5 Insane Pop Culture Questions Answered by Super Fans

Well, Kinetic Analysis Corp., a group specializing in figuring out how much disasters cost, got bored enough to do a detailed analysis of how much damage was done during the finale of The Avengers. Let's just say that it's going to take a while for the New York economy to recover. Using complex computer simulations and fancy math with, like, letters instead of numbers (so you know that it's hardcore), a team lead by Chuck Watson and Sara Jupin put the Avengers' damage at a mind-boggling $160 billion, making it the most costly disaster in human history. That includes 9/11, Katrina, and the 2011 tsunami that hit Japan (the last one costing "only" $122 billion in damages).

The KAC team estimated that the total physical damage from all of those smashed-up skyscrapers and the ruined infrastructure would equal $60 to $70 billion. The cleanup costs take that number up to $90 billion (watch the finale again, and think about how many truckloads of rubble and broken glass would need to be hauled out of the city over the next several months). Throw in the medical costs of the thousands of casualties, and you reach the grand total of $160 billion -- CGI is good at rendering a crumbling skyscraper, but not at conveying how many hundreds of survivors now have lifelong disabilities and seven-figure medical bills.

They helpfully noted that, because of the gods involved, Thor and Loki, the city could blame the damage on "an act of God," so thank goodness the insurance companies will be off the hook for the damage. Still, we've got a feeling that the team of vigilantes who took it upon themselves to fight off the invasion had better get ready for a drawn-out legal battle, especially since one of them helped facilitate the attack. We hope you've got good liability insurance, Hawkeye.

But regardless of which side you're on, you can't seriously compare the verbal range of, say, Wu-Tang Clan with a master like William Shakespeare. Right?

Well, Matt Daniels wanted to find out. He's a data scientist from New York who used the magic of numbers to prove that some rappers have vocabulary skills that make Shakespeare sound as eloquent as a drunken infant. First, Daniels gathered a 35,000-word sample from Shakespeare's works and various songs from famous rappers, and then counted how many unique words each of them used. The results of the analysis showed that Shakespeare used 5,170 unique words. Wu-Tang Clan, on the other hand, bested him with 5,895 unique words in their raps. Ha! Eat it, you long-dead motherfucker!

Granted, artists like Lil Wayne and 50 Cent lagged behind the Clan and Shakespeare both, at 3,500 to 3,700 words (we could have guessed that, right?). Tupac's 3,970 unique words trailed not only Shakespeare, but also Kanye West (3,982). However, all of these are surprisingly comparable to the Bard, considering that the rappers needed them all to rhyme.

By the way, the highest-scoring person in Daniels' analysis was alternative/underground rapper Aesop Rock, with a score of 7,392 unique words, or enough to give a thesaurus an erection, making him the best-spoken rapper of them all. To give you a better idea of how impressive Aesop Rock's vocabulary is, it's generally believed that Shakespeare was ... the best at words. Daniels believes he might have known up to 100,000 of them, and yet, based on the research, he would still lose a rap battle with Aesop.

And because we know you're dying to know: DMX scored the lowest, with 3,214 words. But hey, it's not like you'd ever see him in a Shakespeare adaptation or anything.

Marvel is the creator of one of the most inventive shared universes that doesn't involve different fictional characters having freaky butt sex. And now with half a dozen film franchises all crossing over one another, surely you must have wondered how it all fits together -- what was Bruce Banner doing while Tony Stark was farting around in Iron Man 2? How long did it take Tony to build the first Iron Man suit? Well, fear not, dear reader, because Andrew Norfolk is here to help you:

Norfolk compiled the entire Marvel universe into one timeline, giving us specific dates and even approximate times for everything that's transpired in it. For example, did you know that Tony Stark attends a firefighter benefit on October 21, 2009, right between testing the Mark II Armor (October 20) and blowing up the Ten Ring gang in Afghanistan (October 22)? No, because you are sane and didn't sift through Iron Man and all of its supplementary materials with a fine-toothed comb, scanning for date clues. But really, it's as simple as obsessively studying every single frame of film and line of dialogue for dates, and then counting the days backward and forward to orient the other events.

For example, Norfolk knows that Killian initiated the testing of Project Extremis on June 25, 2009, because that date briefly appears in tiny print on the monitor in Iron Man 3 when Tony hacks the bad guys' computer. One glimpse of a partial date in The Incredible Hulk let him match it up with the "Days Without Incident" counter on screen, and boom -- we can now draw up an entire timeline of Bruce Banner's life.

The timeline contains a very user-friendly interactive slider that starts a few thousand years ago when "The Dark Elves of Svartalfheim attempt to conquer the nine realms" and goes all the way through the events of Iron Man 3 (December 2013). What, no Winter Soldier? Come on, don't be lazy, dude!

The above headline probably doesn't sound all that impressive unless you've actually seen the Netflix-only fourth season of Arrested Development. The 15 episodes were released simultaneously and take place at the same time, each episode following the events through the eyes of a different character. The whole thing forms one huge, labyrinthine meta-joke full of intersecting storylines and callbacks that would probably need six viewings to untangle.

Of course, only the most passionate and/or deranged fan would watch the entire season that many times. And only one fan would get the urge to load all eight hours or so into editing software and rearrange every scene to put it all together chronologically, either for science or to be able to watch it while stoned and not get confused, whatever their motives may be.

A Reddit user named morphinapg did just that and then uploaded the "fixed" season online. He wound up with 12 distinct episodes, now told in chronological order, culminating in the finale of "Cinco de Cuatro." The episodes vary in length, from a standard 21-minute show to a full hour-long feature. Oh, and get this: morphinapg didn't just splice these episodes together over the course of a year, fiddling around with it in his spare time -- that would be rookie shit right there. No, morphinapg had all of the episodes in the correct order and ready for download a week after release.

Yep, most of us weren't even through watching the new season in the time it took him to take the whole thing apart, scene by scene, just so we could see how the story would work when everything was lined up in sequence. And it was all worth it, because he was rewarded by having the entire thing immediately yanked off the Internet. Since, you know, the whole endeavor violates every copyright law known to man. It's not everyone who gets the kind of cooperation from the creators that we have in this next entry ...

That is the handiwork of one Ser Mountain Goat, and with Ser Goat's map, you can track any episode or chapter and find out where the characters were at the time. Pretty cool, to be sure, but when it comes to knowledge of the series, all must bow down to Elio Garcia, who literally knows more about Martin's world than anyone else alive, including Martin.

That's right -- while it's not surprising that Martin's epic has spawned fan websites (even exhaustive ones like Garcia's Westeros.org), what's remarkable is that when George R.R. Martin wants to know some detail about the ASoIaF universe, he fucking asks Garcia. By virtue of having maintained an exhaustive database of every single character, location, and event in the series over the last 17 years, he's become the man Martin calls when he's forgotten some element of his own goddamned story:

"[Martin calls] when [he] has an idea and he wants to make sure that he hasn't used this character before, or he hasn't mentioned this particular detail previously, because he doesn't want to contradict himself or trap himself."

Just think about that for a moment. That's like God manifesting himself in front of a marine biologist because he's forgotten how many legs go on a squid. And you know who else relies on Garcia's expertise? The producers of the HBO series (although their questions probably revolve around whether a female character's breasts are described in detail in the novels, or if they're free to leave it up to the horny dudes in casting).

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