Incredible 193 facts you cannot deny

193 Funny and Interesting Facts

If you use these small jokes on your presentation materials (publication, website, powerpoint, seminars, lecture, tv show, etc), please have the courtesy to QUOTE THE SOURCE. It is not easy collecting all these. Thank you!

Please note that some of the 'facts' below have been proven false myths. An example is the duck's echo which does not echo (but proved that it does).

1. It is impossible to lick your elbow (busted)
2. A crocodile can't stick it's tongue out.
3. A shrimp's heart is in it's head.
4. People say "Bless you" when you sneeze because when you sneeze,your heart stops for a mili-second.
5. In a study of 200,000 ostriches over a period of 80 years, no one reported a single case where an ostrich buried its head in the sand.
6. It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky.
7. A pregnant goldfish is called a twit. (busted?)
8. More than 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.
9. Rats and horses can't vomit.
10. If you sneeze too hard, you can fracture a rib.
11. If you try to suppress a sneeze, you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck and die.
12. If you keep your eyes open by force when you sneeze, you might pop an eyeball out.
13. Rats multiply so quickly that in 18 months, two rats could have over a million descendants.
14. Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times.
15. In every episode of Seinfeld there is a Superman somewhere.
16. The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.
17. Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
18. A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.
19. 23% of all photocopier faults worldwide are caused by people sitting on them and photocopying their butts.
20. In the course of an average lifetime you will, while sleeping, eat 70 assorted insects and 10 spiders.
21. Most lipstick contains fish scales.
22. Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different.
23. Over 75% of people who read this will try to lick their elbow.
24. A crocodile can't move its tongue and cannot chew. Its digestive juices are so strong that it can digest a steel nail.
25. Money notes are not made from paper, they are made mostly from a special blend of cotton and linen. In 1932, when a shortage of cash occurred in Tenino, Washington, USA, notes were made out of wood for a brief period.
26. The Grammy Awards were introduced to counter the threat of rock music. In the late 1950s, a group of record executives were alarmed by the explosive success of rock ‘n roll, considering it a threat to "quality" music.
27. Tea is said to have been discovered in 2737 BC by a Chinese emperor when some tea leaves accidentally blew into a pot of boiling water. The tea bag was introduced in 1908 by Thomas Sullivan of New York.
28. Over the last 150 years the average height of people in industrialised nations has increased 10 cm (about 4 inches). In the 19th century, American men were the tallest in the world, averaging 1,71m (5'6"). Today, the average height for American men is 1,75m (5'7"), compared to 1,77 (5'8") for Swedes, and 1,78 (5'8.5") for the Dutch. The tallest nation in the world is the Watusis of Burundi.
29. In 1955 the richest woman in the world was Mrs Hetty Green Wilks, who left an estate of $95 million in a will that was found in a tin box with four pieces of soap. Queen Elizabeth of Britain and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands count under the 10 wealthiest women in the world.
30. Joseph Niepce developed the world's first photographic image in 1827. Thomas Edison and W K L Dickson introduced the film camera in 1894. But the first projection of an image on a screen was made by a German priest. In 1646, Athanasius Kircher used a candle or oil lamp to project hand-painted images onto a white screen.
31. In 1935 a writer named Dudley Nichols refused to accept the Oscar for his movie The Informer because the Writers Guild was on strike against the movie studios. In 1970 George C. Scott refused the Best Actor Oscar for Patton. In 1972 Marlon Brando refused the Oscar for his role in The Godfather.
32. The system of democracy was introduced 2 500 years ago in Athens, Greece. The oldest existing governing body operates in Althing in Iceland. It was established in 930 AD.
33. A person can live without food for about a month, but only about a week without water.
    If the amount of water in your body is reduced by just 1%, you'll feel thirsty.
    If it's reduced by 10%, you'll die.
34. According to a study by the Economic Research Service, 27% of all food production in Western nations ends up in garbage cans. Yet, 1,2 billion people are underfed - the same number of people who are overweight.
35. Camels are called "ships of the desert" because of the way they move, not because of their transport capabilities. A Dromedary camel has one hump and a Bactrian camel two humps. The humps are used as fat storage. Thus, an undernourished camel will not have a hump. 
36. In the Durango desert, in Mexico, there's a creepy spot called the "Zone of Silence." You can't pick up clear TV or radio signals. And locals say fireballs sometimes appear in the sky.
37. Ethernet is a registered trademark of Xerox, Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T.
38. Bill Gates' first business was Traff-O-Data, a company that created machines which recorded the number of cars passing a given point on a road.
39. Uranus' orbital axis is tilted at 90 degrees.
40. The final resting-place for Dr. Eugene Shoemaker - the Moon. The famed U.S. Geological Survey astronomer, trained the Apollo astronauts about craters, but never made it into space. Mr. Shoemaker had wanted to be an astronaut but was rejected because of a medical problem. His ashes were placed on board the Lunar Prospector spacecraft before it was launched on January 6, 1998. NASA crashed the probe into a crater on the moon in an attempt to learn if there is water on the moon.
41. Outside the USA, Ireland is the largest software producing country in the world.
42. The first fossilized specimen of Australopithecus afarenisis was named Lucy after the paleontologists' favorite song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," by the Beatles.
43. Figlet, an ASCII font converter program, stands for Frank, Ian and Glenn's LETters.
44. Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.
45. Every year about 98% of atoms in your body are replaced.
46. Hot water is heavier than cold.
47. Plutonium - first weighed on August 20th, 1942, by University of Chicago scientists Glenn Seaborg and his colleagues - was the first man-made element.
48. If you went out into space, you would explode before you suffocated because there's no air pressure.
49. The radioactive substance, Americanium - 241 is used in many smoke detectors.
50. The original IBM-PCs, that had hard drives, referred to the hard drives as Winchester drives. This is due to the fact that the original Winchester drive had a model number of 3030. This is, of course, a Winchester firearm.
51. Sound travels 15 times faster through steel than through the air.
52. On average, half of all false teeth have some form of radioactivity.
53. Only one satellite has been ever been destroyed by a meteor: the European Space Agency's Olympus in 1993.
54. Starch is used as a binder in the production of paper. It is the use of a starch coating that controls ink penetration when printing. Cheaper papers do not use as much starch, and this is why your elbows get black when you are leaning over your morning paper.
55. Sterling silver is not pure silver. Because pure silver is too soft to be used in most tableware it is mixed with copper in the proportion of 92.5 percent silver to 7.5 percent copper.
56. A ball of glass will bounce higher than a ball of rubber. A ball of solid steel will bounce higher than one made entirely of glass.
57. A chip of silicon a quarter-inch square has the capacity of the original 1949 ENIAC computer, which occupied a city block.
58. An ordinary TNT bomb involves atomic reaction, and could be called an atomic bomb. What we call an A-bomb involves nuclear reactions and should be called a nuclear bomb.
59. At a glance, the Celsius scale makes more sense than the Fahrenheit scale for temperature measuring. But its creator, Anders Celsius, was an oddball scientist. When he first developed his scale, he made freezing 100 degrees and boiling 0 degrees, or upside down. No one dared point this out to him, so fellow scientists waited until Celsius died to change the scale.
60. At a jet plane's speed of 1,000 km (620mi) per hour, the length of the plane becomes one atom shorter than its original length.
61. The first full moon to occur on the winter solstice, Dec. 22, commonly called the first day of winter, happened in 1999. Since a full moon on the winter solstice occurred in conjunction with a lunar perigee (point in the moon's orbit that is closest to Earth), the moon appeared about 14% larger than it does at apogee (the point in it's elliptical orbit that is farthest from the Earth).
    
    Since the Earth is also several million miles closer to the sun at that time of the year than in the summer, sunlight striking the moon was about 7% stronger making it brighter. Also, this was the closest perigee of the Moon of the year since the moon's orbit is constantly deforming. In places where the weather was clear and there was a snow cover, even car headlights were superfluous.
62. According to security equipment specialists, security systems that utilize motion detectors won't function properly if walls and floors are too hot. When an infrared beam is used in a motion detector, it will pick up a person's body temperature of 98.6 degrees compared to the cooler walls and floor.
    
    If the room is too hot, the motion detector won't register a change in the radiated heat of that person's body when it enters the room and breaks the infrared beam. Your home's safety might be compromised if you turn your air conditioning off or set the thermostat too high while on summer vacation.
63. Western Electric successfully brought sound to motion pictures and introduced systems of mobile communications which culminated in the cellular telephone.
64. On December 23, 1947, Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., held a secret demonstration of the transistor which marked the foundation of modern electronics.
65. The wick of a trick candle has small amounts of magnesium in them. When you light the candle, you are also lighting the magnesium. When someone tries to blow out the flame, the magnesium inside the wick continues to burn and, in just a split second (or two or three), relights the wick.
66. Ostriches are often not taken seriously. They can run faster than horses, and the males can roar like lions.
67. Seals used for their fur get extremely sick when taken aboard ships.
68. Sloths take two weeks to digest their food.
69. Guinea pigs and rabbits can't sweat.
70. The pet food company Ralston Purina recently introduced, from its subsidiary Purina Philippines, power chicken feed designed to help roosters build muscles for cockfighting, which is popular in many areas of the world.
71. According to the Wall Street Journal, the cockfighting market is huge: The Philippines has five million roosters used for exactly that.
72. Sharks and rays are the only animals known to man that don't get cancer. Scientists believe this has something to do with the fact that they don't have bones, but cartilage.
73. The porpoise is second to man as the most intelligent animal on the planet.
74. Young beavers stay with their parents for the first two years of their lives before going out on their own.
75. Skunks can accurately spray their smelly fluid as far as ten feet.
76. Deer can't eat hay.
77. Gopher snakes in Arizona are not poisonous, but when frightened they may hiss and shake their tails like rattlesnakes.
78. On average, dogs have better eyesight than humans, although not as colorful.
79. The duckbill platypus can store as many as six hundred worms in the pouches of its cheeks.
80. The lifespan of a squirrel is about nine years.
81. North American oysters do not make pearls of any value.
82. Human birth control pills work on gorillas.
83. Many sharks lay eggs, but hammerheads give birth to live babies that look like very small duplicates of their parents. Young hammerheads are usually born headfirst, with the tip of their hammer-shaped head folded backward to make them more streamlined for birth.
84. Gorillas sleep as much as fourteen hours per day.
85. A biological reserve has been made for golden toads because they are so rare.
86. There are more than fifty different kinds of kangaroos.
87. Jellyfish like salt water. A rainy season often reduces the jellyfish population by putting more fresh water into normally salty waters where they live.
88. The female lion does ninety percent of the hunting.
89. The odds of seeing three albino deer at once are one in seventy-nine billion, yet one man in Boulder Junction, Wisconsin, took a picture of three albino deer in the woods.
90. A group of twelve or more cows is called a flink.
91. Cats often rub up against people and furniture to lay their scent and mark their territory. They do it this way, as opposed to the way dogs do it, because they have scent glands in their faces.
92. Cats sleep up to eighteen hours a day, but never quite as deep as humans. Instead, they fall asleep quickly and wake up intermittently to check to see if their environment is still safe.
93. Catnip, or Nepeta cataria, is an herb with nepetalactone in it. Many think that when cats inhale nepetalactone, it affects hormones that arouse sexual feelings, or at least alter their brain functioning to make them feel "high." Catnip was originally made, using nepetalactone as a natural bug repellant, but roaming cats would rip up the plants before they could be put to their intended task.
94. The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans ages the equivalent of five human years for every day they live, so they usually die after about fourteen days. When stressed, though, the worm goes into a comatose state that can last for two or more months. The human equivalent would be to sleep for about two hundred years.
95. You can tell the sex of a horse by its teeth. Most males have 40, females have 36.
96. Money isn't made out of paper; it's made out of cotton.
97. The 57 on Heinz ketchup bottle represents the varieties of pickle the company once had.
98. Your stomach produces a new layer of mucus every two weeks - otherwise it will digest itself.
99. The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper.
100. A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top.
101. Susan Lucci is the daughter of Phyllis Diller.
102. Every person has a unique tongue print as well as fingerprints.
103. 315 entries in Webster's 1996 Dictionary were misspelled.
104. On average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.
105. During the chariot scene in 'Ben Hur' a small red car can be seen in the distance.
106. Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine are brother and sister.
107. Orcas (killer whales) kill sharks by torpedoing up into the shark's stomach from underneath, causing the shark to explode.
108. (removed, duplicated)
109. Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn't wear any pants.
110. Ketchup was sold in the 1830s as medicine.
111. Upper and lower case letters are named 'upper' and 'lower' because in the time when all original print had to be set in individual letters, the 'upper case' letters were stored in the case on top of the case that stored the smaller, 'lower case' letters.
112. Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time.
113. Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II were made of wood.
114. There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.
115. The name Wendy was made up for the book Peter Pan, there was never a recorded Wendy before!
116. There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with: orange, purple, and silver!
117. Leonardo Da Vinci invented scissors.
118. A tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion will make it instantly go mad and sting itself to death.
119. The mask used by Michael Myers in the original "Halloween" was a Captain Kirk mask painted white.
120. If you have three quarters, four dimes, and four pennies, you have $1.19. You also have the largest amount of money in coins without being able to make change for a dollar.
121. Celery has negative calories! It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with. It's the same with apples!
122. Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying!
123. The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.
124. Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from Public Libraries.
125. Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because passing wind in a space suit damages them.
126. The word "queue" is the only word in the English language that is still pronounced the same way when the last four letters are removed.
127. Beetles taste like apples, wasps like pine nuts, and worms like fried bacon.
128. Of all the words in the English language, the word ’set’ has the most definitions!
129. What is called a "French kiss" in the English speaking world is known as an "English kiss" in France.
130. "Almost" is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order.
131. "Rhythm" is the longest English word without a vowel.
132. In 1386, a pig in France was executed by public hanging for the murder of a child
133. A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off.
134. Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.
135. You can’t kill yourself by holding your breath
136. There is a city called Rome on every continent.
137. It’s against the law to have a pet dog in Iceland.
138. Your heart beats over 100,000 times a day.
139. Horatio Nelson, one of England’s most illustrious admirals was throughout his life, never able to find a cure for his sea-sickness.
140. The skeleton of Jeremy Bentham is present at all important meetings of the University of London
141. Right handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people
142. Your ribs move about 5 million times a year, everytime you breathe!
143. The elephant is the only mammal that can’t jump!
144. One quarter of the bones in your body, are in your feet!
145. Like fingerprints, everyone’s tongue print is different!
146. The first known transfusion of blood was performed as early as 1667, when Jean-Baptiste, transfused two pints of blood from a sheep to a young man
147. Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails!
148. Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin!
149. The present population of 5 billion plus people of the world is predicted to become 15 billion by 2080.
150. Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
151. Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, and had only ONE testicle.
152. Honey is the only food that does not spoil. Honey found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs has been tasted by archaeologists and found edible.
153. Months that begin on a Sunday will always have a "Friday the 13th."
154. Coca-Cola would be green if colouring weren’t added to it.
155. On average a hedgehog’s heart beats 300 times a minute.
156. More people are killed each year from bees than from snakes.
157. The average lead pencil will draw a line 35 miles long or write approximately 50,000 English words.
158. More people are allergic to cow’s milk than any other food.
159. Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand.
160. The placement of a donkey’s eyes in its’ heads enables it to see all four feet at all times!
161. The six official languages of the United Nations are: English, French, Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Spanish.
162. Earth is the only planet not named after a god.
163. It’s against the law to burp, or sneeze in a church in Nebraska, USA.
164. You’re born with 300 bones, but by the time you become an adult, you only have 206.
165. Some worms will eat themselves if they can’t find any food!
166. Dolphins sleep with one eye open!
167. It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open
168. The worlds oldest piece of chewing gum is 9000 years old!
169. The longest recorded flight of a chicken is 13 seconds
170. Queen Elizabeth I regarded herself as a paragon of cleanliness. She declared that she bathed once every three months, whether she needed it or not
171. Slugs have 4 noses.
172. Owls are the only birds who can see the colour blue.
173. A man named Charles Osborne had the hiccups for 69 years!
174. A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue!
175. The average person laughs 10 times a day!
176. An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain
177. If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.
178. If you farted consistently for 6 years and 9 months, enough gas is produced to create the energy of an atomic bomb.
179. The human heart! creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the body to squirt blood 30 feet.
180. A pig's orgasm lasts 30 minutes.
181. A cockroach will live nine days without its head before it starves to death!
182. Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories a hour
183. The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. The female initiates sex by ripping the male's head off.
184. The flea can jump 350 times its body length. It's like a human jumping the length of a football field.
185. The catfish has over 27,000 taste buds.
186. Some lions mate over 50 times a day.
187. Butterflies taste with their feet.
188. The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.
189. A cat's urine glows under a black light.
190. An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
191. Starfish have no brains.
192. Polar bears are left-handed.
193. Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for pleasure.

The world most expensive camera

Amazing

5 Cities That Will Be Wiped Off the Map by Natural Disasters

No matter how technologically advanced humans become, we'll always spend a good portion of our time pathetically flailing at nature and the various disasters it attempts to grind us down with. Which makes it all the more awesome that many have actually chosen to live right on the bulls-eye of mother nature's bazooka practice target. As we all go blithely about our daily lives, just remember ...

#5. New York Is Due for a Hurricane Worse Than Sandy

Thinkstock Images/Comstock/NA/Photos.com/Getty Images

There's no shortage of hazards that can be associated with New York: Muggings, terrorist attacks, andterrible celebrity chef restaurants are all par for the course when it comes to the Big Apple. Yet the most dangerous of them all tends to go unmentioned ... right until it throws a skyscraper at you. Most of us were shocked to find out that New York was in hurricane territory at all, then all of a sudden the city gets sideswiped by Irene and Sandy. They flooded subways, collapsed quite a few buildings and dealt billions in damage. And they were nothing compared to what is (eventually) coming.

wzohaib via ABC News
Like David-Ortiz-gets-elected-mayor bad.

Both of those storms were only Category 1 when they hit, meaning that they were not that powerful -- even though they still tore up plenty of shit in the region, some of which still hasn't been fixed. Which is to say that it could have been much worse. As in, Roland Emmerich worse.

Greenpainting
Whoa, whoa, let's not be hasty. Have we forgotten how bad 2012 really was?

In fact, New York City has a pretty good chance of being hit by a category 3 Hurricane this very decade. And the next one. And, in fact, each and every decade. A Category 3 hurricane, in case you were wondering, is defined by the phrase "Devastating damage will occur." We're talking demolished houses, damaged skyscrapers, and destroyed infrastructure, here. We're talking JFK airport under 19 feet of water, according to the people who study this sort of thing.

Because of New York's unique geography (and in case anyone needed an extra reason to dislike New Jersey), Northeast New Jersey and Western Long Island form a bottleneck for hurricanes to pass right into. Essentially, any storm with great intensity has a decent chance of a direct hit. This, incidentally, subjects the city to far worse things than just a "mere" Category 3: New York's near future can very well see a full-on "Oh shit" hurricane of the Category 5 classification. Destruction wise, this storm would be a dozen times worse than a Category 3.

Matthew Bloch via New York Times
Leading us to wonder why it's not a Category 36 hurricane.

So, What Can Be Done?

Luckily, New York City is prepared for pretty much anything. And when we say prepared, we meanthey know precisely how screwed they're going to be.

Using a Category 4 hurricane as a sort of average of terror, authorities have calculated that a massive hurricane would do about $500 billion worth of foreseeable damage -- that is, four times as much as Hurricane Katrina managed. Hell, a mere Category 2 would turn the subway into an aquarium in 40 minutes, with Grand Central and Penn Stations flooding as well. There is also the matter of the 15-foot wall of water expected to hit three of the five N.Y. boroughs with all the havoc a mini-tsunami with New York attitude can wreak.

Digital Vision./Digital Vision/Getty Images
"HEY- I'm floodin' here."

Bottom line for hurricane survival in New York: When it hits, be in Cleveland. Though it could be worse...

#4. Amsterdam Lives in Constant Dread of Drowning

Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Amsterdam is the capital of Netherlands, and the Red Light Districted obligatory rest stop for backpackers who want to take pictures of each other giggling nervously over a ridiculously oversized and overpriced blunt. It is a beautiful city with hundreds of years of history and wonderful art museums, with the added bonus of hash bars freaking everywhere.

It's also about to be eaten by the ocean, every single minute of the day.

Most of Netherlands resides below sea level, and if anything -- anything, anywhere, at all -- goes wrong, Amsterdam will take an entire ocean right in the face. Subsequently, the map of the Netherlands would look a little something like this:

Albert Delahaye
But the weed shops are OK, right? RIGHT?!

See the black blip labeled "Amsterdam" that's right in the middle of the fucking blue? That's what happens if just one of the various, intricate failsafe barriers and dams surrounding the country goes down. Not only the city (highest point: seven feet above sea level), but in fact much of the entire country (lowest point: minus 23 feet) is at constant risk of being claimed by the sea.

The good news is, Amsterdam's an old hand at fighting water and the authorities have actually set up the elaborate not-getting-drowned network that is keeping them safe. The bad news: They absolutely blow at keeping said network up to date. In fact, only 50 percent of the defenses are somewhat capable of handling their task of keeping people's feet dry. The Netherlands had their latest hazardous flood defense failure in 2010, and rest assured there will be more: Many experts are not even suresome of the dams will hold if they get just the tiniest of hairline cracks.

Comstock/Comstock/Getty Images

In fact, The defenses keeping Amsterdam turning from pot paradise to Waterworld are so leaky, maintaining and improving them (what with the rising sea levels) add up to around 1 billion euros a year. Oh, and that's just for ocean level preparedness. If the sea level rises sufficiently, their rivers can also fuck them up.

So, What Can Be Done?

Not a lot, really. There is a century-spanning multibillion-dollar plan to fortify the country's defenses, sure, but even its makers acknowledge the absurdity of attempting to plan so far into the future.

Still, before you rush mailing bong-shaped lifeboats to random Amsterdam dwellers, it's worth keeping in mind that this is a situation that has been going on for centuries. The country has been flooded dozens and dozens of times, including a great 1953 flood that essentially turned Amsterdam into Venice for a while.

Wikipedia
Getty Images via Wired
Visit New Venice! We have marijuana and hookers!

So, they might be going under, and facing insurmountable odds against saving themselves from that fate, but at least they're fully aware what they're up against. Also, this situation goes a long way toward explaining all the pot.

#3. Greater Seattle Will Be Drowned by a River of Hot Mud

Ablestock.com/AbleStock.com/Getty Images/Massey University

Poor Seattle can't catch a break. We've already covered how the mild-mannered city is particularly prone to giant earthquakes, but it gets even worse: the entire Greater Seattle is at the risk of beingburied under a sea of mud.

The area lies downstream from Mount Rainier, which carries the questionable honor of being one of the most dangerous volcanoes in existence. However, this particular danger doesn't come from soot and magma -- sure, there would be some if it was to erupt, but that would be just the icing on the horror cake. The true killer would be a lahar, whose nerdy name betrays its potential for destruction.Lahars are giant flows of hot mud, trees and water, rolling forward with the consistency of a zillion tons of wet cement and at speeds up to 60mph.

USGS
"Slow down! You're devastating like a bat out of hell!"

And they can get big: Urban Seattle could be facing a Lahar as tall 600 freaking feet. How do we know? Because it's happened before! Around 5,000 years ago, a giant lahar called the Osceola Mudflow filled a part of Puget Sound with three cubic kilometers of hot, steamy, gooey mud. What was once a pristine sea was, in a matter of hours, suddenly 200 square miles of new land. For comparison, the disastrous 1985 Nevado del Ruiz lahar that killed 25,000 people in Colombia only had 2.5 percent of the volume of the Osceola Mudflow.

So, What Can Be Done?

A lahar detection system was installed in 1998, but it remains loose and incomprehensive. To make matters worse, these mud tsunamis (mudnamis!) are a right bastard to detect: a lahar doesn't need a volcanic eruption as an excuse to kick in: A sector collapse or some magma leakage could be enough to send a mudnami the size of Godzilla into Seattle.

USGS
We'll just get Matthew Broderick to stop it. No matter what happens, we win.

If just the Puyallup Valley lahar (the purple one in the above picture) sparks off, material damages alone could be as high as $13 billion. Also, a non-volcanic lahar could easily spread from one to several of the six (six!) Mount Rainer lahar systems, multiplying the destruction.

USGS via Wikipedia
Mudnami scoffs at your puny bridges.

6 Terrifying Children's Cartoons from Around the World

The Animals of Farthing Wood is an early '90s cartoon about a bunch of talking woodland critters who, after their forest is destroyed, make a friendship pact and set out on a grand adventure to find a new home. It took the combined efforts of Britain and France to turn such a harmless-sounding concept into what's possibly the most depressing animated series ever made outside of Japan.

For example, in one episode, the group gains new characters when two members of the party, the field mice, have little mice babies:

"They're all so adorable. I'm not sure which one to consume."

Surely adding kids to the cast will make the show more whimsical and fun, right? Um, no ... because exactly one episode later, this happens:

They couldn't have known they were trespassing on Vlad the Bluejay's territory.

Holy shit -- there's more gore in that scene than in the entire second season of The Walking Dead. Yes, those are the newly born baby mice impaled on a thicket of thorns.

They weren't just killed off subtly off screen: We needed to witness their horrible deaths, for some reason, and then watch their mother crying in sadness and guilt. Why introduce a litter of babies only to have them snatched away an episode later?

"Chill out, lady. They were basically strangers."

And this wasn't a one-time thing -- in another episode, the group is found out while hiding on a farm, and one of them, Mrs. Pheasant, is shot and killed by a human. Oh, but that's not the unusually cruel part yet: After the group has managed to escape, they notice that one of the animals was left behind, and the recently widowed Mr. Pheasant volunteers to go back and get them. If you already know where this is going, you are one sick individual.

"Mummy, I'm a vegetarian now." "Oh, get over yourself, honey."

Yes, he finds his dead wife plucked and cooked and about to be eaten by humans. Mr. Pheasant is so distraught that he is literally blinded by the tears and doesn't see the farmer coming. Long story short, they had a really big dinner that night.

If you look at things from the farmer's perspective, it was an incredibly happy ending.

There are actually three full seasons of this shit, with a running total of 23 on-screen deaths, many of them regular characters.

#5. Wakfu (France) -- The Heroes Become Accidental Cannibals

Wakfu is a French cartoon based on a popular (in France) MMO video game of the same name. It follows a group of heroes who wander across the land having adventures, fighting the forces of evil and occasionally murdering innocent people and eating their remains. By "occasionally," we mean "in one disturbing episode," but that's enough to land them on this list.

The episode starts innocently enough. The heroes are walking through a forest, looking for food, when they come across a little piglet ...

Awwwww.

... which they proceed to murder the shit out of and devour. That's actually not the disturbing part.

There it is on the spit.

Granted, the fact that the animators went out of their way to make the pig look as cute as possible before slaughtering it may be disturbing enough for some kids, but it's not what we're here to talk about. It's about to get much, much worse.

After picking the piglet's bones dry and doing some other things we don't completely understand because a) we've never played the game this is based on and b) it's all in French, the heroes end up making their way into a nearby dungeon. At this point, three of the characters wander into a poorly ventilated chamber filled with green fart-air ... and when they emerge, they look like this:

In France, this is probably a metaphor for sexting or something.

It turns out that the dungeon is inhabited by a giant pig monster who somehow turns people into little piglets with wings. Oh, yes, you see where this is going.

The characters get turned back to normal at the end of the episode, of course, but that leaves a question: What about the piglet they just killed and ate? You know, the one they found near the pig-transforming dungeon, who looked exactly like they did when they were turned into pigs?

This one.

Everything seems to indicate that the pig was another adventurer who just happened to be caught in the same trap, came out as a pig and was looking for help. That's why it was smiling when they found it. And just in case you think we are jumping to some conclusion here that isn't in the show, they actually explain the whole thing again during a little credits sequence. First we see a lone swordsman wandering around, minding his own business.

"Once I sell this magic sword, I'll have enough gold to keep the orphanage afloat!"

As he wanders off screen, he is treated to the same gaseous stink as before ...

... and emerges as the little piglet from the beginning of the episode. Scared and confused, he sees something coming toward him ...

Something with inexplicable vampiric teeth.

... which turns out to be our heroes, locked on to his sweet bacon aroma. They chase the poor little bastard back off screen and off to his horrible, terrible demise.

Level up! You get +4 cannibalism!

This is either a re-creation of what happened earlier in the episode or an extra scene showing what happens once the heroes get a taste for human flesh.

#4. The Moomins (Finland) -- The Moomins Are Visited by Death Incarnate

The only things kids under 5 demand out of their TV screens are pretty colors, catchy tunes and characters with annoyingly high-pitched voices. It's that simple. On all those counts, The Moomins pretty much delivers. The classic Finnish stop-motion show stars a race of wide-eyed mouthless semi-anthropomorphic hippos called Moomins.

A consequence of Finland's rampant genetic experimentation.

The colorful storybook valley the Moomins inhabit is populated by all sorts of friendly animals and cheerful children. Everything is happy and pleasant -- but then out of nowhere comes the Groke, and everything goes to shit.

This is what the Teletubbies needed.

The Groke is an almost indescribably terrifying creature that occasionally invades the show for no apparent reason. You never actually see the Groke move: It slips between the seconds, its gaze fixed on your soul, as it emits a low, horrid breathing sound, like a recording of death itself. The worst part? It kills everything it touches. In one episode, we see a butterfly approaching it ...

You know, Finland's famous cyclops butterfly.

... and instantly dropping dead just for breathing the same air.

Technically, the Groke prevented a hurricane in France. But fuck France.

The same happens to the plants and trees surrounding it. The butterfly comes back to life when the Groke leaves at the end of the episode, but we seriously doubt there was a single kid left watching by that point.

Every other character in the show is terrified of the Groke to the point of hysteria. Another episode shows the Moomins panicking and barricading themselves into their house because they know the Groke is coming that night. Desperate, Moominpappa runs to the attic and grabs a shotgun.

"The gun won't hurt it," said Snufkin. "I know," said Moominpappa, "it's for us."

The next morning, when they head out to investigate the spot in the garden where the Groke was, they find it dead and frozen, as if the warmth of a loving God just blew away like leaves in the wind. Then the narrator says, "Oh, what could they do? The terrible Groke would surely return" -- and then the credits roll. That's how the episode ends, with the lingering thought that it's still out there.

"I don't know who you should pray to, for our God shuns you for being so funny-looking."

It's never explained what the Groke is or where it comes from. It seems specifically designed to teach kids about the randomness and inevitability of death (which is apparently more important in Finland than learning the ABC's and shit like that).

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_19768_6-terrifying-childrens-cartoons-from-around-world.html#ixzz2QnuFdS00

The 5 Stupidest Decisions You Didn't Notice in Famous Movies

There are countless movies that hinge on an obsessively detailed master plot, whether it be the ultimate bank heist or a plan to make Chris Rock president. But sometimes the characters responsible for that plot throw caution to the wind for no apparent reason, endangering (or flat-out ruining) the plans they had so intricately laid and leaving the rest of us to wonder what the hell they were thinking about. It makes for great drama, but baffling logic.

#5. Inception -- Cobb Blows the Mission for No Reason

Inception is about international fugitive Dom Cobb (Leo DiCaprio) hacking into other people's dreams in order to steal and/or implant information, which the movie explains by finding hilarious ways for Cobb and his team to lie down and sleep next to their targets while connected to a forest of complicated electrodes and somehow still be incognito.

"Just having a nice sleep EKG, nothing strange here."

The movie focuses on Cobb's big final heist, wherein he and his operatives must reach the deepest level of a tycoon's subconscious and implant an idea. This is actually the least complicated part of the film.

Throughout the movie, the big problem lurking below the surface is that Cobb is haunted by the memories of his dead wife, Mal, which threatens to screw up the whole operation. To make sure this doesn't happen, much of the final plan is hidden from Cobb himself. So Ellen Page's character, Adriadne, knows a way into the mind fortress of the tycoon, but Cobb doesn't. It's for their own protection -- if Cobb knows, his memories of Mal will fuck everything up.

Phantom dream women, right?

The Scene:

Once Cobb and his Dream Bandits make it inside the tycoon's subconscious, they get intercepted by a bunch of dudes on snowmobiles trying to keep them out of the mountain bunker where the tycoon's innermost secrets are stored (because without question, this is how everyone's mind is organized). With everything going to hell, Cobb demands that Adriadne tell him the one thing he can't be allowed to know: the way into the complex. This exchange happens:

ARIADNE: I don't think I should tell you. If Mal finds out ...
COBB: We don't have time for this! Did he add anything?
ARIADNE: He added an air duct system that can cut through the maze.
COBB: Good. [points to her radio] Explain it to them.

"Don't explain anything to the audience, though. They like being kept in the dark."

The Problem:

First, Cobb silences her entirely justified objections by shout-screaming "There's no time for this!" Maybe you could justify this if, in fact, they were in a position where they had no way of succeeding unless Cobb knew. But then he doesn't even use that information. He immediately has her tell it to the other members of the team so they can do all that air-duct-scuttling bullshit while he watches through binoculars.

Predictably, Mal appears and shoots one of Cobb's team members, effectively ruining the mission (or at least making it a lot more difficult and confusing). Had Cobb not insisted that Ariadne tell him about the secret way into the base, Mal would never have shown up (because Mal is Cobb's evil subconscious, so she only knows what he knows). There wasn't even any reason to tell him about it, either -- Cobb could've just asked, "Hey, is there another way into the base? There is? Good, tell them about it while I plug my ears and sing 'Black Hole Sun' to myself for a minute."

Hemera Technologies/PhotoObjects.net
"Black Hole Sun, dreams are dumb, dreams are duuuuuumb ..."

His "There's no time for this!" outburst is especially ridiculous because he's asking Ariadne to take an extra step explaining everything to him, making the whole thing take longer. She could've just relayed the information directly to the rest of the team in less time than it took to unnecessarily involve Cobb, and they would've avoided the "murderous wife ghost" factor in the process.

#4. Die Hard With a Vengeance -- Simon Gruber Involves the One Man He Knows Can Ruin His Plan

Die Hard pitted shoeless New York detective John McClane against bearded German murder-thief Hans Gruber. Hans had a delicately intricate plan to steal millions of dollars of bearer bonds and fake his own death via skyscraper explosion, but McClane foils it step by step before ultimately shooting Hans out of a window. Die Hard With a Vengeance continues the saga by throwing John McClane against Hans' younger brother, Simon, who is similarly engaged in an epic super-robbery. However, this time it's personal, and Simon goes out of his way to drag McClane into the plot so he can send him on pointless riddle-infused errands around New York City before ultimately killing him in some spectacularly hilarious fashion.

"Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the ... ah, shit, you've already killed me."

The Scene:

By using McClane to stage a citywide distraction, Simon is able to tie up the resources of the entire NYPD and literally steal a boatload of gold from the Federal Reserve Bank. In fact, his plan was so good that the FBI questioned the film's writers to see if they were actually planning to rob the joint, because the FBI evidently had very little to do in 1995.

"Bruce Willis wearing flannel represents a clear and present danger to our national security."

So, the robbery is obviously brilliant and very carefully orchestrated. Simon then meticulously covers his tracks by blowing up a decoy boat in the middle of the harbor, staging it to look like an international terrorist attack on the wealth of America by burying all of the gold at the bottom of the sea. Only the gold wasn't blown up -- it was on a different ship with Simon. He is a Gruber, after all. Disguising thievery as a terrorist explosion is pretty much what they do.

Jupiterimages/liquidlibrary/Getty Images
"We're a German family. Compared to their grandparents, Hans and Simon are angels."

The Problem:

Does Simon's plan seem a little familiar? It should, because it is the exact same plan Hans had in the first film: steal a bunch of money, pretend to blow it up, escape with aforementioned money to Rum-and-Sex Island.

Now, what went wrong with Hans' plan?

And what does Simon deliberately introduce into his plan?

That's right -- Simon executes a slightly jazzier version of the same scheme his brother pulled, and then goes out of his way to bring in the exact same man who systematically dismantled that plan and made Simon an only child. This also happens to be the one man likely to recognize what's really going on. Because, you know, he was there the first time around.

We understand that Simon wants revenge for Hans, but why did both killing McClane and robbing the bank have to be done at the same time? Was Simon only in town for the weekend? Did he have a bus transfer ticket that was about to expire? He could've spread that agenda out over at least a year if he wanted to. Rob the bank, dye your hair and wait for your beard to grow in, then go back and kill McClane. Or do the killing first, whatever. You've got time, Simon.

As a wise man once said, buying a yacht full of prostitutes is the best revenge.

Instead, he mashes them both together, which to the surprise of absolutely no one results in McClane foiling the robbery and cheerfully executing Simon in public. We assume subsequent generations of Grubers will spend their formative years looking under their beds for John McClane.

On a similar note ...

#3. Aliens -- The Evil Corporation Hires Alien-Killing Ripley to Not Kill Their Aliens

We've previously discussed how ridiculous it was for Ripley to accept another job from Weyland-Yutani despite all of the bullshit they pulled on her in the first Alien (you know, what with them intentionally sending her down to a planet to get eaten by space monsters).

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on the whole damn franchise."

But now look at it from the company's point of view. Why in the possible hell did they want to involve her a second time?

In Aliens, Ripley wakes up from hypersleep after half a century, and her bosses say they don't believe a goddamn word of her frenzied babbling about a murderous space creature. Moreover, the flight computer from her original ship (the one she set to self-destruct in the first film in an attempt to kill the alien) claims that she blew the whole thing up for no apparent reason. She spends her hearing with the Weyland-Yutani board members shouting and flinging papers around like a lunatic.

"How could you botch a suicide mission this badly?!"

The Scene:

In the very next scene, Weyland-Yutani sends Mad About You's Paul Reiser to convince Ripley to escort a team of marines down to one of their colonies, which they think may be overrun with the same aliens that they refused to acknowledge even existed in the previous scene. Ripley agrees to accompany the marines as an adviser, because she's having trouble adjusting to civilian life due in large part to the PTSD we mentioned earlier, and because marines apparently need advice on how to shoot monsters.

"We point the barrel at them? Sacred Dancing Moses, that's genius."

The Problem:

Let's go over what happened the last time Weyland-Yutani sent Ripley into outer space with a bunch of expensive equipment and an alien -- she blew everything up, all of it, and floated around in the stars for six decades.

Seriously, Ripley's personnel file must just be a list of things she has done in direct opposition to the Weyland-Yutani business model. Also, they already know she's crazy -- they spent an entire board meeting telling her so. But the moment they find out that their colonists may have come into contact with some aliens, they trip over themselves in their rush to put Ripley back on the payroll so she can oversee another operation involving billion-dollar equipment and nightmare space creatures. And guess what happens this time:

That's right -- the same fucking thing. Ripley's entire testimony (containing every piece of knowledge that would have been useful to the marines) was available in a written report, which the marine lieutenant specifically mentions as being available for the entire team to read. They already have everything she could possibly tell them safely written down in a folder that can't blow anything up. There is literally no reason to send her along on the mission, yet Weyland-Yutani does so anyway, presumably as an exercise to keep their insurance division on their toes.