The final installment of a survey of global warming by Elizabeth Kolbert published in The New Yorker (May 9, 2005), sets forth some ideas for attacking the problem advanced by Princeton engineering professor Robert Socolow, co-director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative. The article features a striking illustration based on a chart Socolow and his colleagues [...]
We owe more to the printed picture than to the printed word. That, paraphrased, is the thesis of a wonderful book, Prints and Visual Communication, by William M Ivins, Jr., first published in 1953. Ivins was for many years curator of prints at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. From the title and cover, [...]
Information marching across the page by ranks and columns looks more purposeful than when it’s milling about in paragraphs. But, even with a computer, laying out a table is labor-intensive.
The layout below will provide some useful guidelines. It exemplifies a “formal” table of the kind scientists and scholars construct when they have categories-within-categories of data [...]
Sometimes it makes sense to create an animation in Flash and then to embed it in PowerPoint. Here are some instructions I wrote up a while back. The screen grabs are from an earlier version of PowerPoint, but PowerPoint 2007 looks the same.
1). Go to the slide where you want the Flash animation [...]
Looking at the Flash timeline interface, you can see that it derives from traditional cel animation. You see layers, numbered frames, and what look like spreadsheet cells, analogous to the cels traditionally used to separate characters and scenery.
In the traditional Disney and Warner Brothers style, characters are inked and painted onto celluloid, then photographed over [...]