The 22 Worst Place Names in the World 22. C…

The 22 Worst Place Names in the World

22. Cockburn, Western Australia
Although this name is often pronounced “Coburn” by those who stand to lose from its awfulness, who actually reads that when they see this word? Oh, how it burns.

21. Twatt, Orkney, Shetland Islands, Scotland
The Shetland Islands, pronounced “Shitland Islands” if you have an accent like mine, make up a happy little area north of Scotland where it’s too cold for trees to grow. I am related to approximately half the population of the Shetland Islands, share a last name with a quarter of them, and can probably trace my ancestry back to Twatt if I try hard enough. The pride!

[Full list here]

The 22 Worst Place Names in the World 22. …

The 22 Worst Place Names in the World

22. Cockburn, Western Australia
Although this name is often pronounced “Coburn” by those who stand to lose from its awfulness, who actually reads that when they see this word? Oh, how it burns.

21. Twatt, Orkney, Shetland Islands, Scotland
The Shetland Islands, pronounced “Shitland Islands” if you have an accent like mine, make up a happy little area north of Scotland where it’s too cold for trees to grow. I am related to approximately half the population of the Shetland Islands, share a last name with a quarter of them, and can probably trace my ancestry back to Twatt if I try hard enough. The pride!

[Full list here]

Funny Cursor Check out this funny computer curso…

Funny Cursor

Check out this funny computer cursor

The World’s Thinnest Notebook [Link] When…

The World’s Thinnest Notebook

[Link] When Intel asked designers to build a better laptop, its instructions were simple, really. The machine has to be fashionable, able to connect to all manner of wireless networks, and full of the latest, fastest computing capabilities. Oh yes, and make it as thin as Motorola’s Razr. Its own engineers in conjunction with Ziba Design in Portland, Ore., rose to the challenge.

The result, code-named Intel mobile Metro notebook, is less than 0.7 inches thick—about one-quarter of an inch thicker than Motorola’s (MOT) iconic cell phone, making it the world’s thinnest notebook. And at 2.25 pounds, it’s also one of the lightest small-sized portable computers. Other features include always-on Internet connectivity via various wireless technologies.

And unlike other computer prototypes, including some from Intel, this one actually may line the shelves of a retailer before long. Intel hasn’t announced an official release date but people familiar with the matter say a PC maker will announce plans to start manufacturing the machine later this year.

Hilarious Indian Superman and Spidergirl movie …

Hilarious Indian Superman and Spidergirl movie

[Via BoingBoing]: “This song and dance clip taken from a Hindustani film (I think) has got to be one of the weirdest ever to come out from the Bollywood studios. The lousy special effects used for the flying scenes – you can look through both of them – coupled with really horrendous Superman and Spiderwoman costumes, make this a real classic!”

Boy kills half-ton monster boar with pistol Ho…

Boy kills half-ton monster boar with pistol

Hogzilla is being made into a horror movie. But the sequel may be even bigger: Meet Monster Pig. An 11-year-old Alabama boy used a pistol to kill a wild hog his father says weighed a staggering 1,051 pounds and measured 9-feet-4 from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail. Think hams as big as car tires.

If the claims are accurate, Jamison Stone’s trophy boar would be bigger than Hogzilla, the famed wild hog that grew to seemingly mythical proportions after being killed in south Georgia in 2004.

Hogzilla originally was thought to weigh 1,000 pounds and measure 12 feet in length. National Geographic experts who unearthed its remains believe the animal actually weighed about 800 pounds and was 8 feet long.

Regardless of the comparison, Jamison is reveling in the attention over his pig, which has a Web site put up by his father—http://www.monsterpig.com —that is generating Internet buzz.

“It feels really good,” Jamison, of Pickensville, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “It’s a good accomplishment. I probably won’t ever kill anything else that big.”

Jamison, who killed his first deer at age 5, was hunting with father Mike Stone and two guides in east Alabama on May 3 when he bagged Hogzilla II. He said he shot the huge animal eight times with a .50- caliber revolver and chased it for three hours through hilly woods before finishing it off with a point-blank shot.

Through it all there was the fear that the animal would turn and charge them, as wild boars have a reputation of doing.

“I was a little bit scared, a little bit excited,” said Jamison, who just finished the sixth grade on the honor roll at Christian Heritage Academy, a small, private school.

His father said that, just to be extra safe, he and the guides had high-powered rifles aimed and ready to fire in case the beast with 5- inch tusks decided to charge.

With the pig finally dead in a creek bed on the 2,500-acre Lost Creek Plantation, a commercial hunting preserve in Delta, trees had to be cut down and a backhoe brought in to bring Jamison’s prize out of the woods.

It was hauled on a truck to the Clay County Farmers Exchange in Lineville, where Jeff Kinder said they used his scale, which was recently calibrated, to weigh the hog.

Kinder, who didn’t witness the weigh-in, said he was baffled to hear the reported weight of 1,051 pounds because his scale—an old, manual style with sliding weights—only measures to the nearest 10.

“I didn’t quite understand that,” he said.

Mike Stone said the scale balanced one notch past the 1,050-pound mark, and he thought it meant a weight of 1,051 pounds.

“It probably weighed 1,060 pounds. We were just afraid to change it once the story was out,” he said.

The hog’s head is now being mounted on an extra-large foam form by Jerry Cunningham of Jerry’s Taxidermy in Oxford. Cunningham said the animal measured 54 inches around the head, 74 inches around the shoulders and 11 inches from the eyes to the end of its snout.

“It’s huge,” he said. “It’s just the biggest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Mike Stone is having sausage made from the rest of the animal. “We’ll probably get 500 to 700 pounds,” he said.

Jamison, meanwhile, has been offered a small part in “The Legend of Hogzilla,” a small-time horror flick based on the tale of the Georgia boar. The movie is holding casting calls with plans to begin filming in Georgia.

Jamison is enjoying the newfound celebrity generated by the hog hunt, but he said he prefers hunting pheasants to monster pigs.

“They are a little less dangerous.”[Source: breitbart via AP]

Coca-Cola Agrees to Buy Glaceau The Coca-Cola Co…

Coca-Cola Agrees to Buy Glaceau

The Coca-Cola Co., which has been looking to expand its water and energy drink portfolio and jump-start sales in North America, said Friday it has agreed to buy Vitaminwater maker Glaceau in a cash deal valued at $4.1 billion.

The world’s largest beverage maker said the agreement to acquire privately held Energy Brands Inc., known as Glaceau, provides Atlanta-based Coca-Cola with a strong platform to grow its “active lifestyle” beverages.

The acquisition, Coca-Cola’s largest ever, will be financed with debt, and is expected to add to Coca-Cola’s earnings starting in 2008, but will slightly dilute profits this year, executives said.

Coca-Cola’s chief financial officer, Gary Fayard, said in a conference call with analysts that Coke will take full ownership of Glaceau, which for now is 30 percent owned by holdings of India’s Tata Group, a conglomerate with interests spanning steel, software services, hotels, chemicals and insurance. The Tata stake will be acquired later than the majority stake, Fayard said.

Tata paid $677 million for the stake last year, a deal that valued the entire company at $2.2 billion, Coca-Cola said.

The deal could reduce Coca-Cola’s financial flexibility to buy back its own shares. Coca-Cola had previously said it would buy $2.5 billion to $3 billion of its stock this year; Fayard said Friday the company now expects to repurchase at least $1.75 billion to $2 billion in shares in 2007.

Fayard said the company expects cost savings from the deal to develop later, and he added that Coca-Cola will invest those savings in further growth of Glaceau’s brands.

Formed in 1996 and based in Whitestone, N.Y., Glaceau is the maker of Vitaminwater, Fruitwater, Smartwater and Vitaminenergy.

The deal to buy Glaceau, which would operate as a separate business unit within Coca-Cola’s North America segment, is expected to close in the summer. It is subject to regulatory review. The boards of both companies have approved the transaction.

Glaceau is attractive for Coca-Cola because of its position in the enhanced-water and energy drink categories, which Coca-Cola is betting will make up a large portion of the beverage industry’s growth in North America through 2010.

Coca-Cola said Glaceau’s top three executives – founder and CEO J. Darius Bikoff, President Mike Repole and Chief Financial Officer Mike Venuti – intend to lead the business for at least three years, and that other key managers will remain in the business.

A spokeswoman for Glaceau, Nina Fiddian-Green, declined to discuss her company’s corporate structure and financial information, and she referred questions to Coca-Cola. Glaceau does not release annual sales figures.

Coca-Cola has been trying to improve sales in its key North America unit, which has been a weak spot. The company’s 14 percent increase in first-quarter profit came on a double-digit rise in overall sales, but in North America, unit-case volume declined 3 percent in the quarter.

Coca-Cola shares rose 62 cents to $51.86 in morning trading Friday. [Via AP]

Sony develops film-thin, bending display Son…

Sony develops film-thin, bending display

Sony unveiled what is billed as the world’s first flexible, full-color OLED display built on organic thin-film transistor (TFT) technology. The 2.5-inch prototype display supports 16.8 million colors at a 120 x 160 pixel resolution, is 0.3 mm thick and weighs 1.5 grams

In the race for ever-thinner displays for TVs, cell phones and other gadgets, Sony may have developed one to beat them all – a razor-thin display that bends like paper while showing full-color video.

Sony Corp. released video of the new 2.5-inch display Friday. In it, a hand squeezes a display that is 0.3 millimeters, or 0.01 inch, thick. The display shows color images of a bicyclist stuntman and a picturesque lake.

Although flat-panel TVs are getting slimmer, a display that’s so thin it bends in a human hand marks a breakthrough.

Sony said it has yet to decide on commercial products using the technology.

“In the future, it could get wrapped around a lamppost or a person’s wrist, even worn as clothing,” said Sony spokesman Chisato Kitsukawa. “Perhaps it can be put up like wallpaper.”

Tatsuo Mori, an engineering and computer science professor at Nagoya University, said some hurdles remained, including making the display bigger, ensuring durability and cutting costs.

But he said the display’s pliancy is extremely difficult to imitate with liquid crystal displays and plasma display panels – the two main display technologies now on the market.

“To come up with a flexible screen at that image quality is groundbreaking,” Mori said. “You can drop it, and it won’t break because it’s as thin as paper.”

The new display combines two technologies: Sony’s organic thin film transistor, which is required to make flexible displays, and organic electroluminescent display.

Other companies, including LG. Philips LCD Co. and Seiko Epson Corp., are also working on a different kind of “electronic paper” technology, but Sony said the organic electroluminescent display delivers better color images and is more suited for video.

Sony President Ryoji Chubachi has said a film-like display is a major technology his company is working on to boost its status as a technological powerhouse.

In a meeting with reporters more than a year ago, Chubachi boasted Sony was working on a technology for displays so thin it could be rolled up like paper. He had predicted that the world would stand up and take notice.

Some analysts have said Sony, which makes Walkman portable players and PlayStation 3 video game machines, had fallen behind rivals in flat-panel technology, including Samsung Electronics Co. of South Korea and Sharp Corp. of Japan.

But Sony has been marking a turnaround under Chubachi and Chief Executive Howard Stringer, the first foreigner to head Sony, by reducing jobs, shuttering unprofitable businesses and strengthening its flat TV offerings. [Via AP]

Your Eye Gaze Has Power She’s sitting across the…

Your Eye Gaze Has Power

She’s sitting across the room. She’s beautiful. You’ve got the skills to approach her. Maybe it’s a nightclub or a a bookstore and nobody knows each other.

Or maybe it’s a social circle situatoin. Maybe a house party. Maybe a dinner party. A seminar. A yoga class. An improv comedy class. A work function. A dance class.

In a non-social circle situation, you can approach the girl right away. Or you can talk to other people in the room. It’s not as big a deal.

But in social circle situations, sometimes you want to bide your time. You still want to be the most social guy in the room, but there’s no need to show interest right away. Biding your time can be in your favor.

At this point, I believe that body language is paramount. What you do with your eye gaze and body language orientation will demonstrate your power in this situation.

If you guys are like me, you love to look at beautiful women. I check out hot girls all the time.

Men are built differently. We get gratification from visual stimulation.

That hot girl walks by and I check her out. She walks by again and I check her out again. I keep looking. I enjoy looking.

Not that women don’t like looking at men, but it’s not as huge an urge. They don’t get as much pleasure as men do. Multiple studies have shown that the brain is not as visually stimulated seuxally in women as in men.

So what do I do in a social situation? I check the girl out. And I keep checking her out. Even though I already have the information.

I know she’s hot. I know I’m attracted to her.

This is the point at which I advise to NOT keep checking her out. After you initially look at her, do not keep looking her way.

Do not continue to “steal glances.” Do not continue to look at her without speaking to her. She can sense it. And so can everyone else in the room.

Your eye gaze has power. You gain confidence from people looking at you. And you get people looking at you when you are confident.

Lance Mason, founder of Pickup 101, talks about this concept as well. The manager of a restaurant will get attraction from all the waitresses in the restaurant simply because whenever he walks across the restaurant, all eyes are on him. Everyone is watching to see what he’s doing.

In studying social geometry in primates, Michael Chance reveals that in any social interaction

There is a persistent focusing of attention by all subordinate members of rank-ordered primate groups toward the alpha or dominant animal, usually without its taking specific action to attract this constant attention.

And this makes sense. Everybody watches the leader to see what he’s going to do next.

Think about this in a social situation. Instead of you stealing glances at the attractive girl, every once in a while you catch her looking at you.

How do you feel at that point? Pretty good, right? You start to gain confidence in that situation.

I’m not saying you should never look at an attractive woman. If and when you do look at her, look deliberately and slowly. Do not look away if she looks at you. Let her look away first.

And there are other aspects to being attractive in social situations, such as speaking loudly, being the most fun guy in the room, taking the lead. But pay careful attention where you place your gaze. Your gaze has power and should be treated as such.

Once you finally speak to the girl, whether you are introduced to her or take the opportunity to walk up to her and say “I don’t believe we’ve met,” your interest in her will be seen as interest from an equal or from an attractive cool guy, rather than someone already completely sold on her for her beauty. [Via ApproachAnxiety]