A Recipe for Motivation: Easy to Read, Easy to Do: Scientific Am. ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS American cartoonists of the 20th century was Rube Goldberg, who was widely known for his “Goldberg machines.”
Each of these comical inventions depicted a complex set of “instructions” for completing what should have been a fairly simple everyday task. His Self-Operating Napkin, for example, required 13 sequential steps involving a parrot, a cigar lighter, a rocket and a sickle—along with various strings, springs and pendulums. The cartoons were funny because they poked good-natured fun at a fundamental irony of human psychology. People will make even the simplest task much more complicated than it needs to be, yet all this overexplaining rarely helps. Indeed, the opposite is often true: Goldberg’s convoluted “how-to” instructions may make us laugh, but they also leave us feeling exhausted. Linked Data - Connect Distributed Data across the Web. Technology Review: A Way Out of E-mail Overload. Despite all our best efforts, most of us are still drowning in e-mail, and much of it is sent by machines rather than real people.
OtherInbox, a Web service launched this weekend at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) conference, in Austin, TX, promises to rescue e-mail-swamped users from this problem. The messages that the new service handles usually aren’t spam. Instead, they’re legitimate communications from trusted companies that sometimes contain useful information: alerts, special offers, and service updates.