Tech-tonicTech Quiz Compilation

Infinite bounce - 1

Sitter to start with

• The best-selling Playboy edition was the November 1972 edition, which sold 7,161,561 copies. One-quarter of all American college men were buying the magazine every month.[32] On the cover was model Pam Rawlings, photographed by Rowland Scherman.

• Perhaps coincidentally, a cropped image of the issue's centrefold became its most important contribution to technology. What?

Lenna

• Known primarily for his breakthrough invention. His other products include:

• Mouseless – an invisible computer mouse

• SPARSH – a novel way to copy-paste data between digital devices

• Quickies – intelligent sticky notes that can be searched, located and can send reminders and messages

• Blinkbot - a gaze and blink controlled robot

• a pen that can draw in 3D

• and a public map that can act as Google of physical world

Pranav Mistry

A new condition dubbed X is on the rise due to the amount of time people spend hunched over their mobile phone and tablet computer screens, chiropractors have warned. The affliction, caused by flexing the neck for extended periods of time, can be a forerunner of permanent arthritic damage if it goes without treatment. Cases of the repetitive strain injury are on the rise as smart phones and tablet computers such as the iPad become increasingly popular, experts said.

Identify X. ( 2 word answer)

Text neck

• In the world of cyber security what is the significance of the message – “Welcome to the dungeon © 1986 Brain and Amjads (pvt) Ltd…”

The Brain virus

• It is considered to be the first virus for MS-DOS. It replaced the boot sector of a floppy with a copy of the virus. The real boot sector is moved to another sector and marked as bad. Infected disks usually have five kilobytes of bad sectors. The disk label is changed to ©Brain, and the following text can be seen in infected boot sectors:

• Welcome to the Dungeon (c) 1986 Brain & Amjads (pvt) Ltd VIRUS_SHOE RECORD V9.0 Dedicated to the dynamic memories of millions of viruses who are no longer with us today - Thanks GOODNESS!! BEWARE OF THE er..VIRUS : this program is catching program follows after these messages....$#@%$@!!

• The virus came complete with the brothers' address and three phone numbers, and a message that told the user that their machine was infected and to call them for inoculation:

• Welcome to the Dungeon © 1986 Basit * Amjad (pvt) Ltd. BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES 730 NIZAM BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN LAHORE-PAKISTAN PHONE: 430791,443248,280530. Beware of this VIRUS.... Contact us for vaccination...

Where would you find this?

Google’s Data Center!

Who owns/owned this?

• This is the yacht that Steve Jobs and Philippe Starck collaborated on for 6 years, is finally finished and unveiled in a shipyard in North Holland. The ship is called Venus, and is designed with a distinctly Apple aesthetic. Its sleek and minimal, the hull is made completely of aluminum, which makes it light and agile. The bow is wrapped in structurally reinforced glass.

• As reported in his biography, Steve worked on the project until his death and  had his chief Apple Store engineer design a special glass that could be used as structural support. As at an Apple store, the cabin windows were large panes, almost floor to ceiling, and the main living area was designed to have walls of glass that were forty feet long and ten feet high.

• A row of 27-inch iMacs control the ship.

Identify both guys.• X (born 1972) is an Indian American computer engineer. He is the Senior Vice

President of Chrome, Google Apps and Android at Google Inc. X was brought up in Tamil Nadu. He received a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and was awarded an Institute Silver Medal. He holds an M.S. from Stanford University and an MBA from the Wharton School, where he was named a Siebel Scholar and a Palmer Scholar.

• X joined Google in 2004 where he led the product management and innovation efforts for a suite of Google's client software products, including Google Chrome and Chrome OS, as well as being largely responsible for Google Drive. He went on to oversee the development of different apps like Gmail and Google Maps. On November 19, 2009, X gave a demonstration of Chrome OS. On May 20, 2010, he announced the open-sourcing of the new video codec VP8 by Google, and introduced the new video format WebM to the public. He has been a Director of Jive Software, since April 2011. X is married and has a daughter and a son.

• On March 13, 2013, Larry Page announced that X would add Android to the list of Google products he oversees, including Chrome and Chrome OS. Android was formerly managed by Y who will be co-lead with founder Larry Page in ultra secretive Google X Labs.

X – Sundar Pichai, Y – Andy Rubin

What did they pioneer?

• theGlobe.com was an internet startup founded in 1994 by Cornell students Stephan Paternot and Todd Krizelman. They made headlines by going public in 1998 and posting the largest first day gain of any IPO in history up to that date. After the dot-com-bubble burst, their stock price plummeted finally ceasing operations in 2008.

The social network

• b2/cafelog, more commonly known as simply b2 or cafelog, was the precursor to X. b2/cafelog was estimated to have been employed on approximately 2,000 _____ as of May 2003. It was written in PHP for use with MySQL by Michel Valdrighi, who is now a contributing developer to X. Although X is the official successor, another project, b2evolution, is also in active development.

• From a dorm in the University of Houston, X first appeared in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little to create a fork of b2. Christine Selleck Tremoulet, a friend of Mullenweg, suggested the name X.

Wordpress.com

Connect

Adobe Photoshop

• John and Thomas Knoll were among the original creators of Photoshop

• John Knoll is also a visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) where he has worked on Star Wars, Star Trek, Pirates, Hugo and many more movies.

• He won an Oscar for Pirates: Dead man’s chest

• The Vatican, surprisingly, has an astronomical department staffed with Jesuits and runs one of the worlds largest telescopes,

• The “Large Binocular Telescope Near-Infrared Utility with Camera and Integral Field Unit for Extragalactic Research” is run by the Vatican Observatory Research Group at the Mount Graham International Observatory in southeast Arizona.

• After more than a decade of design, manufacturing and testing, the telescope provides a powerful tool to gain spectacular insights into the universe.

• What is the telescope known as?

LUCIFER

• A particular everyday sighting is said to greatly boost range and efficiency of flying birds over long migratory routes.

• All birds except the first fly in the upwash from the wingtip vertices of the bird ahead. The upwash assists each bird in supporting its own weight in flight. Each bird can achieve a reduction of induced drag by up to 65% and as a result increase their range by 71%. The birds flying at the tips and at the front are rotated in a timely cyclical fashion to spread flight fatigue equally among flock members.

• What am I describing?

The V formation in birds

Sitter

• According to X, it’ll be biggest disappointment of his life is mankind doesn’t make it to Mars by the time he dies.

• “I’d like to die on Mars, just not on impact”, he said

Elon Musk

Id the invention

• This was one of the few reliable methods of measuring time at sea. It has been speculated that it was in use as far back as the 11th century, where it would have complemented the magnetic compass as an aid to navigation.

• However, its earliest known evidence of existence was found in a painting by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1328. Written records from the same era also appear in lists of ship stores.

• It was the job of a ship's page to turn the X and thus provide the time for the ship's log. Noon was the reference time for navigation, which did not depend on the glass, as the sun would be at its zenith.

What practise am I talking about?

• The original length of this period was 30 days and hence called, trentina

• This was later extended to 40 days, and called X

• The choice of this period is said to be based on the period that Christ and Moses spent in isolation in the desert.

• In 1423, Venice set up its lazaretto, or X station, on an island near the city. The Venetian system became the model for other European countries thereafter.

Put funda

• In 1924, American battery manufacturers, the War Industries Board, and a few government agencies got together to develop some nationally uniform specifications for the size of battery cells, their arrangement in batteries, their minimum performance criteria, and other standards.

• As battery technology improved, smaller batteries were using in the growing consumer electronics industry. They also found use in the niche medium and high-drain applications.

• Connect the event in the first para to the second para and weave a story around it to explain a peculiar absence of a category of products.

Why there are no A and B size batteries

• The standard sizes of A,B,C and D were introduced in 1924. There was also a larger "No. 6" battery which retained that name.

• As smaller batteries came along, they were added as AA and AAA size. The mid-size A and B simply didn't have a market and gradually went out of production worldwide.

• Debates over the ethics of using the device X have already begun. A Seattle-based bar has already banned X from their establishment.

• According to their Facebook post:

• “For the record, the 5 point is the first Seattle business to ban in advance X. Ass-kickings will be encouraged for violators.”

• Identify the device in question.

Google Glass

• How did this guy influence Linus Torvalds while developing Linux?

• Specifically, the name of the brand led to naming of something.

Mr Clean

• When you clean the kernel source tree, you type ‘make clean’. If you really really want to scrub it clean, you type ‘make mrproper’. The guy in the picture is Mr. Proper (Mr Clean in Americans)

• Mr Clean was a popular brand in Europe but went by the name Mr Proper

• X is a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. In the course of ordinary activities, someone "using" X engages many computational devices and systems simultaneously, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so. This model is usually considered an advancement from the desktop paradigm. More formally, X is defined as "machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs."

• This paradigm is also described as pervasive computing, ambient intelligence, or, more recently, everyware, where each term emphasizes slightly different aspects.

• What is X? Is it also in the news for a recent product announcement by a tech major.

Ubiquitous computing

• Apple watch gadget coming out this year end

Stop dreaming about electric sheep

• X is open-source software. It was originally written by Dan Bornstein, who named it after the fishing village of X in Eyjafjörður, Iceland, where some of his ancestors lived.

Dalvik

• Android uses this

Simple. Patent for what? And by whom?

Apple Store layout

Long story about?

• The story dates back 130 years, to a period known as the Bone wars. Named after the bitter feud between Yale’s Marsh and Cope of Philadelphia.

• In 1877, Marsh discovered the partial skeleton of a long necked long tailed herbivorous dinosaur he dubbed Apatosaurus. Since the fossil was missing a skull, in 1883 he borrowed a skull from a Camarasaurus in his published reconstruction.

• A few years later he found a second skeleton believed to belong to a completely new dinosaur which he named X. However this was in reality, a more complete adult version of Apatosaurus. In his rush to outdo Cope, he carelessly mistook the dinosaur for something new.

• The mistake was spotted only in 1903, the name X lived on in pop culture and children literature everywhere.

• X means ‘thunder lizard’ while Apatosaurus means ‘deceptive lizard’.

• In 1989, US post office released a set of stamps featuring X instead of Apatosaurus. There was a lot of backlash from the scientific community for fostering scientific illiteracy by promoting the obsolete X.

Brontosaurus

Etymological history of which element’s name?

• X is derived from the greek word for blue-green spar, which is derived from Prakrit and pali terms for ‘to become pale’ in reference to the pale semi-precious gemstone Y

• The word is ultimately derived from the Sanskrit word vaidurya which might come from the name of Belur.

Beryllium

• Route:

• Belur

• Vaidurya

• Vilar

• Veliru

• Veluriya

• Berullos

• Beryllos

• This started with an erroneous correction of the word medieval in Yahoo Mail in 2001

• In 2001, Yahoo! Introduced an email filter which automatically replaced Javascript-related strings with alternate versions, to prevent viruses in HTML email. The filter would hyphenate the terms ‘JavaScript’, ‘Jscript’ and replaced ‘mocha’, ‘eval’ and ‘statement’ with similar terms.

• Some of the unintended errors of this were – evaluation -> reviewuation, expressionist -> statementist, rendering them into near gibberish.

The Medireview effect

• One unintended effect of this was that the word medieval became medireview, in the body of Yahoo! email messages. Not all email recipients recognised this as an error or may have even thought it was intentional. As of 2012 there are still web pages seen which use medireview instead of medieval.

Simple one

• Victims:

• Tyson Gay -> Tyson Homosexual

• Assassination -> Buttbuttination

• Classic -> clbuttic

• Hint: Made famous by Ian Botham

Scunthorpe effect

Funda?

• In order to see the Easter egg, simply go to your Settings menu and tap "About Phone." You'll see "Android Version" in that menu. Tap on that part very fast a bunch of times, and eventually a reward will pop onto your screen.

• One of his earliest known stories goes like this:

• While at school, a young X was tasked with writing a code for a program that schedules classes.

• X altered the code to put himself in a class with mostly female students.

Bill Gates

What are these the stages of?

Beatboxing

• Vella MIT researchers have conducted extensive MRI studies of the vocal tract while beatboxing

Connect

1) Gytha or Nanny from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. She is a witch and member of the Lancre coven.

2) The head of the Quisition and later the Cenobiarch of Omnia from Pratchett’s Small Gods. He's a frightening character, bald by design, with completely dark eyes.

Ogg Vorbis

• Open source video container

2.Where?

• Simpler clue next slide

Present day Kronisberg bridges

• The city is now named Kalingrad

• Two of the seven original bridges did not survive the bombing of Königsberg in World War II. Two others were later demolished and replaced by a modern highway. The three other bridges remain, although only two of them are from Euler's time (one was rebuilt in 1935). Thus, as of 2000, there are now five bridges in Kaliningrad.

• In terms of graph theory, two of the nodes now have degree 2, and the other two have degree 3. Therefore, an Eulerian path is now possible, but since it must begin on one island and end on the other, it is impractical for tourists.

• Canterbury University in Christchurch, New Zealand, has incorporated a model of the bridges into a grass area between the old Physical Sciences Library and the Erskine Building, housing the Departments of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science.

• At 16, X saved pennies to buy materials for his chemistry experiments. While still a teenager, he set his mind on developing a commercially viable aluminum refining process. By age 25, X received a patent on his revolutionary electrolytic process.

Charles Hall

• This process was also discovered at nearly the same time by the Frenchman Paul Héroult, and it has come to be known as the Hall-Héroult process.

• X, remembered as "the female Edison," received some 26 patents for such diverse items as a window frame and sash, machinery for cutting shoe soles, and improvements to internal combustion engines. Her most significant patent was for machinery that would automatically fold and glue paper bags to create square bottoms, an invention which dramatically changed shopping habits. Workmen reportedly refused her advice when first installing the equipment because, "after all, what does a woman know about machines?"

Margaret Knight

8. Patent for?

• Patent for?

Cathode Ray Amusement Device

• The early-prototype for arcade games

• The first video game used a cathode ray tube, and was constructed of analog electronics. The patent application submitted to the US patent office, describes a device that allows a player to use buttons and knobs to manipulate a cathode ray tube beam in a manner that simulates firing at moving ‘airborne’ targets. A transparent sheet of printed squares including targets and airplanes images, was overlaid on the CRT screen and used to define the targets users were aiming at.

• The patent application is signed by two people:

• Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Estle Ray Mann.

• Goldsmith, was an American professor of physics and known as one of the pioneers of American television.

• He was considered an innovator and has more many patents written to his name, including different innovations in the development of television and several electronic testing patents.

• Not much is known on Estle Ray Mann, who was his partner in this invention.

• The X canals were a network of gullies and ravines that some 19th century scientists erroneously thought to exist on X. First detected in 1877 by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, modern telescopes and imaging technology completely debunked the myth. The “canals” were actually found to be a mere optical illusion.

The Martian Canals hypothesis

• A small planet that was supposed to exist in an orbit between Mercury and the Sun, French mathematician Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier coined the name “X” while trying to explain the nature of Mercury’s orbit. No such planet was ever discovered, while the orbit of Mercury was explained in detail by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

• We know it though for an entirely different reason in the field of entertainment and science fiction

The planet Vulcan

• First postulated in 1667 by German physician Johann Joachim Becher, X Theory is an obsolete scientific theory regarding the existence of “X”, a fire-like element, which was contained within combustible bodies and released during combustion. The theory tried to explain burning processes such as combustion and the rusting of metals, which are now jointly termed as “oxidation”.

Phlogiston Theory

• The X theory (or Tabula rasa), widely popularized by John Locke in 1689, proposed that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception. Modern research suggests that genes and other family traits inherited from birth, along with innate instincts of course, also play a very important role.

The Blank Slate hypothesis

• Now widely considered as a pseudoscience, X was the study of the shape of skull as indicative of the strengths of different faculties. Modern scientific research wiped it out by proving that personality traits could not be traced to specific portions of the brain.

Phrenology

• Most recently seen in Django Unchained

• Dennis Carter, while head the marketing team of a technology company in 1991, came up with a revolutionary slogan after a failed promotion. He and his team studied successful consumer marketing techniques and tactics used by well-known companies supplying a ingredient of a finished product, like NutraSweet™, Teflon™ and Dolby™. Name the person, company and the slogan.

Intel Inside

• X is a canned precooked meat product made by the Hormel Foods Corporation, first introduced in 1937.

• The product has become part of many jokes and urban legends about mystery meat, which has made it part of pop culture and folklore. Through a Monty Python sketch, in which X is portrayed as ubiquitous and inescapable

• Y is a cured meat prepared from a pig. It is first cured using large quantities of salt, either in a brine or in a dry packing; the result is fresh Y (also known as green Y). Fresh bacon may then be further dried for weeks or months in cold air, boiled, or smoked.

Spam and Bacon

• Bacn (pronounced like bacon), is email that has been subscribed to and is therefore not unsolicited (like email spam is), but is often not read by the recipient for a long period of time, if at all. Bacn has been described as "email you want but not right now."

Symbolism

• Where would you find a floral symbol that, in Sweden, indicates a noteworthy attraction in a campground. Alternately known as the Gorgon loop, the splat, the infinite loop, and, in the Unicode standard, a “place of interest sign”?

• According to Andy Hertzfeld of the original Mac development team. While working with other team members to translate menu commands directly to the keyboard, Hertzfeld and his team decided to add a special function key. The idea was simple: When pressed in combination with other keys, this “Apple key” would select the corresponding menu command. Jobs hated it – or more precisely the symbol used to represent the button – which was yet another picture of the Apple logo. Hertzfeld recalls his reaction: “There are too many Apples on the screen! It’s ridiculous! We’re taking the Apple logo in vain!” A hasty redesign followed.

• A runic symbol that represents the initials of a king, who was a connoisseur of blueberries.

• The first device for this technology had a ‘teeth-like’ shape.

• This icon was drawn to resemble Neptune’s Trident, the mighty Dreizack. In lieu of the pointed triangles at the tip of the three-pronged spear, the promoters decided to alter the shapes to a triangle, square and circle.

• This was done to signify all the different peripherals that could be attached using the standard.

• They first appeared as tape transport symbols on reel-to-reel tape decks during the mid-1960s. The direction of the play arrow indicated the direction the tape would move. Easy.

• It resembles the notation for an open connection on an electrical schematic. Some say it is simply a stop symbol with a chunk carved out of its center. We’d put our money on a more classical origin: In musical notation, the caesura indicates a X.

• This terror is known by many names: the hypnowheel of doom, the spinning pizza, the pinwheel of death or more commonly as X. It is actually an evolution of the wristwatch “wait” cursor that the company first used in early versions of the OS. While its design origins remain mysterious, the watch was dropped as it reminded users of the time passing as the program remained perpetually hung up.

SBBOD (Spinning Beach Ball of Death)

Tech-in-laws

• X’s law is the storage equivalent of Y’s Law : Seagate's vice president of research Mark X said back in 2005 that magnetic disk storage density doubles approximately every 18 months.

• That also means the cost of storage halves every eighteen months, enabling online services to give us more storage without charging any more for it. It's worth mentioning that SSDs aren't subject to X’s Law: as they're solid state, Y’s Law is more relevant.

Kryder’s Law and Moore’s Law

• Ever wondered why your seventy-three-core monster PC isn't noticeably faster at everyday tasks than the PCs of ten years ago? Niklaus X has, and in 1995 he observed that "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster." X’s law has been invoked by, and wrongly credited to, both Google's Larry Page and Microsoft's Bill Gates.

Wirth’s Law

• 3Com founder Bob X’s Law originally described fax machines and computers, but it applies equally to the internet and to internet services such as Facebook: the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system. A social network with one user is completely useless; with a billion, it becomes almost essential.

Metcalfe’s Law

• "If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions." The rule itself is believed to come from the now-defunct online comic zoomout.co.uk, although it's possible that the comic got it from an anonymous "rules of the internet" copy-and-paste email. It has since been adapted to note that if you can't find a X version of something, saying so online will immediately cause what Urban Dictionary describes as "insane Japanese hentai animation artists" to create it.

Rule 34

• "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes," professor Charlie X said in 1975: in other words, if you set targets to try and make something good happen, people will find a way to hit the targets without improving anything, rendering the whole exercise pointless.

• The best example of this in action is Google: when it used incoming links in PageRank to make search more useful, spammers set up link farms and spammy blogs to artificially inflate their sites' PageRank.

Goodhart’s Law

• X’s Law is crucial to user interface design, from touchscreen apps to the buttons on a website. Paul X studied human-computer interaction and found that the time it takes to move and click on something is a function of how far away it is and how big it is.

• Smartphones are particularly good places to see it in action - some sites' navigation is effectively unusable on small screens, while on-screen keyboards in iOS invoke X’s Law by trying to predict what character you'll go for next and making its tappable area larger.

Fitts’s Law

• The late Roy X was a scientist and president of the Institute for the Future, a Californian think tank, and his Law encourages us to think long term about new technology: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." The online reaction to Apple products tends to illustrate both bits of X’s Law beautifully.

Amara’s Law

• There are two different X’s Laws: one says that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" - that is, throw enough smart people at something and they'll work out how to fix it - but we prefer the one X Torvalds described in his 2001 book, The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age: the motivation for everything falls into three categories, "survival", "social life" and "entertainment". It explains why some people contribute to open source projects and why others join Anonymous or do daft things for the "lulz".

Linus’s Law

• "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1". That's X’s Law of Nazi Analogies as defined by US attorney and author Mike X in 1990. It's generally agreed that when a discussion thread has been “X-ed" the discussion is over, although that only applies if the Nazi or Hitler reference is used in a non-ironic way. Although it's a funny idea, X had a serious point to make: "I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler or to Nazis to think a bit harder about the Holocaust," X says.

Godwin’s Law

• X’s Law was a part of X’s 1979 book Y.

• It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account X’s Law.

• The law is a statement regarding the difficulty of accurately estimating the time it will take to complete tasks of any substantial complexity. The recursive nature of the law is a reflection of the universal experience of difficulty experienced in estimating complex tasks despite all best efforts, including knowing that the task is complex.

Douglas Hoffstader, Godel Escher Bach, Hoffstader’s Law

• The law was initially introduced in connection with a discussion of chess-playing computers, whereas top-level players were continuously beating machines, even though the machines outweighed the players in recursive analysis. The intuition was that the players were able to focus on particular positions instead of following every possible line of play to its conclusion. Hofstadter wrote: “In the early days of computer chess, people used to estimate that it would be ten years until a computer (or program) was world champion. But after ten years had passed, it seemed that the day a computer would become world champion was still more than ten years away”. He then suggests that this was “just one more piece of evidence for the rather recursive Hofstadter’s Law.”

The ninety-ninety rule

• The first 90% of the code takes 90% of the time. The remaining 10% takes the other 90% of the time.

Brook’s Law

• Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

The Dilbert Principle, by Scott Adams

• The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.

Law of Demeter

• An object should only talk to its "neighbors" and not tell its neighbors how to work or invoke methods on a neighbor's neighbor.

• In other words : Tell your dog to walk, not tell a dog's legs to walk.

There are no silver bullets, Frederick P. Brooks, Jr

• There is no single development, in either technology or in management technique, that by itself promises even one orderof- magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.

Knuth’s Optimization principle

• We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Segal’s Law

• A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure

Peter principle

• In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.

Serendipitous inventions

• "Baby, Its Cold Outside" may have been the song running through 13 year old Chester Greenwood's head one cold December day in 1873. To protect his ears while ice skating, he found a piece of wire, and with his grandmother's help, padded the ends. In the beginning, his friends laughed at him. However, when they realized that he was able to stay outside skating long after they had gone inside freezing, they stopped laughing. Instead, they began to ask Chester to make X for them, too. At age 17 Chester applied for a patent. For the next 60 years, Chester's factory made X, and X made Chester rich.

Earmuffs

Patent for?

Frisbees

• The term FRISBEE did not always refer to the familiar plastic disks we visualize flying through the air. Over 100 years ago, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, William Russell Frisbie owned the Frisbie Pie Company and delivered his pies locally. All of his pies were baked in the same type of 10" round tin with a raised edge, wide brim, six small holes in the bottom, and "Frisbie Pies" on the bottom. Playing catch with the tins soon became a popular local sport. However, the tins were slightly dangerous when a toss was missed. It became the Yale custom to yell "Frisbie" when throwing a pie tin. In the 40's when plastic emerged, the pie-tin game was recognized as a manufacturable and marketable product. Note: FRISBEE ® is a registered trademark of Wham-O Mfg. Co.

• Late one night in 1946, a very tired mother was faced with a wet, crying baby yet again. Changing her second daughter's soaked cloth diaper, clothing, and bed sheets, Marion O'Brien Donovan knew there had to be a better way to keep babies dry. Soon after, she tore down the shower curtain hanging in her bathroom, cut out a section, and sat down at her sewing machine, determined to create a diaper cover that would prevent leaks. That first shower-curtain experiment eventually led to the creation of?

Diapers

• One day in the 1930s, while sitting in his brother’s fountain parlor, the Varsity Sweet Shop, in San Francisco, Joseph B. Friedman (1900-1982) watched his young daughter Judith at the counter struggling to drink a milkshake out of a straight paper straw. Friedman, an inventor with a natural curiosity and a creative instinct, took the straw and inserted a screw. He then wrapped dental floss around the paper into the screw threads, creating corrugations. After he removed the screw, the altered paper straw would bend conveniently over the edge of the glass, allowing a small child to better reach the beverage. U.S. patent number 2,094,268 was issued for this new invention, under the title Drinking Tube

Flexible drinking straw

What is this device used for?

Brannock Device

• If you’ve ever been fitted for a pair of shoes, you’ve been in close contact with a Brannock Device, though you may not recognize it by its name. Charles F. Brannock’s 1925 invention, which measured overall length, width, and heel-to-ball length of the foot all at one time, was a great improvement over previous measuring implements. By making possible more accurate fitting of shoes, the instrument helped many people alleviate or avoid foot problems, and its impact on the health and comfort of men and women serving in World War II was particularly notable. The Brannock Device quickly became the industry standard and is still used in shoe stores all over the world.

• In 1879, Ira Remsen and Constantin Fahlberg, at work in a laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, paused to eat. Fahlberg had neglected to wash his hands before the meal — which usually leads to a quick death for most chemists, but led to him noticing an odd flavour during his meal. They had discovered X.

• The duo published their findings together, but it was only Fahlberg's name that made it onto the (incredibly lucrative) patent, now found in pink packets at tables everywhere. That is to say, Remsen got screwed—he later remarked, "Fahlberg is a scoundrel. It nauseates me to hear my name mentioned in the same breath with him."

Saccharin, Artificial sweetener

• In 1943, Navy engineer Richard James was trying to figure out how to use springs to keep the sensitive instruments aboard ships from rocking themselves to death, when he knocked one of his prototypes over. Instead of crashing to the floor, it gracefully sprang downward, and then righted itself. So pointless — so nimble — so X. The spring became a goofy toy of many childhoods—that is before every kid inevitably gets theirs all twisted up and ruins it. 300 million sold worldwide!

Slinky

• X was ironically created to be a cleaning product. The paste was first marketed as a treatment for filthy wallpaper — before the company that produced it began to go down the tubes. The discovery that saved Kutol Products — headed for bankruptcy — wasn't that their wall cleaner worked particularly well, but that schoolchildren were beginning to use it to create Christmas ornaments as arts and crafts projects. By removing the compound's cleanser and adding colors and a fresh scent, Kutol spun their wallpaper saver into one of the most iconic products of all time — and brought mega-success to a company headed for destruction.

Play-Doh

• In what have been a very messy moment of discovery in 1942, Dr. Harry Coover of Eastman-Kodak Laboratories found that a substance he created — cyanoacrylate — was a miserable failure. It was not, to his dismay, at all suited for a new precision gun sight as he had hoped — it infuriatingly stuck to everything it touched. So it was forgotten. Six years later, while overseeing an experimental new design for airplane canopies, Coover found himself stuck in the same gooey mess with a familiar foe — cyanacrylate was proving useless as ever. But this time, Coover observed that the stuff formed an incredibly strong bond without needing heat. Coover and his team tinkered with sticking various objects in their lab together, and realized they had finally stumbled upon a use for the maddening goop. Coover slapped a patent on his discovery, and in 1958, a full 16 years after he first got stuck, cyanoacrylate was being sold on shelves.

Super glue

• Chemist Roy Plunkett had hoped to create a new variety of chlorofluorocarbons (better known as universally-despised CFCs), when he came back to check on his experiment in a refrigeration chamber. When he inspected a canister that was supposed to be full of gas, he found that it appeared to have vanished — leaving behind only a few white flakes. Plunkett was intrigued by these mysterious chemical bits, and began at once to experiment with their properties. The new substance proved to be a fantastic lubricant with an extremely high melting point — perfect at first for military gear, and now the stuff found finely applied across your non-stick cookware.

Teflon

• An assistant professor at the University of Buffalo thought he had ruined his project. Instead of picking a 10,000-ohm resistor out of a box to use on a heart-recording prototype, Wilson Greatbatch took the 1-megaohm variety. The resulting circuit produced a signal that sounded for 1.8 milliseconds, and then paused for a second — a dead ringer for the human heart. What resulted?

Pacemakers

• Greatbatch realized the precise current could regulate a pulse, overriding the imperfect heartbeat of the ill. Before this point, pacemakers were television-sized, cumbersome things that were temporarily attached to patients from the outside. But now the effect could be achieved with a small circuit, perfect to tuck into someone's chest.

Tech inspired by Sci-Fi

• Back in 1945, Arthur C. Clarke wrote an article for the magazine Wireless World, outlining a new idea – which turned out to be the X. So thanks to Clarke, we got long-distance phone calls and satellite television. These days, X allow people in very remote areas access broadband internet.

• The article was not considered serious at the time, but became a reality nearly 20 years later with the launch of the first commercial X.

Geostationary satellite

• The geostationary orbit is now sometimes referred to as the Clarke Orbit or the Clarke belt.

• Einstein wrote about it in 1917, but way back in 1898, science-fiction author HG Wells described a familiar-sounding ‘heat-ray’ in War Of The Worlds. What’s more, in 1925, Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov wrote, in Fatal Eggs, about an intense red light that stimulated growth – long before the first experiments into X bio-stimulation took place in the late 1960s.

Lasers

• The first concept of X occurred on a little television series called Star Trek. In fact, Martin Cooper, the inventor, has stated that his inspiration came from watching Captain Kirk speak into his handheld communicator on the series.

Mobiles

• In 1973, Cooper made history when he placed the first public telephone call on a portable cellular device. Who did he call? His competitors at AT&T's Bell Labs, phoning them from the streets of New York City. Mobile phones have come a long way since then (the original weighed in at 30 ounces!) and I believe we all owe Cooper a debt of gratitude for being a Trek fan.

• X was initially a short story published by Robert A. Heinlein in Astounding Magazine in 1942 under the pseudonym Anson McDonald. The story is about a mechanical genius, X, and his journey from a self-imposed exile to a more normal existence. X was born as a weakling, unable to lift up his head or use his hands to drink or eat. X created a mechanical hand that he used with a glove and harness. Today, these mechanical arms, called Xs, are used by the nuclear industry.

A remote manipulator, also known as a telefactor, telemanipulator, or Waldo

Its lasting contribution to computers?

Computer virus

• This is probably not something we want to celebrate as an invention that owes its existence thanks to science fiction, but it is inspired by sci-fi all the same. In 1975, a novel by British author John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider, described a self-replicating program that could spread across a network. In 1982, John F. Shoch and John A. Hupp, Xerox researchers, created the first computer worm, a small program that was designed to identify idle CPU cycles but ended up growing beyond their intentions. Fast forward to today, when many hackers still refer to The Shockwave Rider as an influential book.

Infinite bounce - 2

• Created in 1994, the X font was inspired by Batman and Watchmen comic books.

• Comic Sans

• Near the event horizon of a black hole (the boundary in space time surrounding said black hole), “X" will occur, stretching matter into thin strips.

• Spaghettification

• In algebraic geometry, a X may refer to any of several figure-eight or ∞-shaped curves. The word comes from the Latin word meaning "decorated with ribbons", which in turn may come from the ancient Greek island of Lemnos where ribbons were worn as decorations, or alternatively may refer to the wool from which the ribbons were made.

• Lemniscate

Where will you find this? Funda?

• The Technische Universität München (TUM; University of Technology, Munich; Technical University of Munich) is a research university with campuses in Munich, Garching, and Weihenstephan. It is a member of TU9, an incorporated society of the largest and most notable German institutes of technology.

• Located inside the Faculty Building for Math and Computer Science are a pair of three storey slides that descend to the first floor. Being a Math and Computer Science facility these are actually “parabolic slides” (formula: z = y = h x²/d²). For those proclaiming this a waste of money: according to German law, a certain fraction of the budget for erecting a state-owned building has to be spent on “architectural art” (German Kunst am Bau)—which, in the case of the FMI building, are the two huge slides you can see in the picture above.

• The slides are open to visitors and are accompanied with sliding pads that are required for using the slide. What a fun and quick way to get from the third floor to first! If you’re ever in Munich, be sure to take a ride down these! [Source: Wikipedia]

What is the popular name for this genus of Cauliflower?

Fractal Cauliflower

• Romanesco broccoli, or Roman cauliflower, is an edible flower of the species Brassica oleracea, and a variant form of cauliflower. First documented in Italy, it is light green in colour and approximates a natural fractal.

• Romanesco broccoli’s inflorescence (the bud) has an approximate self-similar character, with the branched meristems (plant tissue) making a logarithmic spiral. In this sense the broccoli’s shape approximates a natural fractal; each bud is composed of a series of smaller buds, all arranged in yet another logarithmic spiral. This self-similar pattern continues at several smaller levels.The vegetable is rich in vitamin C, vitamin K, dietary fiber and carotenoids.

• The head of Romanesco broccoli is a visually striking example of an approximate fractal in nature. The pattern is only an approximate fractal since the pattern eventually terminates when the feature size becomes sufficiently small. The number of spirals on the head of Romanesco broccoli is a Fibonacci number. In computer graphics, its pattern has been modeled as a recursive helical arrangement of cones. [Source: Wikipedia]

• While it opened a while back, here's a rare look inside China's X theme park, also known as Joyland World. It's located in Changzhou, Jiangsu province and cost 200 million yuan (about $30 million USD) to build. This theme park spans seven sections spread over 600,000 square meters. Continue reading for two videos, more pictures, and additional information.

• In addition to the theme park sections, the company "also built enormous gaming and technology R&D facilities on the park premises, including the National E-Sports Competition Center, International Anime-and-Game Expo Pavilion, Anime-and-Game Technology and Derivatives R&D Park, and a Digital Technology High-end Professionals Training Center."

World of Warcraft

• This game essentially created a whole new genre – the first person shooter- but its name is hardly original. The title roughly translates to X which was first used in 1981, when Muse software released Castle X for the Apple IIe.

• Because 1992’s X was heavily influenced by the original game, ID software hoped to use the name if it wouldn’t bee too expensive to license. However, Muse software had gone out of Business in 1987, so the name was no longer protected by copyright and was free to use.

Wolfenstein 3-D

• X is the princess that the hero Y is trying to save. According to the game’s creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, the name was inspired by the wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, simply because he liked the sound of it.

• As for Y, he was originally going to be named Christ or Christo after Shigeru’s godfather, but the name Y was ultimately chosen because he is meant to be a ‘Y’ between the player and the fantasy world of the game.

Legend of Zelda, Link

• X is a photographic printing process that gives a cyan-blue print. The process was popular in engineering circles well into the 20th century. The simple and low-cost process enabled them to produce large-scale copies of their work, referred to as blueprints. Two chemicals are used in the process - Ammonium iron(III) citrate and Potassium ferricyanide.

• The English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel discovered this procedure in 1842. Though the process was developed by Herschel, he considered it as mainly a means of reproducing notes and diagrams, as in blueprints. It was Anna Atkins who brought this to photography. She created a limited series of X books that documented ferns and other plant life from her extensive seaweed collection. Atkins placed specimens directly onto coated paper, allowing the action of light to create a sillhouette effect. By using this photogram process, Anna Atkins is regarded as the first female photographer.

Cyanotype

• Anna Atkins was one of the first scientists to use the cyanotype to record delicate specimens, as in Himanthalia lorea, from her 1843 book on algae.

Identify

• John Harington’s 1596 invention.

Flush toilet

• The text accompanying Harington's diagram identified A as the 'Cesterne,' D as the 'seate boord,' H as the 'stoole pot,' and L as the 'sluce.' If used correctly, 'your worst privie may be as sweet as your best chamber.'

What are these interfaces known as?

Skeumorphic design

• It has it’s place, like in the various genres of punkery (Steam, diesel, etc.)But, it’s distracting when not used in a common way across many functions/programs/products.

Sitter. What is this?

Heliocentric Universe, Nicolaus Copernicus

• What was the revolutionary idea put forth by Galileo is his Moon drawings that changed astronomy forever

• Aided by his telescope, Galileo's drawings of the moon were a revelation. Until these illustrations were published, the moon was thought to be perfectly smooth and round. Galileo's sketches revealed it to be mountainous and pitted with craters.

What is happening here?

• Dutch researchers, in 2006, analyzing the anatomical accuracy of Rembrandt’s 1633 painting titled ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp’

Kansas city is the first to get this. What?

Google fiber

• 1000Mbps net connection

Whose headquarters?

FB

• Facebook employees painted a giant 42 foot giant QR code on the Facebook Office roof so that it is visible from space, appears on Google maps and can be scanned by QR code readers to visit target facebook sites on mobile smartphones.

• It was part of the “Space Hackathon” called by Mark Zuckerberg at the  new Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park. As Facebook staff eagerly climbed on the roof and painted the QR code, they chose a short url fbco.de so that the QR code could be made simpler and easily scannable even is smaller sizes when viewable on maps!

What ‘unexpected’ discovery are scientists trying to reconstruct here?

• A scientist’s reconstruction of the Homo Floriensis, colloquially called ‘The Hobbit’

Which deal is being finalized here?

Bono and The Edge from U2 investing into DropBox

This is a newly discovered species. Where was it discovered?

On Flickr!

• One day in May of 2011, Shaun Winterton was looking at pictures of bugs on the Internet when something unusual caught his eye.

• It was a close shot of a green lacewing — an insect he knew well — but on its wing was an unfamiliar network of black lines and a few flecks of blue.

• "I sent the link to a few colleagues of mine," Winterton told The Picture Show. "They hadn't seen it either. And I realized: This thing's new."

• The new species was dubbed Semachrysa jade — not after its pale green color, but after Winterton's daughter. It was introduced to the world in the latest issue of ZooKeys, a scientific journal focused on biodiversity. In keeping with the digital nature of their discovery, Winterton, Guek and Brooks wrote the paper from three different continents using a Google document.

Who was X

• A Russian chemist X found the perfect mix of Vodka to be 38% alcohol. However, since spirits in his time were taxed on their strength, the percentage was rounded up to 40% to simplify calculations.

• Any less than this, drunk neat, Vodka can taste watery, while strengths above 40% may give it more burn.

Dmitri Mendeleev

• X; one of the most well known compositions in the world, was originally known as "Aboveground". It is one of the six themes composed by Koji Kondo, however, only this one is renowned. The music has a calypso rhythm and was originally played on the piano accompanied by steel drums. Today, however, most of it is synthesized to suit the purpose and is mostly found in 8-bit or 16-bit format.

Super Mario Bros theme

Click icon to add picture

What is the significance of the song ‘Daisy daisy’ sung by HAL in its ending scene in

2001:A Space Odeyssey?

• Composed by Harry Dacre in 1892.

• In 1961 an IBM 704 became the first computer to sing, in a demonstration of Bell Labs' newly invented speech synthesis -- and the song was “Daisy Daisy". Vocals were programmed by John Kelly and Carol Lochbaum and the accompaniment was programmed by Max Mathews.

• In the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey the intelligent HAL 9000 computer during its deactivation loses its mind and degenerates to singing “Daisy Daisy". The reason the computer reverted to singing this song, according to the film, was because it was one of the first things HAL learned when it was originally programmed. The author of the story, Arthur C. Clarke, had seen the 1961 demo.

What is the epoch-making exhibit on display here?

• Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity on display in its entirety for the first time, at the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities on Tuesday in Jerusalem, Israel.

• Einstein donated the complete original forty-six page handwritten manuscript of his ground-breaking theory to The Hebrew University of Jerusalem during its inauguration in 1925.

Weave a story around the faux-pas made by CERN. People are now rallying to rename

something in Windows 8.

• Use of Comic Sans in CERN’s presentation prompted users to rally for renaming it as Comic Cerns

Connect

Hint

Cameras on Curiosity

• MARDI – 2 MP; Wide-Angle

• MastCams (34, 100) – 2 MP; for 3-D stereo and Panorama

• MAHLI – 2 MP; Macro lens

• HazCams – 1 MP b/w; to avoid running into obstacles

• NavCams – 1 MP; maneuver to interesting locations

Which company did he accidentally rename?

• Prof. David Cheriton wrote a $100,000 check to Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. He wrote ‘Google’ instead of ‘Googol’. Today that check is now worth more than $1 billion in Google shares

Humorous Units of Measurement

• This physicist X Y was known among his colleagues for his precise yet taciturn nature. His colleagues in Cambridge jokingly defined a unit of a Y, which was one word per hour.

Dirac

• This system was invented by Cambridge mathematician W.A.H Rushton.

• Negative values also exist. -1 X is the amount of ugliness that can launch one thousand ships the other way.

• David Goines describes 1 picoX as amount of beauty that can ‘Barbeque a couple of Steaks and Toss an Inner Tube into the Pool’

• X herself had a beauty rating of 1.186 X, capable of launching more than one thousand ships

Helen (from Troy)

• Other interpretations of 1 X include, the quantity of beauty to be more beautiful than 50 million women, the number of women estimation in the 12 century B.C

• A X is unit that denotes the amount of international aid a country receives when it becomes the cause celebre of a prominent celebrity.

• In 2005, International Rescue Committee calculated that Darfur received $300 per capita in aid, while DRC received $11 per capita. Hence, a X can be thought of as a 27x increase in aid receipt.

Jolie

• The X is the amount of global attention W X commands across all media over the space of a day.

• We might then think of the X as a unit of surplus attention, attention not demanded by the leading news story of the day which could theoretically be directed towards Somali famine or conflict in Sudan.

Kardashian

LVCExhaustive (for now)

A plant with many uses. Prior to the use of hops in the flavoring of beer, X1 was used for

this purpose.

X2 is a city in Germany that is a producer of hops.

X3 is a city in Germany, and also a brand/distributor of beer.

Andre X4 is a French winery. As such, both X3 and X4 are distributors of alcoholic

beverages.

X5 is a wine-producing region in France, as well as a comic book character.

General X6 is a character in the DC Comics universe, as well as an independent record

label.

X7 is an independent record label, and also the name of a movie.

Hint: Mountain Dew

X8 is the name of a movie about a dude who turns into a X8. A X8 also has an adverse

reaction (death) when it comes into contact with silver.

X9 is an element that causes an adverse reaction (tarnishing) when it contacts silver. In mythology, it is an element used to drive

away werewolves. X9 is also a city in the United States.

X10 is a city in the United States, and was the name of a ship in the United States Navy.

X11 was a ship in the United States Navy.

X12 is the name of Township in St. Joseph County, Michigan in the United States, as

well as a name of a bay in the United Kingdom.

X12 Tsiolkovsky was a rocket scientist, and so was Robert X13.

Robert H. X13 was a professor of physics, and so was Robert X14.

X14 is a city in the state of Nevada (United States), and so is X15.

James X15 is a futurologist, and so was Jules X16

X17 was suggested as a name, just like X16

It is also something that has never been observed.

X18 is something that has never been observed, and may also therefore be considered as a theoretical thought

experiment.

X19 corresponds to a theoretical thought experiment.

Answers

Yarrow

A plant with many uses. Prior to the use of hops in the flavoring of beer, X1 was used for

this purpose.

Tettnang

X2 is a city in Germany that is a producer of hops.

Heidelberg

X3 is a city in Germany, and also a brand/distributor of beer.

Stentz

Andre X4 is a French winery. As such, both X3 and X4 are distributors of alcoholic

beverages.

Bordeaux

X5 is a wine-producing region in France, as well as a comic book character.

Zod

General X6 is a character in the DC Comics universe, as well as an independent record

label.

Moonshine

X7 is an independent record label, and also the name of a movie.

Hint: Mountain Dew

Werewolf

X8 is the name of a movie about a dude who turns into a X8. A X8 also has an adverse

reaction (death) when it comes into contact with silver.

Sulphur

X9 is an element that causes an adverse reaction (tarnishing) when it contacts silver. In mythology, it is an element used to drive

away werewolves. X9 is also a city in the United States.

Cambridge

X10 is a city in the United States, and was the name of a ship in the United States Navy.

Leonidas

X11 was a ship in the United States Navy.

Constantine

X12 is the name of Township in St. Joseph County, Michigan in the United States, as

well as a name of a bay in the United Kingdom.

Goddard

X12 Tsiolkovsky was a rocket scientist, and so was Robert X13.

Laughlin

Robert H. X13 was a professor of physics, and so was Robert X14.

Lovelock

X14 is a city in the state of Nevada (United States), and so is X15.

Verne

James X15 is a futurologist, and so was Jules X16

Beefy Miracle

X17 was suggested as a name, just like X16

It is also something that has never been observed.

Spherical Cow

X18 is something that has never been observed, and may also therefore be considered as a theoretical thought

experiment.

Schrodinger’s Cat

X19 corresponds to a theoretical thought experiment.

Code names of Fedora versions