment.
Regarding (2), currently when you are presented with the papers in the search result, there is a link that looks like
I’d like a link added that shows you results for everything this paper cites, so I don’t have to open the paper and manually search for everything in there. The link would basically say “Cites 13 articles” (or something similar). That’s not so hard, is it?
And for (3), I want to be able to search the papers that cite a particular paper or author and the papers that are cited by a particular paper or author. There are definitely more issues that need to be worked out for this, since it would be a many-to-many explosion in the case of ill-formed queries. Maybe just an option to narrow it down so we’re searching based on a paper that was already turned up in a search.
Added (3) after the original post.
The things Bush says are so awesome sometimes. My new favorite quote is “Childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured.” [source] At first the White House transcriptionists corrected the mistake, but then press secretary Dana Perino instructed them to include the mistake, saying that the integrity of the transcriptions is very important to her. This is good.
Language Log brought this particular juicy quote to my attention and Mark Liberman has an interesting commentary on the nature of the grammatical mistake – one more common to children than adults. He also has a clip you can listen to. He goes on to say that Bush does pause after he says childrens but that there’s no indication he’s just made a planning mistake. I’m not completely sure I agree here. I don’t think he necessarily did, but it’s possible. I’m curious whether he was reading from a teleprompter or piece of paper and misread it as children’s and then seeing the rest of the quote, paused because it didn’t parse at first and then plunged on ahead because he’s a public speaker and it’s better to just keep going than stop and visibly appear to be lost.
Anyhow, the interesting part of Liberman’s post is the reference to chilluns, which he attributes to some possibly fictional southern dialect. It’s not fictional. It’s called Gullah and it’s from around the Charleston area in South Carolina. Interestingly, I have also heard some people use a similar form in the country around the midlands of South Carolina. I’m not really sure how to transcribe it, but it’s sort of like chillren. Unlike chilluns it’s usually not plural (at least not that I recall). When I first heard it, I thought the speaker was joking and using covert nonsense speech, like many of the words my wife and I use together. For example, Kek kek kek = Connecticut, Pennsyltucky = Pennsylvania (especially when referring to the more rural parts), and South Kakalakee = South Carolina. (We didn’t make all those up, but they are parts of our private conversations.)
But you can actually find a lot of occurrences of chillren on Google, so it’s not all that uncommon. It seems to appear in a lot of slave narratives (judging by the Google results), so it probably had its origins in the pre-Civil War era and has survived in some areas.
I came across this dog costume on the Green Man. I think Daedalus would look hilarious in it. Last Christmas, we dressed him as Daedal the red-nosed reindog. Just need to find some stuffed animals and someone who knows how to sew…
