MindSpark'12 TorQuest! Mains

TorQuest!
2012
The Science & Technology Quiz
Proudly sponsored by:

TorQuest - Mind Spark 2012

1
Imagine a single proton being blown up to the
size of the universe. The unit of length we are
looking for then would be the size of a human.
This is the smallest length possible in the
universe—one hundred trillion times smaller
than a proton. It is important in the theory of
everything, in string theory and in the Big Bang
theory.
What name is given to this length with a size of
1.6 x 10^-35 m?

Torquest - Mind Spark 2012

Plank Length


2
Actor X came up with the idea for a simple
wordplay site where people could respond to a daily
wordplay topic in an attempt to "one-up" each other
in the cleverness of their response. However, as he
knew nothing about the web, the codes or design,
he turned to his first cousin for help. Hence, the site
called oneupme.com was designed, built and is run
entirely by his first cousin, who worked as Social
Design Strategist at Y and hence, the userbase of
this website is built solely off Y.
X also shares another special connection with Y's
founder.
Identify X and Y.


X: Jesse Eisenberg Y: Facebook


3
An X is a diagrammatic means of
representing sets and their relationships, are
closely related to Y.
X contains only the actually possible zones in a
given context.
Y for n component sets must contain all 2n
hypothetically possible zones that correspond to
some combination of inclusion or exclusion in
each of the component sets.
X & Y please. NO PART POINTS


X- Euler diagram; Y- Venn diagrams


4
What one word connects?
• A single animal organism with genetically distinct
cells from two different zygotes
• A virus containing genetic material from other
organisms
• A wildly unrealistic idea or hope or a completely
impractical plan


Chimera


5
Dr James Fletcher, _________ administrator & deputy
administrator, Dr George Low, had the following
exchange:
Fletcher: “I’m simply not comfortable with those letters,
something is missing.”
Low: ―Well, yes, the cross stroke is gone from the letter
A.‖
Fletcher: “Yes, and that bothers me.”
Low: ―Why?‖
Fletcher: (long pause) “I just don’t feel we are getting
our money’s worth!”
What is being discussed above?


NASA worm logo


6
Hindustan Latex Ltd. (HLL) is targeting the new
condom range at prostitutes, who are among the most
vulnerable to STDs such as AIDS.
The company ran taste tests with sex workers,
including prototypes with chocolate, banana and
strawberry flavors, but the paan flavor came out tops.
Family Health International in collaboration with HLL
launched this ‗product‘, Aastha for use among the sex
workers in Mumbai in 2007. FHI is implementing the
Aastha project as a part of the _________ India AIDS
initiative of _____________________
Gimme both blanks!


Avahan and Bill & Melinda Gates foundation


7
Vision:
• To be a world class educational and research institution contributing
significantly to the Space Endeavours.

Mission:
• Create a unique learning environment enriched by the challenges of
the Space Programme.
• Nurture the spirit of innovation and creativity.
• Establish Centres of Excellence in niche areas.
• Provide ethical and value based education.
• Promote activities to address societal needs.
• Network with national and international institutions of repute.

Whose vision & mission ?


Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST)


8
The branding of ________ was created by
Timothy Hanley to distinguish items that
integrate consumer audio and video with
conventional computing products.
The _______logo also represents the
integration of analog and digital technology with
the the first half representing an analog wave
and the the other half representing a
digital binary code.
Which brand/logo?


9
The guy to the left, when asked where he got the t-shirt
stated, "a friend of mine shared it with me." Who?


Shawn Fanning (of Napster)


10
In an incandescent lamp, an electric current
flows through a thin tungsten wire called a
filament. The current heats the filament to about
3000°C, which causes it to emit both heat and
light. The bulb must be filled with an inert gas to
prevent the filament from burning out.
For many years incandescent lamps were filled
with a mixture of nitrogen and argon.
Recently which gas is used as it allows the
filament to operate at a higher temperature,
which produces a brighter light?


Krypton


Audience Q!
Identify the Indian nuclear experimental physicist and
educationist.


H C Verma Sir 


11
His cutting edge technology during WWII was critical in
keeping the country from falling under Hitler's assault by
decoding hundreds of thousands of secret German
documents and messages but was prosecuted under the
country's draconian gross indecency laws.
He was sentenced then he got fed up & committed
suicide by ingesting a cyanide-laced apple.
There have been many calls for the British government
to exonerate him and, in 2009, former Prime Minister
Gordon Brown did issue an apology but his advocates
have pressured for more.
What is the consequence of this pressure?


Alan Turing (Centenary) Year, 2012


12
Connect & put funda:
• President Ronald Reagan
• William P. Rogers, Chairman
• Richard Feynman, winner of the 1965 Nobel
Prize in Physics
• Former astronaut Neil Armstrong
• Test pilot Chuck Yeager.


A special commission appointed by United States
President Ronald Reagan consisted of the men stated , to
investigate the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.


13
What binds:

• Shantanu Chowdhury of the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology
• Suman Kumar Dhar of the Special Centre for Molecular Medicine at the
Jawaharlal Nehru University
• Gangadhar J Sanjayan of the CSIR National Chemical Laboratory, Pune
• Govindsamy Mugesh of the IISc
• Ravishankar Narayanan of the IISc
• Y Shanthi Pavan of IIT-Madras
• Siva Ramachandran Athreya of the Indian Statistical Institute and
Debashish Goswami of the Indian
• Statistical Institute
• Sandip Basu of the Radiation Medicine Centre at BARC
• Arindam Ghosh of the IISc and Krishnendu Sengupta of the Indian
Association for the Cultivation of Science


Scientists honoured With Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar
Prize 2012


14
This was the first
___________________ by the
modern definition, appeared in
1968 and was the beginning of
company‘s history of using
entry on their __ __ __ __ __ .
The engineer and the co-
founder of this company said,
"If we had called it a computer,
it would have been rejected by
our customers computer gurus
because it didn't look like an
IBM. We therefore decided to
call it a __ __ __ __ __ , and all
such nonsense disappeared."
FITBs!


Scientific calculator; Calculator


15
X was a German manufacturer of optical instruments
who studied medicine. In 1846, he opened a shop in
which he produced and repaired optical equipment for
the University of Jena.
Initially he specialized in the manufacture of
microscopes. In 1866 he invited Ernst Karl Abbe, a
German mathematician and physicist, to be his director
of research; Abbe, who made outstanding contributions
to the design of optical instruments, became X's partner
in 1875.
The X‘s workshop soon acquired a worldwide
reputation for the manufacture of high-quality optical
equipment, particularly cameras and microscopes.
Which company?


16
XY is technology for manufacturing metallic
articles from suitable X. Xs are squeezed together under
high pressure and then heated to temperatures below
their melting points. The result is a solid article.
Commercial products of XY include parts of
automobiles, household appliances, power tools, and
other machines, carbide and carbide-faced tools and
dies & a variety of other products, such as jet-engine
turbine components, filters, coins, and tungsten wire.
XY is preferable to other methods of manufacture
such as casting or machining when it is more economical
or when a product with the desired qualities can be
made only from Xs.
XY?


Powder Metallurgy


17
The Modulor is an
anthropometric scale of
proportions devised by the
Swiss-born French architect X.
It was developed as a visual
bridge between two
incompatible scales, the Imperial
system and the Metric system.
What is blanked out?
Blank = X


18
Global site of _____________ has the tagline,
‗The Science Of Looking Awesome!‘
_____________ was invented in the United States
in 1950 by Ivan Combe with the help of chemist
Kedzie Teller.
_____________ is the top-selling brand of skin
care and acne medication, whose products contain
chiefly benzoyl peroxide, sulfur & resorcinol,
triclosan, or salicylic acid as active ingredients.
FITB!


Audience Q!

What is ‘unofficially’ celebrated annually on October 23
from 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m.?


Scores!


Special Round: XKCD

THINK SIMPLE… Remember this is a Sci-Tech Quiz 
10 points for correct answer
-5 points for wrong attempt.

Only exact keyword is acceptable. NOTHING ELSE!

Special Round: XKCD
(Answers)

Please inter-change sheets!

Special Round: XKCD

Section scores & total score!

19

What?


Fisher Space Pen


20
X is an Internet slang term used to describe any
Internet user behavior that is meant to intentionally anger or
frustrate someone else. It is often associated with online
discussions where users are subjected to offensive or
superfluous posts and messages in order to provoke a
response.
Early incidents of X were considered to be the same as
flaming, but this has changed with modern usage by the news
media to refer to the creation of any content that targets
another person.
The Internet dictionary NetLingo suggests there are four
grades of X: playtime X, tactical X, strategic X, and
domination X.

What is X?


Trolling


21
This branch of Mathematics originated in the
efforts of military planners during World War II.
In the decades after the war, the techniques
began to be applied more widely to problems in
industries, finance, logistics, and government,
moving to a focus on the development of
mathematical models that can be used to
analyze and optimize complex systems, and has
become an area of active academic and
industrial research.
Which branch?


Operations Research


22
A world renowned company first started
as an electrical repair shop for a copper mining
company. Then it was established in its present
shape in 1910 and the first products were
electric motors. The word meaning of its name is
Sunrise. Now, this company is a leading brand in
consumer electronics.
Identify the company?


Hitachi


23
John F Kennedy
John C Stennis
Joseph Sweetman Ames
George C. Marshall
Lyndon B. Johnson
Robert H. Goddard

Connect!


NASA Space Centers named after these people


24
In early march 2010, the mayor of X, Kansas stunned
the world by announcing that his city was changing its
name to Y.
For 150 years, its fortuitous location at the confluence
of the Kansas River and the Oregon Trail has made the
city formerly known as X, a key jumping-off point to the
new world of the West, just as for 150 months the
company formerly known as Y has been a key jumping-off
point to the new world of the web.
The word ―X‖ itself derives from a term used by the
Kansa and Ioway tribes to refer to ―a good place to dig for
potatoes,‖ we‘d like to think that our website,Y is one of
the web's top places to dig for information.
Identify X & Y!


X: Topeka; Y: Google


25
This pioneering work in the field of
thermodynamics was unnoticed until 1834 when
French mining engineer Emile Clapeyron put it on a
graphical footing in his Memoir on the Motive Power
of Heat. Through Clapeyron's paper, German
physicist Rudolf Clausius learned of the author's
theory of heat and through some modification,
Clausius put the second law in mathematical form
with his introduction of the concept of entropy.
What founding work in thermodynamics?


Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire by Sadi Carnot


26

Unexpected changes in the orbit of Uranus led Alexis
Bouvard to deduce that its orbit was subject to
gravitational perturbation by an unknown force. This
led to a discovery, which was first of its kind.
What?


Neptune, the first planet to be discovered by
mathematical predictions rather than by empirical
observations.


27
Where would you possibly find this?

“Lies, damned lies, and Wikipedia articles.”
~ Benjamin Disraeli on Wikipedia

“Isn't it annoying how Wikipedia always copies your homework”
~ A School kid on Wikipedia

“Wikipedia isn't a good source. Didn't you know it was a fuckin'
parody?”
~ A Teacher on Wikipedia


28
According to the first programmer the X Star Thinker in
the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity can
calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle
throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand
blizzard. -- HGTTG
X is also the name of an internet giant's headquarter.
What is X?


Googleplex


29
Apple, HP, Huawei, LG, ZTE, HTC, RIM and Samsung
were involved in a law suit over a patent dispute.
The infringement was of a caller id patent - The
device displays the caller’s name/number, but as the
name implies, will announce it as well so you will
know who’s calling before you even answer the
phone.
Which company owned the patent described
above and was involved in the law suit.


30
The credit of flying first airplane goes to Wright
Brothers. But, there was a Indian named X, who flew a
plane 8 years before Wright Brothers.
According to aviation historians , X used his
knowledge of the Rig Vedas to build a plane. He used
the principle of solar energy combined with mercury to
design his plane.
X‘s plane has not found a place in the aviation
museum at Nehru Centre, nor is there a memorial to his
feat at Chowpatty. However there are some documents
relating to his experiment have been preserved at the
HAL, Bangalore.

Who?


Shivkar Bapuji Talpade


31
Connect:
1667 Galileo

1675 Ole Roemer

1728 James Bradley

1849 Hippolyte Louis Fizeau

1862 Leon Foucault


several attempts were made to measure the speed of
light


32
A New York Times headline from November 10, 1919
headline was seen due to efforts of X & hence Y’s
theory triumphs.
Gimme X & Y both!
(Part points for each element asked)


X: Arthur Eddington;
Y: Einstein's


33
Certain research results indicate that listening
to this kind of music may induce a short-term
improvement on the performance of certain
kinds of mental tasks. This is called X effect.
A research was conducted with reasoning
tests before and after listening to the music. It
was found that, effectively, IQ scores were 8 to 9
points higher after the participants had listened
to the music than before.
X?


Mozart Effect,
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Amadeus – lover of God


34
__________ was created in 2003 at a company
founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis.
Originally it was called a little different, but later
shortened to __________ when it was discovered that
original name wasn‘t available with all Internet domains.
It is less known is that these two guys also co-
founded KaZaA, the first music sharing site – and much
of the __________ code was based on this.
In 2005, the world was shocked when Internet
behemoth eBay bought __________ outright for
approximately $2.6 billion.

FITB!


Skype


35


The Roads of CERN.
All roads are named after famous scientists from
member countries


36
In the early industrial age, buildings began to spring
up all over the east coast. Many of these new
buildings were taller than anything ever built before
and most had elevators. As buildings got taller and
taller, more people began to use elevators.
Elevators in those days were pretty darn slow.
People were constantly complaining about how slow
the elevators were. So they went off to re-design the
elevators.
What was the idea they came up with to tackle
this problem?


Mirrors in elevators. Keep people entertained while
they are in the elevator so that they don’t care about
the time


Special thanks (again!) to EATON for sponsoring the
event 

So Long (?) , And Thanks for ALL the fish !


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