16 Things My Dad Taught Me

1. You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight-savings time.

2. You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.

3. The most powerful force in the universe is gossip.

4. The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status, or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above-average drivers.

5. There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age 11.

6. There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness."

7. People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.

8. If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings."

9. The main accomplishment of almost all organized protests is to annoy people who are not in them.

10. If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle.

11. You should not confuse your career with your life.

12. A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.

13. No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.

14. When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.

15. Your friends love you, anyway.

16. Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.

- from AskMen.com

Don't get mad...

Feeling like you want to choke your fellow employee, or worse, your boss?

According to Yahoo! HotJobs, recent research shows a welcome decline in workplace stress, but, like an unhealthy condition that never really goes away, the reality of workplace stress can still lead to uncomfortable situations at the office.

A study done by career coach Rachelle J. Canter and Opinion Research Group revealed that there was a 15-point drop from 2000 to 2007 in the percentage of people who reported workplace stress is a problem for them at least occasionally. She also found that 16 percent of workers said this year that stress caused them to yell at a co-worker (down from 29 percent in 2000).

The overall atmosphere may have improved, but for workers stuck in an office with a co-worker who yells at them, damages property, or shows signs of "office rage," life is difficult. Canter defines office rage as "verbal or physical abuse that is out of proportion and inappropriate in a workplace setting."

Some tips:
1. Don't Take It Personally

If you're faced with a coworker who overacts or lashes out in an inappropriate manner, don't take it personally, said anger management expert Leonard Ingram, who created angermgmt.com. "Other people are going to get angry at you whether the anger is just or not."

The next step is to "not make yourself angrier than you need to be," Ingram said, noting that you shouldn't stew, or form an inner dialogue that makes you angry.

2. Allow Some Room to Vent

From there, give the angry colleague the "opportunity to diffuse, calm down, and make their own case -- people tend to appreciate that."

The key is empathy, Ingram said, which does not mean that if you are the victim of office rage, you're legitimizing their bad behavior. After the most tense moments have passed, Ingram suggests you "ask them what happened to make them so upset. That gives them an option to get rational for a moment."

3. It Can Happen to You, Too

If you find yourself overreacting at the office, chances are the cause goes far beyond your inbox, said Liz Bywater, president of Bywater Consulting Group. "People will often arrive at the office primed to lose it," Bywater said, noting that traffic, family issues or a bad night's sleep can set you up for office rage.

The simplest step is to just remove yourself from the situation if you think you can't control your anger.

"It's perfectly appropriate to say 'You know what, I'm a little hot under the collar, and I don't think it is just about this.' Walk away from it if you can."

4. Take a Breather

It also helps to make some sort of physical change, Bywater said.

"Try deep breathing, go out and get some fresh air, maybe your blood sugar has dropped."

The larger issue is to figure out why you slipped into office rage, especially if it is a pattern.

"Maybe you're in a work environment you can't tolerate" she said, "but more often than not you have to look at what else is wrong."

Man outruns horse

Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Johnson got a head start without having to jump offside, and beat his coverage to the goal line again.

Johnson was waiting at the finish line when Restore the Roar arrived at the end of his one-eighth-mile gallop. Yes, Johnson raced a horse Saturday and easily won.

Johnson was spotted a 100-meter lead -- roughly about half the distance the horse had to cover in the race for charity. And when it was over, Johnson, as usual, was anything but humble. He sounded ready to take on boxing, basketball and NASCAR.

"Floyd Mayweather, you're next," Johnson said. "I want to fight you. I'd like to take Kobe and LeBron one-on-one. Jeff Gordon, we can take a couple laps. ... Now it's my time to take over the race world."

The 4-year-old colt's jockey, P.J. Cooksey, rode a horse that beat former Bengals receiver Cris Collinsworth in 1993. She sounded more impressed with Johnson's speed.

"He's quick," Cooksey said. "He's a fast man. That was phenomenal. When I looked over at him, all I could see were his legs; they looked like a windmill. He was a blur. I was beat bad."

The latest on deja vu

Déjà vu (French for "already seen"); an uncanny feeling or illusion of having already seen or experienced something that is being experienced for the first time.

If we assume that the experience is actually of a remembered event, then déjà vu probably occurs because an original experience was neither fully attended to nor elaborately encoded in memory. If so, then it would seem most likely that the present situation triggers the recollection of a fragment from one's past. The experience may seem uncanny if the memory is so fragmented that no strong connections can be made between the fragment and other memories.

Thus, the feeling that one has been there before is often due to the fact that one has been there before. One has simply forgotten most of the original experience because one was not paying close attention the first time. The original experience may even have occurred only seconds or minutes earlier.

The brain cranks out memories near its center, in a looped wishbone of tissue called the hippocampus. But an article from LiveScience.com reports on a new study suggesting that only a small chunk of it, called the dentate gyrus, is responsible for “episodic” memories—information that allows us to tell similar places and situations apart.

The finding helps explain where déjà vu originates in the brain, and why it happens more frequently with increasing age and with brain-disease patients, said MIT neuroscientist Susumu Tonegawa. The study is detailed today in the online version of the journal Science.

Like a computer logging its programs’ activities, the dentate gyrus notes a situation’s pattern—it’s visual, audio, smell, time and other cues for the body’s future reference. So what happens when its abilities are jammed?

When Tonegawa and his team bred mice without a fully-functional dentate gyrus, the rodents struggled to tell the difference between two similar but different situations.

“These animals normally have a distinct ability to distinguish between situations,” Tonegawa said, like humans. “But without the dentate gyrus they were very mixed up.”

Déjà vu is a memory problem, Tonegawa explained, occurring when our brains struggle to tell the difference between two extremely similar situations. As people age, Tonegawa said déjà-vu-like confusion happens more often—and it also happens in people suffering from brain diseases like Alzheimer’s. “It’s not surprising,” he said, “when you consider the fact that there’s a loss of or damage to cells in the dentate gyrus.”

As an aging neuroscientist, Tonegawa admitted it’s a typical phenomenon with him. “I do a lot of traveling so I show up in brand new airports, and my brain tells me it’s been here before,” he said. “But the rest of my brain knows better.”

Top 15 signs of a drunk

1. You lose arguments with inanimate objects.
2. You have to hold on to the lawn to keep from falling off the Earth.
3. Your job starts to interfere with your drinking.
4. Your doctor finds traces of blood in your alcohol stream.
5. The back of your head keeps getting hit by the toilet seat.
6. You sincerely believe alcohol is the elusive 5th food group.
7. Every woman you see has an identical twin.
8. You fall off the floor.
9. Your idea of cutting back is less salt.
10. Every night you're beginning to find your neighbor's cat more and more attractive.
11. Your moral is: I'm not drunk, you're just sober!!!
12. You don't recognize your wife unless she's seen from the bottom of a glass.
13. That dammned pink elephant followed you home again.
14. You have a reserved parking space at the liquor store.
15. The shrubbery's drunk too, from frequent watering.

- From Askmen.com

So young and so...robotic

A group of scientists in Japan have developed a humanoid that acts like a toddler to better understand child development.

The Child-Robot with Biomimetic Body, or CB2, was developed by a team of researchers at Osaka University in western Japan and is designed to move just like a real child aged between one and three years old.

CB2, 4.3 feet tall and weighing 73 pounds, changes facial expressions and crawls on the floor.

The robot's movements are smooth fitted with 56 actuators in lieu of muscle. It has 197 sensors for touch, small cameras working as eyes, and an audio sensor.

CB2 can also speak using an artificial vocal cord.

When it stands on its feet, the robot wobbles like a child who is learning how to walk.

Minoru Asada, a professor at Osaka University who leads the project, said the robot was developed to learn more about child development. The goal is to study human recognition development such as how the child learns a language, recognizes objects and learns to communicate with his father and mother.

Now showing: Ocean's Thirteen

In Ocean's Eleven, Danny (George Clooney) and Rusty (Brad Pitt) assembled a team of specialists to rob three Las Vegas casinos run by Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) and not coincidentally get back Danny's wife from Benedict, too. Ocean's Twelve was the sequel about Benedict's revenge, a romance for Rusty with an Interpol agent, and a complicated European heist. Now, Danny Ocean and his gang is back in Ocean's Thirteen, where they try to pull off their most ambitious and riskiest casino heist in order to defend one of their own. But they’re going to need more than luck on their side to break The Bank. Ruthless casino owner Willy Bank never imagined that the odds were against him when he double-crossed Danny Ocean’s friend and mentor Reuben Tishkoff, putting the distraught Reuben in a hospital bed in critical condition. But Bank miscalculated - badly. He may have taken down one of the original Ocean’s eleven, but he left the others standing and, worse for him, gave them a shared purpose: to take Bank down on the night of what should be his greatest triumph - the grand opening of his new casino, appropriately named The Bank. Their strategy is twofold. First they will ruin him financially by turning the tables on the precept that the house always wins. But that’s just money. The knockout punch will be to Bank’s personal pride and joy: his reputation as the only hotelier who has earned the Royal Review Board’s Five Diamond Award on every single one of his hotels. The plan is elaborate, dangerous and damn near impossible - but there are no limits when it comes to one of their own.

Starring: George Clooney, Ellen Barkin, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Andy Garcia
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh