The Prelims

Just a heads-up, she's not in the entertainment business.

Identify her.

Marissa Mayer, The new CEO of Yahoo

This company was started by the husband-wife team of Tim and
Nina in 1979. The idea germinated over dinner with friends when
they discussed the shortcomings of restaurant critics in the
newspapers. Thus began the idea of surveying people on this topic
on a variety of dimensions (today, the survey has a 30-point scale).
Google recently acquired this company, for their content and
brand. The company's name is the same as the couple's last name.
Which company?

The second self-funded space tourist and the first
South-African in space.
Identify this guy.

Mark Shuttleworth,The founder of
Canonical(makers of Ubuntu OS)

Recently, he was spotted in the French Rivera with a bevy of
models, and ran up 50,000 dollars tab on the bar in St. Tropez.
He also features on the list of the Forbes billionaires list at no.
782. Who is this reclusive billionaire?

Among the five, the first three are lucky enough to
have names. The first one (known since 1978) is
called "Charon", a boatman of the dead in Greek
mythology. The next two were found together, in
2005, and are called "Nix" (the mother of "Charon"
and the goddess of night) and "Hydra" (the
mythical nine-headed serpent).The last two have
the eminently boring identifiers of "S/2011
(134340) 1" and "S/2012 (134340) 1", denoting
when they were found. "S/2012 (134340) 1" was
located in July 2012.
What are these five?

The satellites of Pluto, the dwarf-
planet-formerly-known-as-a-planet.

WTF

Identify The Designer of
this ring.

Mark Zuckerberg designed this ring
for his wife Priscilla Chan.

WTF

GNU software is copy righted, but not in the
same sense as other software you might own.
Software created under the GNU Public
License is free to reproduce and use but
carries certain restrictions. What is this
concept called?

According to X’s founder Drew Houston ,he conceived
the idea after repeatedly forgetting his USB flash
drive while he was a student at MIT. He says that
existing services at the time "suffered problems with
Internet latency, large files, bugs, or just made me think
too much." He began making something for himself, but
then realized that it could benefit others with the same
problem. Houston founded X Inc. in 2007.

Id X.

The guy is Nicolas Léonard Sadi
Carnot and the word which is
blanked out is Carnot

The famous X was produced by Musikvergnuegen and
written by Walter Werzowa from the Austrian 1980s
sampling band Edelweiss.X has since undergone
substantial changes in tone since the introduction of
the ______________________________________, yet
keeps the same jingle.

Id X

WTF

It is one of the most sophisticated pieces of
malicious software ever discovered. It has about
20 times as much code than Stuxnet. It is built
with some 20 modules - researchers still don't
understand the full purpose of most of them.
Kaspersky Lab, which claimed credit for
uncovering it, believes the virus may be the work
of the same nation or nations that built
the Stuxnet worm that attacked Iran's nuclear
program in 2010.

Which virus??

Identify the blurred personalities.

Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning.

This graphic novel, issued in 2011, is written by Jim Ottaviani and
illustrated by Leland Myrick. The subject is a non-fictional
biography of a legendary twentieth century figure, known for his
contributions to physics,education, and for popularising science.
He was also an amateur musician and painter.
Who is this book about?

X(blurred out in the above xkcd comic) is
a microblogging platform and social networking website.
Id X.

BITCH PLEASE!!!!

Id this guy.

Yao Ming, a professional basketball player

While filming one of his films in 2006, 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 1 for help. So although the basic idea behind this website
is X's, the site was designed, built and is run entirely by 1, 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.

1

Identify X and Y.

X-Jesse Eisenberg
Y-Mark Zuckerberg

WTF

Why are these scientific publications of recent
interest?

Hurley, I; Hershlag, N; Woodward, J (October 1998). "A Simple
Method to Demonstrate the Enzymatic Production of
Hydrogen from Sugar". Journal of Chemical Education 75 (10):
1270.
Baird, AA; Kagan, J; Gaudette, T; Walz, KA; Hershlag, N; Boas,
DA (August 2002). "Frontal lobe activation during object
permanence: data from near-infrared spectroscopy".
NeuroImage 16 (4): 1120–6. doi:10.1006/nimg.2002.1170. PMID
12202098.

The "Hershlag, N." refers to Natalie Portman( she is
probably the only Oscar winner with an Erdos number.)

Quoting from Wikipedia, the definition for this
two word term from aeronautics is:
an aerial maneuver in which an airplane makes a
complete rotation on its longitudinal axis while
following a helical path, approximately
maintaining its original direction. It is
sometimes described as "a combination of a
loop and a roll".
This term became part of an internet sensation
in November 2011. What term and why the
hooplah?

The term is "barrel roll". Google revealed a new
"easter egg" in which one could type "do a barrel roll"
on the Google search engine (on reasonably modern
browsers such as Chrome or new Firefox versions) to
cause the page to imitate a "barrel roll".

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is
named after Ernest Lawrence (a Nobel laureate for
Physics) and is situated in Livermore, California, in the
United States. On the other side of the former Iron
Curtain, the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions is
part of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, and is
located in Dubna, near Moscow. This one is named
after Georgy Flerov, a Russian physicist.
They recently became neighbours in a particular way.
Explain?

Two synthetic chemical elements, numbers 116
and 114, have been named Livermorium and
Flerovium respectively, in honour of these two
institutes where they were discovered.

WTF

Which website is housed in this bomb-
proof underground nuclear-shelter-turned-
datacenter?

WTF

Now infamous cover. Who?

Kevin Rose,an American Internet
entrepreneur who co-founded
Revision3, Digg, Pownce, and Milk.

The Prelims

More Related Content

What's hot (18)

Similar to The Prelims (20)

More from Doug Adams (12)

Recently uploaded (20)

The Prelims