The 2010 Winter Olympics are set to kick off in Vancouver this Friday, featuring 15 winter sports. While that sure is a bag of fun, are you aware of the weirdest Olympic sports of all time? Learn about it below. Oh, and be prepared - a bunch of them involve animals.

The 7 weirdest Olympic sports

1. Biathlon.

   Biathlon: Sounds like a contest to see how much biology you know. In general, it’s a sporting term for one event with two disciplines. In relation to the Olympics, it’s a winter sport combining-cross country skiing and… rifle shooting. Yeah… I’ll stay a safe distance away from that one.

2. Pigeon racing.

   Imagine a time when there was no Internet. No Super Bowl. Not even World Wars to look back on. That was the year 1900 - a year when pigeon racing was an Olympic sport.

   And, well, the only year that it was an Olympic sport.

3. Skeleton.

   Dare to believe in a whole new take on sledding. No, this is not the Rosebud from your childhood, folks. This is skeleton, a one-man face-down sled race on an ice track. I shudder to think why it’s called skeleton.

4. Skijoring.

   How much do you really trust your pet? Would you let Rover take the lead while attached to him with a rope… on skis? That’s skijoring, and it’s ski-aring the bejesus out of me. In the 1928 Winter Olympics it was a demonstration sport, using horses.

5. Curling.

   

   Curling, to me, sounds like it should mean something completely different - like some kind of salon Olympics. It’s anything but: the game involved two four-person teams sliding heavy stones towards a circle drawn at either end of an ice court. It originated in Scotland; somehow that makes sense.

6. Handball.

   You may be familiar with handball as a school recess favorite, but an older version of the game known as field handball did play a role as a sport in the 1936 Summer Olympics. It even had six teams contesting.

7. Korfball.

   Korfball is a version of netball played in outer space… Kidding! It is, however, a mixed-gender version of netball played in 57 countries. It was a demonstration sport in the 1920 and 1928 Olympic games. Each team consists of four men and four women… but no mixed duels! Keep it clean, kids.

The sky is a little bit closer now that the 250+ titles on ReferenceAnswers include an Illustrated Dictionary of Aviation.

The new reference book provides definitions and illustrations for the entire spectrum of aviation: aerodynamics, navigation, meteorology, aircraft equipment and maintenance, aerial photography, avionics and more.

So where else are you going to learn the science of the reflex camber, check out an illustration of an absolute angle of attack, or learn that ‘eyelid’ is a term for… wait, what?

Last week Answers.com sponsored VatorSplash, an event showcasing emerging technology, organized by Bambi Francisco at Vator TV.

Robert Scoble hosted the event, where start ups demoed and Mark Pincus of Zynga gave a talk.

Colts? Saints?

Unicorns? Leprechauns?

Whatever.

Yeah, that’s right - I’m a girl, so what? I join friends at Super Bowl parties and cheer along with the team I like better. And no, it’s not always dependant on the color of their uniforms.

As a girl, though, my favorite part of the Super Bowl isn’t the commercials. I happen to think you’re a sucker for spending 4,328,968 trillion dollars for 25 seconds of marketing. My favorite part of the Super Bowl isn’t sweaty men ramming each other, either. And I can take or leave the betting - swimming pool over office pool any day.

No, what I love… is the grub. You take the football, I’ll take the food-bowl.

First thing’s first: The chicken wings. Take a buncha wings, slather them with your favorite sauce and bake, deep fry or brown ‘em. Answers.com has a great recipe for the Buffalo wings variety, including a video for making the dip.

Once that’s out of the way, make sure you have the right crunchy snacks. It’s all about the chips: potato chips, tortilla chips, sour cream and onion potato chips, corn chips, rippled potato chips, pita chips, barbecue potato chips… and pretzels.

With the chips come the dips. Salsa, guacamole, cheese, mustard, sour cream, humus… Whatever your spread, make sure there is plenty of variety.

And what would a Super Bowl party be without the football-shaped cookies (with frosting laces)? Oh, c’mon, boys - a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

But, whether you’re a die-hard football fan or just along for the advertisements, check out the Super Bowl Q&A on WikiAnswers and make sure you have all your facts straight. Or at the very least, the colors of the uniforms.

What are your favorite Super Bowl snacks?

Extra, extra!

As Steve Jobs and Apple turn the speculation into reality, releasing their latest and, arguably, greatest product into the technological wild, the questions are quickly being answered…

…on Answers.com, of course.

The iPad Q&A category has been set up and is being filled with questions that are being complimented with answers - as I type this.

Visit the category or start here:

• What is the iPad?
• How much will the iPad cost?
• How big is the iPad?
• What is the battery life of the iPad?
• What features does the iPad have?

The 7th million answer was added on WikiAnswers this week. The answer is - drum roll, please…

If nail polish remover went down the sink what would happen?

Answer by Wolfgang schwartzschild: “It will float on top of the trap and stink-up the room until it has all evaporated and dispersed. You could try heavy flushing in hopes of washing it down in the current, or open up the trap and pour it into a bucket.”

Let’s not forget to mention that there were plenty of good answers coming in at numbers like 6,999,998 or 7,000,001:

• When was the last time the Saints went to the Super Bowl?
• Are hedgehogs as prickly as they seem?
• Which organ is part of digestion but not part of the digestive tract?

I’d also like to take the opportunity to point out that great community answers aren’t always the first answer added. Take another look at the prickly hedgehog answer. Two contributors made that answer great; one addressed the question in a functional way while the other addressed it on another level. Q&A the wiki way, where answers grow and evolve and deepen with collaboration.

See you at 8 million!

Answers.com’s Bob Rosenschein is in Munich attending DLD this week, and there is nothing like a Digital, Life, Design conference to get us inspired.

A few such inspired moments were captured on digital film and are shared below.

First, ‘Disruptive,’ a panel with guests all involved in disruptive technologies that changed their respective industries.

This panel was moderated by Yossi Vardi, the father of Israeli high-tech and an angel investor inAnswers.com. The speakers included Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, Niklas Zennström, founder of Skype, and Mitchell Baker, founder of Mozilla.

Another noteworthy moment was when Mitchell Baker received the Aenne Burda award for outstanding female entrepreneur from last year’s winner, Esther Dyson.

Bob sat with Sharona Justman, who runs the annual Israel Conference in Los Angeles.

A quick chat between sessions… Hey, Bob, are you using Mobile Answers?