SCI-BIZ-TECH QUIZ DRAV 2016Saturday, 20 Feb 2016NIT, Calicut

RULES AND REGULATIONS The quiz is going to be a relatively short one, with 48 questions in total. There will be two rounds: two dry rounds, each of 16 questions, and two written rounds, one of 10 and the other of 6 questions. The details regarding the written rounds will be given when they come. For the dry rounds, bounce and pounce rules apply. +10/-10 on the pounce, +10/0 on the bounce. The pounce window remains for 30secs after I complete reading the question. Please raise your hands, all answers will be checked at the end of the pounce window. Please refrain from using your cellphones.

CLOCKWISE DRIES 16 questions160 points on offer.

1. Type designer Hoefler & Co. recently released a font called Operator, which is specifically aimed at X. The aim of the font is to make it easier for X, and as such things like braces, brackets and punctuation marks were focused on. The font as a result makes it easier to identify the likes of l, I or 1 by using colors for characters used most frequently by X.

Give me X.

ANSWER Programmers.

2. Earlier this month, an ancient Greek statue by the name Grave Naiskos of an Enthroned Woman with an Attendant made headlines for apparently depicting an ancient X. Conspiracy theorists say that the structure is too narrow to be a jewellery box and the woman’s eyes are focused on the centre of the ‘lid’ like a/an X. Sceptics claim it to be a wax tablet used by ancient Greeks for writing, but theorists say that this could be the Oracle of Delphi – which in ancient Greece connected priests with super natural beings who passed along advanced technology and information.

What was X?

ANSWER A laptop, complete with USB ports.

3. X’s rule or X’s law is an internet adage that states – as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of comparison involving Hitler or Nazis approaches 1 – that is, if an online discussion goes for long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism.

In December 2015, the creator of the law, after whom it is named, cited several articles on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, for their Nazi and Fascist comparisons.

X?

ANSWER Mike Godwin and Godwin’s Rule/Law.

4. Unknown to most people, the villains in X all have distinct characteristics, behavior and even names. :

1. Blinky the red chases you. 2. Pinky the pink positions itself in a set way and sometimes chases you along with Blinky.

3. Clyde the orange moves in a randomized fashion. 4. Inky the blue tries to ambush you.

Villains in what?

ANSWER Pac-Man.

5.Parking spaces at University of California, Berkeley are highly coveted, with spots usually costing $1,500 a year. But the university has decided to make it a practice to offer a special category of people an extra perk : a free lifetime permit to park in the highly coveted parking spaces.

What do you need to do to get an NL permit at UCB?

ANSWER Get a Nobel Prize. 72 Nobel Laureates come from the campus, and the campus offers the coveted parking spaces near the central campus to Nobel Laureates.

6.Long question ahead. Pretty interesting anecdote too.

X came to Y and said, “We’ve done a good job fabricating these motherboards for you. Why don’t you let us assemble the whole computer for you, too? Assembling those products is not what made you successful. We can take all remaining manufacturing assets off your balance sheet, and maybe do it for 20 percent less too.” The analysts at Y thought this was a win-win. The process continued until Y outsourced everything to X except its brand. Then, in 2005, X announced the creation of its own brand of computers. In this Greek tragedy tale, X had taken everything from Y and applied it for itself.

X has now become a major player in its market, and has entered into many successful collaborations, most famously with Lamborghini in 2006.

ANSWER X – ASUS and Y – Dell.

7. X was a CIA project launched by the Directorate of Science and Technology, which in the 1960s intended to use Y to spy on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies. In an hour-long procedure, Y’s were implanted with a microphone, a small radio transmitter and a thin wire. This would allow Y to record innocuously and transmit sound into its surroundings. Victor Machetti, a former CIA officer, claimed that X cost about $20 million.

The first mission was to eavesdrop two men in a park outside a Soviet compound, but the Y was hit and killed by a taxi almost immediately.

Give me X. (the name of the project.)

ANSWER Acoustic Kitty.

8. As fun as X may be, it wasn’t designed for entertainment. Although X has existed in its physical version since the 1700s, the digital version had a far greater aim: it was teaching mouse fluency by stealth.

The intention was that X would get a generation of computer users still most familiar with a command-line input to teach themselves how to drag and drop, without realizing what they were doing. Many other games introduced along with X had similar motives, from making the idea of left and right clicking second nature to fostering speed and precision in mouse movement.

What is X?

ANSWER Solitaire.

9. The inventor of X, Japanese chiropractor and acupuncturist Dr. Kenzo Kase, claims that the elastic tape reduces pain and supports muscles without restricting movement like other traditional sports tapes. According to the website of X, the tape microscopically lifts skin and channels away moisture.

The tape went mainstream when 50,000 rolls of the tape were provided to athletes at the Beijing Olympics, who flaunted it out in the open. X has now been widely adopted by many athletes across various domains.

What is X?

ANSWER Kinesio Tape.

10. Put Funda.

ALS Ice Bucket Challenge : Every August until a cure. WIRED : Remember, it’s all just prelude. Tinder : Thank you for swiping right. HBO : All men must Oculus Rift.

ANSWER Five word speeches at the Webby Awards.

11. Haneefah Adam, a 24 year old master’s graduate from Nigeria, created the Instagram account X to “create an avenue to make modest outfits for dolls, because I haven’t really seen one before.” The official collection has a World Culture collection featuring Venetian Muse, Tribal Beauty, Maiko and Inuit Legend, but as yet no doll like X.

So, what makes X special? (part of its name reflects the same.)

ANSWER Hijarbie. A Barbie with a Hijab.

12. Reuben Mattus started the business in the 1920s as a child of 10 after he and his widowed mother stepped off the boat in America. However, Reuben struggled quite a bit with marketing his product. “I prided myself in being a marketing man”, said Reuben. “If you’re the same like everybody else, you’re lost.”, and so resulted the name X.

Reuben was inspired by Jewish history. “The only country which saved the Jews during World War II was Denmark, so I put together a totally fictitious Danish sounding name and had it registered.”, Mattus says. “X doesn’t mean anything, it would attract attention, especially with the umlaut.”

ANSWERHäagen-Dazs.

13. The X, also known as Clarus the X, is a bitmap image first introduced by Y. It was originally created in 1983 as part of the Cairo font by Susan Kare as the glyph for “z.” That image was later chosen for the Page Setup print dialog box, though it needed to be slightly redrawn because the original Cairo dog did not proportionally fit the Page Setup dialog box. This modified version became the image famously known as the X. The X was also used on the configuration pages of Y printers.

The term “X” was first coined by either Scott Zimmerman or Ginger Jernigan.

Mark “The Red” Harlan named the X “Clarus” as a joking reference to Claris, Y’s office software unit at the time. The sound she makes is “Moof!”

X and Y?

ANSWER X is the Dogcow or Clarus the Dogcow and Y is Apple.

14. This is Hannah Steller photographed by her older brother, Dustin Steller. The photo was originally uploaded to iStockphoto in August 2005 as a result of which, it made her immensely popular all over the world. 

How/what is she known as?

ANSWER The Parked Domain Girl.

15.The Independent, one of Britain’s most iconic newspapers, earlier announced this month that it would stop its print editions and would go completely online. The Independent on Sunday will be particularly missed, as it often delivered headlines in now iconic front-pages.

In 2006, a particular edition was guest edited by X, as part of his campaign Y, with Damien Hirst designing the front page. The Independent also went on to pledge half of all the paper’s revenue to Y.

Give me X and Y, which achieved considerable success through a number of brand partnerships.

ANSWER X is Bono and Y is his campaign, Product (RED).

16. After going out on a hunting trip with his dog in the Swiss Alps, a Swiss engineer, Georges de Mestral, discovered that his pant legs and his dog’s hair were covered in burrs from the burdock plant. As an engineer, he naturally began to wonder how exactly the seeds stuck so effectively to his pants and his dog. He then examined the burrs under a microscope and discovered that they had very tiny hooks which allowed the seeds to catch on to things like which have tiny loops.

What did Georges de Mestral thus invent?

ANSWER Velcro.

THEME ROUND 10 Questions.

RULES There is a common theme to all the ten questions in this round, which is a business related one. (if it helps)

This will be a written round, please number your answers and write them neatly and legibly.

At the end of the round, teams will be given 30 seconds to check their sheets and the sheets would then be exchanged among the teams.

Each question fetches you +10. If you get all the questions correct, you get a bonus +10.

A scoring slab exists for each pair of questions: +50, +40, +30, +20, +10. A team is allowed to go for the overall theme for one attempt per slab. Each attempt, if incorrect, would carry a consistent -10 across all slabs.

1. Augsburg is a city in Bavaria, Germany, which was a Free Imperial City for over 500 years. Augsburg is Germany’s third oldest city, being founded by the Romans as Augusta Vendelicorum, named after the Roman Emperor Augustus. Augsburg was the home of two patrician families that rose to great prominence internationally, replacing the Medicis of Florence as Europe’s leading bankers.

X is most well known among Germans as X the Rich and is the most famous resident of Augsburg. In the 14th century, X had an almost monopolistic hold on the European copper market and a decisive influence on European politics, successfully negotiating to secure the election of Charles V of Spain to become Holy Roman Emperor.

2. The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered cloth nearly 70 metres (230 ft) long and 50 centimetres (20 in) tall, which depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England concerning X, Duke of Normandy, and Harold, Earl of Wessex, later King of England, and culminating in the Battle of Hastings.

The tapestry consists of some fifty scenes with Latin tituli, embroidered on linen with coloured woollen yarns.. In 1729 the hanging was rediscovered by scholars at a time when it was being displayed annually in Bayeux Cathedral. The tapestry is now exhibited at the Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux in Bayeux, Normandy, France.

The Bayeux Tapestry and seals and coins issued in that age are possibly just contemporary depictions of X, and no authentic portrait of him has been found yet. X was sometimes also known as X the Bastard, for obvious reasons.

3. Long question again. Interesting anecdote, yet again.

Nervous of driving through tunnels possibly weakened by the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake in the highway between the region and Rome, X instructed his motorcade to take a winding route through the mountains. He stopped for a break at a village named Antrodoco, and was repeatedly bowled over by the villager’s warmth and hospitality. X was so enchanted by the village that when the mayor told him that they suffered from high unemployment and complained of a lack of tourism in the area, X went on to promise to help the village by converting a historic palazzo into a luxury hotel and setting up a water bottling plant.

Who is X, who, unfortunately, wasn’t loved pretty well by his own people?

4. Wealth or The Gospel of Wealth is an article that X wrote in June of 1889, that describes the responsibility of philanthropy by the new upper middle-class of self-made rich. X proposed that the best way of dealing with the new phenomenon of wealth inequality was for the wealthy to redistribute their surplus means in a responsible and thoughtful manner. As a result, the wealthy should administer their riches responsibly and not in a way that encourages “the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy”.

X applied the principle to his life in a big way, founding many educational institutions and funding numerous philanthropic causes.

5. Though he ascended the throne after Russia formally ended Tsardom in 1721, X is often referred to as a Tsar, and his official title was by the Grace of God, X, Emperor and Autocrat of All of the Russias. He is also known as Saint X, the passion-bearer by the Russian Orthodox Church and has been referred to as X the Martyr. This makes X the wealthiest saint in human history, though his canonization was a subject of much debate for most of the late ‘90s.

Who is X?

6. The Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary was started in 1881 by Harriet E Giles and Sophia Packard in Atlanta, Georgia, for the upliftment of African-Americans. At a time when they were seeking for donations, Giles and Packard met X at a church conference in Ohio. X’s was so impressed by Packard’s vision that he settled the debt on the property. X’s wife and her parents, longtime activists of the abolitionist movement, were also supportive of the school and in 1884, the seminary was officially renamed to the Spelman Seminary and later the Spelman College, in honour of Laura Spelman, X’s wife.

7. X, also known as Commodore X, was an American business magnate and philanthropist who built his wealth in railroads and shipping, best known for building the New York Central Railroad. One of the richest Americans in history, X was described as such by historian H. Roger Grant, especially after the Erie War when X essentially cornered the market: Contemporaries, too, often hated or feared X or at least considered him an unmannered brute. While X could be a rascal, combative and cunning, he was much more a builder than a wrecker, being honourable, shrewd, and hard-working.

8. Spread over 8.77 acres and built in the shape of a butterfly, Y is an amalgam of Mughal and European architecture. The entrance hall of the palace, a dome with an entrance hall beneath with symmetrical wings at fifty-five degree angle, is its outstanding feature. It has 36 rooms including a zenana and is located to the northwest of the India Gate, New Delhi. It was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens for X, after most important princely rulers in British India were inducted into the Chamber of Princes in 1919.

X, unknown to many, is also one of the few Indians to be featured on the cover of TIME magazine, dated February 22, 1937.

Give me X and Y. Part points apply.

9. X (1280 – 1337) was the tenth emperor of the Malian Empire, who had his throne at Timbuktu. X commanded a fortune in excess of $400bn, four times the current richest person in the world. X was a devout Muslim and in 1325, made a pilgrimage to Mecca. X was so rich that he generously gave gold to the poor he met along the way at Cairo and Medina, and built a mosque each and every Friday.

However, X’s activities devastated the economies of the cities through which he passed, with the sudden influx of gold devaluing the metal for the next decade. This is the only time in recorded history that one man directly controlled the price of gold in the Mediterranean.

10. The X Motor Company is a division of the Ford Motor Company that sells luxury vehicles, primarily in North America and the Middle East. Founded in 1917 by Henry M. Leland, a former manager of the Cadillac division of General Motors, X was named after Leland’s hero, for whom he cast his first presidential vote in 1864. Ford purchased the company in 1922, and it continued to operate as a separate company until the early 1940s.

What is X?

ANSWERS FOLLOW.

1. Augsburg is a city in Bavaria, Germany, which was a Free Imperial City for over 500 years. Augsburg is Germany’s third oldest city, being founded by the Romans as Augusta Vendelicorum, named after the Roman Emperor Augustus. Augsburg was the home of two patrician families that rose to great prominence internationally, replacing the Medicis of Florence as Europe’s leading bankers.

X is most well known among Germans as X the Rich and is the most famous resident of Augsburg. In the 14th century, X had an almost monopolistic hold on the European copper market and a decisive influence on European politics, successfully negotiating to secure the election of Charles V of Spain to become Holy Roman Emperor.

ANSWER X – Jakob Fugger von der Lilie.

2. The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered cloth nearly 70 metres (230 ft) long and 50 centimetres (20 in) tall, which depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England concerning X, Duke of Normandy, and Harold, Earl of Wessex, later King of England, and culminating in the Battle of Hastings.

The tapestry consists of some fifty scenes with Latin tituli, embroidered on linen with coloured woollen yarns.. In 1729 the hanging was rediscovered by scholars at a time when it was being displayed annually in Bayeux Cathedral. The tapestry is now exhibited at the Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux in Bayeux, Normandy, France.

The Bayeux Tapestry and seals and coins issued in that age are possibly just contemporary depictions of X, and no authentic portrait of him has been found yet. X was sometimes also known as X the Bastard, for obvious reasons.

ANSWER X – William the Conqueror/William the Bastard.

3. Long question again. Interesting anecdote, yet again.

Nervous of driving through tunnels possibly weakened by the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake in the highway between the region and Rome, X instructed his motorcade to take a winding route through the mountains. He stopped for a break at a village named Antrodoco, and was repeatedly bowled over by the villager’s warmth and hospitality. X was so enchanted by the village that when the mayor told him that they suffered from high unemployment and complained of a lack of tourism in the area, X went on to promise to help the village by converting a historic palazzo into a luxury hotel and setting up a water bottling plant.

Who is X, who, unfortunately, wasn’t loved pretty well by his own people?

ANSWER X – Muammar Gaddafi/Col. Gaddafi

4. Wealth or The Gospel of Wealth is an article that X wrote in June of 1889, that describes the responsibility of philanthropy by the new upper middle-class of self-made rich. X proposed that the best way of dealing with the new phenomenon of wealth inequality was for the wealthy to redistribute their surplus means in a responsible and thoughtful manner. As a result, the wealthy should administer their riches responsibly and not in a way that encourages “the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy”.

X applied the principle to his life in a big way, founding many educational institutions and funding numerous philanthropic causes.

ANSWER X – Andrew Carnegie.

5. Though he ascended the throne after Russia formally ended Tsardom in 1721, X is often referred to as a Tsar, and his official title was by the Grace of God, X, Emperor and Autocrat of All of the Russias. He is also known as Saint X, the passion-bearer by the Russian Orthodox Church and has been referred to as X the Martyr. This makes X the wealthiest saint in human history, though his canonization was a subject of much debate for most of the late ‘90s.

Who is X?

ANSWER X – Saint Maximovitch/Tsar Nicholas II

6. The Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary was started in 1881 by Harriet E Giles and Sophia Packard in Atlanta, Georgia, for the upliftment of African-Americans. At a time when they were seeking for donations, Giles and Packard met X at a church conference in Ohio. X’s was so impressed by Packard’s vision that he settled the debt on the property. X’s wife and her parents, longtime activists of the abolitionist movement, were also supportive of the school and in 1884, the seminary was officially renamed to the Spelman Seminary and later the Spelman College, in honour of Laura Spelman, X’s wife.

ANSWER X – John D. Rockefeller

7. X, also known as Commodore X, was an American business magnate and philanthropist who built his wealth in railroads and shipping, best known for building the New York Central Railroad. One of the richest Americans in history, X was described as such by historian H. Roger Grant, especially after the Erie War when X essentially cornered the market: Contemporaries, too, often hated or feared X or at least considered him an unmannered brute. While X could be a rascal, combative and cunning, he was much more a builder than a wrecker, being honourable, shrewd, and hard-working.

ANSWER X – Cornelius Vanderbilt

8. Spread over 8.77 acres and built in the shape of a butterfly, Y is an amalgam of Mughal and European architecture. The entrance hall of the palace, a dome with an entrance hall beneath with symmetrical wings at fifty-five degree angle, is its outstanding feature. It has 36 rooms including a zenana and is located to the northwest of the India Gate, New Delhi. It was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens for X, after most important princely rulers in British India were inducted into the Chamber of Princes in 1919.

X, unknown to many, is also one of the few Indians to be featured on the cover of TIME magazine, dated February 22, 1937.

Give me X and Y. Part points apply.

ANSWER X – Mir Osman Ali Khan of Hyderabad Y – The Hyderabad House

9. X (1280 – 1337) was the tenth emperor of the Malian Empire, who had his throne at Timbuktu. X commanded a fortune in excess of $400bn, four times the current richest person in the world. X was a devout Muslim and in 1325, made a pilgrimage to Mecca. X was so rich that he generously gave gold to the poor he met along the way at Cairo and Medina, and built a mosque each and every Friday.

However, X’s activities devastated the economies of the cities through which he passed, with the sudden influx of gold devaluing the metal for the next decade. This is the only time in recorded history that one man directly controlled the price of gold in the Mediterranean.

ANSWER X – Mansa Musa.

10. The X Motor Company is a division of the Ford Motor Company that sells luxury vehicles, primarily in North America and the Middle East. Founded in 1917 by Henry M. Leland, a former manager of the Cadillac division of General Motors, X was named after Leland’s hero, for whom he cast his first presidential vote in 1864. Ford purchased the company in 1922, and it continued to operate as a separate company until the early 1940s.

What is X?

ANSWER X – The Lincoln Motor Company.

THE TEN RICHEST MEN IN HISTORY

1. Mansa Musa ($400bn)2. John D. Rockefeller ($340bn)3. Andrew Carnegie ($310bn)4. Tsar Nicholas II ($300bn)5. Mir Osman Ali Khan ($230bn)

6. Jakob Fugger ($221bn)7. William the Conqueror

($209bn)8. Muammar Gaddafi ($200bn)9. Henry Ford ($199bn)10.Cornelius Vanderbilt ($185bn)

ANTI-CLOCKWISE DRIES

16 questions160 points on offer.

1. X is a result of a fork on Mambo, on August 17, 2005. As Mambo was a trademark of Miro International, the creators of X started a website called OpenSourceMatters (OSM) to distribute information to the software community. Project Lead Andrew Eddie called for community input to suggest a name, and the name X was finally chosen on September 22.

X is the anglicized spelling of a Swahili word meaning all together or as a whole, which also has a similar meaning in Amharic, Arabic and Urdu.

ANSWER Joomla!

2. These four students from NYU’s Courant Institute are working on perhaps the world’s first distributed social network. Their software allows you to host a personal web server or ‘pod’ where all your photographs, personal information etc., are stored on your computer and not a centralized server, thus ensuring greater privacy. What is the name of the new social network?

Image follows.

ANSWER Diaspora*

3. Last Wednesday, a Qantas Flight of QF73, travelling from Sydney, Australia to San Francisco, California was the venue for the first ever X. The Sydney community of X and the Australian airline Qantas teamed up to bring the latest iteration of X – Ideas that Travel. Aboard the flight were Jo Burston, CEO and founder of Rare Birds, Michael Biercuk, experimental physicist and director of the Quantum Control Laboratory, Marita Cheng, CEO and founder of 2MAR Robotics, and Jeremy Howard, CEO and founder of Enlitic, along with a host of tech entrepreneurs, startup founders and all around amazing people doing great things with their lives.

First ever what?

ANSWER First ever TEDx talk aboard a plane.

4.X recently showed off a version of Y that eliminates cash, and replaces it with special cards that can be scanned on a handheld banking unit to make purchases and pay off debt. X claims that now cash would be replaced by a scannable card that can be used for all transactions on Y. Cards now come with codes that can be scanned in order to complete a transaction.

X and Y, please.

ANSWER X - Hasbro and Y – Monopoly.

5. Simon Oxley designed the X, alongside the white bird Twitter used (before they received a proper logo) as part of a usual routine of cranking out images for iStock. Y saw it, and wanted it, presumably under the notion that it can represent how complex code combines to create peculiar things, much like the X, which is a combination of two different animals. However, X was never named by its creator, Oxley, this was done by the CEO of Y, Chris Wanstruth.

ANSWER X – The Octocat, Y- GitHub’s logo.

6. X is a Central American country and is the most populous state in the region. The Y, is the currency of X, and is possibly the only currency in the world named after a bird. In ancient Mayan culture, Y’s tail feathers were used as currency. Y is also the national bird of X, prominently featuring on X’s flag and coat of arms.

Give me both X and Y.

ANSWER X – GuatemalaY – Quetzal (the Resplendent Quetzal, to be more precise.)

7. Aktarer Zaman is a 22-year-old New York-based programmer who founded a website named Skiplagged. Skiplagged specialises in providing dirt-cheap flights for passengers (an example given is a flight from Raleigh to LaGuardia, which usually costs $239, but is only $94 on Skiplagged). The only condition is that passengers travel without checked-in baggage.

How does Skiplagged work?

ANSWER Hidden City Flights : Basically if you want to book a flight from A to B, you book a flight from A to C and then get off at B.

8.Almost all cultivated versions of X, until the 17th century, were purple, contrary to its present colour. The modern day version did not arrive until growers in this country Y took mutant strains of the purple X and gradually developed them into the sweet, pulpy version that we have today. Some say the reason that the mutant straints became popular in Y was because it was felt to be a tribute to the emblem of the Royal House and the struggle for Y’s independence.

ANSWER X – CarrotsY – Netherlands (Oranje)

9. CALO, an acronym for Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes, was an AI project that aimed to integrate numerous AI technologies into a coherent whole. The name was inspired by the Latin word calonis, which translates to soldier’s servant.

The CALO effort has had many major spin-offs: Social Kinetics, an application that offers personalized intervention and treatment strategies; the Trapit project, an intelligent web scraper and news aggregator; Desti, a personalized travel guide; and X – which is by far the most notable spin-off of CALO.

What is X, whose creator was accused of war-profiteering when X made its debut on products marketed by them?

ANSWER X – Siri.

10. The term X Peak first appeared in an XKCD comic, and is a comic exaggeration of the Yerkes-Dodson Law, which states that for optimal learning, you need a specific level of arousal – not too low, not too high.

The comic goes on to state that it “..was discovered in the late ‘80s. The cause is unknown, but somehow a BAC between 0.129% and 0.139% confers superhuman ability”. The comic also goes on to state that it is a “delicate effect of careful calibration”, and chances to mess things up are high – as what happened to a product which released in 2000, created by a company of which X was the CEO. The product was dubbed by PC World as “one of the worst tech products of all time.”

ANSWER The effect is called the “Ballmer Peak”, and the product was Windows ME.

11. In early 2012, X was looking for a brand makeover and had already brand consultants Wolff Olins and work was well under way. This was when chairman and founder Chet Pipkin returned to the Chief Executive role, bringing with him a personal passion for the idea that drove the rebranding – “it’s all about people.” The nine-dot star person in the logo was then named Pip, which stands for People Inspired Products.

ANSWER Belkin.

12. Apple has always been a company that claims that their products are flawless, and when a problem pops up, they usually come up with a workaround rather than actually addressing the problem. In 1980, when the Apple III was released, the computer had numerous hardware problems, mainly arising from its inability to dissipate heat, as Steve Jobs did not want to include fans or air vents. The problems were so severe that users reported that their computers became so hot that the chips started getting dislodged from the board, causing the screen to display garbled data or their disk to come out of their slots. BYTE wrote that “the integrated circuits tended to wander out of their sockets”, and this resulted in a quick workaround issued by Apple, much like how they handled the “Grip of Death” issue.

What was the workaround?

ANSWER Apple suggested that users lift the computer six inches in the air and then drop it down so that the chips would resettle on the board, thereby making the computer work again.

13. Where would you find this?

Bigger image on the next slide.

ANSWER Vatican City. The instructions are in Latin.

14. The Vasa (or Wasa), is a Swedish warship built between 1626 and 1628. The ship was built on the orders of the King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, as part of the military expansion he initiated. However, the Vasa foundered and sank after sailing about 1,300m into her maiden voyage on 10 August 1628. For a long time, the reasons behind the sinking were unknown, and the two teams that worked on the construction of the ship – a local, Swedish team and a Dutch team led by master shipwright Henrik Hybertsson, kept trading blame at each other.

However, in 1961, when the ship was salvaged with a largely intact hull, archaeologists made a startling discovery which put both teams to blame, that they claim is the reason behind the sinking.

What did they find?

ANSWER They found four rulers used by the workers – two turned out to be based on the Swedish feet (12 inches), and two to be based on the Amsterdam feet (11 inches). Thus, the Vasa was built asymmetrically, causing it to sink.

15. X is a popular injectable drug, which is measured in terms of mouse units. According to a particular reference on Medscape : the dose of X is expressed in mouse units. One unit is equal to the amount that kills 50% of a group of 18- to 22-g Swiss Webster mice when injected intraperitoneally. 

The human lethal dose (LD) X is estimated at approximately 3000 units.

What is X, which has the ability to reverse time?

ANSWER Botulinum Toxin, or BOTOX.

16. X is an independent R&D biotech company established in 2013 by Google and Arthur D. Levinson with the goal of combating aging and associated diseases.

X is also is a plain-woven textile made from unbleached and often not fully processed cotton. It may contain unseparated husk parts, for example. The fabric is less coarse and thick than canvas or denim, but it is still very cheap owing to its unfinished and undyed appearance.

ANSWER Calico. [Californial Life Company]

SCIENCE SPARRING SOCIETY

six questions for the six teams here.60 points on offer.

ABOUT THIS ROUND Science Sparring Society is a humble take on Fight Club, and the round would feature questions on great rivalries in science. All of the questions will have two part answers, featuring both an X and a Y. Part points are on offer, except when noted. Written round, answers will be checked at completion of the round.

1. The backdrop to this rivalry was the Franco-Prussian War, so nationalist sentiments most likely exacerbated their feud. By the 1870s, X shifted his attention to specific diseases instead of general processes like fermentation and putrefaction. As it happened, he focused on anthrax, a disease also studied by a young German doctor named Y.

Initially, this overlapping interest didn’t cause problems. Y focused on identifying and isolating the microbes responsible for the illness, while X was looking into immunization.

However, it wasn’t long until Y and his followers started finding faults in X’s work. Supposedly, when X organized a meeting to address his critics, the rivalry was exacerbated by a simple case of mistranslation. When X said “recueil Allemand” (“German work”), someone translated it to Y as “orgeuil Allemand” (“German arrogance“). Over the next years, a game of one-upmanship would develop between the two, each one eager to show up the other.

X and Y, please?

2. Because the Earth is roughly spherical, every flat map distorts our planet one way or another. The most popular version is the X version, created by Flemish cartographer X in 1569. It’s been widely used for centuries, and preserves directional bearing, presenting rhumbs (imaginary lines that cut all meridians at right angles) as straight lines, thus making it a useful tool for navigation. However, there are a few major misconceptions regarding the X projection, such as Alaska being as large as continental USA or Greenland being roughly the same size as Africa.

One of the best alternatives to the X projection was presented in 1974 at a conference in Germany by Y, though well after the discovery of an identical map made by James Gall in the 1800s. Notably, the X version made Europe look larger, and Y claimed that this harmed the world’s perception of developing countries.

3. In mathematical logic, the theory of infinite sets was first developed by X. Although his work has become a thoroughly standard fixture of classical set theory, it has been widely criticized by mathematicians and philosophers. X’s theorem is that there are sets having cardinality greater than the (already infinite) cardinality of the set of whole numbers.

Y was a German mathematician and X’s most outspoken critic, and was quoted as saying, “God made the integers, all else is the work of man.”, and did considerable work in finitism, the philosophy that accepts the existence of only finite mathematical objects.

X and Y, please.

4. The Italian anatomist and physician X was one of the first to investigate experimentally the phenomenon of what came to be named "bioelectrogenesis". In a series of experiments started around 1780, X, working in the University of Bologna, found that the electric current delivered by a Leyden jar or a rotating static electricity generator would cause the contraction of the muscles in the leg of a frog and many other animals, either by applying the charge to the muscle or to the nerve.

The noted Italian physicist Y repeated X’s experiments at the University of Pavia, and obtained the same results. However, he was not convinced of X’s explanation. He noted that since applying the bimetallic probes to the nerves leading to the muscles, only, would also cause a contraction, the model proposed by X could not be true, and a long controversy started. Y proposed the alternative hypothesis, that external electricity was generated by the contact between two kinds of metal. He claimed that the frog muscle worked only as a detector of the small differences in external electrical potential external; a kind of foil electroscope, so to say. What Y then invented to prove the same went on to become a landmark scientific discovery.

X and Y, please.

5. The Bone Wars, also known as The Great Dinosaur Rush, refers to a period of intense fossil speculation and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a heated rivalry between X and Y. Though they both made massive contributions to paleontology, both used under-handed methods to out-compete the other.

Their rivalry was born when X presented his reconstruction of his then crowning achievement – the Elasmosaurus. Y publicly humiliated X when he pointed out that X put the dinosaur’s head at the wrong end. Nowadays, we are all familiar with dinosaurs with very long necks, but back then, this was not common, and X assumed the long end to be the tail.

Who were X and Y, X also being a founder of the Neo-Lamarckism school of thought?

6. The rivalry was never really between X and Y, but rather between their life-changing creations. The men created their own versions only a few years apart (X was first, in 1955). There were some key differences between the two: X’s version was injected, while Y’s was administered orally. X’s version was used initially but was then replaced by Y, though it has not been conclusively proven that Y’s is more potent than X’s. People have argued that Y’s version could actually cause an infection if it wasn’t weak enough, causing the US government to switch back to X’s version.

Who were X and Y?

ANSWERS FOLLOW.

1. The backdrop to this rivalry was the Franco-Prussian War, so nationalist sentiments most likely exacerbated their feud. By the 1870s, X shifted his attention to specific diseases instead of general processes like fermentation and putrefaction. As it happened, he focused on anthrax, a disease also studied by a young German doctor named Y.

Initially, this overlapping interest didn’t cause problems. Y focused on identifying and isolating the microbes responsible for the illness, while X was looking into immunization.

However, it wasn’t long until Y and his followers started finding faults in X’s work. Supposedly, when X organized a meeting to address his critics, the rivalry was exacerbated by a simple case of mistranslation. When X said “recueil Allemand” (“German work”), someone translated it to Y as “orgeuil Allemand” (“German arrogance“). Over the next years, a game of one-upmanship would develop between the two, each one eager to show up the other.

X and Y, please?

ANSWER X – Louis Pasteur and Y – Robert Koch.

2. Because the Earth is roughly spherical, every flat map distorts our planet one way or another. The most popular version is the X version, created by Flemish cartographer X in 1569. It’s been widely used for centuries, and preserves directional bearing, presenting rhumbs (imaginary lines that cut all meridians at right angles) as straight lines, thus making it a useful tool for navigation. However, there are a few major misconceptions regarding the X projection, such as Alaska being as large as continental USA or Greenland being roughly the same size as Africa.

One of the best alternatives to the X projection was presented in 1974 at a conference in Germany by Y, though well after the discovery of an identical map made by James Gall in the 1800s. Notably, the X version made Europe look larger, and Y claimed that this harmed the world’s perception of developing countries.

ANSWER X – Gerardus Mercator and Y – Dr. Arno Peters

3. In mathematical logic, the theory of infinite sets was first developed by X. Although his work has become a thoroughly standard fixture of classical set theory, it has been widely criticized by mathematicians and philosophers. X’s theorem is that there are sets having cardinality greater than the (already infinite) cardinality of the set of whole numbers.

Y was a German mathematician and X’s most outspoken critic, and was quoted as saying, “God made the integers, all else is the work of man.”, and did considerable work in finitism, the philosophy that accepts the existence of only finite mathematical objects.

X and Y, please.

ANSWER X – Georg Cantor and Y – Leopold Kronecker

4. The Italian anatomist and physician X was one of the first to investigate experimentally the phenomenon of what came to be named "bioelectrogenesis". In a series of experiments started around 1780, X, working in the University of Bologna, found that the electric current delivered by a Leyden jar or a rotating static electricity generator would cause the contraction of the muscles in the leg of a frog and many other animals, either by applying the charge to the muscle or to the nerve.

The noted Italian physicist Y repeated X’s experiments at the University of Pavia, and obtained the same results. However, he was not convinced of X’s explanation. He noted that since applying the bimetallic probes to the nerves leading to the muscles, only, would also cause a contraction, the model proposed by X could not be true, and a long controversy started. Y proposed the alternative hypothesis, that external electricity was generated by the contact between two kinds of metal. He claimed that the frog muscle worked only as a detector of the small differences in external electrical potential external; a kind of foil electroscope, so to say. What Y then invented to prove the same went on to become a landmark scientific discovery.

X and Y, please.

ANSWER X – Luigi Galvani and Y – Alessandro Volta

5. The Bone Wars, also known as The Great Dinosaur Rush, refers to a period of intense fossil speculation and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a heated rivalry between X and Y. Though they both made massive contributions to paleontology, both used under-handed methods to out-compete the other.

Their rivalry was born when X presented his reconstruction of his then crowning achievement – the Elasmosaurus. Y publicly humiliated X when he pointed out that X put the dinosaur’s head at the wrong end. Nowadays, we are all familiar with dinosaurs with very long necks, but back then, this was not common, and X assumed the long end to be the tail.

Who were X and Y, X also being a founder of the Neo-Lamarckism school of thought?

ANSWER X – Edward Drinker Cope and Y – Othniel Charles Marsh.

6. The rivalry was never really between X and Y, but rather between their life-changing creations. The men created their own versions only a few years apart (X was first, in 1955). There were some key differences between the two: X’s version was injected, while Y’s was administered orally. X’s version was used initially but was then replaced by Y, though it has not been conclusively proven that Y’s is more potent than X’s. People have argued that Y’s version could actually cause an infection if it wasn’t weak enough, causing the US government to switch back to X’s version.

Who were X and Y?

ANSWER X – Jonas Salk and Y – Albert Sabin.

THANK YOU!

EXTRAS… 48 years ago when Kalanthan Koya opened Ameen Juice Shop at Moideen Mosque Jn, Calicut, it was probably Calicut’s first juice shop. He opened KPK Fruit and Cool Bar in Mananchira in 1980, and later opened shops at Kidson Corner and Stadium Jn.

KPK Fruit and Cool Bar came up with a juice made of ‘Njaalipoovan’ banana, frozen milk and sugar — the first customers were a set of guys watching X Cup in a shop next door. When asked the juice’s name, he just cooked up a name and said, “X Shake”. 

What was X, now popular across the state?

ANSWER Sharjah Shake.

EXTRAS… X is the third-richest Malayali in the world, with a net worth of about Rs. 13000 crore. Having lost his father when he was 10, X discontinued college to become an interior designer at Thrissur where his father once ran a small business. One day in 1976 his fortunes changed when he met Brig Gen Suleiman Al-Adawi from Oman in the lobby of a Kochi hotel. The general invited him to Muscat where the duo founded an interior design firm with a bank loan of 3,000 riyals. Thus started X’s business journey, who made headlines a few years back for doing something peculiar at the Sree Krishna Temple at Guruvayur.

ANSWER X - PNC Menon