QOTD - 9th March - Hari

The X, also called "Emily", "Silver Lady", was designed by Charles Robinson Sykes. The first version of X called "The Whisper" was made at the personal request of John Walter Edward Scott-Montagu. Sykes chose Eleanor Thornton, Montagu's secret lover as the model for his work.

The subsequent more famous version of X was nicknamed "Ellie in her Nightie" by critics, suggesting Eleanor's influence as Sykes' muse.

Sykes described X as "A graceful little goddess, the X, who has selected ________ as her supreme delight and alighted on the _________ to revel in the freshness of the air and the musical sound of her fluttering draperies."

Identify X.

Question for March 8th

Posting early...

Below is a drawing made by Picasso of two characters from a very famous novel. As a founding work of modern Western literature, this novel regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published.

Different ages have tended to read different things into the novel. When it was first published, it was usually interpreted as a comic novel. After the French Revolution it was popular in part due to its central ethic that individuals can be right while society is quite wrong and seen as disenchanting—not comic at all. In the 19th century it was seen as a social commentary, but no one could easily tell "whose side the author was on." By the 20th century it had come to occupy a canonical space as one of the foundations of modern literature.

The novel is also responsible for the adjective X, which is behavior that is noble in an absurd way, or the desire to perform acts of chivalry in a radically impractical manner.

Identify the novel and the word X.

Question for March 5th 2010

The first edition of his most famous work was published by himself and didn't carry his name. Instead in the body of the text he described himself as -

"X, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest."

He kept adding and revising this work till his death in 1892, in Camden NJ.

One of his popular poems was written on the death of Y -

O Captain my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;

Recently, Levi's used one of X's poems in their advert -

"COME, my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready;
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp edged axes? Pioneers! O pioneers!"

The video can be found at this link. http://goforth.levi.com/downloads
Try not to scroll down as that would give away the answer !

Id X and if possible, Y ?

Question for March 4, 2010

X was one of several famous French mathematicians during the time of Napoleon. His most famous contribution, which was actually developed to solve heat equation but is now used in the original form or some derived form in almost every applied mathematics field. The original article was submitted to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, but was heavily criticized by the reviewers (most strongly by Lagrange among others including Laplace, Legendre and Malus). In their report, the committee concluded: "the manner in which the author arrives at these equations is not exempt of difficulties and [...] his analysis to integrate them still leaves something to be desired on the score of generality and even rigour." He later succeeded Laplace as the president of Academy of Science and his work including the previously rejected work was then published in what is now considered a classic.

Identify X and the contribution.

The pigeons were gone but not the noise.

A now famous antenna was used to listen to satellites. Also, it was to help listen to the universe. Listening to the universe needed quiet. However, all that was heard was a strange noise, a maddening hum.

The noise was first thought to be due to pigeons nesting inside the antenna. The pigeons were trapped and released many kilometers away, but they kept coming back to the antenna.

The pigeons were finally killed but the noise remained. Later, it was realized that the noise could be the residue of the event X. The noise has been called the most important scientific find of the 20th century and won the discoverers a Nobel prize.

What is the event X?

Question for March 2 - PS

We've had lots of "whats this map" style questions, here's a small twist, a "whats this graph" question.

The above graph was part of a paper in 2004 in the American Journal of Sociology, by researchers from Columbia and Washington. The paper, and specifically this graph, got lot of media attention, and subsequently was studied by researchers in diverse other fields.

Identify the graph (try to be as specific as possible).

Question for Mar 1

The X line , is a 10-km long defensive line made of dragon's teeth (see visual) that was built during the second world war between Bassins and Prangins, in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland. The purpose of the line was to stop tank invasions. The 9-ton concrete blocks that make up the defences are similar to the shape of X, which gave its name to the line.

Identify X.