Quiz week 27

Themed week. LVCish. Not an Olympics one.

1) The PGM 17 Thor was the first operational ballistic missile of the U.S. Air Force (USAF).  Subsequent satellite and space probe flights soon followed, using a Thor first stage with several different upper stages with each getting a greek letter as a name.
What was the name given to the fourth stage of the Thor? (Let the name be X)
Eventually the entire Thor-X launch vehicle came to be called simply X. NASA intended X as "an interim general purpose vehicle" to be "used for communication, meteorological, and scientific satellites and lunar probes during '60 and '61". Now there have been more than 300 Xs launched, with a 95 percent success rate.

This is the Thor
#No reason why this pic should be here

2) This fellow was was an Egyptian polymath. Don't believe the polymath part? Well, he was

Chancellor of the King of Egypt, Doctor, First in line after the King of Upper Egypt, Administrator of the Great Palace, Hereditary nobleman, High Priest of Heliopolis, Builder, Chief Carpenter, Chief Sculptor, and Maker of Vases in Chief.

Anyway he was the architect who developed the first pyramids in ancient Egypt, His ability was such that he was later said to have descended from the gods. Several scholars regard him to be the real father of medicine.
His name means "one who comes in peace" (I'm not sure people now would think of him when someone says "peace").
What is it?

Another fellow has a name that is an anagram of Death By Ra, is the name of a fictional sworn protector of mankind from the guy above.


Identify both these people.

the polymath dude

3) This is a nickname that has been given to several women. Some of them are

• Indira Gandhi
• Margaret Thatcher
• Benazir Bhutto
• Angela Merkel
• Golda Meir ( Prime Minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974 ) 

There is also a movie about one of the above with the same name. What is that nickname?

And which man-made structure is also called the La dame de fer which is French for the above nickname?


4) Starting in the late 1860's, two of America's most prominent paleontologists, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, had a falling out. Personal attacks between the men, thinly veiled as "scientific criticism," followed in articles that they wrote for publication. Later, each would send teams into the fossil fields of the West where they would fight over digging rights amid claims that the other side had destroyed or damaged fossils in order to block their rivals from getting a hold of them.
In their rush to beat each other to the next find, the scientists often based their claims on incomplete or inaccurate data.

In 1877 Marsh wrote a short two-paragraph article for the American Journal of Science that included only a description of the animal's vertebral column, but he named the creature anyway. Marsh estimated that the X, meaning "deceptive lizard", was fifty feet in length.
In that same year, in another short article in American Journal of Science, Marsh claimed finding another dinosaur based on a description of the pelvis and vertebrae. He named this one Y meaning "thunder lizard" and estimated it to be seventy to eighty feet in length. Y is in the logo of a petroleum company.
Y please and if possible, X.


5) From the logo, identify this organization that is often referred to as "GAP".

6) He is a sea giant, god of the ocean, king of the sea creatures and a party freak in Norse mythology. A phenomenon in which the leading edge of the incoming tide forms a wave of water that travels up a river or narrow bay against the direction of the river or bay's current is named after the god who used to go all crazy like this.
Identify the god or the popular word for this phenomenon.

7)  Gray goo is a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario known as ecophagy ("eating the environment"). They were originally described by mathematician John von Neumann, and are sometimes referred to as von Neumann machines. The term grey goo was coined by nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler in his 1986 book Engines of Creation.
What things would be responsible for the grey goo?




8) This is a term that Isaac Asimov coined for the fear of mechanical men. It  is not a fear of roboticists, scientists, or even mad scientists, but rather, a fear of artificial human beings. This fear gets its name from a character in M W Shelly's The Modern Prometheus. What is this fear called?


9) This is the Nicobar Pigeon, the only living member of the genus Caloenas.  Based on several tests, it is sensible to believe that the Nicobar Pigeon is  the closest living relative of the extinct didines (Raphinae) family. The Rodrigues Solitaire is one of the two birds in that family. Which was the other?

10) Carl Diem, president of the Organizing Committee of the 1936 Summer Olympics, wanted to hold a torchbearers' ceremony in the stadium at Delphi, site of the famous oracle, where the Pythian Games were also held. For this reason he ordered construction of a milestone with the _______ carved in the sides, and that a torchbearer should carry the flame along with an escort of three others from there to Berlin. The ceremony was celebrated but the stone was never removed. Later, two British authors Lynn and Gray Poole when visiting Delphi in the late 1950s saw the stone and incorrectly reported in their "History of the Ancient Games" that the ________ design came from ancient Greece.

The thing in question was probably inspired by an ad for Dunlop tyres. What are we talking about? And what are the things in it supposed to represent?

The overall theme?

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Quiz week 23 (themed week 3)

Quiz Week 23

Please do leave your answers as comments.
This is a themed week with all the answers vaguely leading to a theme. Get the theme to get a special mention when we give the answers.
There was a request to make it very simple. Here is an attempt at that.  I have also tried to make the questions short.


1) This two word term originated in racing; as an entity that was not known to gamblers and thus was difficult to place betting odds on. What?



2) This is one of the most iconic sculptures in Hampi - the statue of Ugra Narasimha. But the statue itself was not meant to be an angry Narasimha. The Narasimha became ugra(angry) when a part of the original statue fell down. What fell down?
If it helps, whatever fell down is now in a nearby museum. 


3) They were invented in 1704 for use in watches by Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, Peter Debaufre, and Jacob Debaufre, who received an English patent for the idea. Originally natural ____ were used, such as diamond, sapphire, ruby, and garnet. In 1902, a process to make synthetic sapphire and ruby was invented by making ______ much cheaper.
_____ are advantageous due to their high accuracy, very small size and weight, low and predictable friction, including good temperature stability, and the ability to operate without lubrication and in corrosive environments.
What?


4) What are these?


5) Here's this week's hard question:



Mr.____ was conceived by Dr. Richard Moriarty of Pittsburgh to help children learn to avoid ingesting poisons.

Why did Dr. Dr. Richard Moriarty want to choose an alternative to the original label for poison?



6) The original name of this Disney Princess is Badroulbadour (Arabic بدر البدور, badru l-budūr, "full moon of full moons") in the One Thousand and One Night's 'tale of the enchanted lamp'. But the guys at Disney gave her a different name.

What name?


7) Connect Gujarat, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Lakshadweep (exhaustive).



8) The term derives from the story that the kings of Siam were accustomed to make a present of one of these animals to courtiers who had rendered themselves obnoxious, in order to ruin the recipient by the cost of its maintenance. In modern usage, it is an object, scheme, business venture, facility, etc., considered to be without use or value.
Ironically, some of Thailand's highest civilian awards are also named with the same phrase.
Identify the phrase.


9) slightly used but still...
X is the first nuclear reactor in all of Asia. The characteristic “blue glow” of nuclear reactors is due to Čerenkov radiation. Nehru was highly impressed with its beauty and he decided to name the reactor as X, after mythical damsels. Identify.

 10)  In 1833, the company's father, founded an import business to sell seashells to London collectors. When collecting seashell specimens in the Caspian Sea area in 1892, the founders realised there was potential in exporting lamp oil from the region and commissioned the world's first purpose-built oil tanker, the Murex (Latin for a type of snail), to enter this market; by 1907 the company had a fleet. 
X's logo is one of the most familiar commercial symbols in the world.
The company's official name is Koninklijke Nederlandsche ______ Maatschappi.
i) Which company are we talking about?
ii) Based on what creature is their logo designed?
iii) What were the colours of the logo meant to relate to?




11) Connect

 

12) The work was initially done by  the person shown below which gave the structure its popular name.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh

This person rebuilt and decorated the interiors of the structure.

Jassa Singh Ahluwalia

  

What?



Right. I guess that would do. Now connect.

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Fact File #2 NATURAL DISASTERS

With the huge earthquake that sent tremors(quite literally) today,11/4/2012 ,
and the talks of tsunamis that bring us the memories of Dec 26,04 back,
I decided to post something about natural Disasters that you are unlikely to have heard of before.

1) Let us start of with a relatively common thing,
the tsunami
the name derives from Japanese for harbour waves , and are often refered to as tidal waves which is wrong.
they are oft triggered by earth quakes near or under the sea.
Tsunamis cause damage by two mechanisms: the smashing force of a wall of water travelling at high speed, and the destructive power of a large volume of water draining off the land and carrying all with it, even if the wave did not look large.

Damage caused by a tsunami

LOL

2)
Limnic eruption
Never heard of it right?
thats probably because this has happened only twice in recorded history

A limnic eruption, also referred to as a lake overturn, is a rare type of natural disaster in which  CO₂ suddenly erupts from deep lake water, suffocating wildlife, livestock and humans. Such an eruption may also cause tsunamis in the lake as the rising CO₂ displaces water. Scientists believe lanslides,volcanic activity, or explosions can trigger such an eruption. Lakes in which such activity occurs may be known as limnically active lakes or exploding lakes. Some features of limnically active lakes include:

• CO₂-saturated incoming water
• A cool lake bottom indicating an absence of direct volcanic interaction with lake waters
• An upper and lower thermal layer with differing CO₂ saturations
• Proximity to areas with volcanic activity

For a limnic eruption to occur, the lake must be nearly saturated with gas.
Once the lake is saturated with CO₂, it is very unstable. A trigger is all that is needed to set off an eruption.
Once an eruption occurs, a large CO₂ cloud forms above the lake and expands to the neighbouring region. Because CO₂ is denser than air, it has a tendency to sink to the ground while pushing breathable air up. As a result, life forms that need to breathe oxygen suffocate once the CO₂ cloud reaches them, as there is very little oxygen in the cloud. The CO₂ can make human bodily fluids very acidic, potentially causingCarbon di oxide poisoning . As victims gasp for air they actually hurt themselves more by inhaling the CO₂ gas.
(the thing abt limnic explosion was from wiki,for more details search it on wiki)

3)
Gamma-ray bursts
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are flashes of gamma rays associated with extremely energetic explosions that have been observed in distant galaxies. They are the most luminous electromagetic events known to occur in the universe. Bursts can last from ten milliseconds to several minutes; a typical burst lasts 20–40 seconds. The initial burst is usually followed by a longer-lived "afterglow" emitted at longer wavelengths 


The sources of most GRBs are billions of light years away from EARTH, implying that the explosions are both extremely energetic (a typical burst releases as much energy in a few seconds as the sun will in its entire 10-billion-year lifetime)
All the bursts astronomers have recorded so far have come from distant galaxies and have been harmless to Earth, but if one occurred within our galaxy and were aimed straight at us, the effects could be devastating. Currently orbiting satellites detect an average of about one gamma-ray burst per day.
More Details

4)
1918 flu pandemic The 1918 flu pandemic (the "Spanish flu") was an influenza pandemic, and the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus (the second was the 2009 flu pandemic, an outbreak of swine flu). It was an unusually severe and deadly pandemic that spread across the world. Historical and epidemiological data are inadequate to identify the geographic origin. Most victims were healthy young adults, in contrast to most influenza outbreaks, which predominantly affect juvenile, elderly, or weakened patients. The flu pandemic was implicated in the outbreak ofencephalitis lethargica in the 1920s.

The pandemic lasted from January 1918 to December 1920, spreading even to theArctic and remote Pacific islands. Between 50 and 100 million died, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. Even using the lower estimate of 50 million people, 3% of the world's population (which was 1.86 billion at the time) died of the disease. Some 500 million, or 27%, were infected.

the cause

5)
HAIL STORMS
Hail is a form of solid precipitation. It consists of balls or irregular lumps of ice, each of which is referred to as a hail stone. Hail stones generally fall at higher speeds as they grow in size, though complicating factors such as melting, friction with air, wind, and interaction with rain and other hail stones can slow their descent through Earth's atmosphere. Severe weather warnings are issued for hail when the stones reach a damaging size, as it can cause serious damage to man-made structures and, most commonly, farmers' crops.
During the Middle Ages, people in Europe used to ring church bells and fire cannons to try to prevent hail, and the subsequent damage to crops. Updated versions of this approach are available as modern hail cannons. Cloud seeding after World War II was done to eliminate the hail threat, particularly across Russia - where it was claimed a 50 to 80 percent reduction in crop damage from hail storms was achieved by deploying silver iodide in clouds using rockets and artillery shells. Their results have not been able to be verified. Hail suppression programs have been undertaken by 15 countries between 1965 and 2005.
But ,to this day, no hail prevention method has been proven to work.

PS
Hope you are all safe and don't get affected by any of these :D
Oh yeah and I also hope that the mayas were wrong

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FACT FILE 1 #SPACE

Howdy??
Those  <fill in adjective yourself> exams had kept us away for a while


Owing to some popular demand ,we have decided to post a bunch of facts now and then regarding a particular theme
This Week's theme is space...so here we go

Before We Get Started,set the tone by simultaneously playing this space rock song.....

(and btw that is the only Pink Floyd Song where all the 5 band members have contributed)

1)
In 2008, Doritos were promoted by an "out-of-this-world" advertising campaign, literally beaming a 30 second advertisement for Doritos brand tortilla chips into a planetary system 42 light years away. 
The project was in collaboration with EISCAT Space Center in Svalbard, Norway. 
The "You Make It, We'll Play It" contest chose the winning advertisement that was transmitted on June 12, 2008. The ad was beamed towards a distant star within the Ursa Major constellation that is orbited by planets which may harbor life. 


2)
NASA began a tradition of playing music to astronauts during the Gemini Program, and first used music to wake up a flight crew during Apollo 15. Each track is specially chosen, often by the astronauts' families, and usually has a special meaning to an individual member of the crew, or is applicable to their daily activities


Here's a famous one

other famous songs songs include Coldplay's Viva La Vida,
Oh yeah the song which you are supposed to be playing now(I know you arent),
the one at the top of the post was also played on the Phobos mission.

3. The Tungaska event
Tungaska is a river somewhere in Soviet Russia(yes,the place where the blog reads you)
where an extremely bizarre event took plae about a century ago.

It was a huge explosion believed to be caused deu to a powerfule meteor or comet burst.
For comparison the blast 1000 times as powerful the Hiroshima explosion.
Heres an eyewitness report

• Krasnoyaretz newspaper, July 13, 1908

Kezhemskoe village. On the 17th an unusual atmospheric event was observed. At 7:43 the noise akin to a strong wind was heard. Immediately afterwards a horrific thump sounded, followed by an earthquake that literally shook the buildings, as if they were hit by a large log or a heavy rock. The first thump was followed by a second, and then a third. Then the interval between the first and the third thumps were accompanied by an unusual underground rattle, similar to a railway upon which dozens of trains are travelling at the same time. Afterwards for 5 to 6 minutes an exact likeness of artillery fire was heard: 50 to 60 salvoes in short, equal intervals, which got progressively weaker. After 1.5–2 minutes after one of the "barrages" six more thumps were heard, like cannon firing, but individual, loud and accompanied by tremors. The sky, at the first sight, appeared to be clear. There was no wind and no clouds. However upon closer inspection to the north, i.e. where most of the thumps were heard, a kind of an ashen cloud was seen near the horizon, which kept getting smaller and more transparent and possibly by around 2–3 p.m. completely disappeared.

Oooh...Scary

4)

If two pieces of metal touch in space, they become permanently stuck together

This may sound unbelievable, but it is true.

Two pieces of metal without any coating on them will form in to one piece in the vacuum of space. This doesn’t happen on earth because the atmosphere puts a layer of oxidized material between the surfaces. 

This might seem like it would be a big problem on the space station but as most tools used there have come from earth, they are already coated with material. In fact, the only evidence of this seen so far has been in experiments designed to provoke the reaction. This process is called cold welding.

 For those who still don’t believe it, here is the Wikipedia article on Cold Welding.

5)
Interested in spotting  a comet yourself??
Here's a table that might come in handy
LIST OF COMETS VISIBLE SOON


Too Be Continued...

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