Connect:

1998

2002

2012

2013

Stratospheric cool

Early in the 20th century, as test pilots began flying higher than Mount Everest, they had to defend themselves against temperatures as low as minus-80 degrees Fahrenheit. To survive the frigid blast, they wore leather hoods, and they insulated their eyes with fur-lined goggles. To lift those goggles for even an instant was to risk death. In 1920, when Shorty Schroeder dared to take a biplane above 33,000 feet, his goggles fogged and he had no choice but to pull them off. Moments later, his vision blurred, and his eyes were soon frozen over. Schroeder managed to land the plane that day, and his friend John Macready helped pull him out of the cockpit. A month later, still haunted by the memory of his friend’s swollen eyelids, Macready climbed into the same plane to beat Schroeder’s altitude record. Like Schroeder, Macready depended on goggles that had been designed to seal his eyes from the cold and protect his sight. But the early goggles were not dark enough, and “the bright sunlight in the upper atmosphere hurt his eyes,” said his daughter, Sally Macready Wallace. And so Macready began working with X to design goggles especially suited to protect against the dazzle in the stratosphere. “My dad gave X the original ____” of Y, Wallace said. By the late 1930s advertisements for X's Z brand of Y started coming out. Identify X Y Z

Question for Jun 5

The signage shown in the visual partly inspired X.  A key design principle of X is better focus on the content of applications, relying more on typography and less on graphics. Its designers say that X is designed to be "sleek, quick, modern" and a "refresh" from its predecessors.

Identify X.

Question for June 4, 2012

Connect the following images. The arrows indicate the images that are directly linked to each other (obviously, by different connects). Identify all connects. Click on the image for a larger view.

Googling, Binging, etc. is allowed for this question. Please mention if you were able to crack this on your own or not.

Question for May 31st

The Department of Motor Vehicles in Nevada recently granted a license to a Toyota Prius car. Ordinarily, this would have been a routine affair, but not in this case. This car was given the license plate number of "001". The license plate will be in red and sport the symbol used to indicate "infinity".

If you see this car whizzing past you, who would be driving it?

(Lifted Q from IZ)

Quiz question for 5/16/2012

From it's Wikipedia disambiguation page...

X may refer to:

• ____, a supernatural entity believed in many religions and cultures to be the personification of evil and the enemy of God and humankind
• ____ MC, a motorcycle club
• Lamborghini ____, an Italian sports car
• _____ Data Systems, a division of Xerox
  • _____ 630, a daisy wheel printer
• USS _____ (SS-479), an American submarine
• ______ wind, a type of hot, dry wind
• _____ (Marvel Comics), a Fantastic Four villain

• El _____ (comics), a DC Comics hero
• _____ (Disney), a fictional raven from the 1959 Disney film Sleeping Beauty
• _____ (series), a dark fantasy video game series
  • ____ (video game), the first game of the series
  • ____, the title character of the series

X = ?

What is X Y (Members are usually referred by this term)

The X Y is not a formal organization, so there is no formal criterion for membership. Many of the group's members do acknowledge that it exists and use the name when referring to themselves. Some have formed various social networking service and other online community groups together.

Members include:

Peter Thiel, is often called the "don" of the X Y. He made a $500,000 early investment in Facebook that was worth approximately $1 billion at the valuation established by Microsoft's investment in 2007. He started The Founders Fund with fellow members Ken Howery and Luke Nosek in 2005. The Founders Fund and its principals collectively made early investments in SpaceX, Facebook, Geni.com, IronPort, Ooma, Quantcast, Rapleaf, slide.com, LinkedIn, Friendster, Yammer, Yelp, Inc., Powerset, Vator, Palantir Technologies, Joyent, and SmartDrive Systems, among others. He also founded Clarium Capital, a $2 billion hedge fund. He was executive producer of Thank You for Smoking and co-wrote The Diversity Myth: 'Multiculturalism' and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford.

Founder and Chief Technology Officer Max Levchin invested in IronPort as well, a company founded by early X investor Scott Bannister. With the money he made from the sale of that company to Cisco Systems he founded Slide.com and made the founding $1 million investment in Yelp, Inc.

Former Chief Operating Officer David O. Sacks later founded Geni.com and Yammer, and formed a movie production studio, Room 9 Entertainment, that produced Thank You for Smoking with funding from Thiel and Hoffman.

Chief Financial Officer Roelof Botha later joined as a partner of Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm that has funded many X Y companies. Botha personally invested in YouTube, Facebook, Joost, Tokbox, and Xoom.

Engineers Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, and web designer Chad Hurley founded YouTube, after investigating why it was so difficult at the time to share videos online.

Elon Musk, who was forced out after losing a fight to run the X service on Microsoft servers, co-founded Tesla Motors, and also founded private space exploration company SpaceX with $100 million of his own money.[4] He made a $10 million founding investment in SolarCity, where he served as chairman.

Eric M. Jackson, later wrote The X Wars and became Chief Executive Officer of WND Books, the publishing arm of World Net Daily. He then went on to co-found CapLinked, focused on linking companies and investors.

Russel Simmons, one of the first engineers, and Jeremy Stoppelman, Vice President of Technology, founded Yelp, Inc. in 2004, after a luncheon at the Slanted Door restaurant hosted by Levchin. The conversation turned to why it was so hard to find a good dentist. Levchin discussed the idea with Simmons and Stoppelman on the walk back to Levchin's business incubator office and agreed the next day to fund their company proposal for local business reviews. Yelp has a number of other X Y members among its employees, advisers, and investors.

Product manager Premal Shah became founding president of Kiva.org.

Daniel Issen became Vice President of Engineering at AdBrite

Keith Rabois was an early executive who later held positions at LinkedIn and Slide, and invested in Tokbox, Xoom, Slide, LinkedIn, Geni, Room 9 Entertainment, YouTube, and Yelp. He is now COO of Jack Dorsey's payment company Square

Jared Kopf was an assistant to the X CEO, helped found Slide, and later served as a Director of Clarium Capital before founding several other companies, including a behavioral targeting company, Adroll.
Former Executive Vice President Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn in 2002, and was an early investor in Aviary[16], Friendster, Six Apart, Zynga, IronPort, Flickr, Digg, Grockit, Ping.fm, Nanosolar, Care.com, Knewton, Kongregate, Last.fm, Ning, Technorati, Tagged and a number of other Web 2.0 firms. When YouTube was first formed, Hoffman housed them in his LinkedIn office which had also been X's office.[4] In 2009 he became a partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners.

Other members include Luke Nosek and Ken Howery.

Identify the connect!

1. A Unipolar "Field-Effect" Transistor, Proceedings of the IRE, Nov. 1952
2. "Traitorous eight" or "Fairchild eight"
3. Flynn effect and dysgenics
4. Point contact transistor

Check the comments if you care for another clue!

Question for May 1

_____ Week was born in 1976. The week transpired just as founder Paul Salata hoped and dreamed. Hardly anyone outside of Newport Beach, CA swooned or blinked. Few noticed. Fewer cared. Perfect. It was so _____ that birds didn't even sing. But some kind of strange spark was ignited. The humble essence of being _____ stirred souls.

_____ Week is a week long (annual) celebration of the Underdog. Events include a golf tournament, a regatta and a sports banquet, and are open to the public. The week is capped by the presentation of the trophy shown in the visual. Many sports celebrities join in the fun of roasting and toasting the xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx before he ventures to Orientation Camp.

Identify _____.

Question for April 30th 2012

This is X, who is the first person to achieve this feat (Y) in 1997, and remained the only member of this exclusive club for about 13 years. Her achievement came against Denmark in Bombay. Since then, the club has grown to a membership of three, and has received a lot more attention in India.

X & Y?

Question for April 26, 2012

France has most number of representations with representatives from this country attending 4 times. Bhutan, Mauritius and USSR/Russia are next with 3 representations. 7 nations have sent representatives 2 times, while 27 other nations have sent representatives once. Representation to this event is by invite only. Generally, only one invite is sent each year. However, two were sent in 1968 and 1974, while in a further 11 years, none were sent. Some of the more famous names to have attended include Queen Elizabeth II, Joseph Tito, Jacques Chirac, John Major, Vladimir Putin, Nicolas Sarkozy and Yingluck Shinawatra, who is also the most recent invitee. Only King Wangchuck of Bhutan and Jacques Chirac of France have attended twice.

Which event is described here?

Question for March 29, 2012 - PS

Hey all,

Here's an attempt to revive our quiz blog. 

Question for today: What does the graph below depict?

Question for September 5, 2011

Connect the following:

• Cooch-Behar (India) – Bangladesh
• Baarle Nassau (The Netherlands) – Belgium
• Nahwa (UAE) – Madha (Oman)
• Puducherry (India) – Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh (all India)
• Liberty Island, Ellis Island (New York, USA) – New Jersey (USA)
• Dadra (Dadra and Nagar Haveli, India) – Gujarat (India)

Obviously, the list is not exhaustive. However, there is something special about the first three entries in the list. Bonus points for identifying it.

Question for July 19, 2011

A's invasion on the territory B held by C was used as a precedent for X's similar invasion on territory Y, also held by C, almost 15 years later. There were some similarities to both invasions, with both A and X claiming that the territories were historically connected to them, and C claiming that the military action was an assault on their soverignity. Both invasions earned condemnations from other parts of the world, and resolutions were tabled at the United Nations Security Council demanding withdrawal of troops from B and Y respectively.

The differences were in the nature of support obtained for the actions from other countries. The Soviet Union vetoed the UNSC resolution against A, effectively offering support for A's action. The United States was one of the nations that tabled the resolution against A; however, it did not speak out against X as it considered the nation as the most important ally in the region. Where the two invasions differed dramatically was in the aftermath. While B was successfully integrated as part of A, Y was mired in a long and protracted bloody war with X, which eventually ended with Y gaining independence from X more than 25 years later.

Identify (A, B); (X, Y); and C.

Hint: C is a former colonial power. Y obtained independence from X in the 2000s.

Question for Jul 12

What does the visual depict?

Dewan > Maharaja

C. P. Ramaswamy Iyer, or Sir CP as he was called, served as the dewan to the maharaja of X from 1936 to 1947. He was instrumental in X's resistance to assimilation in the Indian Union and it was believed that the he had the Maharaja under his thumb. After an attempt on CP's life, X did eventually agree to join independent India. X was joined with another princely state (Y) and a part (Z) of the Madras province of British India to form a new state which united areas that spoke a common language. Identify X. Bonus points for Y and Z.

Question for June 22, 2011

X is an organism organized in a hexagonal crystal shaped structure. It requires pure energy for growth which it uses with high efficiency, producing no excretory waste. While green in colour under normal circumstances, it changes to a purplish colour during mitotic division. X can grow only under a highly specific set of conditions. The pH range required for its growth is 7.39 to 7.43. The best conditions are under ultra-violet light with the air rich in carbon dioxide while the worst conditions are under infra-red light with the air rich in oxygen.

When introduced in the human body it immediately coagulates the entire blood stream resulting in near instant death. In certain cases it attacks the brain resulting in insanity leading to death. While extremely deadly at the time it was discovered, it has since mutated into a relatively harmless organism with the ability to "eat" through rubber, and is believed to have migrated to upper space.

Identify X.

Question for Jun 14

Who employs the ladies shown in the visual?

One for the monsoon!

X is an Arabic name for a country (called Y today) derived from the Persian work "The three princes of ____" which involves a country in the east whose princes by accidents and sagacity discern the nature of a lost camel.

An English word Z also originates from X and X's connotations in the Persian work above. A certain amount of Z would seem to have stood medieval Arab dhows and Chinese junks docking on the shores of Y in good stead until they learned to count on the regular reversals of monsoon winds to propel their sails beyond that way-stop. There are many celebrated examples of Z in science (unconnected to X and Y) including that of Alexander Fleming and Penicillin.

Identify X, Y and Z.

Question for June 9, 2011

This is an attempt to revive the blog. Questions will be posted spradically. Hopefully we will not see more than a week go by without a new question.

A is a film company founded in 1961 by X and Y. While X produced most of the films, Y directed them and Z wrote the script. The stories were based on novels or short stories, such as those written by Henry James and E. M. Forster. While the initial aim of the company was to make English language movies set in India, it ended up making films set in England and America as well. X once remarked on this collaboration, "It is a strange marriage we have at A... I am an Indian Muslim, Z is a German Jew, and Y is a Protestant American. Someone once described us as a three-headed god. Maybe they should have called us a three-headed monster!"

Identify A, X and Y. Bonus points if you can identify Z as well.

Highlight the text in quotes for a hint.

"Some of the movies made by A include Shakespeare Wallah and Bombay Talkie. A recent movie from 2008 named Before the Rains was directed by Santosh Sivan"