The Dark Furie

Just a few uncommon knowledge questions for you all. Do you guys know as much as you think you know about the world? Have a look through these questions, answer as best as you can in the comments (whispers would be best). When the answers stop coming I'll give you the real answers and announce a winner and maybe even take a leaf out of Kim's book by offering a prize.

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1) You see three naked people walking down the street you live on, but they're not breaking any law by being naked. Why?

2) A drowned man has never been to hospital and is leading a pretty healthy life. How is this possible?

3) The first couple shown in the same bed on television have a daughter on the show. What is her name?

4) America is perceived as one of the richest countries in the world but one thing prints more money every day than the US treasury. What is it?

5) Why is Ohio both the 17th and the 47th US state?

6) Who invented the lightbulb?

7) What is the largest living thing on the planet?

8) Napoleon, Louis XVI and Henry III were all French leaders who had a common phobia. What was it?

9) I can see a rainbow on my right hand side, a cloud slightly left of that and the sun slightly right of the rainbow. What am I doing?

10) Which country sells the largest amount of frog's legs?

When you have eliminated the impossible whatever's left, no matter how improbable must be the truth. So states the principle of Occam's Razor if you listen to some people. The simplest answer is always the truth is the principle of Occam's Razor if you listen to others. Both are kind of right, both are very quotable, and neither is the way I see things. Occam's Razor states simply that the best explanation for any phenomena is the one that contains the facts and nothing but the facts, with no guesswork and no leaps of explanatory faith needed. As such I can state with no problems whatsoever that "I am a cool guy." While this no doubt comes as no surprise to you guys who worship the ground I walk on and eagerly devour every word I have to say (type?) every day of your lives (no doubt declaring national days of mourning and organised silences whenever I take a day away from blogging), it's a conclusion I've only recently arrived at through the very scientific method I described above.

There are other things that have tipped me off to the fact that I'm so cool that I make Fonzie look like a mug of warm cocoa on a sticky summer's night. For example, that wonderous day that I realised the world truly does revolve around me. I'd always wondered before then why interesting things only happened in my life when I was there...

You see, back in 2006 I read an article about blogging and how it's mostly used by companies to spread their brand and maintain a personal side to their brand or by people trying to make a fortune with their life story. It was obvious from the article that the author considered all bloggers to be geeks at heart. In 2008 I read an article that spoke about the rapid growth of blogging and social network use and how "all the cool kids have been doing it for at least a year". As I started blogging in 2007 it's obvious that I'm one of the cool kids which was my first step towards realising just how cool I am.

Of course I had to be careful when writing this post. After all, the scientific method I used to reach my conclusion is one of the uncoolest subjects to ever be written about in a blog post. It seems like whatever moron discovers the principle has to write about it as soon as they can in some transparent attempt to prove that they're more intelligent than others and, if that over-eagerness wasn't enough, they all follow the same format too. First they come up with their own meaning for it, which they'll establish in their opening paragraph as the right meaning while disparaging others' understanding of the concept, then they'll come up with some lame experiment based off a single subject or anecdote, then they'll read the results of the test to prove something to themselves that these lame morons desperately want others to believe. It was tricky to avoid these pitfalls but I think I managed admirably. After all, I'm a cool guy and pressure situations don't get me down.

Now I realise that some of you habitual naysayers may well be scoffing at this post and I do feel sorry for you trying desperately to disprove the scientific method and constantly failing. You may even go to the lengths of a smear campaign, saying that if I were truly as cool as I say I am then I wouldn't have to say it at all. Well, there's a problem there. Certainly that would be true if it was one of you guys claiming to be this cool, but I'm not one of you guys and shouldn't be judged as such. True, with regular levels of cool, saying that you're as cool as they come (I've had that hand-stitched into my business cards) would lose you about 70% of your coolness. But I'm so cool that even running at only 30% I can still keep a steak chilled until dinner and have enough raw coolness left over to run a small airport (the sort with three planes and a cattle-grid) as well as make everyone who reads this look cooler by proxy. So yeah, given those circumstances I think I can get away with stating these hard scientific facts in an effort to get everyone to understand a scientific principle a little better.

I don't know why so many people were worried when they heard that Disney had bought Marvel Comics...

If you've been reading this page recently you'll have seen a couple of posts from me mentioning how much I'm looking forward to the new Bioware game - Dragon Age: Origins. I've had this on my list of games to watch ever since I first heard the concept and I've been waiting for it ever since I started finding out details. If you've not heard of it but know gaming this is basically a big budget version of Neverwinter Nights with a load of better features and some kick-ass attitude to go along with it. As I've been following the details of the game I never thought to watch the trailers that have been coming up on Youtube until now, and they blew me away. Check it out.

Mobile streaming version is here, and the downloadable version is here.

What you're about to see isn't the rotting remains of a dead whale, it isn't a gigantic blood stain left when everyone in a plane jumped at the same time and landed in the same spot, and it isn't the stain left by some crashed oil tanker. What you're about to see is a five storey tall frozen red waterfall.

Blood Falls is located in Antarctica where it slowly pours out of the Taylor Glacier into Lake Bonney. This gigantic frozen waterfall was first discovered by geologists in 1911 and they originally hypothesised that the colour was caused by algae. They got it wrong and while people searched for the true reason behind the colour they found something that is nothing short of amazing.

When the Taylor Glacier first froze over it sealed a small saltwater lake beneath it and that lake has remained undisturbed for approximately two million years. As the Taylor Glacier advanced it picked up some of the surrounding areas iron heavy salts and deposited them into the lake. It's these iron deposits that are staining the water and slowly leaking out as red sludge.

A small group of microbes were also trapped in the body of water and they've remained there for the past two million years, evolving without any interference from the outside world. The falls filter the water without letting anything contaminate the ecosystem. Now these microbes have survived and evolved without heat, light or oxygen and are considered to be the closest thing to the primordial ooze out of which all life on the planet evolved. Put simply, Blood Falls is the blood of God, and shows that life can exist without even one of the basic things we once thought all life forms needed one of.

Scientists are now theorising that the Blood Falls prove that life can exist and thrive in similar lakes on other worlds, notably Mars and Europa (one of Jupiter's moons). While X Files fans around the world are busy dancing a little jig and saying "I told you so" to their collective friend, the rest of us can look on in awe at this absolutely beautiful natural phenomenon.

It be Talk Like A Pirate Day 2009, ye lousy lubbers! Get tharselves some pirate education here or walk the plank!

• First ye'll be wantin' t' learn the lingo and the song.
• Then ye can find out yer pirate name and what kind o' pirate ye are.
• Now ye need a wench and these pirate chat up lines will help ye get one.
• Now ye can relax and check out last years pirate chickens here, or check out this year's pirate chickens here or by clicking the comic above.
• Now relax with yer pirate shipmates and a game of Liar's Dice.

• Now ye've gotten t' know the crew ye'll be wantin' t' find buried treasure but first ye'll need a ship and t' check out the Scumm Bar fer other pirates.
• Now don't ye be spendin' all them pieces o' eight at once bucko, ye'll be needin' some fer yer retirement. Maybe ye need some financial advice before ye walks the plank?

Go on then bucko, what are ye waitin' fer? It be Talk Like A Pirate Day and everybody's doing it.

With so many things on the web that annoy me, I thought it'd be fun to put together a top ten list of the annoyances on the web. And wouldn't you know it, they're almost all people in some way or another.

10) Super Fan
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, its someone who wont shut up talking about how great a mediocre celebrity is to the point that they may as well be adolescent girls with boy band posters on their wall. The latest super fans at the time of writing this are under the mistaken idea that Megan Fox can act and that Twilight was a good film. That alone says how awful this group is.

9) The Depressed
"Sigh", "I'm so sad today." and "Why can't anything go right?" are the trade of this person. Yeah, we all have bad days, but we also all have good days too. When your microblog or status history are full of sentences like that then you're either just looking for pity or you're a bad weather friend who only comes online when they're having a bad day.

8) The Blatant Fantasist
Usually a woman, this person spends every minute of every day blogging about how fabulous their life is. They blog about the picnic they took their kids yesterday despite being online all that time, the high paying job their wonderful husband has despite you never seeing photos of him, micro-blog constantly about their dilemma over which holiday home they own that they should visit next and spend hours redoing web tests until they've got the results they deem to be best. Yeah, we get it, life is hard for all of us and we all need an escape occasionally but do you really see yourself making friends if all you do is lie?

7) The Self Promoter
"Hi this is a good blog. Visit my blog on the following link." We've all had comments like that eh? Yeah, we all appreciate visits from new people but, if they're not actually going to read our posts and are blatantly just pasting in an advert for their own pages, then they're using us. We check out their recent visitors lists and find the exact same comment on their pages too.

6) The One In A Million
Usually found in forums and tech places, this web user counts themselves as more important than others. Not only will they not bother to check if a problem has been reported before, they'll put their report in bold or CAPITALS (or both) just so it stands out from the rest of the crowd. In a blogging environment this person can be combined with The Daily Edition to become the single most annoying person to ever visit your blog.

5) The Porn Baron Wannabe
Okay you've uploaded an incestuous photo of your sister/girlfriend ("Sirlferd" from now on) in a thong to your site and want everyone to know that you have sex with her. Good for you! But why do you feel the urge to repeatedly post the link everywhere you go, over and over again? Why is it so important that more and more people see your Sirlferd? Why does the second picture show the same girl but in a completely different living room? Oh, you have two do you? Hey, wouldn't it have been a better idea to remove the site address watermark before you uploaded and tried to pretend she's your Sirlferd? By the way, why did you think a news article about online banking was a suitable place to post that link?

4) The Stone Bleeder
"Wow, I just read that Michael Jackson is dead and I've had a brilliant idea. I think I'll copy and paste every news article about it into my blog, then I'll take every photo of him that I can find and post them. Individually. One by one. In seperate posts. Until my blog is the only thing you can find on the search engines when someone searches for this one event, as well as the only thing that shows on the site-wide recent posts roll. Oh look, Farrah Fawcett died too that day. I've just had another brilliant idea..."

3) The Paid Blogger
"Best Solution!!! Free Membership!!! Join Now!!!" Thankfully this sort has moved on to microblogging for the most part now, but they're still annoying there. Can't they at least put some effort into their paid spam rather than copying and pasting the same old crap over and over? A subset of these is the Political Blogger who, rather than selling a product, is selling a political ideal... by copying 32 pages of a document then pasting it into every page it sees as a comment, effectively blocking access to the page for anyone else.

2) The Daily Edition
This person comments on your page with information that isn't related to the current subject at all but that they've found interesting and so they think everyone must know. When going on or returning from a holiday they'll visit all the people they've decided are their friends and announce it to them in the same pasted comment. Their friend (who you've never spoken to or met) has something interesting happen and they'll be spreading the news for them. And should a real news story enter their narrow field of vision, they'll blog about it as if they were the first to know it and spread it via microblogging and status updates, usually without checking facts.

1) Celebrity Microblogging Cults
Oprah Winfrey makes between 3 and 5 updates on Twitter per month, mostly pushing upcoming shows or saying she's added a celebrity as one of her 12 friends. At the time of writing this she has 2,083,158 followers. What does following this woman add to these people's lives???