One of Iron Man's armours once gained sentience as a result of the Y2K bug

Your targets this week:

1+ out of 9: Well done, you beat us!
3+ out of 9: We'd have won with you on our team!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The Klingon
4) The game dev
5) The tourist (un)
6) The tourist (deux)

The ones that got away
1) 96% of the atmosphere of Mars is made up of which gas?
2) How long is the biking portion of a traditional Ironman triathlon? You can have 10% either way.
3) Which movie villain gives the order to "Scheiss dem Fenster!" before immediately translating to "Shoot the glass!"?
4) Which of these words is a medical term for the red part of the lips: crimson, scarlet or vermilion?
5) What is the current (on 21st May 2014) year in the Jewish calendar? You can have 20 years either way.
6) Which colour does the human eye notice fastest?
7) According to Wikipedia's list of highest paid film actors, who is the only actor to have earned over $30 million from three different films? This includes not just their base salary, but potentially money earned through 'profit participation' (taking a percentage of the film's gross).
8) The chief legislative body of which country is The Great Khural?
9) Which 'tough guy' actor was born Marion Robert Morrison?

The answers

1) Carbon dioxide
2) 112 miles (so 100.8-123.2 miles gets you the point, or 162.2-198.3 km if you're metrically-minded)
3) Hans Gruber (in Die Hard)
4) Vermilion
5) 5774 (so 5754-5794 gets you the point)
6) Yellow
7) Tom Cruise
8) Mongolia
9) John Wayne

How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more correct)? Would you have helped us win (3 or more correct)? If Blogger have fixed their polling weidget then let us know with the poll on the right (or, if it's still broken, feel free to share in the comments or tweet me @statacake).

Our excuses

1) Extensive discussion of Total Recall (the original one, not the iffy remake) along with the observation that the planet is red because of oxidization, motivated us to put oxygen (albeit unbreathably little). I'd like to think if we'd thought about it slightly more (and made slightly fewer bad Schwarzenegger impersonations) we wouldn't have made that sort of mistake.
2) Despite one of my brothers being an Ironman enthusiast (the triathlon, not the superhero), and knowing that the running component was a marathon (and thus 26.2 miles), my guess of 70km was a long way off.
3) A lesson in "say every idea that comes into your head". Die Hard briefly occurred to me as a movie with a naughty German in it, but given my track record on films I didn't even think to mention it. Cue the classic "Why didn't you say something? I would have got it from that!".
4) As is typical for a 'medical term' quiz question, it's not something the resident doctor had heard of. He proposed scarlet via scarlet fever as 'better than nothing'.
5) A tough ask, but something most of us will at least be vaguely familiar with. We would have needed around 3000 years either way to have been close.
6) Apparently this is why yellow is such a common colour in product packaging. The doctor's attempt to use his knowledge of the eye (he suggested purple) proved as successful as I expected.
7) One of those where you'll almost certainly name most people on this list during your discussion. Our guess of Johnny Depp features twice, along with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom hanks, featured twice, so if you went with one of that trio you can feel fractionally more frustrated.
8) A bit of meta-game gone wrong here, as while the 'kh' put is in mind of the Mongolian title Khan, we thought that was a) pretty tenuous, and b) would seem pretty damn hard. We thought Iran seemed a marginally more plausible punt.
9) Ouch. A truly classic bit of trivia evaded us all. Considering the frequency with which we seem to get questions about Clint Eastwood wrong I'm surprised I'm still yet to get around to adding John Wayne to my revision list.

My alternative questions
1) Mars has two moons named after the twin brothers in Greek mythology who accompanied their father Ares into battle. One is Deimos, the personification of terror, who is the other?
2) Which two British brothers have somewhat dominated the international triathlon circuit of late, most notably taking gold and bronze in the 2012 Olympics?
3) According to Die Hard with a Vengeance, how many were going to St Ives?
4) What term describes a puppetry technique most notably seen in Gerry and Sylvia Anderson-produced shows such as Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet? A portmanteau of three words, my childhood self spent a long time thinking it must be to do with a famous video game character instead.
5) Quiz staple the French Revolutionary Calendar had 12 months of exactly 30 days each. How many days, though, were in a French Revolutionary week?
6) Which superhero has traditionally suffered a rather implausible weakness to the colour yellow due to an 'impurity' in his power source?
7) TOMCRUISE could be a Countdown conundrum - what 9 letter word is it an anagram of?
8) Mongolia and China have a very long border, and while the USA and Canada share the world's longest land border between two countries, it comes primarily in two distinct parts (think Alaska). Which two countries share the world's longest single segment of land border?
9) Despite appearing in over 140 films, for which movie did John Wayne win his only Oscar for best actor in 1969?

The answers

1) Phobos (the personification of fear)
2) (Alistair and Jonathan) Brownlee
3) 1 (there are, of course, various possibilities depending on how the rhyme is interpreted)
4) Supermarionation (from 'super', 'marionette' and 'animation', and nothing to do with Super Mario...)
5) 10 (as part of an attempt at decimalization, and instead of saints, each day had an associated animal, tool, plant or mineral - super fun)
6) Green Lantern
7) Costumier
8) Kazakhstan and Russia
9) True Grit

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