Lazy Guide to Net Culture: Cogito ergo some

The web is a swelling ocean of half-truths punctuated with atolls of sense. A sea of unrelated facts, words and images, it is morally ambiguous. In fact, given some of the pictures I've seen, it's immorally ambiguous.

Who can trust what the web says? Try to find out a fact on a topic of your choice and it will throw back hundreds of contradictory answers - and unsettling yet educational images.

When it comes to the thornier questions of life, a group of philosophers have tried to provide a bit of certainty. At Ask Philosophers you can submit your own queries about the big issues and receive an expert response. Or, this being the web and philosophy, a number of sometimes contradictory responses.

There is a paradox surrounding philosophy that AskPhilosophers seeks to address. On the one hand, everyone confronts philosophical issues throughout his or her life. But on the other, very few have the opportunity to learn about philosophy, a subject that is usually taught only at the college level. (Why? There is no good reason for this and plenty of bad ones.) AskPhilosophers aims to bridge this gap by putting the skills and knowledge of trained philosophers at the service of the general public.

Questions include: Do luck and bad luck exist or have they just been imagined in order to create excuses?; Does knowledge require the impossibility of doubt?; and What's the moral problem with pornography?

However, the big issue that excited me was Is it morally wrong to tell children that Santa exists?. (If you are a child wondering why adults are talking about this stuff, it's because we're scared we'll get ashes in our stocking. Again. Top tip: do not Google the words "ashes" and "stockings".)

There were various answers, all of them engaging, but one phrase stood out that I'm going to stick up in my workplace: "Grim-faced rationalism is to be rejected, especially at Christmas time!"

A different kind of expert can be found at the Box O' Truth. This site also specialises in answering readers' questions. In this case, the subject matter is not ontology but firearms. Perhaps this follows from the US government's principle that a man with a gun tends to win most arguments.

You may not know how well a 9mm 115 gr. Ball from a Beretta 92FS will fare against bullet resistant glass. You may not care. But the Box O' Truth boys have found out this and many other fun gun facts, thanks to their habit of shooting lots of things with lots of guns.

On and here's their report on bullet resistant glass:

1. Shooting stuff is fun.

2. Bullet resistant Polycast is bullet resistant. For some bullets. Not so for others.

3. Handguns are handguns and rifles are rifles. Once again, enough said.

4. Shotgun slugs are awesome. Tman and I discussed how we are continuing to gain respect for the 12 gauge slug.

Outwith philosophy and gunplay, you could just abandon the search for objective truth altogether and turn to a source whose level of reliability you can absolutely guarantee. I refer to the Uncyclopedia, where every word is a fiction.

Take their entry on Scotland:

Scotland was controlled briefly by Sun Tzu during his world tour. However, thanks to the bravery of William Wallace, Macbeth and Hamish the Haggis, Scotland gained freedom from Tzu's control …

… The list of things invented by Scots grows directly in proportion to the amount of alcohol one feeds to the Scot who is reeling off the list. (This list includes: loon pants, Mr T, the idea for Russia being really big, and stabbing.)

The mention of haggis reminds me that scotsman.com's haggis hunt starts on Wednesday - and its encyclopedia is 100 per cent factual. But not really.