Death by PowerPoint

I gave a brief talk today at the 22nd annual Seattle Parasitology Conference. I got to the following slide . . .

. . . and the image shook from side to side, disappeared, reappeared, shook some more, disappeared again, and so on. It was as if I was falling asleep at my own presentation, except that I wasn’t the one dozing off. The projector was. The slides flickered back and forth and off and on for the rest of the talk. I found myself saying things like, “If you could see the Y axis, what you’d see is…”

Afterwards I received a bunch of sympathetic comments and a few funny ones. One observer summarized the talk as “really exciting,” making it clear that she was not referring to my data.

I guess I’m just glad that the audience found it exciting and the projector found it dull, rather than the other way around.