The Tremendous 10 link roundup, #43

1. Kurt Vonnegut Diagrams the Shape of All Stories in a Master’s Thesis Rejected by U. Chicago | “‘What has been my prettiest contribution to the culture?’ asked Kurt Vonnegut in his autobiography Palm Sunday. His answer? His master’s thesis in anthropology for the University of Chicago, ‘which was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun.’ The elegant simplicity and playfulness of Vonnegut’s idea is exactly its enduring appeal. The idea is so simple, in fact, that Vonnegut sums the whole thing up in one elegant sentence: ‘The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.'”
2. Hey, Internet: Stop Trying To Inspire Me | “I think when people are ultra-positive and have this incomparably sunny disposition toward the world, I get turned off. There’s a lot of stuff out there which attempts to make you feel inspired, but ends up leaving you feeling ashamed for being human.”
3. 1000 Musicians Simultaneously Perform ‘Learn To Fly’ to Persuade the Foo Fighters to Play Concert in Italy | “Conceived in 2014 by Fabio Zaffagnini, a multi-lingual musician, adventurer and TEDx speaker, the project took many months to come together through crowdfunding and of course, finding the right musicians who could synchronize with other musicians perfectly.”
4. Inside the failure of Google+, a very expensive attempt to unseat Facebook | “Create a social network or risk everything. That was the original pitch for Google’s Facebook rival, Google+, a refrain hammered over and over by the social network’s chief architect, Vic Gundotra, in meetings with the company’s top brass.”
5. What if you could replace performance evaluations with four simple questions? | “Deloitte has come up with them (and two only need a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer).”
6. Slack is amazing, but will its success destroy any semblance of work/life balance we have left? | “Thinking through remedies for the always-on, always-communicating world.”
7. The User Experience of Creative Sprints | “Here’s how the role of UX has shifted from wireframing in isolation to spearheading whole teams to think about great user experience – and why that’s a good thing.”
8. BLACKBOX: a boring new business company from the creators of Cards Against Humanity | “Selling stuff online is tedious and horrible, but at some point we got really good at it. Blackbox lets you sell and ship your stuff for a fraction of the cost and effort of doing it yourself. The shipping is fast. We pay your sales tax. You can customize the packaging and the inserts. It’s pretty great.”
9. Canon Just Unleashed an ISO 4,000,000 Camera | “That’s right: this camera can basically see in the dark. Canon says the sensor in the camera allows it to shoot Full HD video while subjects are illuminated with less than 0.0005 lux. To put that in perspective, full moon on a clear night is about 0.27 to 1.0 lux, and 0.0001 lux is a moonless, overcast night. The camera can capture high-quality images of things the human eye cannot see.”
10. DAILY OVERVIEW | “Our project was inspired, and derives its name, from an idea known as the Overview Effect. This term refers to the sensation astronauts have when given the opportunity to look down and view the Earth as a whole. They have the chance to appreciate our home in its entirety, to reflect on its beauty and its fragility all at once. That’s the cognitive shift that we hope to inspire.”

Image: YouTube screenshot via link #3.