TechTryst - Prelims

T ECH T RYST Shreyans Jain
Abhimanyu Dubey
PRELIMS

1
In a letter to the Daily Telegraph last year, physicist Stephen
Hawking and 10 other signatories asked David Cameron to
"formally forgive" X. The other signatories include Lord Rees, the
astronomer royal, Sir Paul Nurse, the head of the Royal Society,
and Lady Trumpington, who worked for X.

The letter describes X as "one of the most brilliant _____ of the
modern era", and pays tribute to his "astonishing achievement"
in ________.

"Yet successive governments seem incapable of forgiving his
conviction for the then crime of ______," the letter continues. "We
urge the prime minister to exercise his authority and formally
forgive the iconic British hero."

2
In February 2012, the team behind the OPERA (Oscillation Project
with Emulsion-Racking Apparatus) experiment found two problems
with their test, eventually narrowing the culprit down to a faulty
optical fibre connection between the GPS signal and the
experiment's main clock. What anomaly was debunked as a result?

3
The _____ Maximus (Latin, literally: "greatest bishop") was the high
priest of the College of Priests (Collegium Pontificum) in ancient Rome.
This was the most important position in the ancient Roman religion,
open only to patricians until 254 BC, when a plebeian first occupied
this post. A distinctly religious office under the early Roman Republic, it
gradually became politicized until, beginning with Augustus, it was
subsumed into the Imperial office.

The word "____" later became a term used for Christian bishops,
including the Bishop of Rome, and the title of "____ Maximus" was
applied within the Roman Catholic Church. Though it is not included in
any official titles in Roman Catholicism, it appears on buildings,
monuments and coins of Renaissance and modern times.

Why did this _____ term come into news recently in the field of tech?

4
It was initially named ‘punkt’ by Arthur Korn. When brought to the
notice of the world it was described by Alfred Dinsdale as “a
mosaic of selenium cells, a great number of small parts, thousands
of little squares, and a succession of little areas of varying
brilliance”.
What?

5
First proposed by Johann Becher in 1667, a hypothetical substance
was thought to be present in all flammable objects and was
released when the object burned. The refutation of this theory a
century later, by Lavoissier, lead to the discovery of oxygen. What
name was given to that mythical substance?

6
X is the technique of transforming a function that takes multiple
arguments (or a tuple of arguments) in such a way that it can be
called as a chain of functions, each with a single argument. It
technically derives its name from its inventor, but has a peculiar
Indian connect.

7
This Dilbert comic is a reference to a famous thought experiment
by which mathematician?

8
In February 201 0, a site known as Please Rob Me was launched, a
site which scraped data from public Twitter messages that had
been pushed through X, to list people who were not at home. The
purpose of the site was to raise awareness about the potential
thoughtlessness of _____ sharing, the site's founder saying "On one
end we're leaving lights on when we're going on a holiday, and on
the other we're telling everybody on the internet we're not home."
Give X.

9
Here, the Internet’s favorite scientist, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse
Tyson takes to Twitter to weigh in on a classic comic technical
question, in trademark badass-ery. What is the question that he
tries to answer here?

10
X is a neurological disorder in which the afflicted person's hand
appears to take on a mind of its own. X is best documented in
cases where a person has had the two hemispheres of their brain
surgically separated, a procedure sometimes used to relieve the
symptoms of extreme cases of epilepsy. It also occurs in some
cases after brain surgery, stroke, infection, tumor, aneurism and
specific degenerative brain conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Video to follow.

11
This particular algorithm X is a non-deterministic backtracking
solution to the exact cover problem - variations of which range
from a Sudoku solver to a way to arrange eight queens on a
chessboard without letting them attack each other. This algorithm,
created by Y is most easily implemented by a program called
Dancing Links, named by Y after the way the control jumps from
one link to another during execution. Give X and Y.

13
Sir Norman Lockyer was an English scientist and astronomer. Along
with the French scientist Pierre Janssen he is credited with
discovering the gas helium. However, he is equally or more famous
for having established/started what?

(Picture on next slide)

14

Spikey, geometrically a rhombic hexecontrahedron, is the logo of
what product/service?

15
X is the largest satellite of Y and is named after the ferryman of
Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased across the rivers
Styx and Acheron that divided the world of the living from the
world of the dead in Greek mythology.
To commemorate the discovery of Y, one ounce of the ashes of Z
are aboard the NASA spacecraft New Horizons scheduled to visit X
and Y in July 2015.
The container includes the inscription: "Interred herein are remains
of American Z, discoverer of Y and the solar system's ‘_________’.

16
X is a mobile service introduced by Y Inc. that lets you capture and
share short looping videos spanning a maximum of six seconds.
Barely a week after its launch, X was already under criticism for
becoming a new home for explicit material after it mistakenly
made a hardcore pornographic video – which was tagged "porn"
and "_______" – an "editor's pick", prompting Y to publicly
apologize and add a 17+ rating to the app.

17
Y's log for 6 May ____ records "The great quantity of these sort of
fish (stingrays) found in this place occasioned my giving it the
name of Stingrays Harbour". However, in his journal (prepared later
from his log), he changed to "The great quantity of plants Mr.
Banks and Dr. Solander found in this place occasioned my giving it
the name of X.”
Story behind the nomenclature of which place? Also give Y.

18
X was a mathematician, physicist, politician and theologist. Born in
Ireland, X spent all of his career at University of Cambridge, where
he served as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1849
until his death in 1903. He was secretary, then president, of the
Royal Society.
X made seminal contributions to fluid dynamics, optics, and
mathematical physics – most notably a theorem in differential
geometry and the Y equations (named after him and a French
engineer) whose existence and smoothness forms one of the
Millennium Prize Problems declared by the Clay Mathematics
Institute in 2000.

19
Peter Neumann coined the first project name of X as a pun on the
time-sharing operating system Multics. As X started supporting
multiple users, it was given its current name. Under a 1956 consent
decree in settlement of an antitrust case, Y (the parent
organization of Z) had been forbidden from entering the
computer business. X could not, therefore, be turned into a
product. Indeed, under the terms of the decree, Z was required to
license its non-telephone technology to anyone who asked. One
of X's inventors, W quietly began answering requests by shipping
out tapes and disks, each accompanied by — according to legend
— a note signed, "Love, Ken”. Give W,X,Y, Z

20
This is Leonard McCoy with one of his catchphrases from Star Trek.
How has the catchphrase been referenced in the world of
technology?

TechTryst - Prelims

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