1. The NSIT Quiz Fest 2013
Sci-Tech Quiz

2. 1
Fans speculate that the writers and directors of __________
casted X as a tribute to Y. The following are some of the
idiosyncratically similar behaviors that Y had too:
1) Y was 6'2" tall and pale.
2) He was meticulous in his grooming, clothing, and regimented
in his daily activities.
3) He had an Eidetic memory
4) Y probably suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder.
5) Y was a celibate and never married, claiming that his chastity
was very helpful to his scientific abilities.
6) He became a proponent of an imposed selective breeding
version of eugenics.
7) Y was raised as an Orthodox Christian.
Give me X and Y.

4. 1
X – Sheldon Cooper
Y – Nikola Tesla

5. 2
What is this comic a reference to?

7. 2
Instagram
The reference is to Instagram’s policy stating
that the user’s data will be owned by Instagram;
which it was eventually forced to withdraw due
to protests from it’s users.

8. 3
This is a 2007 blog post about a person’s fight with depression.
Identify the person.
“Surely there have been times when you’ve been sad. Perhaps
you cry. You feel worthless. You wonder whether it’s worth going
on. Everything you think about seems bleak — the things you’ve
done, the things you hope to do, the people around you. You
want to lie in bed and keep the lights off. Depressed mood is like
that, only it doesn’t come for any reason and it doesn’t go for
any either. Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a
loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at
being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel.
Everything gets colored by the sadness.”

10. 3
Aaron Swartz

11. 4
In case of a/an __________ , the following approaches are to be
considered as of now:
• Use of nuclear force. However an explosion would just “divide” the
problem rather than solving it.
• The European Space Agency is working on a mission called ‘Don
Quijote’ that aims to use a large, heavy spacecraft. This method can
only be used if the problem is detected with enough time to spare.
• Another non-violent proposal is to use the Yarkovsky effect that
describes the way in which sunlight can be used to give a gentle
push.
• Perhaps the most elegant, though least spectacular, solution
involves a device called a "gravity tractor“.
Fill in the blank.

13. 4
Possible asteroid collision with Earth/
Armageddon

14. 5
• Google doodle on whose birthday?

16. 5
Copernicus

17. 6
X was developed at Y. The office on the fourth floor of
Y’s building housed a database room.
When the database started to grow, a number of
requests that could not be fulfilled were answered with
a standard message: ‘’__ __ : __ _ ___.’’. Later, when
processes were automated and people could directly
query the database, the message ID's for error
messages remained linked to the room where the
process took place and have led to the coining of the
term given by the blanks.
Give me X and Y.

19. 6
X – World Wide Web(WWW)
Y - CERN

20. 7
Godwin's law is an observation made by Mike
Godwin in 1990 that has become an Internet adage.
It states: "As an online discussion grows longer, the
probability of a comparison involving X or Y
approaches 1." In other words, Godwin observed
that, given enough time, in any online discussion—
regardless of topic or scope—someone inevitably
makes a comparison to X or the Y.
X and Y are synonymous with each other. Give me X
and Y.

22. 7
X – Hitler
Y - Nazis

23. 8
The _____ ___________: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the
Question? is a 1993 popular science book by Nobel Prize-winning
physicist Leon M. Lederman and science writer Dick Teresi.
The book provides a brief history of particle physics, starting with the
Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Democritus, and continuing through
Isaac Newton, Roger J. Boscovich, Michael Faraday, and Ernest
Rutherford and quantum physics in the 20th century.
Fill in the blanks.
(Pic in the next slide)

26. 8
God Particle

27. 9
Following are excerpts from an email by one of the pioneers in his field, and
the beginning of one of the most famous flame wars in the early 90s
computer industry:
From: ast@cs.vu.nl
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: ___ _ ____
Date: 29 Jan 92
As a result of my occupation, I think I know a bit about where operating
systems are going in the next decade or so...
Don’t get me wrong, I am not unhappy with ___. It will get all the people
who want to turn MINIX in BSD UNIX off my back. But in all honesty, I would
suggest that people who want a **MODERN** "free" OS look around for a
microkernel-based, portable OS, like maybe GNU or something like that...
FITB for the subject line.

29. 9
Linux is obsolete

30. 10
The twelve rules of this garage are:
• Believe you can change the world.
• Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever.
• Know when to work alone and when to work together.
• Share tools, ideas. Trust your colleagues.
• No Politics. No bureaucracy. (These are ridiculous in a garage).
• The customer defines a job well done.
• Radical ideas are not bad ideas.
• Invent different ways of working.
• Make a contribution every day.
• If it doesn’t contribute, it doesn’t leave the garage.
• Believe that together we can do anything.
• Invent.
What began here?

32. 10
Hewlett-Packard

33. 11
X was an Indian Bengali scholar and the first director of the Indian
Association for the Cultivation of Science, the oldest research institute in
India.
In 1909, X passed the Collegiate entrance exam, standing first among the
students from East Bengal. In 1911 he ranked third in the ISC exam. In the
same year he went to Calcutta and joined the Presidency College to study
Applied Mathematics and found himself surrounded by numerous scholars
who later went on to become very well known as well.
During his Bachelors degree, he stood second only to another prolific
Bengali scientist and polyglot Y who achieved immortality through a
particular nomenclature.
In a tribute to X, Enrico Fermi wrote, "I still remember with great pleasure
the inspiration that I received from reading Professor X's fundamental
contributions to the theory of gas ionization."
X and Y?

35. 11
X – Meghnad Saha
Y – SN Bose

36. 12. What, in the World of Science, is
this?

38. 12
Einstein’s notebook in which he noted his work
on Relativity and some other subjects, popularly
known as ‘The Zurich Notebook’.

39. 13
X is renowned for his contribution to pure and applied chemistry.
In 1936, the British Government conferred the Order of British
Empire (OBE) on X and he was knighted in 1941 in recognition of
his work for the war effort.
After India's independence, Y was set up under the chairmanship
of X. X played a significant part in building India's post-
independence science and technology policies and was the first
Chairman of the University Grants Commission (UGC). After his
death, Y established the X Award for eminent scientists in his
honour.
X and Y?

41. X – Dr. Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar
Y – Council of Scientific and Industrial Research

42. 14
The first of this device was invented by Hippolyte Marié-Davy in
1854. Simon Lake used it in his submarines in 1902. Sir Howard
Grubb perfected the device in World War I.
However, Morgan Robertson (1861–1915) claimed to have tried to
patent the device. In 1905, Robertson's book The Submarine
Destroyer was released. It described a submarine that used a
similar device.
Which device am I talking about ?

44. 14
Periscope

45. 15
This first took place in New York in 1967 and was a spin-off from Y, which
until then was used for the purpose. The kick-off speaker for the first
event was Bob Galvin. X is held in January each year at the Las Vegas
Convention Center.
As of late, two of the usual organizations have scaled back their patronage
from the event. This year, for the first time since 1999, a head from one of
these organization did not deliver the keynote and instead Z, a leader in a
different but similar industry took over the podium.
Give me X and Z.

47. 15
X – Chicago Music Show
Z - Qualcomm

48. 16
This is a pictorial representation of one of the most famous
experiments in science. Which one, or what was its premise?

50. 16
The Miller-Urey experiment that simulated
conditions on early Earth.
It’s one of the most famous origin of life
experiments, and resulted in the synthesis of
over 20 different amino acids, providing insight
into how organic compounds might have been
created from inorganic compounds.

51. 17
The mathematician X published more papers than any other
mathematician in history. He was known for describing proofs he
found particularly elegant as coming from "The Book", a
hypothetical tome containing the most beautiful method(s) of
proving each theorem. Because of his prolific output, friends
created the X number as a humorous tribute.
His life was documented in the film N Is a Number: A Portrait of X.
X is known for his idiosyncratic elements, especially of his
mathematical analogies of real life people or situations.
He referred to children as Greek Letter "Y" because in
mathematics, particularly calculus, an arbitrarily small positive
quantity is commonly denoted by the Y.
X and Y?

53. 17
X – Erdos
Y - Epsilon

54. 18
X is a circumstance which occurs twice a year, during which the
setting sun aligns with the east–west streets of the main street
grid in __________.
The neologism is derived from Y, where the sun aligns with the
stones on the solstices with a similarly dramatic effect.
During X, an observer on one of the gridded east-west streets
will see the sun setting over ___ ______ directly opposite, from
the street, along its centerline.
The circumstance has been the backdrop of many movies
including the Harrison Ford starrer Morning Glory and was
depicted on the cover of the album ‘The Chemistry of Common
Life’ as it employed the dramatic nature of the event.

56. 18
Manhattenhenge

57. 19
The above car has a Nevada number plate with the infinity sign
prefixed to the number.
According to the Department of Motor Vehicles
"...using the infinity symbol was the best way to represent the future.”
What is so special about the number plates or these cars?

59. 19
Google’s driverless cars

60. 20
Scientists have been eyeing X as a potential storage medium for a long
time, for three very good reasons:
1. It’s incredibly dense (you can store one bit per base, and a base is
only a few atoms large)
2. It’s volumetric rather than planar
3. It’s incredibly stable. X can survive for hundreds of thousands of
years stored away in a box.
To read the data stored in X, you simply sequence it — just as if you
were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the bases
back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each building block of X has a
19-bit address block at the start, so a whole box of X can be sequenced
out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses.

62. 20
DNA

63. 21
Imagine a college housing scenario wherein 400 students have
applied for rooms at a college that can only accommodate 100 of
them. A selection of 100 students must be paired together in
rooms, but the dean of students has a list of pairings of certain
students who cannot room together. The total possible number
of pairings is ridiculously large — more than the total number of
atoms in the universe — but the solutions, i.e. the list of pairings
finally provided to the dean, is easy to check for errors: If one of
the dean’s prohibited pairs is on the list, that’s an error.
This is a description of a very famous problem/ question that has
been unanswered or unsolved. What is the name given to the
problem?

65. 21
P-NP Problem

66. 22.Graph depicting what?

68. 22
Statistics of Felix Baumgartner’s space jump
capsule.

69. 23
X was the capital of Prussia from the Late Middle Ages until 1701
when the capital was moved to Berlin. It is the home of
mathematicians Christian Goldbach, David Hilbert as well as
philosopher Immanuel Kant.
In 1736, the mathematician Leonhard Euler used the
arrangement of the city's geography as the basis for a very
famous mathematical problem Y which led to the mathematical
branches of topology and graph theory. Y?

71. X – Konigsberg
Y – The Seven Bridges of Konigsberg

72. 24
Researchers at Stanford have figured out how harvester ant
colonies decide when to send out more ants to get food. Ants
behave nearly the same way as the X, when searching for food.
They found that the rate at which harvester ants – which forage
for seeds as individuals – leave the nest to search for food
corresponds to food availability.
A forager won't return to the nest until it finds food. If seeds are
plentiful, foragers return faster, and more ants leave the nest to
forage. If, however, ants begin returning empty handed, the
search is slowed, and perhaps called off. This is similar to how
traffic on the X is managed, and has led to the coining of Y, a very
specific term to describe the process occuring on the X.
X and Y?

74. 24
X – Internet
Y – Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)

75. 25
Identify the scientist in this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKTSaezB4p
8

77. 25
Richard Feynman