The Tremendous 10 link roundup, #130

1. Why You Can Focus in a Coffee Shop but Not in Your Open Office | “A few years ago, during a media interview for one of my books, my interviewer said something I still ponder often. Ranting about the level of distraction in his open office, he said, ‘That’s why I have a membership at the coworking space across the street — so I can focus.’ While I fully support the backlash against open offices, the comment struck me as odd. After all, coworking spaces also typically use an open office layout.”
2. Card catalogs and the secret history of modernity | “Card catalogs feel very old but are shockingly new. Merchants stored letters and slips of paper on wire or thread in the Renaissance. (Our word “file” comes from filum, or wire.) But a whole technology, based on scientific principles, for storing, retrieving, and circulating an infinitely extensible batch of documents? That is some modern-ass shit. And it helped create the world we all live in.”
3. The 7 Kinds of Data Visualization People | “Data visualization practitioners are a motley group, and while no two may look exactly alike, they all fall into one of 7 distinct categories.”
4. The subtle art that differentiates good designers from great designers | “Comparisons can be difficult. The concept of relativity, by which we ascertain that a particular subject is better than another subject, allows us to choose the better among the best. It helps us in making decisions effectively. And even when humans have no innate means of determining the value of something, we often evaluate things on the basis of emotions and experiences.”
5. How Twitter Killed the First Amendment | “You need not be a media historian to notice that we live in a golden age of press harassment, domestic propaganda and coercive efforts to control political debate.”
6. 10 Unusual But Critical Edit Checks Before You Hit Publish | “A good story is more than good structure, grammar and spelling. Does it keep your reader interested? Do they feel compelled to continue to the end? It’s difficult for us to judge ourselves. We’re too close to it. I come from a background in copywriting. The goal of the copywriter is to sell. To do that, you must keep your reader interested until the end. Before I put the finishing touches on copy I go through a checklist.”
7. Spoon – Do I Have to Talk You Into It (Official Video) | Done as a Photoshop retouching session.
8. Kevin Kelly and the Golden Age of World Travel | “In the latest episode of On Margins (iTunes, Google Play), Kevin Kelly and I discuss photography and traveling around Asia in the 1970s with just a Nikkormat and a bag filled with Kodachrome. In 2002, he turned his tens of thousands of images from those travels into the Taschen published book, Asia Grace.”
9. ‘Verbatim: What Is a Photocopier?’ | “In 2012, on my Facebook feed, I stumbled across a hilarious excerpt from a legal transcript. In a deposition in Ohio, a lawyer became embroiled in an absurd argument about the definition of a photocopier… In this short film, I sought to creatively reinterpret the original events.”
10. The End. | “After publishing Quipsologies for 12 years (7 as its own site, 5 when it lived inside Speak Up before that), it is with a good amount of sadness that this is the last Quip and the end of the road for this site. Aside from Brand New, this has always been my favorite site to run simply because it has given me the excuse to explore the internet and all the cool things out there.”

Photo by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash.