geekosystem

How many bears is too many for Switzerland to handle? Apparently, just one, as Swiss wildlife officials have shot and killed the country's only known wild bear, a 2-year old male known as M13. The bear had wandered into inhabited areas looking for a meal, and reports indicate it had even been following some Swiss citizens around, apparently hoping for a handout, leading Switzerland to declare itself a 'no-bears' zone in rather decisive fashion.

The world of copyright and licensing is one full of convoluted oddities. Apple's no stranger to this habitat, as they've happily shown in the past, but it's unusual for the company to actually be on the defensive. They're almost always the aggressor in such cases, but their recent clock app design upgrade in iOS 6 may have landed them in the hot seat with Switzerland's national rail company.

People will do almost anything to lose weight, although admittedly, things like the Twinkie diet don't sound that bad. A sunshine diet, on the other hand, sounds absolutely horrible, but that's not going to keep some people from trying it. Then again, when was the last time you saw a fat plant, right? Taking that last bit into consideration, a woman from Switzerland decided to give this diet a shot. Did she lose weight? Definitely. Is she still, you know, alive to enjoy her svelte new physique? Unsurprisingly, no.

Some people's hobbies are just cooler than others. For example, I like to build things in Minecraft whereas Tom Samui likes to build huge, hulking sculptures out of old car parts. My His hobby is just cooler. Hailing form Switzerland, Samui has been up to this for over ten years, harvesting car and motorcycle parts from the junkyard, polishing them up, and welding them into these awesome, gigantic sculptures. The larger ones can take around 400 hours of work, but when you're talking about 7 foot tall horseback warrior or a 26 foot dinosaur, that's a pretty good time investment. Also, he'll take commissions. Who wants to go in on a full-sized Uziel?

More pictures after the jump.

What's a blob jump? You'll know it when you see it and if you ever went to summer camp, you've probably done it yourself. This is no ordinary blob jumping though. This is Switzerland blob jumping. World record setting, three-person, 17 meter blob jumping. Blob jumping that might be better without that music in the background. People are setting bizarre and useless world records all the time, and I'm not sure this is really any different, but man, that is some crazy hang-time, so I'm going to go ahead and call this 100% worthwhile.

(via Reddit)

We've all been there, counting the number of tiles on the floor while stuck listening to a presenter drone on as they shuffle through PowerPoint slides on something we couldn't care less about. But a new political party in Switzerland is making dislike of PowerPoint a political issue. The presentation medium of choice, Microsoft's PowerPoint has come under fire for being uninformative, boring, and hurting our ability to think. The New York Times even warned about the U.S. military's use of PowerPoint to convey its strategy declaring, "We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint." Now, the Anti-PowerPoint Party is taking a political stand, rallying behind the cause to make PowerPoint illegal in Switzerland. The Anti-PowerPoint Party claims that the use of the presentation software costs the Swiss economy approximately 2.1 billion Swiss Francs a year (US $2.5billion). They base their calculation on reportedly unverified assumptions about the number of employees that attend PowerPoint presentations weekly, and the assumption that these presentations hold no value for 85% of attendees thus costing companies money from the loss of productive work hours.