The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
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The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
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Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
#2I've been slowly refining a pitch deck over the past couple years and the feedback from reviews and test pitches has strongly reinforced for me just how important it is for slides to be short and laid out precisely.
You want the most important information in the right places, communicated with as few words as possible, using the most accurate words possible.
You want the key takeaways to be the things that people are most likely to remember from each slide.
You want to minimize distractions and try not to pollute slides with a bunch of vaguely related stuff. A crowded slide risks communicating nothing.
It's a real dramatic change compared to how I am used to using powerpoint for technical audiences or when I had to make presentations during school.
Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
#3Interesting article. Nice to see Tufte quoted. I took his class about the visual display of information. It was very informative.
Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
#4Interesting article. Nice to see Tufte quoted. I took his class about the visual display of information. It was very informative.
Tufte also had a lot to say about the Challenger disaster, which predates Powerpoint but not the visual display of information.
Found the chapter here: https://williamwolff.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/tufte-ch...
Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
#5This article (as it makes clear) owes it's analysis at least largely to what Tufte has written about the Challenger disaster (1986) and Columbia Disaster (2003). He wrote about the Columbia one more fully in the second edition of The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.
Given that the link in the article to his report on his website is now broken, people might be interested in teh few page grabs that he has included in the "comments" on his site here[0].
See also the article that he has re-posted under the "comments" section on his page on the matter[1].
[0]: https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/new-edition-of-the-cogn... [1]: https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/the-columbia-evidence/
Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
#6[dead]
Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
#7How realistic was the idea of sending another shuttle up to rescue them? Would they have had enough oxygen?
If they did a spacewalk and found the damage, what were their options?
Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
#8How realistic was the idea of sending another shuttle up to rescue them? Would they have had enough oxygen? If they did a spacewalk and found the damage, what were their options?
One option would have been to place whatever high melting point metal tools they could spare into the hole, and freeze water around them to hold it in place. It also might have been possible to change the series of s-curves and other maneuvers done during re-entry, in order to lessen the heating on the left wing.
Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
#9My dad headed up the redesign effort on the Lockheed Martin side to remove the foam PAL ramps (where the chunk of foam that broke off and hit the orbiter came from) from the external tank, as part of return-to-flight after the Columbia disaster. At the time he was the last one left at the company from when they had previously investigated removing those ramps from the design. He told me how he went from basically working on this project off in a corner on his own, to suddenly having millions of dollars in funding and flying all over for wind tunnel tests when it became clear to NASA that return-to-flight couldn't happen without removing the ramps.
I don't think his name has ever come up in all the histories of this—some Lockheed policy about not letting their employees be publicly credited in papers—but he's got an array of internal awards from this time around his desk at home (he's now retired). I've always been proud of him for this.
Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
#10As an engineer, that slide looks completely reasonable to me. Its purpose was to communicate technical info, which it did adequately. Keep in mind that the subject matter is highly technical, given that we're literally talking about the Space Shuttle, and more than a high school level of reading comprehension is heavily implied. If the NASA personnel weren't competent enough to review technical data without a pithy summary, that's on them.