Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Great Flying Pigs!

A slightly hardcore connect:

1.





2.





3. A painkiller called Nurofen marketed by Crookes Healthcare in the U.K.

4. The Samaritans, a British charity organization

Answer to the previous question:

The Klingon language in the Star Trek series. This is also called the Warrior Tongue, which I didn't mention in the question, for it would have been a big clue.

Cracked by Rare Hand Axe, Arjun and Hussain and conceptually cracked by Sridhar.

Monday, June 27, 2005

qaStaH nuq? (What's Happening?)

This language was invented by Dr. Marc Okrand, a linguist who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. The basic character set of the language is shown below.




The language is also remarkable for the importance it places on swear words. Any speaker of the language considers it a great compliment if told that he/she swears well. The most popular swear words are:
* petaQ
* toDsaH
* yIntagh
* taHqeq
* Qu'vatlh
* ghay'cha'
* lo'be'voS
(translations unprintable :) )

A well-documented and carefully created language, it has also formed the subject of a Bachelor's thesis in Sociology in a university in Sweden. There is even a scholarship available for students of the language offered by the language's official foundation. Some famous English works have been translated into this language, including Shakespeare's Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing and the Bible. Though there are said to be only about 30 fluent speakers worldwide, there are a number of rock bands who create music in the language. Finally, Google is also available in this language. Identify.

Answer to the previous question:
This is a famous easter-egg found in the Mozilla series of web browsers. The quote can be read on typing about:mozilla in the address bar.

"And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror."
- from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

The quote tells the story of the fall of Netscape (the beast) and the rise of the Mozilla foundation (the great bird) from its ashes. The "fire" and "thunder" refer to firebird and thunderbird: the browser and email client created by the Mozilla foundation. Thunderbird is still in wide use, while Firebird evolved into Firefox, the browser that is fast conquering the world. Mammon of course, represents Microsoft.

Two different quotes appear in other versions of the browser:

"And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble."
- from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31
(Red Letter Edition)
and
"And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days."
- from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10

Sridhar and Arjun cracked this, demonstrating their geekiness :) And like Sridhar mentioned, the hostage picture in the Wikipedia question is a modified form of a picture from the Elian Gonzalez crisis. Nice work, tracking that down.

Saturday, June 25, 2005

The Phoenix

Where can you find the following quote?

"And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror."

Clue: I am and always will be a geek :-) Also, there are some clues in the quote for the geekily inclined.


Answer to the previous question:

The reference is to Wikipedia's April Fool's day prank on April 1, 2005.

The picture of Queen Elizabeth I and King Eric IV were from a fictitious article entitled "Toilet paper through the ages", which was the featured article for the day. The term Nihilartikel refers to a fictitious article deliberately inserted in an encyclopaedia.

One of the other gags that Wikipedia pulled on that day was the false news story that the Encyclopaedia Britannica had bought the Wikimedia foundation in a hostile takeover. The fake hostage photograph was visual "proof" accompanying the news story - showing the creator of the Wikimedia foundation, Jimmy Wales being threatened by hostile gunmen.

Good debut from Arjun :-)

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Enough with the PhDs, already!

After that disappointing response, I decided to do away with the PhD questions for a while. Here is a good old-fashioned picture connect:

1.


2.


3.


4.





5.




Answer to the previous question:

The spoof article was written by Isaac Asimov, as preparation in formal writing for his PhD dissertation. When it was published by Asimov's friend against his own wishes, he was afraid his PhD examiners would take the matter seriously during his oral examination. He was relieved when all they asked him was a humourous question about it ("Mr. Asimov, tell us something about the thermodynamic properties of the compound thiotimoline"). He subsequently wrote three sequels, "The Micropsychiatric Applications of Thiotimoline", "Thiotimoline and the Space Age" and "Thiotimoline to the Stars".

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Another PhD Question

What can I say? I'm developing a healthy respect for research, being a grad student who's getting away with doing none at all :P

"The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" was a paper written by a PhD student in the Chemistry department of Columbia University in 1948. It described a chemical compund named Thiotimoline, which had the remarkable property of dissolving in water upto 1.3 seconds BEFORE the water was added. The author is famous for things other than Chemistry, however and is said to be the only person to have authored atleast one book under each category in the Dewey Decimal Classification system of library books. Identify the author, and resist the temptation to google!

Answer to the previous question:

The dissertation was authored by Theodore Kaczynski, who became a professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley and who was later to become famous as the serial killer nicknamed The Unabomber. He killed 3 people and injured numerous others through letter bombs, prompting one of the FBI's most high-profile manhunts in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1995, he threatened to kill more people unless an article written by him was published in a leading newspaper. In this article, he vented his anger against industrialization and claimed that the Industrial Revolution was the greatest ill to have befallen humans (Such beliefs are characteristic of Luddites. Kaczynski was a neo-luddite.) He was finally arrested and sentenced in 1996.

Bill Joy wrote an article in 2000 entitled "Why the future doesn't need us", in which he endorsed some of Kaczynski's views, leading to widespread criticism despite the fact that he also deplored Kaczynski's actions in the same article.

There are two connections to the movie Good Will Hunting. The first is that the main character in the movie (Will) and Kaczynski both suffer from Asperger's Syndrome - in which a person has normal or exceptional intelligence and language development, but exhibit autistic-like behaviors and marked deficiencies in social and communication skills. The other is that the Unabomber is actually mentioned in the movie as an example of what Will could become if not guided properly.

Half points to Sridhar for cracking the Asperger's Syndrome connection.

Sunday, June 19, 2005

Who said PhD research is boring?

In 1967, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, selected a 75-page PhD dissertation, written in less than a year and entitled "On Boundary Functions" as the best dissertation in the Math department for the year. People on the dissertation evaluation committee called it "remarkable" and one member estimated that fewer than 12 people in the country were capable of understanding it. The dissertation basically answered the question (I don't know who was asking it, though :-) ) "If a function is continuous inside a circle, what is the possible structure of the set of points on the boundary circle where the function has limits along arcs?".

This dissertation has since become well known (but not widely understood) outside the mathematical world, and drew the FBI's interest in 1995-96. Why?

Ok, a clue: Luddites (you can look that up if you want to)

Ok, some really arbitrary clues: Good Will Hunting (the movie), Bill Joy (co-founder of Sun Microsystems). I mean it, these are really arbit clues!

Answer to the previous question:

All the people mentioned belong to the secret society Skull and Bones, which exists at Yale university.

The society is supposed to have connections with the Illuminati and other famous secret societies. Almost the entire Bush family, from the time of George W. Bush's grandfather and including George Bush Sr., have been members of this society. This has reportedly helped G.W. Bush's political career in many ways, including funding for his presidential and gubernatorial campaigns and assistance for his attempts at entrepreneurship. Other famous members include William Howard Taft (the 27th US President), Harold Stanley (founder of Morgan Stanley), and a number of prominent industrialists, bankers and senators.

Friday, June 17, 2005

Shhhhhhh!

George W. Bush and John Kerry may not agree on many things, but this is one thing they have in common. When asked about it by an interviewer, Bush responded "It's so secret, I can't talk about it". Kerry too, parried the question when put to him, saying "Well not much, because it's a secret... Sorry, I wish there was something I could manifest..." before changing the subject. It also appears that more than 10 members of Bush's first cabinet could have (but probably wouldn't have) thrown some light on the subject, as could have George Bush Senior, all having been intimately involved with the same thing. Exactly what am I talking about?

Answer to the previous question:

Matchanu's father is the guy all Indian bachelors look up to: Hanuman.

The story goes like this: When Rama's monkey army started building the stone causeway across the sea to reach Longka (Lanka), they found that the structure were being dismantled from within the sea. Rama asked Hanuman to solve this problem. Hanuman found out that it was Suwan Matcha (called Suphanna Matcha in some versions), the sea maiden who was removing the stones and preventing the construction from proceeding. Possibly as a means to another end, Hanuman courted the sea maiden and consequently, won her over to his side. The construction of the bridge resumed and Suwan Matcha subsequently gave birth to Hanuman's son, Matchanu.

Another point: A website mentioned that Ravana was Suwan Matcha's father, which would ironically make him Hanuman's father-in-law. I haven't found any other sources that corroborate this fact, though.

Sridhar was almost there, and Kierthi's matsya connection was actually on the right track - matsya meaning fish, but you didn't fit in the Ramayan clue.

BTW, I believe the word "google" has entered common usage as a verb for "to search". Everyone except Google Inc. is happy with the usage (they are obviously unhappy, because it would cease to be a trademark if it actually entered the OED or something).

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Game, set and Matcha!

The Ramakian (Glory of Rama) is the national epic of Thailand, and is basically another version of the Ramayan. There is this interesting character in the Ramakian called Matchanu, whose mother is a fish-maiden named Suwan-matcha. She is the daughter of Totsakan, one of the ministers in Lanka and the goddess of the sea. The question is, who is Matchanu's father and how was Matchanu conceived?

Answers to the previous quiz:

1. The Simpsons

2. The first couple of guests on the show, Persis Khambatta (who played Lt. Aliea in the first Star Trek movie) and the dancer Protima Bedi, both died within days of shooting their episodes! Later guests like Sharmila Tagore were understandably reluctant to follow :-) and the show had to be cancelled.

3. Alfred E. Neumann of Mad magazine, of course.

4. A couple of clues in the question. The island was called Lesbos, and the word is lesbian.

5. Ronin. Also the title of a John Frankenheimer movie starring Robert De Niro. Incidentally, many characters in Akira Kurosawa movies including some in the Seven Samurai and the main character in Yojimbo are Ronin.

Four out of five to Sridhar. Good show!

And regd. Arjun's comment, I can't think of anything else other than mailing the answers to me personally. But that seems like a lot of work, so maybe ROT13 will be easier. I leave it to the readers of this blog.

Monday, June 13, 2005

From the archives

Feeling too lazy to make up a question today, so just picked up a few from a quiz I did at IITK earlier this year:

1. The Tracey Ullman Show was premiered on the newly launched Fox Television Network in 1987. It was a madcap song-and-dance comedy, featuring a British comedienne named Tracey Ullman as the central character. Guest stars included Keanu Reeves, Kelsey Grammer, Glenn Close and Martin Short. It became the first Fox show to be nominated for five Emmy awards and it won a total of eight, including two for Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Program. It was the show that launched Fox network in a big way among the American viewers. On April 17, 1987, it ran a 5-minute short entitled “Good Night”, which received favourable reviews. The director of the Tracey Ullman Show decided that the short was good enough to become a show on its own. What did this result in?

2. "Not a Nice Man to Know" was a talk show anchored by Khuswant Singh on Star plus 2 years ago. It seemed to go well, but was pulled off the air after a few episodes for a strange reason - guests were unwilling to appear on the show. Why?

3. Long before he appeared on a famous magazine's cover in January 1955, he appeared in several ads for dentists in the 1800's. People who have appeared with him on the cover range from Batman to Jerry Seinfeld. He has jug ears, a missing front tooth and one eye higher than the other. He has a girlfriend named Moxie Cowznofwski, and even ran for President in 1960! Identify this famous fictional character.

4. This was a Greek island in the Aegean, off the coast of Asia Minor. Its inhabitants were primarily female, with its most famous inhabitant being a (female) poet called Sappho. Today, a Sapphic poem is a poem with a stanza of three lines, of five or six stresses each, followed by a short line. Apart from this, a word has originated from the name of the island, which is quite common in today's liberal world. This word is also synonymous with a secondary meaning of "sapphic" in some (completely different) context. Identify the island & hence the word.

5. This term referred to (literally, wave man - one who is tossed about, like a wave in the sea) a master-less samurai during the feudal period of Japan that lasted from 1185 to 1868. A samurai became master-less from the ruin or fall of his master, or after the loss of his master's favour or privilege. Identify this term which is also the nickname of a famous software cracker, who published the cheats for Quake III Arena.

Answer to the previous question:

The reference is to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, of course. The perpetrators were a certain Caleb Schaber and his associates, who innovatively called themselves "Some People".

The clues: Pink Floyd's "Echoes" is supposed to synchronize perfectly with the stargate sequence at the end of the movie and HAL is supposedly named for the preceding letters of IBM (though Arthur C. Clarke denied this).

Incidentally, I agree with Hussain that this is a movie to be watched with lots of patience (it's slow even by Kubrick's standards). Possibly the abstract ending put Sridhar off (as it did me), but that doesn't take away from the greatness of the movie.

Eyes Wide Shut is something entirely different, though. There is this interesting theory that Kubrick wrote a script for a movie about a director who is so revered that even when he makes a pornographic movie, his audiences lap it up. The movie was never made and apparently, Kubrick made EWS as a personal joke. It may not be a true story, but it fits what I think about the movie!

Saturday, June 11, 2005

The mystery of the missing massive Monolith

On the morning of January 1, 2001, visitors to Magnuson Park in Seattle, Washington discovered a metallic monolith on the top of Kite Hill. The object measured approximately three feet wide by nine feet tall and appeared to be hollow. Sometime during the early hours of January 3, the monolith disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived. What was this supposed to signify?

Clues: Pink Floyd, IBM...

Answer to the previous question:

The 1975 Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi when the Allahabad High Court found her guilty of election fraud. Mother Teresa was one of its unlikely supporters.

Ramesh Sippy was forced to change the ending of Sholay by the censor board acting under rules imposed by the Emergency. In the original ending, Thakur Baldev Singh (Sanjeev Kumar) kills Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan) a la the Matrix with flying kicks and a push onto a Trishul. The relatively tame ending we know was forced because the government did not want people taking the law into their own hands. Note that the Thakur was no more a policeman when he killed Gabbar (he retired even as Gabbar escaped from prison).

Cracked by Sridhar and Hussain. Thanks for the appreciation, guys :)

Thursday, June 09, 2005

Another short one

About what did Mother Teresa controversially say "People are happier. There are more jobs. There are no strikes."?

Ok, a clue: Ramesh Sippy changed something famous as a result of what I'm talking about.

Answer to the previous question:

The answer is the Bikini

The "Atome" was touted as the smallest one-piece bathing suit in the world and was considered daring in itself. Louis Reard split the Atome, creating the first world's first bikini. The lateral science connect is also the source of the garment's name - the shock created by it was compared to the shock caused around the world by U.S. nuclear testing on the Bikini atoll in the Pacific.

I'm surprised nobody got this, but I guess the question contained too few clues. Sorry about that.

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

A Small One

A short, but interesting question. Avoid googling this one & try to work it out. Jacques Heim introduced the "Atome" in May 1965. Louis Reard was a French Engineer who famously "split" the "Atome" two months later, sending shock waves across the world. What am I talking about?

Clue: The answer has nothing to do with science. Well, there is a lateral connection to science, maybe you could give me that as well...


Answer to the previous question:
The connection is Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft Corporation.
1. He plays the rythm guitar for "Grown Men"
2. He was one of the principal investors in the SpaceshipOne project
3,4. He owns both the Portland Trailbazers and the Seattle Seahawks
5. He resurrected the SETI program by donating more than 12 million dollars to buy a new Radio Telescope Array.
6. He resigned from Microsoft in 1983 to battle Hodgkin's disease.

The bonus connect: Paul Allen is a great fan of Jimi Hendrix and is the founder of the Experience Music Project, which attempts to collect Jimi Hendrix's recordings and memorabilia.

Both Kierthi and Sridhar got the entire connect, including the title. Good one.

Sunday, June 05, 2005

The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Connect:
1. A rock band called Grown Men
2. SpaceshipOne (the first civilian space shuttle; for which it won the $10 million Ansari X-Prize)
3.

4.

5. SETI (The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence)
6. Hodgkin's disease


Clue: Think technology. Also, the title of the post is another clue.

Answer to the previous question:

These were all early instances of bio-warfare. In each case, the articles given to the enemy were infected with the smallpox virus. Incidentally, there is renewed fear about the possible use of the smallpox virus as a weapon for bio-terrorism, though it has been extinct for more than 25 years.
Cracked by Hussain and by Kierthi on the 2nd try.

Friday, June 03, 2005

Generosity?

A dry question this time, for a change.
In the medieval ages, the Spanish conqueror Francisco Pizarro distributed clothing to the natives of South America. Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the commander-in-chief of British forces during the French and Indian war in America, distributed blankets and handkerchiefs to some Native American-Indians sympathetic to the French cause. Captain Ecuyer of the Royal Americans did the same in 1763. What was the reason behind these acts and what were these early instances of?


Answer to the previous question:

The symbol shown is the official emblem of Singapore. The blanked-out portion read "Majulah Singapura", which translates to "Onward, Singapore!" and is Singapore's motto.

The man in the picture is Sir Stamford Raffles, the explorer and botanist who founded the city of Singapore.

The flower is of course, the Rafflesia, the largest flower in the world, which was discovered by Sir Stamford Raffles.

The bonus connect, which nobody got :( was that in the Sherlock Holmes stories, Watson was introduced to Sherlock Holmes by a certain induvidual named Stamford (hence the connect to pic 2). Toughie, but expected someone to crack it!

Hussain got the main connect.

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Hey, Watson... Meet Sherlock Holmes

Connect 1 to 2 and 2 to 3. Note that some portion of 1 has been blanked out. As a bonus, connect the title of this post to one of the pictures.

1.




2.




3.





Answer to the previous question:

The connection is Eunuchs (or hijras)

Arjun was cursed by the nymph Urvasi to become a eunuch when he resisted her sensual advances and instead, addressed her as his mother. Indra commuted his sentence to a year and gave him the choice of when to undergo the transformation. Arjun transformed himself into the eunuch Brihannala during the Pandavas' year of hiding (Agyatavas) and joined King Virata's court as a singing/dancing teacher to Virata's daughter, Uttara.

Indra was cursed by the rishi Gautama to become a eunuch after he assumed Gautama's form and copulated with Gautama's wife, Ahalya. Incidentally, Gautama cursed Ahalya to become a stone, from which curse she was freed when Rama visited the ashram and laid his foot on her. (I don't know how Indra freed himself from this curse. Any info on this?)

Uranus, the son and husband of Gaia (the Earth) was castrated by his son, Cronos. Uranus had hidden away his first 150 children, the Hecatoncheires from their mother. Gaia never forgave him for this, and she asked her other children, the Titans to attack Uranus, with the unfortunate consequences described above.

Finally, Ashutosh Rana plays Shabnam Mausi in the movie of the same name, based on the life of India's (and possibly the world's) first elected eunuch member of a legislative assembly.

Cracked by Hussain.