I have always been proud of my completely geeky and random interest in the most abstract of things. Even when the thirst for knowledge strikes me in the middle of the night (I once got up at 3am because I HAD to know whether Bournemouth got it name because it was the mouth of the River Bourne. It is.)

Yesterday when I discovered Wolfram Alpha I was far too excited, the excitement lasted longer than my rant about National Express seat charges, though won’t quite beat shopping at DVF in New York last year. Every time I have been on Wolfram Alpha in the past 24 hours (I have probably ramped up their visitor stats!) I have become more and more amazed at the kind of information I can find… things I never thought I needed to know are fascinating. I will never have to go without data and statistics again!

I’ve already discovered that I am 9492 days old today (who’s up for celebrating my 10000th day on Saturday 9th October 2010?) and that Southport has over twice the population of Durham.

Last week I was so annoyed with the over hyped Swine Flu issue I wanted to find out the deaths from Swine Flu vs. Malaria, to make a point about how ridiculous the ‘pandemic’ fear was, but even with the power of Google I couldn’t. Now thanks to Wolfram Alpha I know it’s 910707 per year… that’s 341827 deaths from malaria to date in 2009 compared to 69 deaths from Swine Flu.

I better curb the amount of time I spend on the site otherwise I’ll find myself ditching fiction to entertain people with numbers and facts instead!

Apart from being involved in the CPPIH I discovered I have a website (okay I didn’t discover it at all, I obviously am aware I have a website, which is in desperate need of an update!). I have a public profile on bebo (which has been quickly converted to private), and lead me to discover lots of friend requests, which was quite nice of people to want me to be their friends. However I only accepted the ones from people I know.

Some of the other highlights were as follows. I am on my university course website with my degree work. I created a website for the book my brother-in-law wrote and my sister is currently publishing. I contributed to a sculpture community forum, my university course (unofficial) forum, even contributed my thoughts on the farepak scandal of last year and, it seems, in my very early days of internet browsing wished a member of the band Eternal a happy birthday on their forum.

Probably the thing that generated the most results was being the Vice President in the Students Union. Google acknowledges the website I created for Student Reps, and a new link I hadn’t noticed before shows that because of this website I am referenced in Ulster Universities Best Practice for Student Representation document (along with a good number of other people, but still it’s nice to be referenced). I also was reminded that I had written at least one newsletter to my Student Reps, I feature in a Project Plan template for Personal Development Plans and in a Community Radio application form. There are also two newspaper articles I am quoted in, which is interesting as I never spoke to the newspaper in question once during my elected period, and one of them is most blatantly a reason for a liable case (a very boring one) if I could have been bothered at the time.

And that is not all. ‘No’ I hear you cry, there can’t be more. Well there is. I feature in an article in the International Journal of Art & Design because of a piece of art work I did in sixth form (I have to come clean about purposely trying to mislead you in my last statement. To be more precise, my art work was in said journal because my teacher had written an article on teaching methods, and my art work was one of a few examples of this method).

I’m not quite sure what my Google results say about me as a person, but there could be a much worse selection of links produced… or I could be overshadowed by many more people if I had a more common name, just like one of my friends who seems to share a name with a very prolific character in the world of Stilton cheesemaking. If you type his name followed by the words ‘stilton’ and ‘cheese’ you get almost 400 hits… I will never be overshadowed by a namesake of mine by that scale, and at the moment I am the overshadower of my namesakes in the world of Google, that has to be some kind of achievement in itself.