7 ms·
The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
- kg 1y agoI'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.
- ahazred8ta 1y ago"Kings, heroes, and gods use a short and direct form of speech." -- theater maxim
- Full_Clark 1y agoit's also important to know your audience. If they've spent their career reading technical papers or dense prose, that's one thing. If they've largely grown up in the social media era and click away from reels/shorts that don't have animated captions, you'd design a very different deck.
- hinkley 1y agoOne of the dynamics is that if there is too much text they’ll read instead of listening to you. Another is that if the conclusion is on the deck, they’ll get bored waiting for you to get to the punchline they’ve already read, and that can lose your audience as well. So you’re better off either opening with the conclusion or putting it on the next slide, but accidentally jumping two slides forward can still ruin your audience’s attention span. So sometimes it’s better for it not to be in the deck at all.
- msarrel 1y agoInteresting article. Nice to see Tufte quoted. I took his class about the visual display of information. It was very informative.
- The_Fox 1y agoTufte 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-challenger-1997.pdf https://williamwolff.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/tufte-ch...
- hydrox24 1y agoThis 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-cognitive-style-of-powerpoint/ https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/new-edition-of-the-cogn... [1]: https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/the-columbia-evidence/ https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/the-columbia-evidence/
- sidewndr46 1y agoIf you haven't read it, I highly suggest you read Feynman's addendum to the Challenger disaster report: https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm The words "a safety factor of three" will live with me for every day of my life.
- dpstart01 1y ago"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
- alberto-m 1y ago> the few page grabs The full report (2003 edition, low-res) is available on ResearchGate. It appears to be a lawful copy, uploaded by the author himself. Fascinating reading, indeed. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/208575160_The_Cognitive_Style_of_PowerPoint https://www.researchgate.net/publication/208575160_The_Cogni...
- cxr 1y agoThat link is the chapter "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" from Tufte's book Beautiful Evidence, and it does mention Boeing's slides in the Columbia incident, but the main work that the author of this blog post cribbed (and failed to grasp) is a more detailed essay by Tufte called "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science: Assessing the Quality and Credibility of Technical Reports". <https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/powerpoint-does-rocket-science-and-better-techniques-for-technical-reports/ https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/powerpoint-does-rocket-...>
- black_13 1y ago[dead]
- suzzer99 1y agoHow 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?
- PopePompus 1y agoOne 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.
- poulpy123 1y agoFrozen water would have exploded at reentry
- bell-cot 1y agoSource? It would be solid water ice, mostly surrounded by shuttle wing structure, in a low-g reentry. Not an "ice & volatiles & etc." meteor in a high-g situation.
- poulpy123 1y agothe sources are the pressure and temperature conditions at reentry and the water phase diagram
- bell-cot 1y agoAblative heat shields work very reliably, even though their material has no substantial liquid phase between solid and vapor. The function of the ice would be to act as an ersatz ablative heat shield. Also a famous ex-NASA engineer analyzed a similar situation (water + protein) - https://what-if.xkcd.com/28/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/28/ - and noted no possibility of explosion, except in the case of a hypersonic tumble. A hypersonic tumble would shred the shuttle orbiter anyway, due to the extreme aerodynamic forces.
- mintplant 1y agoMy 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.
- kstrauser 1y agoWell, I’m proud of him, too. Thank him for helping us return to the stars.
- dclowd9901 1y agoIt's funny how the thankless jobs of quality assurance become so critical so quickly. And I mean that ironically of course. To folks out there: do the important work, not the glamorous work, and you'll not only sleep well, but you might actually matter as well.
- jacquesm 1y agoYes, but first it has to go horribly wrong. Same for security. After the breach there is plenty of budget.
- arethuza 1y agoMany years ago I had a fascination with security and fancied becoming the CISO for the multinational I was working for at the time - my boss at the time, the CIO, said the role would really have no power and would be there as a sacrificial lamb should there actually be a serious security breach. This rather put me off the idea.
- gjejcjekdnfnwja 1y agoAs 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.
- bpt3 1y agoThey should have made it abundantly clear that they had no idea what was going to happen and that loss of the crew and shuttle was a real possibility, but I agree with you. This slide was presented with a verbal talk track, and anyone who can't handle focusing on the topic because the slide is boring shouldn't be in a position of responsibility.
- cntainer 1y agoI can't remember the last time I saw a slide as mangled as the one in the article. It hurts my brain just reading it. But you are right, most engineers would consider that reasonable, while complaining about the "muggles" that just don't get it. As a Software Architect, one of my main responsibilities has been to take information presented like above and turn it into something that non-technical people can digest. Being able to express a complex concept in simple terms is an invaluable skill.
- gjejcjekdnfnwja 1y agoWe're talking about something a lot more technically sophisticated than a B2B SAAS CRUD web app. PhD level education is considered a prerequisite.
- renewiltord 1y agoAnother example of "guy can't spell" => "he's retarded". If you can't get everything right, you probably got lots of things wrong. It also shows why software engineers are superior engineers. The history of software engineering has some single-digit kills, at most 20 in total. Meanwhile, shuttle engineers are supposed to be the best in the aerospace business and they've lost some 13 or so? All aerospace would be put in the thousands. An old saying is "Any fool can build a bridge. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands". But these are fools who built bridges that didn't stand. One day, I will teach them real engineering: It is Rails backend with React frontend. Zero kills. Life above all. BTW: Here's is the original content with Tufte review https://www.edwardtufte.com/wp-content/uploads/bboard/images/0000jR-725.gif https://www.edwardtufte.com/wp-content/uploads/bboard/images...
- firesteelrain 1y agoOne could argue otherwise such as the Boeing 787 MAX MCAS Software Design.
- renewiltord 1y agoThat's a good counterexample. We can count that in software engineering. Can't say I expected Boeing software engineers to be any good. Dregs of the field but they still count as in the field. Aerospace software engineering quality substantially lacking, it's true.
- inetknght 1y ago> One day, I will teach them real engineering: It is Rails backend with React frontend. Zero kills. Life above all. Buddy, if you think that is "real engineering", you've got a lot of things to learn. Even in software engineering, rails and react aren't really engineering. Real engineering includes calculations -- data structures, algorithms, data structures, and user interfaces designed to work with people who are deaf or blind. You wanna tell me that rails is performant? Have you done calculations? You wanna tell me react's algorithms are well-defined in memory and time? Have you ensured that your "software" is usable by people with disabilities?
- socalgal2 1y agoThis was an interesting article but it doesn't really provide solutions. I watched a few tech talks teaching a new API. Most slides were split, left side bullet poitns, right side either code or an image. As I was watching I was thinking "isn't this supposed to be almost the worst style"? but I was also thinking "I can't think of any way to do this better". It's an API. It requires examples. And it requires something describing what to concentrate on, what the example or image is showing. I've been the plenty of great talks with just images, no words. But they fit the type of talk. I'm not sure an API talk would be better without bullet points. If you know of some to reference, please post links.
- klaff 1y agoTufte did make specific recommendations that one should prepare a real document that your audience can and should read, and that they would have in front of them during the meeting. I'm not sure how best to translate that to your API example.
- like_any_other 1y agoWhat would make the most important point of that slide stand out any more in a "real document" than in a slideshow? If anything, I would expect it to be buried even more - a slide and limited-time presentation forces you to be concise, while in a document there tend to be few limits on length. I would say the disaster occurred despite PowerPoint, not because of it. It's not clear to me at all why the slide author thought all that text was needed, when it seems to communicate almost nothing. If anything I would blame it on the culture around "real documents", where having more information is treated as better (probably because they serve multiple functions - to educate, but also as a record of activities), even if it makes it bloated and hard to read.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoA document generally has an abstract at the front and/or a conclusion at the back where the important information goes. A presentation accompanied by a document can be more easily done with punchy slides because the detail is in the document.
- nettlin 1y agoDiscussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19668161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19668161 I found it surprising that the slide in the article uses Calibri, a typeface that wasn’t publicly available at the time. The original discussion confirms that the slide in the article is a recreation of the original one: > The slide in the article has the same text, but is a recreation of the original (The Calibri typeface used wasn't part of PowerPoint until 2007). > The original slide can be seen in the full report linked in the article: > https://www.edwardtufte.com https://www.edwardtufte.com
- bigstrat2003 1y agoI don't see how this has anything to do with PowerPoint. There wasn't clear communication; the medium was completely incidental to that. They could have been writing on a chalkboard and had a communication failure, does that mean that chalkboards should be blamed in that case?
- stinkbeetle 1y agoBecause the medium is not conducive to dense amount of technical information that readers are expected to use to make or understand decisions. Other similar mediums like a chalkboard were not singled out because the problem was identified with PowerPoint specifically. And it wasn't a choice of mediums all with similar problems, but slides vs papers. From the article, > “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”
- breadwinner 1y agoWould it be better if you sent them a PDF document instead? There seems to be an assumption here that if you send the stakeholders a larger volume of information they will take the time to read it. Is that a valid assumption?
- mhh__ 1y agoMemos and reports also ask the author to try to explain things clearly and at length, a PowerPoint, even a technical one is usually figures and bullet points Jeff bezos iirc speaks at length about this.
- stinkbeetle 1y agoAre you asking me what I (a layperson having no knowledge of the organizations or projects) think, or are you asking me to look up the recommendations in the report that found over use of PowerPoint to have contributed to the communication problems at NASA for you?
- andrewflnr 1y ago
- ChrisArchitect 1y ago(2019) Some previous discussions: 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30615114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30615114 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19668161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19668161
- quacked 1y agoThis isn't a failure of PowerPoint. I work for NASA and we still use it all the time, and I'll assure anyone that the communication errors are rife regardless of what medium we're working in. The issue is differences in the way that in-the-weeds engineers and managers interpret technical information, which is alluded to in the article but the author still focuses on the bullets and the PowerPoint, as if rewriting similar facts in a technical paper would change everything. My own colleagues fall victim to this all the time (luckily I do not work in any capacity where someone's life is directly on the line as a result of my work.) Recently, a colleague won an award for helping managers make a decision about a mission parameter, but he was confused because they chose a parameter value he didn't like. His problem is that, like many engineers, he thought that providing the technical context he discovered that led him to his conclusion was as effective as presenting his conclusion. It never is; if you want to be heard by managers, and really understood even by your colleagues, you have to say things up front that come across as overly simple, controversial, and poorly-founded, and then you can reveal your analyses as people question you. I've seen this over and over again, and I'm starting to think it's a personality trait. Engineers are gossiping among themselves, saying "X will never work". They get to the meeting with the managers and present "30 different analyses showing X is marginally less effective than Y and Z" instead of just throwing up a slide that says "X IS STUPID AND WE SHOULDN'T DO IT." Luckily for me, I'm not a very good engineer, so when I'm along for the ride I generally translate well into Managerese.
- wredcoll 1y agoI was just reading a great discussion about how "academics use qualifiers as to how confident they are in the information" and you can see similar trends in spaces like hacker news. But using "uncertain" language seems unconvincing to people outside of these types of cultures. Also of course the power dynamics.
- dclowd9901 1y agoOh yeah, I've certainly seen this before. I'll assess my ability to complete a project under a time frame as "reasonably confident." In my mind, I'm thinking "so long as a meteor doesn't cause an extinction event," but the manager graciously pushes the target date back a week.
- NaOH 1y agoA 2008 episode of the PBS NOVA program covers the Columbia disaster. It does not get into the focus of the article posted here, but it does well covering how poorly the situation was handled (along with other things like the broad history of the Shuttle program). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t48bc2dyzo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t48bc2dyzo
- cxr 1y agoEveryone should note that the slides in this blog post are fabricated, and the author of this post misrepresents Tufte and the conclusions of the review board—subtly pointing people in a direction that's the exact opposite of the real takeaways from the investigation. It's almost insidious. The first time I came across this blog post a few years ago, I found it enraging, and I still do. As I said I said in my personal notes at the time, "The choice to use this fabricated material for this article and the false claims in it—claims not actually confirmed by the sources that it cites—amounts to what would be considered serious misconduct elsewhere." But there's no real accountability here, of course, because at the end of the day it's just some jerk with a blog serving up distorted pop science insights to aspiring entrepreneurs.
- firesteelrain 1y agoTake the text and send it to ChatGPT. Then, use this self doubt prompt and you get some alarming results. https://justin.searls.co/posts/sprinkling-self-doubt-on-chatgpt/ https://justin.searls.co/posts/sprinkling-self-doubt-on-chat...
- userbinator 1y agofalling nine times faster than a fired bullet No, that's not how the physics works. The foam is moving at the same velocity as the shuttle when it breaks off, and had a short time to accelerate(decelerate) before hitting the shuttle.
- KiwiJohnno 1y agoTHANK YOU. I've seen the velocity of the space shuttle quoted as the speed that the foam had when it hit Columbia's wing so many times, and it bugs the crap out of me.
- userbinator 1y agoIf that was the actual impact velocity of the foam, there would not be any doubt about whether the shuttle would survive reentry, that is if it even managed to make it all the way into space.
- blankx32 1y agoAs the crew rose at 28,968 kilometres per hour the piece of foam collided with one of the tiles on the outer edge of the shuttle’s left wing. This also cannot be correct at approx 82 seconds into flight.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI think Edward Tufte was involved in the investigation on that disaster. He has a legendary hatred of PowerPoint. https://www.edwardtufte.com/product/the-cognitive-style-of-powerpoint/ https://www.edwardtufte.com/product/the-cognitive-style-of-p...
- cromulent 1y agoThis is mentioned in the article, and linked to.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoYes. You are correct. I took his course, a number of years ago, and he mentioned it.
- dang 1y agoRelated: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30615114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30615114 - March 2022 (197 comments) Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19668161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19668161 - April 2019 (127 comments)
- os2warpman 1y ago> Why, given that the foam strike had occurred at a force massively out of test conditions had NASA proceeded with re-entry? What was the alternative? Columbia could not have made it to ISS. Columbia could not have repaired the damage in orbit. Columbia could not have lasted, after two weeks in space, long enough to launch a rescue mission. I know the "In Flight Options Assessment" said they could launch at an accelerated pace but the assessment assumes that it's ok to launch another vehicle with the same problem, no fix, and no completed analysis of the cause. Yeah, they suspected the external tank bipod foam, but WHY did the foam come off? Was it a fluke? Had some unknown factor not present in previous external tank bipod foam applications but now present in all external tank bipod foam applications manifested? >Two major assumptions, apart from the already stated assumption that the damage had to be visible, have to be recognized – the first is that there were no problems during the preparation and rollout of Atlantis, and the second is the question of whether NASA and the government would have deemed it acceptable to launch Atlantis with exposure to the same events that had damaged Columbia. At this point, at least two of the last three flights (STS-112 and STS-107) had bipod ramp foam problems, and the flight in-between these two, STS-113, was a night launch without adequate imaging of the External Tank during ascent. https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/caib/news/report/pdf/vol2/part13.pdf https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/caib/news/report/pdf/vol2/pa... (page 397) That's not a valid assumption. This is from a pre-flight safety report for STS-113 >“More than 100 External Tanks have flown with only 3 documented instances of significant foam loss on a bipod ramp” STS-1 through STS-111, April 1981 - June 2002: three "significant" bipod foam losses STS-112, October 2002: significant foam loss STS-113, November 2002: night time, but they saw 112 and went "oh shit" and wrote a report STS-107, January 2003: yet another, fatal, significant foam loss If two of the last three flights had foam problems and the one that didn't only didn't because you couldn't see if it did, and over 100 of the preceding flights only had three, you don't risk four more lives. You start designing a memorial at Arlington.
- wat10000 1y agoThe alternative is to try. Apollo 13 probably seemed pretty hopeless. They didn't just say "sorry fellas, maybe you'll get lucky and make it, good luck." The late great Bob Hoover said, "If you’re faced with a forced landing, fly the thing as far into the crash as possible." You keep trying until you can't anymore. Saying "well, maybe they'll survive," and not even telling them, is not the move when you have nearly a month to figure something out.
- poulpy123 1y agoFor once I will defend PowerPoint: 1/ the slide is atrocious, even by 2003 standard 2/ you don't decide on the life or death based on a crappy slide you don't understand.
- theK 1y agoFTA: > Think about your message. Don’t let that message be lost That was the important bit of the article. Regardless the medium, ensuring you deliver the message you want should always be the driving point. Also: Yes to less slides and more Position Papers (but keep em brief please :-D)
- cromulent 1y agoPeter Norvig's Gettysburg Address powerpoint is a great illustration of how Powerpoint makes things worse. https://norvig.com/Gettysburg/ https://norvig.com/Gettysburg/
- sankhao 1y agoThe slide is so bad it might be intentional. The intent would be to be reassuring enough that no one will point at Boeing and say "Boeing technical failure strands astronauts in space", while providing just enough information that in the event (at the time of writing the slide considered very unlikely) things go bad, they can say that nothing was withheld.
- LorenPechtel 1y agoYeah, the problem here isn't Powerpoint, it's what it said. This is a case of shoot the messenger. Powerpoint doesn't hinder communication, it lets people think they understand when their actual knowledge is superficial and can easily be a case of the primrose path.
- amelius 1y agoThe main problem is they didn't use reusable rockets, so these couldn't be properly tested before putting a human crew in. This problem seems mostly solved now.
- bell-cot 1y agoWhat would "proper testing" look like, to have caught and corrected the fatal design flaw? The shuttle was about as reusable as the Falcon 9 is now. Though at vastly higher expense.
- rbanffy 1y agoThe shuttle needed extensive refurbishment between flights. It wasn’t until after the loss of Columbia that they examined heat shield damage in orbit, assuming any damage observed on the ground would have occurred during reentry. For an organisation so risk averse as NASA, I was surprised how little focus was placed on the orbiters as experimental vehicles.
- LorenPechtel 1y agoAll they actually needed to do is pay attention. Both Columbia and Challenger were quite preventable, but the problems were basically ignored because they clearly hadn't destroyed the orbiter. Never mind that both showed random behavior outside the design spec, sooner or later the orbiter was going to roll a 1. They had seen the blow-by that killed Challenger, they had seen orbiters scoured by the foam before. However, it didn't really have a solution. The blow-by problem that destroyed Challenger was fixable, the foam problem was not. You could reduce the chance of a problem but nothing could be done about the fundamental problem of having parts of the heat shield aerodynamically behind other parts of the spacecraft, especially cryogenic parts of the spacecraft. (Ice could also do damage.)
- extraduder_ire 1y agoWhich parts weren't reusable?
- 1y ago
- rbanffy 1y agoThere is another point to be made about insisting on the reentry - Columbia didn’t have propellant to reach the ISS, and life support couldn’t be extended until a rescue mission could be mounted. A rescue mission would be further complicated because the docking hardware was not needed for this mission and was removed, and there was no airlock for EVAs (and no EVA suit on board), again, because it wasn’t part of the mission. If a rescue mission could have been mounted, it’d be something straight out of science fiction - tying ships together with cables and shuttling astronauts in their orange pressure suits through the side doors of two disconnected shuttles.
- blauditore 1y agoNote that the people making these slides are one the selling side, so they have a natural incentive to downplay the problem, and the slide smells a bit like that to me. (And by selling side I don't necessarily mean sales people, but also the engineers involved in designing, building, or at least working on the product.)
- dudeinjapan 1y agoTLDR; Bill Gates has blood on his hands.
- nuker 1y agoSome asked DoD to use satellites to see the damage. Linda Ham declined the request. "The imagery request was soon rescinded by NASA Mission Management Team Chair Linda Ham after she investigated the origin of it. She had consulted with Flight Director Phil Engelauf and members of the Mission Management Team, who stated that they did not have a requirement for imagery of Columbia. Ham did not consult with the Debris Assessment Team, and cancelled the imagery request on the basis that it had not been made through official channels." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disas...