By David Crotty - @DAVIDACROTTY - NLMagazine, AI, IT, PowerPoint, VIDEO - Not sure how I ended up going down this particular rabbit hole, and though this post may only appeal to a highly niche audience, today I offer you the work of Tom Wildenhain, who apparently, in fourth grade, wanted to learn how to program but had a PC that had only the basic Windows Office Suite of programs available.
And so he chose Powerpoint as his preferred programming platform.
The video below shows how he used PowerPoint to construct a Turing Machine, declaring that with PowerPoint, no other computer applications are necessary, as all computational tasks can be accomplished through the creation of dedicated .pptx files. All the example below takes is 1,600 animations and 700 autoshapes.
If you want a really deep dive into PowerPoint programming, you can find a lecture Wildenhain gave at CMU here.
Who knew that we had the answer to all of our computational needs lurking in that presentation you gave to your editorial board last month.
David Crotty
David Crotty is a Senior Consultant at Clarke & Esposito, a boutique management consulting firm focused on strategic issues related to professional and academic publishing and information services. Previously, David was the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press. He oversaw journal policy across OUP’s journals program, drove technological innovation, and served as an information officer. David acquired and managed a suite of research society-owned journals with OUP, and before that was the Executive Editor for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, where he created and edited new science books and journals, along with serving as a journal Editor-in-Chief. He has served on the Board of Directors for the STM Association, the Society for Scholarly Publishing and CHOR, Inc., as well as The AAP-PSP Executive Council. David received his PhD in Genetics from Columbia University and did developmental neuroscience research at Caltech before moving from the bench to publishing.
