SciTech Quiz Alcheringa 2017

SciTech Quiz, Alcheringa 2017
QM : Dhrubojit Bhattacharya

Rules
 18 Questions, +1/0 (unless specified otherwise)
 No googling allowed.
 Quizmaster’s decision is final
 Starred questions will act as tiebreakers. If tie still persists, sudden death from Q1
 Score will be carried forward multiplied by 5.

Q1
Connect these companies:
(Non-exhaustive list)

Q2
As the captain of USS Enterprise, X lead his crew as they explore "where no man has gone before“. X
became the first and only student at Starfleet Academy to defeat the Kobayashi Maru test, garnering
a commendation for original thinking for reprogramming the computer to make the "no-win
scenario" winnable. Give me X.

Q3
Whose ‘Uncyclopedia’ entry?
“'Wicked Smaht' was a ________-born theoretical physicist and the world's first true gangsta. He is
famous for __________, and specifically the parachute-pants equivalence, E = MC Hammer. Up
through the 1930's, his German detractors championed the notion that this and his simultaneously
developed quantum theory was all BS "Jewish science" until they woke up one day and realized they
could build a bomb with it. Thereafter, it was revealed that _________'s work was plagiarized, having
suddenly been expressed only a few decades earlier by Max Planck, Henri Poincare or other lesser
known gangsters. These he referred to as "hairy-assed playa-hata””

Q4
X wrote the first treatise on probability theory, De ratiociniis in ludo aleae ("On Reasoning in Games
of Chance", 1657) He studied spherical lenses from a theoretical point of view in 1652–3, obtaining
results that remained unpublished until Isaac Barrow (1669). His aim was to understand telescopes.
He began grinding his own lenses in 1655, collaborating with his brother Constantijn.[ He designed
in 1662 what is now named after him, with two lenses, as a telescope ocular. He was also one of the
first to believe the wave theory of light. Who is he?

Q5
X is the arsenic equivalent of pyrrole. it is rarely found in its pure form. Its structure is as shown
below. Give me its common name, which it shares with a popular curse word and body part, thus
making it sound extremely inappropriate?

Q6*
Fill in the blank :
____________ is excessive, misdirected or obtrusive artificial light. As a major side-effect of
urbanization, it is blamed for compromising health, disrupting ecosystems and spoiling aesthetic
environments. _______________ is a broad term that refers to multiple problems, all of which are
caused by inefficient, unappealing, or (arguably) unnecessary use of artificial light

Q7
X and Y are two similarly named scientific ‘technologies’. While X stands for the process it is
generated, Y is named after the creator, Jack Cover’s favourite childhood hero, Tom Swift’s Electric
Rifle. Give me X and Y. (+1 for each)

Q8
Literally meaning a connection or series of connections linking two or more things, this is a line of
consumer electronic devices that run the Android operating system. As of August 2016, the devices
currently available in the line are two smartphones, the 6P (made with Huawei) and 5X (made with
LG). Name this.

Q9
This happens when the magnetosphere is sufficiently disturbed by the solar wind that the trajectories
of charged particles in both solar wind and magnetospheric plasma, mainly in the form of electrons
and protons, precipitate them into the upper atmosphere (thermosphere/exosphere), where their
energy is lost. The resulting ionization and excitation of atmospheric constituents emits light of
varying colour and complexity.
What am I talking about?

Q10*
X's membership has long been composed of engineers and scientists. Allied professionals who are
members include computer scientists, software developers, information technology professionals,
physicists, and medical doctors, in addition to X's electrical and electronics engineering core. For this
reason the organization no longer goes by the full name, except on legal business documents, and
is referred to simply as X. Give me X

Q11*
_____________ is an American content delivery network (CDN) and cloud services provider
headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. it's content delivery network is
one of the world's largest distributed computing platforms, responsible for serving between 15 and
30 percent of all web traffic.
The company was founded in 1998 by Daniel M. Lewin (then a graduate student at MIT) and MIT
applied mathematics professor Tom Leighton. Lewin was killed aboard American Airlines Flight 11,
which crashed in the September 11 attacks of 2001. Leighton currently serves as ________'s CEO.
__________ is a Hawaiian word meaning "intelligent" or "clever".
FITB

Q12
What have been blanked out?
No part points

Q13
An expedition from 1737 to 1740 by French scientist Pierre Bouguer attempted to determine
something by measuring the period of a pendulum (and therefore the strength of gravity) as a
function of elevation. The experiments were carried out in Ecuador and Peru, on Pichincha Volcano
and mount Chimborazo.
On the other hand, George Biddell Airy sought to determine the same thing by measuring the
difference in the period of a pendulum between the surface and the bottom of a mine. The first tests
took place in Cornwall between 1826 and 1828. The experiment was a failure due to a fire and a
flood. The final accepted value is 5.51 (CGS Units). What is being measured?

Q14
_______ Day is celebrated on the 256th day of the year (13 September in normal years and 12
September in leap years). The number 256 (2^8) was chosen because it is the number of distinct
values that can be represented with an eight-bit byte.
Also, '256' in hexadecimal is '100' ('0x100'), and it's the highest power of two that is lower than 365
(the number of days in a year).
Typical celebrations of _______ Day include playing around with old computers and behaving in a
generally inane(stupid and silly) manner.
It is an official professional holiday in Russia. FITB

Q15
A major issue of the purchase was the fact that X was a major competitor to Y, raising many
concerns among antitrust regulators, open source advocates, customers, and employees. The EU
Commission delayed the acquisition for several months over concerns of Y's plans for MySQL. The
commission finally approved the takeover, apparently pressured by the United States to do so,
according to a Wikileaks cable released in September 2011.
Several notable engineers resigned following the acquisition, including James Gosling, the (resigned
April 2010); Tim Bray, the creator of XML (resigned February 2010); Kohsuke Kawaguchi, lead
developer of Hudson (resigned April 2010); and Bryan Cantrill, the co-creator of DTrace (resigned
July 2010).
Name X and Y (Order is important) (+1 for each)

Q16
___________ is a scripted, headless browser used for automating web page interaction. It provides a
JavaScript API enabling automated navigation, screenshots, user behavior and assertions making it a
common tool used to run browser-based unit tests in a headless system like a continuous
integration environment. It shares its name with a very popular comic book character. FITB.

Q17
What has been blacked out?/
Give Funda.

Q18*
"There were a lot of different color iterations", says Ruth Kedar, the graphic designer who developed
the now-famous logo. "We ended up with the primary colors, but instead of having the pattern go
in order, we put a secondary color on the L, which brought back the idea that _______ doesn't follow
the rules.“
What is being talked about here?

Q3
Whose ‘Uncyclopedia’ entry?
“'Wicked Smaht' was a ________-born theoretical physicist and the world's first true gangsta. He is
famous for __________, and specifically the parachute-pants equivalence. Up through the 1930's, his
German detractors championed the notion that this and his simultaneously developed quantum
theory was all BS "Jewish science" until they woke up one day and realized they could build a bomb
with it. Thereafter, it was revealed that _________'s work was plagiarized, having suddenly been
expressed only a few decades earlier by Max Planck, Henri Poincare or other lesser known gangsters.
These he referred to as "hairy-assed playa-hata””

Light Pollution/
Photopollution

Q7
X and Y are two similarly named scientific ‘technologies’. While X stands for the process it is
generated, Y is named after the creator, Jack Cover’s favourite childhood hero, Tom Swift’s Electric
Rifle. Give me X and Y.

Q17
What has been blacked out?

RULES
 12 Questions, 6 clockwise, 6 anticlockwise
 +10/0 on direct
 +20/-10 on pounce
 +10 on bounce
 Infinite pounce and bounce.

Q1
The tragic end of the dodos occurred because Dutch sailors brought pigs to the island of Mauritius,
which plundered the dodos' nests and ate their eggs and ultimately drove the birds to extinction. It is
a misconception that the sailors ate the dodos themselves - they rarely did so as the meat tastes
bad.
What, in the world of technology, is a magnificent historical reconstruction of this tale ?

Angry Birds
The clinching evidence for this interpretation is that dodos were flightless birds, so of course they
would have needed to use catapults.

Q2
Founder and CEO of the parent company commanded his deputies in 2004 to build the world's best
____________ before competitors could. In reference to this, they originally used the codename Fiona.
The name was devised by branding consultants Michael Cronan and Karin Hibma. Lab126 tasked
them to name the product, so Cronan and Hibma suggested this name. They felt this was an apt
metaphor for reading and intellectual excitement.
What are we talking about?

Q3
In publishing and graphic design, X is a Latin term. Literally meaning ‘pain itself’, it is typically a
scrambled section of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC Latin text by Cicero, with
words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical, improper Latin. What is X?

Q4
Whose epitaph reads, “3.14159265358979323846264338327950”, because he had demanded that
one of his most famous ‘discoveries’, which he was so proud of, should be on his grave?

Ludolph Van Ceulen
He was the first to calculate the value
of pi accurately to 15 places.

Q5
X is known as a "Renaissance Man" of 17th century England for his work in the sciences, which
covered areas such as astronomy, physics and biology.
In 1653, X enrolled at Oxford's Christ Church College, where he supplemented his meager funds by
working as an assistant to the scientist Robert Boyle. While studying subjects ranging from
astronomy to chemistry, he also made influential friends, such as future architect Christopher Wren.
His publications include Micrographia (1665) and Lectures of Spring (1678). Who is X?

Q6
She went to high school in Tehran at Farzanegan, National Organization for Development of
Exceptional Talents (NODET).
In 1994, she won a gold medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad, the first female Iranian
student to do so. In the 1995 International Mathematical Olympiad, she became the first Iranian
student to achieve a perfect score and to win two gold medals.
Whom am I talking about?

Q7
Identify the waterbody shown (the one passing between
the land).

Q8
For NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, each _____ is drawn on a 12×12 pixel grid. When transmitted, ______ are
specified as a two-byte sequence, in the private-use range E63E through E757 in the Unicode
character space, or F89F through F9FC for Shift JIS. The basic specification has 1706 symbols, with 76
more added in phones that support C-HTML 4.0.
Five symbol modifier characters were added with Unicode 8.0 to provide a range of skin tones.
These modifiers are called _________ MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-1-2, -3, -4, -5, and -6 (U+1F3FB–
U+1F3FF). They are based on the Fitzpatrick scale for classifying human skin color.
FITB.

Q9
Slightly smaller than Earth's Moon, X is primarily made of silicate rock and has a water-ice crust and
probably an iron–nickel core. It has a tenuous atmosphere composed primarily of oxygen. Its surface
is striated by cracks and streaks, whereas craters are relatively rare. In addition to Earth-bound
telescope observations, X has been examined by a succession of space probe flybys, the first
occurring in the early 1970s. X has the smoothest surface of any known solid object in the Solar
System. The apparent youth and smoothness of the surface have led to the hypothesis that
a water ocean exists beneath it.
Give me X

Q10
X is an enterprise software company that develops products for software developers, project
managers, and content management. It is best known for its issue tracking application, Jira, and its
team collaboration and wiki product, Confluence. X serves over 60,000 customers. Mike Cannon-
Brookes and Scott Farquhar founded X in 2002.The pair met while studying at the University of New
South Wales in Sydney.
Give me X

Q11
By moving a needle across a surface and monitoring the electric current that flows through it,
scientists can map a surface to the level of single atoms. It is so precise that it not only looks at
atoms—it also can manipulate them into structures. Its development earned IBM researchers Gerd
Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer a Nobel Prize and helped launch the emerging era of nanotechnology.
What invention?

Scanning Tunnelling Microscope

Q12
In spite of having a tradition of bishops in the family, the Gadolins took their family name from a root
word meaning “great”; the choice being a clear deviation from the clerical custom of gentrifying
one’s name into a Latin form (for eg: Linnaeus). As a result, the element Gadolinium, named after
Johan Gadolin is the only element in the periodic table with what distinction?

ROUND 2
GOOGLE MY DOODLE, BABY

Rules
1. Written round
2. 5 Google Doodles. Write down the reason behind them
3. +20/0 for each. +40 bonus on all correct

ANSWERS!
1. Ada Lovelace’s Birthday
2. End of Mayan Calendar
3. Ramanujan’s Birthday
4. Ustad Allah Rakha’s Birthday
5. Jagdish Chandra Bose’s Birthday

Rules
1. 8 Subjects to choose from
2. Two questions in each subject
3. +10/0 and +20/0 for direct, +5 and +10 on bounce
4. +10/-10 and +20/-20 on pounce

THE SUBJECTS
CHEMISTRY
MEDICINE &
BIOLOGY
PHYSICS
TECH GIANTS
INVENTIONS
DISCOVERIES
COSMOLOGY
& ASTROLOGY
COMPUTER
SCIENCE
SCI-FI

Q1 (+10/0)
He was born to a wealthy family of the nobility in Paris in 1743. The son of an attorney at the
Parliament of Paris, he inherited a large fortune at the age of five with the passing of his mother.
During late 1772 he turned his attention to the phenomenon of combustion, the topic on which he
was to make his most significant contribution to science. He reported the results of his first
experiments on combustion in a note to the Academy on 20 October, in which he reported that
when phosphorus burned, it combined with a large quantity of air to produce acid spirit of
phosphorus, and that the phosphorus increased in weight on burning.
Who is he?

Q2 (+20/0)
X was born in Raruli-Katipara, a village in the Khulna District of present-day Bangladesh. His father
Harish Chandra was a land proprietor. Up to the age of nine, he studied in a school in his village. In
1870 his family migrated to Calcutta and he and his elder brother were admitted to Hare School.
In 1896, he published a paper on preparation of a new stable chemical compound: mercurous nitrite.
This work made way for a large number of investigative papers on nitrites and hyponitrites of
different metals, and on nitrites of ammonia and organic amines. He started a new Indian School of
Chemistry in 1924.
Who is X?

Q1 (+10/0)
________ is a British pharmaceutical company headquartered in Brentford, London. drugs and
vaccines earned £21.3 billion in 2013. Its top-selling products that year were Advair, Avodart, Flovent,
Augmentin, Lovaza and Lamictal. Consumer products, which earned £5.2 billion in 2013, include
Sensodyne and Aquafresh toothpaste.
Fill in the Blank

Q2 (+20/0)
____________ was an Indian physicist who was known for his work that led to his creation of the a plot
(named after him) for understanding peptide structure. He was the first to propose a triple-helical
model for the structure of collagen.
In 1970, he founded the Molecular Biophysics Unit at the Indian Institute of Science which was later
known as the Centre of Advanced Study in Biophysics.
Notable awards that he received include the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award for Physics in India
(1961) and the Fellowship of the Royal Society of London. In 1999, the International Union of
Crystallography honored him with the Ewald Prize for his 'outstanding contributions to
crystallography‘.
Who is he?

Q1 (+10/0)
Shortly after Indian Independence, in 1949, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)
designated _________ to be the centre for all large-scale projects in nuclear research The first
theoretical physics group was set up by the founder's students B.M. Udgaonkar and K.S. Singhvi.
In the 1950s, ________ gained prominence in the field of cosmic ray physics, with the setting up of
research facilities in Ooty and in the Kolar gold mines.
Which premier institute am I talking about?

Q2 (+20/0)
__________ is an elementary, half-integer spin (spin 1⁄2) particle that does not undergo strong
interactions. Two main classes of leptons exist: charged, and neutral.
Nearly 40 years after the discovery of the electron, the muon was discovered by Carl D. Anderson in
1936. It became clear that the muon was much more similar to the electron than to mesons, as
muons do not undergo the strong interaction, and thus the muon was reclassified: electrons, muons,
and the neutrino were grouped into a new group of particles, _________.
FITB

Q1 (+10/0)
______ is an American semi-secret research-and-development facility founded by Google in January
2010, operates as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. _____ has its headquarters about a half mile from
Google's corporate headquarters, the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California.
Work is overseen by entrepreneur scientist Astro Teller, as CEO and "Captain of Moonshots". The lab
started with the development of Google's self-driving car.
Name this lab.

Q2 (+20/0)
__________ a Taiwanese multinational electronics contract manufacturing company headquartered in
New Taipei City, Taiwan. It is the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer, and the third-
largest information technology company by revenue.
Notable customers and products the company manufactures include BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, iPod,
Kindle, Nintendo 3DS, Nokia, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii U, and Xbox One.
They have been involved in several controversies relating to how it manages employees in China.
There has been a history of suicides at its factories blamed on working conditions. In January 2012,
about 150 employees threatened to commit mass-suicide in protest of their working conditions.
Which company am I talking about?

Q1 (+10/0)
____________ is a deterministic primality-proving algorithm created and published by three Indian
Institute of Technology Kanpur computer scientists, Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal, and Nitin
Saxena on 6 August 2002 in a paper titled ‘PRIMES is in P’. Commenting on the impact of this
discovery, Paul Leyland noted: "One reason for the excitement within the mathematical community is
not only does this algorithm settle a long-standing problem, it also does so in a brilliantly simple
manner. Everyone is now wondering what else has been similarly overlooked.
Name this algorithm.

Q2 (+20/0)
Before being found ground into the rugs of child-rearing homes everywhere, X was ironically
created to be a cleaning product. The paste was first marketed as a treatment for filthy wallpaper —
before the company that produced it began to go down the tubes. The discovery that saved Kutol
Products — headed for bankruptcy — wasn't that their wall cleaner worked particularly well, but that
schoolchildren were beginning to use it to create Christmas ornaments as arts and crafts projects. By
removing the compound's cleanser and adding colors and a fresh scent, Kutol spun their wallpaper
saver into one of the most iconic toys of all time — and brought mega-success to a company
headed for destruction.
Name X

Q1 (+10/0)
The film depicts a dystopian Los Angeles in which genetically engineered replicants, which are
visually indistinguishable from adult humans, are manufactured by the powerful Tyrell Corporation.
The use of replicants on Earth is banned and they are exclusively utilized for dangerous or menial
work on off-world colonies. Replicants who defy the ban and return to Earth are hunted down and
killed ("retired") by special police operatives known as X, which is also the name of the movie. Give
me X.

Q2 (+20/0)
X is an Indian astrophysicist. He is a proponent of steady state cosmology. He developed with Sir
Fred Hoyle the conformal gravity theory, commonly known as Hoyle–X theory. It synthesises Albert
Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Mach's Principle.
He has written science fiction, novels, and short stories in English, Hindi, and Marathi. He is also the
consultant for the Science and Mathematics textbooks of NCERT. His sci-fi writings include The
Return of Vaman, The Adventure and The Comet. Name X

Q1 (+10/0)
Name what this woman is standing with. The
name of the woman would do too.

Margaret Hamilton
 The code that got Man to Moon (Apollo)

Q2 (+20/0)
He was a Dutch computer scientist and an early pioneer in many research areas of computing
science. A theoretical physicist by training, he worked as a programmer at the Mathematisch
Centrum (Amsterdam) from 1952 to 1962. He was a professor of mathematics at the Eindhoven
University of Technology (1962–1984) and a research fellow at the Burroughs Corporation (1973–
1984). He held the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at
Austin from 1984 until 1999, and retired as Professor Emeritus in 1999. Several concepts and
problems that are now standard in computer science were first identified by him or bear names
coined by him.
Name this Dutch genius.

Q1 (+10/0)
If the universe's expansion speed does not exceed the escape velocity, then the mutual gravitational
attraction of all its matter will eventually cause it to contract. If entropy continues to increase in the
contracting phase, the contraction would appear very different from the time reversal of the
expansion. While the early universe was highly uniform, a contracting universe would become
increasingly clumped. Eventually all matter would collapse into black holes, which would then
coalesce producing a unified black hole. What is this theory called?

Q2 (+20/0)
Where can you find a messages from U.S. President Jimmy Carter, the U.N. Secretary General Kurt
Waldheim, Beethoven, Mozart and several other people? Along with messages from the other
people, you may also find some food, architecture, and signals of a woman in love.

SciTech Quiz Alcheringa 2017

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