One of my biggest fears is deep water. I have always wondered why I’m so afraid of it. One time I was jet skiing in the Cayman Islands and I was cruising around within 50 yards of the shore. One of the boat captains had previously explained to me that about 200 yards off shore the depth of the water sharply dropped off from around 40 feet to a mile. A MILE DEEP. That is 5,280 feet, way deeper than 40! I decided to venture out and see what it was like to cross the “threshold” of depth. I revved my trusty Yamaha and went straight out toward the horizon. Suddenly, all around me, the water turned from light blue to black; I had journeyed over the great shelf. I was immediately filled with an ominous fear I had never experienced before (aside from when Taco Bell took the Volcano Taco off their menu). When I scampered back to safety and calmed down, I posed this question to myself: “Why is it that absolutely nothing changed when I crossed the barrier – my jet ski still worked perfectly, I had the same ability to swim, and the waves remained the same – but I was absolutely horror-stricken?” I researched the answer to this question for 3 solid years and have finally figured out the answer. In keeping with the TGM tradition, this is all totally scientific and full of completely accurate science.

The true fear presented here is actually going down beneath the surface into the depths, either in an ocean or a lake (lakes are almost scarier), and the jet skiing example is what happens as a result of that fear. Though filled with horror, I was able to be on top of the deep water and could probably do it again. It would be absolutely out of the question for me to actually dive into the depths and be “down there” by myself. But why is this so? As you will see, it is not due to any one fear, but a combination of all of our most common fears. Here are the reasons why deep water is a ridiculously scary concept.

1. Fear of the Dark

When you’re at the bottom of a body of water, you can’t see anything. It’s pitch black. Have you ever tried to swim as far down in a lake as you can? It gets really dark and cold really fast – about 10 feet down. Imagine being 20 feet down. Or 5,280 feet down. But even that’s nothing compared to the deepest point on the entire crust of the Earth, located at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean near Japan, called the Mariana Trench, which is 38,000+ feet (or 6.8 miles). If you put Mount Everest at the bottom of the trench, the top of the mountain would still be over a mile below the surface of the ocean. The bottom line is that you can’t see anything. Even if you’re not that far down and there is faint sunlight, everything below you would be complete darkness, and this definitely plays into our collective fear of the dark. In case I haven’t hammered my point home by now, just think about taking a walk in the woods by yourself. Not really scary. Now picture yourself alone in the woods in the middle of the night. I don’t care who you are, the dark is a scary thing.

2. Fear of Suffocating

This is the most obvious reason, but it still needs to be addressed. Have you ever gotten to the point where you swam down too far in the swimming pool and you seriously considered the fact that you might not make it back to the top before you ran out of breath? If you’ve ever been rough-housing as a kid with blankets and pillows and you accidentally got pinned down inside of a sleeping bag or something, and you get to that point where laughter temporarily turns to screaming, you know what a scary concept not being able to breath is. Even if you have scuba gear with you down in that deep dark abyss, there’s a chance a valve could pop out or you could run out of oxygen. You can’t see and you can’t really take a deep breath. Could it get worse? Yes.

3. Fear of the Unknown

Need I remind you there are lots and lots of weird, dangerous, freaky-looking creatures everywhere in deep water? There are over 1 million species of creatures in the ocean. I’d be scared if there were 1 million creatures in the ocean, let alone species of creatures, and scientists estimate there are an additional 9 million species yet to be discovered. That means we only even know what 11% of the creatures in the ocean are. Most of the beings in the ocean are things mankind has never even seen or heard of. Who knows what could be down there?

But it’s worse than you’re even imagining. Allow me to use another analogy that’s happened to you in real life so that you can gauge how truly scary this is. Think about a time when you were walking in a dimly lit basement trying to find something, or, again, walking in the woods at night armed with only a flashlight. All the sudden, something brushes up against the back of your neck. What do 10 out of 10 people do at that point? They become airborne similar to a frightened cat, possibly let out a very girly scream, and instantly turn around and shine their flashlight to see what it was. And every time, what is the thing that touched you? A leaf from a branch or the flap of a cardboard box. It’s never anything actually scary. But in deep water, it’s always something scary.

Think if you couldn’t shine your flashlight on the thing. And think if the thing was lots of things. And think if, even if you could see the thing, you probably would have no idea what you were staring at. You would be forever locked in that initial fright index of 100.

It’s dark, you can barely breath, and some weird things just touched you and you have no idea where they just went. But there is more to fear, I’m afraid.

4. Fear of Flying Insects

Think if you were in a canyon somewhere in Colorado taking a hike. It would be very much like the bottom of a lake except without the water, wouldn’t it? If you answered yes, you clearly don’t appreciate the gravity of the fear of deep water. Imagine that, as you’re walking along, all of the beetles and scorpions crawling along the ground, the huge, black, hairy spiders that are hidden from view in the cracks of the canyon walls, and the slimy worms and snakes that are burrowed beneath the ground, simultaneously started flying anywhere they wanted. That is what the bottom of a lake without water would be like. For the strange creatures underwater, there is no up or down. They simply go wherever they want as if they were flying.

Ever been around someone when a huge bug flies near them? Then you know how even the manliest men, even though they appear to be calm, quickly tense up and become filled with a secret fear that the bug might land on their eyeball or fly into their mouth, and that’s why men try so hard to kill them. Go to a park in the summer and observe a large group of people. You will most assuredly witness at least one person run for their life because a bug is flying around their head. Flying insects are just plain scary.

Unfortunately, in deep water, you can’t see any of the undiscovered freakish flying creatures that brush past your body as you grasp at your suffocating throat. That’s gotta be it, right? Wrong.

5. Fear of Being Caught

Have you ever been chased by a dog, even if you were just playing with the dog? It’s so scary. Dogs will always catch you, and there is nothing more thrilling than when you are running full speed away from the dog and each time you glance back the dog is 10 yards closer until it’s finally nipping at your heels. Now, imagine that same scenario, except instead of a dog, you’re running from a bear. You will be eaten if you are caught, and it doesn’t help that bears can run faster sideways than the fastest human can run forward.

When you’re at the bottom of a lake, everything that is around you was built to move in water. Everything, except you. If something truly frightening like a shark or a giant squid caught site of you, you could turn the other way and flail about all you want, but the monster will catch up with you in a split second. You can’t get away from anything.

Even if you had the wherewithal to see and breath, you couldn’t run from danger. It would simply find you and devour you.

There are lots of places that I wouldn’t want to be, such as trapped in a burning house or alone in the vacuum of space. But in the burning house at least I can see, and in space at least there aren’t any creatures that could get me. There are no other places in the universe that combine as many common fears as places like a mile below the surface of Lake Baikal or 7 miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. It is because of the combination of all of these fears that I am so horrified by deep water.

I personally prefer the theme called Tree because it changes with the weather. All you have to do is type in your city when you select the theme and it takes care of the rest. It’s awesome, and also very accurate. No joke – one time I was checking my email and saw that it was snowing on the screen behind my emails and then I turned my head and looked out the window and sure enough it was snowing. Had it not been for my Gmail theme I might have never known! Based on this principal I have thought of a really fun challenge that you can do. It’s pretty hard because I haven’t even been able to complete it yet. So it’s hard and it’s fun. At least it’s fun, though.

I have been using the Tree theme for about 4 months and up to this point I have only noticed about 4 different weather possibilities. That is until today, when my Gmail suddenly showed a dark and ominous sky that I had never seen before – even during rain. It scared me. It really really scared me. No it didn’t, but anyway I wanted to find out just how many different types of weather my theme was capable of showing me. It turns out there are a total of 12 possible variations of the Tree theme!

Here’s what I usually see:

And here’s what punched me in the face and gave me a dose of reality today:

So dark, I know! Really really scary. Not really, but you can imagine my shock nonetheless. Ever think you’re about to take a big swig of coke and it turns out to be ice tea? You have to be careful in this life. On with the challenge.

So the first ever (and probably last) TGM reader challenge is: can you find all 12? Here’s how to play:

1. Change your Gmail theme to “Tree”:
   • In Gmail, click Settings (top right)
   • Click the Themes tab
   • Click “Tree” (about halfway down the list)
   • Make sure your location is correct (below the list of themes)
2. Note your current weather and then have a look at all 12 possible weather conditions so you’ll know what yours is called (sunny? hazy? cloudy?)
3. Now here’s the hard part: change your city until you find all 12 conditions

So far I have been able to find 6 of the 12. The way I did it was to look at current weather maps and then change my city in Gmail to where it looks like that weather is. For instance, I saw a bunch of rain over Kentucky this morning, so I changed my city to Lexington in Gmail and just like that it was rainy and all my emails were wet (literally – this theme is sweet!)

Tip: each time you change your city, make sure you refresh your browser to see your new weather.

The 12 possibilities are:

1. sunny
2. hazy
3. windy
4. foggy
5. mostly cloudy
6. cloudy
7. rainy
8. stormy
9. thunderstorm
10. icy
11. flurries
12. snowy

Here are the ones I’ve found so far:

Sunny In El Paso

Mostly Cloudy In Cleveland

Cloudy In Alexandria (Louisiana)

Rainy In Lexington

And finally, I’ll help you out with a gem I was able to find today:

Hazy In Los Angeles

So, it’s up to you to find the 6 remaining weather conditions: windy, foggy, icy, thunderstorm, flurries, and snowy. Take a screenshot and post it in the comments (do my comments accept screenshots?) or at least the city, weather condition, and time. I bet thunderstorm is the rarest, and fog is probably hard to snag too. I wish they would add the following conditions: sleet, hail, tornado, hurricane, humid (90%+) and sweltering (100°+).

Good luck and enjoy the weather!

Pay close attention to the super-slow speed footage at 3:11. Where does the car go? I don’t know the answer to that. How do explosions happen? Where do things go? Who decides which pieces are left, how big they are, and where they land?

1. “Your life saddens me.”
2. “That’s impossible. Your life saddens me.”

It only follows that this video intrigued me. It’s another video about the relative size of things, specifically using the power of 10 scale. If you liked my previous posts regarding this sort of thing (Big Ol’ Numbers and Our Sun Is Tiny) then you will undoubtedly enjoy this video. If not, here is the web page you should be reading instead.

BONUS VIDEOS!

Here’s my way of saying thanks to you for somehow having enough of an attention span to still be reading this scatter-brained blog. I like to sprinkle a little miscellany everywhere I can, especially if it’s gimcrack miscellany. If you read Digg everyday you’ve already seen these. Sorry.

Lightning strike right on the beach! (Audio is NSFW)

Chuck Norris in training! BOOM HEADSHOT

Backdrafts were featured in the film by the same name. We all know what a backdraft is by now. All the oxygen is consumed and there are no longer flames but everything is still so hot that any new oxygen introduced to the fire will rapidly expand and splode real big. Lets turn to the video evidence.

I thought that was pretty cool. But then I learned of flashovers, which are indeed cooler – or hotter, depending on your preferred level of literalness. What happens is, in an enclosed room (similar conditions to a backdraft) a fire gives off hot smoke which radiates heat onto all the surfaces in the room. Once all of these surfaces get to around 1000 degrees, they expel flammable gases which ignite, along with every surface in the room. All at the same time. That’s tight.

Read more about flashovers and then feast on these yummy youtubez.

The flashover in this one happens at 1:15:

This one happens right away and the rest of the video is garbage:

But wait, let’s take it one step further. What happens when a flashover occurs OUTDOORS? An eff’n firestorm. That’s right. A storm made out of: fire. Is fire even a thing to be made out of? I’m starting to get confused and overwhelmed and scared.

Firestorms are rare as a dang two-headed kid. They happen usually in nature during wildfires. But we have managed to set buildings and stuff on fire in the past that are capable of producing them too. I want you to visit teh wicky on firestorms and think about them for a minute. Here is the first sentence: “A firestorm is a conflagration which attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system.”

!!!!!!!!11!!1!1one

Here are some firestorms that resulted from fires us humans made: The Great London Fire (1666), The Great Chicago Fire (1871), The Oakland Firestorm (1991), and the one created by the atomic bomb in Heroshima.

So we have this comparison: backdrafts < flashovers < firestorms < fire whirls -WAIT wha??? Fire whirls?!?

Yes, fire whirls. They exist. And they are coming to get you. According to Wikipedia, a fire whirl is a phenomenon in which a fire acquires a vertical vorticity and forms a whirl, or a tornado-like effect of a vertically oriented rotating column of air. You may wonder how this happens. Me too, but I figured it out on my own: Lucifer.

Just listen to the following sentence and then I’m done with my tirade on fire whirls:

“An extreme example is the 1923 Great Kant? earthquake in Japan which ignited a large city-sized firestorm and produced a gigantic fire whirl that killed 38,000 in fifteen minutes in the Hifukusho-Ato region of Tokyo.”

When you go to bed tonight I want you to think of “a gigantic fire whirl that killed 38,000 in 15 minutes” and I guarantee you will have dreams about fire, featuring scenes with Kurt Russell and Donald Sutherland.

I believe that was recorded in Mordor.

Wow, that looked really windy. And fiery angered evil.

So our final tally is backdrafts < flashovers < firestorms < fire whirls < flame hurricanes – WAIT, wha?!?

I know they exist. I have seen them with my mind.

First, glance over the post about why i’m scared of cephalopods which was posted exactly 5 days ago. Then note the following sequence of various references since then, which combined are a classic example of Reference Burst Theory™.

1. My wife sent me this link she found on Yahoo news (she had not read my blog post at that time): http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080429/ap_on_sc/new_zealand_colossal_squid.

2. I was browsing Digg.com and saw this article on the front page: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/04/30/colossal.squid/index.html

Here’s where it gets crazy.

3. I was on The Sixty One listening to some of my old favorites and noticed one of the songs had just changed its avatar to this:

4. Finally, I proceeded to go to the New section of The Sixty One and was shocked to see the following:

That’s right, two songs right next to each other, the first with an octopus as an avatar and the second mentioning tentacles (not to mention the guy in the picture sort of resembles an octopus).

I fully expect a giant squid to be sitting in my favorite chair when I get home.

*****EDIT*****

Another article on Digg’s front page today: 8 Supersize Sea Monsters. Here’s an image from the article:

I have a fear of voids, so that’s all I wanna know.

• 1. Voids
• 2. Cephalopods

While you’re glaring at me for using a big word that I obviously found on Wikipedia, let me touch on #1.

Voids frighten me. Remember ‘The Nothing’ from The Neverending Story? That was my first encounter with this fear. The best way I can describe it is a large, empty, dark space. The best example of a void is a cave entrance, specifically a Blue Hole:

A Blue Hole is a huge sink hole that got submerged and filled with water when the Ice Age ended. The one in these pictures is over 300 feet wide and 400 feet deep. There’s one in The Bahama’s that goes down 663 feet. That scares me.

But what genuinely frightens me more than anything else is a large cephalopod – specifically an octopus or a giant squid. I can deal with my fear of voids. I can go inside a cave as long as it has previously been explored and I’m with at least 2 other people with 2 other flashlights. But you’ll never catch me anywhere near a giant squid – alive or dead. Especially in a void.

Perhaps these pictures will say a thousand words:

That last one might not be an actual photo per se, but I bet that really happened. A lot of people are scared of spiders. A lot of other people are scared of the deep ocean. Well guess what? Squid are basically huge spiders that live in the deep ocean. And they can kill sharks. Gah!

If you’re not convinced, listen to these frightening facts about squid and octopuses:

• Squid can get up to 66 feet long
• Squid have the largest eyes of any living creature – over 1 foot in diameter
• Octopuses have three hearts
• Octopuses and squid are highly intelligent
• Octopuses can detach their own limbs which will crawl around and distract a predator

I can barely even write about this. Octopuses and squid are invertebrate, which means they can flatten their bodies and fit through small spaces. Apparently you can’t really have them as pets because with the combination of their intelligence and ability to fit through small gaps they usually end up breaking out of aquariums. Just look at this octopus escaping an aquarium through a thin crack:

And then watch this video of an octopus escaping a glass cage through a 1 inch hole:

I don’t know what it is, but I am petrified of giant squid. The following image is the most frightening image I have ever laid eyes upon. Just drink it in and tell me it doesn’t freak you out:

Look at the eyes! LOOK AT THEM! What IS that? Now imagine coming face to face with that monster in a Blue Hole.

One more thing I came across that is going on my list is Abyssal Gigantism. It’s the tendency for deep-sea dwelling animals to display a larger size than their shallow-water counterparts. Look at this little gem:

*shutter*

Previously, I thought the differences between the sizes of the stars was like the differences between the sizes of the planets in our solar system. This video really puts my wrongness in perspective.

I’m a total sucker for illustrating a point with really good quality computer animation. That’s why I love shows like Build it Bigger and Mega Movers. Don’t worry, I’ll do a LOLhead post soon.

In this case, a bird fights a deer. And by “fights” I mean “captures in its talons”. The deer never had a chance. Watch right at the end when the eagle is sitting on the deer’s captured body and looking around. It’s like he’s saying “bring on teh liuns and elifints you n00b.”

Catching A Deer With A Bird – Watch more free videos

Moral of the story: get a golden eagle instead of a guard dog.