Top 10 Putting Tips

Golfing great Ben Hogan once described putting as "merely rolling the ball over the surface of the green by striking it with a gentle but firm blow". Sounds easy, doesn't it? Of course, if it were easy, a lot more of us would be raking in big bucks on the PGA tour. It's cool to be able to step up to the tee and blast the ball down the fairway, but let's face it, putting is what separates truly great golfers from good ones. That's because putting is one of the trickiest skills of any sport -- a delicate mixture of muscle control and mental focus. When a skilled putter scrutinizes a 10-foot (3-meter) distance to the cup, pauses and then applies precisely the right amount of force to sink the shot, that triumph of mind over matter is a truly inspiring sight to behold.
In fact, you might call it downright poetic. Canadian poet and golfer T. Arnold Haultain rhapsodized in his 1912 treatise "The Mystery of Golf":
"One putter I remember whose putting was a delight to the eye. He seemed positively to infuse sight and intelligence into his ball. The way that simple sphere would start from his club, mount an incline, negotiate a curve, look for the hole, and endowed with some curious spin, drop unhesitatingly in without dreaming for a moment of rimming it or running over it or stopping short of it, was a sight to make one wise".
We can't promise we'll make your putting the object of such flowery praise, or that we'll make you into the next Ben Crenshaw or Jack Nicklaus. But here are 10 tips from various golf experts on how to improve your skills.

Top 10 Rare Books

What makes a book rare and valuable? It all comes down to supply and demand -- and condition. The rarest books in the world are highly sought after by collectors because they're associated with a particular author or a major historical event or era, or simply because they're incredibly old. In the world of book collecting, old means very, very old. Johannes Gutenberg developed the movable type printing press in the 1440s -- in fact, any printed book dating from 1500 or earlier is known as anincunabulum, and is virtually guaranteed to be rare and valuable. A Gutenberg Bible, printed in 1456 and considered the first book of movable type ever printed, is usually considered the zenith of book collecting. Some books become rare not because of the content of the book itself, but because a famous person owned it. If the book has personal notations in the margins, the value goes up even more. A few rare books are "sleepers" that don't betray their true value to the uninformed -- these are the books you might find at a yard sale for $1, then sell for tens of thousands of dollars. If you'd like to know how much a Gutenberg Bible is worth, how many there are in the world and why it has such lofty status, this article has all the details, along with nine more of the world's rarest books -- including those sleepers you can find in the dusty shelves of used bookstores.

10 Most Spectacular Lottery Burnouts

Walk into my kitchen while I'm fixing dinner any given weeknight and you'll hear "If I had a million dollars" blaring from the stereo. I've been known to chirp along to my favorite CD by Barenaked Ladies while shelling peas or blanching tomatoes: "If I had a million dollars ... I would buy you a house ... I'd build a tree fort in our yard ... I'd buy you a monkey ... If I had a million dollars ...
"I'd be rich."
While our lists might be different, we all have one, don't we? We've all dreamt of what we'd buy (or do) if we had sudden, overwhelming riches. We certainly wouldn't squander it like the lottery burnouts we've profiled for this article.
Or would we? According to a study published by the University of Kentucky in conjunction with the University of Pittsburgh and Vanderbilt University Law School, lottery winners declare bankruptcy at twice the rate of the general population.
Why is this? The inability to squirrel away an unexpected windfall appears to be rooted deep in the human psyche. Money arriving by luck or circumstance is simply easier to spend than money earned through hard work. It's like finding a $20 bill on the sidewalk and splurging at your favorite coffee shop. The researchers also found that lottery winners tended to have below-average education and income, which might translate into lower financial literacy than the average not-that-financially-savvy person. Here are profiles of 10 lottery winners who won big and fell hard.

10 Games that Take Minutes to Learn and a Lifetime to Master

Nolan Bushnell, the video game pioneer who invented Pong in the early 1970s, explained the game's runaway popularity by noting that it was "very simple to learn, difficult to master". But Bushnell's theorem, as that principle came to be known in the electronic entertainment industry, actually was no more than a reflection of wisdom that predates our gadgetry by thousands of years.
In an ancient Assyrian carving now in the British Museum, for example, palace guards are shown passing the time by playing the Game of Twenty Squares, invented in the city of Ur in southern Iraq about 4,600 years ago. That same game is still played today, as are scores of others in which humans toss dice, shuffle cards, and move pieces around boards in pursuit of what might seem to be the simplest of objectives -- but which, if one's opponent is sufficiently skilled and wily, often turn out to be maddeningly difficult.

That seeming paradox is what makes classic games, from chess and checkers to the Asian game of Go, so perennially appealing. As author Jesse Schell explains in his book "The Art of Game Design," such games have what he terms "emergent complexity," in that their simple rules allow players the flexibility to create a multitude of intricate scenarios. At the same time, these games also incorporate small, measured amounts of what Schell calls "innate complexity" -- that is, subtle restrictions that make them more difficult.
Here are 10 prime examples of these seemingly simple, yet delightfully complex, games.

13 Famous People Who Were Adopted

The image of the typical or "normal" American family -- with a father, mother, 2.5 kids, and a dog -- has become less and less familiar over time. These days, families are "blended" and "progressive" and more than a little creative in terms of structure. Below are a few well-known celebrities that were ahead of the curve. Each famous figure listed below was orphaned, fostered, or adopted at a young age and clearly didn't let that set them back.

10 Jaw-dropping Hollywood Scandals

Pop quiz (pun intended): Hollywood and scandal go together like which of the following?

• Rob Lowe and underage women
• Mel Gibson and anti-Semitic rants
• Marilyn Monroe and U.S. Presidents
• All of the above

If you answered all of the above, you're correct! And those are just three of the nigh-infinite number of scandals to have come out of Tinseltown. From DUIs to drug abuse and from infidelity to diagnosable insanity, celebrities provide the media with ample fodder for daily sensations.
But plenty of people cheat on their spouses and throw public fits, so why are we so interested when celebrities do it? One hypothesis is that our obsession with celebrity scandal comes from the halo effect. Research shows that when a person shows unusual talent in one area of life, we tend to believe that extends to all areas of life. This propensity to hold celebrities to a higher moral standard makes their flaws even more scandalous.
But in a town where there's no such thing as bad press, flaws aren't necessarily a negative. In fact, scandals can actually boost a celebrity's popularity; controversy can sell tickets and bring in viewers as effectively as a rave review can. Let's take a look at 10 of the most jaw-dropping scandals to come out of Hollywood.