Dimensions: The Sci-Biz-Tech Quiz

Rendezvous ‘22

FINALS

-Shauryasikt Jena
Lemmas

● Round 1 : 12 Questions in Pounce/Bounce format (infinite bounce, CW)

● Round 2 : 12 Questions in Pounce/Bounce format (infinite bounce, CCW)
● Round 3 : 4 Questions in Written format (sheet exchange)
● Blanks, wherever present, are indicative unless stated otherwise
● Last names work for answers unless specified otherwise
● BEWARE, titular clues may be excruciatingly frustrating
● Have fun !
Round 1 - Dries CW

● 12 Questions in Clockwise manner, infinite bounce

● Bounce (+10/-0) : Chimping allowed
● Pounce (+10/-5) : No Partial Pounce by default, may exist at the discretion of the QM
Q1. The architect’s dad

After WW2 ended, Italian-born Y served under German-born X in the General Advisory
Committee of the newly created United States Atomic Energy Commission. X used this
position to lobby for international control of nuclear power to avert nuclear proliferation,
and opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb (whose yield was estimated to be in
order of 10 Megatons of TNT, as per the Y method) during a 1949–1950 governmental
debate on the question and subsequently took stances on defense-related issues that
provoked the ire of some factions in the U.S. government and military. However, X and Y
never gave any statements regretting the WW2 atomic bombings.
X’s stances led to him suffering the revocation of his security clearance in a
much-written-about hearing in 1954.
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy awarded him with the Y Award
as a gesture of political rehabilitation. X and Y?
Answer

X - (J. Robert) Oppenheimer

Y - (Enrico) Fermi
Q2. Autumn plants

Pictured alongside is Simon Personal Communicator, which has

been retrospectively acknowledged as the first ever smartphone,
for combining a mobile phone and a PDA into one device.

Simon’s parent company Y has had a long-running history of rivalry

with X. It has been widely observed that X’s popular campaign
was a snide response to Y’s nearly century old slogan, by adding
one word to it.

Name the campaign of X, and Y (not Y’s campaign).

Answer

(Apple’s) Think Different

IBM(‘s Think)
Q3. Spilled guts

Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith had the idea of checking their email on a web
interface, and tried to find a name that ended in "mail", finally settling on "hotmail".

What is the significance of this nomenclature?

Answer

Because it contained the letters html, referencing the HTML programming

language used to design the product
Q4. R&D

This molecule is surprisingly sturdy, and is considered a natural flame retardant

and suppressant, explaining the range of biodiversity currently.
Its flame retardant properties can be explained as — when heated, the molecule’s
backbone produces phosphoric acid, which chemically removes water, leaving
behind a flame-resistant, carbon-rich residue. Other bases containing nitrogen,
react to produce ammonia which inhibits combustion. In the future, researchers
plan on coating fabric with this to make fire-resistant clothing.

Which molecule are we talking about?

Answer

DNA
Q5. Augis

A Firewall is a network security device that monitors and filters incoming and
outgoing network traffic based on an organization's previously established
security policies. At its most basic, a firewall is essentially the barrier that sits
between a private internal network and the public Internet.
The ______ _____ Project, colloquially known as X, is the largest of its kind that
employs one of the most extensive firewalls ever created. A simple solution
around this would be to install VPNs before one were to subscribe to the ISP
covered by this project. Yet, people who cannot escape this subscription do not
have access to VPN either.
FITB and give X.
Answer

Golden Shield Project, The Great Firewall of China

Q6. Inside With Great Ease

Ajax is a renowned brand with a range of surface cleaners, named after a stalwart
warrior who fought in the Trojan War. Interestingly, one of the taglines for the
brand is a tongue-in-cheek to Ajax’s reputation of enormous strength in the Iliad.

Arrive at the correct slogan for the brand.

Answer

Stronger than Grease (Greece)

Q7. With Love, From Tibet

Channel 03 was, and still is, simply a signal that appears to us as "static" or "snow." That
"snow" we see on the television comes from a combination of all sorts of sources:
● human-made radio transmissions,
● the Sun,
● black holes,
● and all sorts of other directional astrophysical phenomena like pulsars, cosmic rays
etc in the observable universe.
After scientists devised techniques to subtract the effect of all of the above from the
static, about 1% of it would still remain. This “snow” cannot be removed by any technique
at hand, at all.
Put funda for this leftover “snow”.
Answer

Cosmic Microwave Background / Relic Radiation from the Big Bang Theory
Q8. Blues

Alongside is a concept car designed by Mercedes.

There is no steering wheel, and the driver can control
the car by putting their hand on the dashboard much
like connected by touch. Further, the wheels are
designed for omnidirectional motion.
The car also has object sensors that open as multiple
flaps, which open as “breathing” cells.

What serves as the inspiration for this concept car?

Answer

Avatar (James Cameron)

Q9. Roger That

This renowned distributor of entertainment services changed their name for a few
months for the promotion of a key project. While the name of the project might not
make immediate sense, it borrows from the lead contributors towards it.
The marketing campaign of the distributor also lays more emphasis on its original
name, so as to sound more intense.

What is the above mentioned name change?

Answer

PVRRR
Q10. Potters and Dancers

Topologically speaking, wind on earth is like strands of hair

sweeping the planet. The X theorem states that it is impossible
for all such strands to lie flat without forming an accumulative
excess in at least one region and an absolute blank region. This
has wide reaching effects in studies about Y’s and how to
prepare for such phenomenon well in advance.

For visualization, refer to the given image of how “cowlicks” are

formed upon trying to uniformly spread the strands on a
spherical surface.
Give X and Y.
Answer

X - Hairy Ball Theorem

Y - Cyclones
Q11. Metaverse

Researchers at the University of Toronto created a handheld version of a device

that could apply skin cells on a pig. The pig had its cells harvested, and the cells
were grown to a larger quantity. Once researchers had enough cells, they used
them as fodder for the process ahead.
The device was then rolled over the pig’s wound “like a white-out tape dispenser.”
The skin cells successfully attached to the open wound area. Scientists think that
in the future, this technology could be used to replace skin grafts. It would make it
much easier to treat victims with open wounds - especially burn victims.

What device?
Q11. Metaverse
Answer

3D Printer
Q12. Cooking a step ahead

From the very early days, Jeff Bezos believed in speed of development and
release. This often lead to scenarios like these:

"When we launched the store, we made an early mistake. It was one of my

favorite software bugs of all time. We found that customers could order these
goods and we would deliver on that, I assume, and wait around for them to
complete the transaction on their end without any credibility of them honoring it."

What was the bug about?

Answer

Ordering a negative quantity of books

Round 2 - Dries CCW

● 12 Questions in Counter-clockwise manner, infinite bounce

● Bounce (+10/-0) : Chimping allowed
● Pounce (+10/-5) : No Partial Pounce by default, may exist at the discretion of the QM
Q13. The science of deduction

When it was time to go to the hospital, Judith Love Cohen took with her a
computer printout of the problem she was working on. Later that day, she called
her boss and told him that she had solved the problem. And… oh, yes, the baby
(Jack Black) was born, too.
The problem she solved was not insignificant — it was the key to making the
Abort-Guidance System work, which was crucial to something about a year later.
What? This system came in handy to a fatal flaw, whose reporting has been
famously misquoted in the industry where Jack Black is well known.

Give the actual quote.

Answer

Safe return of Apollo 13 flight crew

“Houston, we've had a problem.”

Q14. Amber-red

In the ongoing trial of Depp-Heard separation, there have been some recent
developments. Bredehoft, Heard’s attorney, showed the jury make-up brand
Milani’s All In One Correcting Kit, which she said Heard used to cover bruises
inflicted on her by Depp.

However, this piece of evidence has actually strengthened Depp’s case instead
after Milani stepped up to share crucial information. How?
Answer

The kit was released in 2017. Heard filed for divorce right after their 2012-16
courtship period
Q15. Cache Magenta

Early programmers didn’t have much storage space to work with, so they came up
with a short-sighted technique to save a couple of bytes. That meant that software
couldn’t handle data given a turn of events.
When a feared turn of such events neared, this became a problem—especially for
mainframe computers deployed for banking, utilities, and any other task critical to
everyday life. Fear of a bug disaster spawned a cottage industry of books devoted
to predicting the worst, from weeks-long power outages to mass starvation.
But by the time the situation changed, the industry had done such a competent job
of updating software that any mishaps were minor. What was this frenzy?
Answer

Y2K
Q16. Press F for fallen comrades

The unsuccessful glassblower and alchemist Hennig Brandt was trying to find the
philosopher’s stone. Instead, he distilled something foamy and, depending on the
preparation, yellow or black. He called it “cold fire,” because it glowed in the dark. “If
anyone had rubbed himself all over with it,” one observer noted, “his whole figure would
have shone, as once did that of Moses when he came down from Mt. Sinai.”

Brandt’s recipe called for a ton of urine. It was left out in buckets long enough to attract
maggots, then distilled in hot furnaces, creating a hundred and twenty grams of “cold
fire.” In 1678, the Duke of Saxony asked him to collect a hundred tons of urine from a
garrison of soldiers and render it into what Boyle and others soon started to call X— or
“light-bearer” in another language. What had been discovered?
Answer

Phosphorus
Q17. I am excited

X is a next-generation wearables research platform

developed by researchers at the MIT Media Lab. The
goal of this project is the development and prototyping
of new techniques of human-computer interaction for
body-worn applications. Through the application of
human factors, machine learning, hardware
engineering, and software engineering, the team is
constructing a new kind of computing environment and
developing prototype applications for health,
communications, and just-in-time information delivery.
Answer

MIThril
Q18. CS fire

Short selling is an investment or trading strategy that speculates on the decline in a

stock or other security's price. It is an advanced strategy that should only be
undertaken by experienced traders and investors.
In short selling, a position is opened by borrowing shares of a stock or other asset
that the investor believes will decrease in value. The investor then sells these
borrowed shares to buyers willing to pay the market price. Before the borrowed
shares must be returned, the trader is betting that the price will continue to decline
and they can purchase them at a lower cost. The risk of loss on a short sale is
theoretically unlimited since the price of any asset can climb to infinity.
Recently, professionals had this technique backfire hugely when a community got to
know of their manipulation of the stock market in this manner. What incident?
Answer

Redditors crashing the stock market by blowing up GameStop’s evaluation

Q19. Big Vendor

One likely action of the treatment was deactivation of the muscle-specific nuclear
receptor corepressor 1 (NCoR1). To illustrate, trials utilizing knockout mice to examine
the physiological effects of the suppression of this gene reported tremendous
physiological enhancements, including increased muscle mass and endurance,
improved lipid oxidation, and skeletal muscle oxidative capacity. The five-pronged
development is proposed in terms of
● Mitochondria size
● Mitochondria density
● Heart size
● Fiber size
● Capillary density
What treatment is being talked about?
Answer

Super Soldier Serum

Q20. Computers among us

The X hacking group first made headlines when it waged a ransomware attack against the
Brazilian Ministry of Health in December 2021, compromising the COVID-19 vaccination data
of millions within the country.
Since then, it has targeted a number of high-profile technology companies, stealing data from
NVIDIA, Samsung, Microsoft, and Vodafone. They also managed to disrupt some of Ubisoft’s
services and also gained access to an Okta contractor’s laptop, putting the data of thousands
of companies that use the service at risk. Name this group.
They are not to be confused with another prominent North-Korean State sponsored group, that
have been recently responsible for stealing over $600 million in the past week from the US
economy in a very convenient wealth form. Either name this group, or the form in which they
stole.
Answer

Lapsus$; Lazarus - Ethereum

Q21. That German likes Jap games

Nearly half a decade ago, the Puerto Rican Tourism Company named citizen X
as their next global brand ambassador. They front the company's upcoming
tourism campaign, encouraging visitors to take their time to experience the
island, drawing on the reason why they would be named so in the first place.

Moreover, to emphasize the importance of deliberation in touring the country,

this campaign fired off with the catchy tagline Y.

Give X and Y.
Answer

X - Luis Fonsi

Y - Despacito
Q22. Metaverse again

Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense

integrated circuit doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation
and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an
empirical relationship linked to gains from experience in production. Thus, to
stay afloat in the market, the cost of transistors roughly halves over this
timespan.

However, in the pharmaceutical setting, the cost of drug development roughly

doubles every decade due to inherent flaws in research, cost overruns among
other things. What law has this been dubbed as?
Answer

Eroom’s Law
Q23. Colin Spray

Neural Networks form the backbone of research in Deep Learning today. Some
popular named examples are ResNet, AlexNet, LeNet etc.
There is a recorded research paper that discusses how selective ignorance of
some input data might lead to better results. This is done by discarding the
weights of irrelevant or outlier inputs as the training progresses over a certain
amount of time.

What is the paper suitably titled as?

Answer

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Net

Q24. Night Hours

The X won't reveal what constitutes a ____ ______, saying its methodology is a
trade secret. We do know X asks chain outlets, independent outlets and
wholesalers about their numbers, but that's about it.
The reason for the secrecy is supposedly that if the system was known,
distributors could play around with the data to their advantage. The conferring of
this self-established title has led X to face several legal battles, where distributors
or creators might blame the branding for facing losses.

Put together X and the blanks about this trade secret.

Answer

NYT Best-Seller
Round 3 - Speculations

● 4 questions, all answers to be written and submitted altogether in the end

● Correct : +10, otherwise 0
● Partial marking at QM’s discretion
● Additional +10 for full house
Q1. No chickens here

The Siege of Fort Pitt took place during the summer of 1763. It was a part of Pontiac's
War, an effort by Native Americans to remove the British from the Ohio Country and
Allegheny Plateau after they refused to honor their promises and treaties to leave
voluntarily after the defeat of the French. The Native American efforts of diplomacy, and
by siege, to remove the British from Fort Pitt ultimately failed.

However, this event is best perceived as an early instance of a horrific strategy. The
effectiveness of it is unknown, although it is known that the method used is inefficient
compared to what was natural occurrences. Moreover, these attempts are difficult to
differentiate from phenomena occurring due to previous contacts with colonists.

What was specifically horrific about the colonists’ strategy during the siege?
Q2. Knows many tongues

While conventional computer use binary “bits” (0 and 1) as the processes for calculation,
a quantum computer uses quantum bits, knows as qubits – which can exist in both states
simultaneously, as well as many other states in between. Qubits exhibit properties of
quantum entanglement – a phenomenon that means pairs, or groups, of particles, cannot
be measured or described independently of each other – they are “entangled” and their
state depends on that of other particles in the group.
Due to factors which are still not fully understood despite the best efforts of Einstein,
Schrodinger and many others since, it appears that particles linked in this way can
transfer information between each other, even though, theoretically, they could be an
unlimited distance apart.
One possible explanation for why quantum computers work involves what popular
science fiction(or reality) trope?
Q3. Popping

Stock prices and X production are apparently inversely related. This indicator
suggests that when the market is rising, fewer people need to “heal” from
market-induced damages. So, lower X sales should indicate a rising market but X
has nothing to do with the Australian Stock Price Riskless Index Note.

What’s X?
Q4. French monsters

Citron is one of the three fundamental types of citrus fruits, from which several
citrus fruits are said to be evolved. Although it has the capability to fertilize other
nearby plants, this is uncommon in nature.

This led to the speculation that the fruit X, is unlikely to have evolved naturally and
may very well be the result of artificial breeding since the ancient times. This lays
waste to a proverb about optimism, involving X.

Give the proverb.

Round 3 - ANSWERS

● 4 questions, all answers to be written and submitted altogether in the end

● Correct : +10, otherwise 0
● Partial marking at QM’s discretion
● Additional +10 for full house
Q1. No chickens here

The Siege of Fort Pitt took place during the summer of 1763. It was a part of Pontiac's
War, an effort by Native Americans to remove the British from the Ohio Country and
Allegheny Plateau after they refused to honor their promises and treaties to leave
voluntarily after the defeat of the French. The Native American efforts of diplomacy, and
by siege, to remove the British from Fort Pitt ultimately failed.

However, this event is best perceived as an early instance of a horrific strategy. The
effectiveness of it is unknown, although it is known that the method used is inefficient
compared to what was natural occurrences. Moreover, these attempts are difficult to
differentiate from phenomena occurring due to previous contacts with colonists.

What was specifically horrific about the colonists’ strategy during the siege?
Answer

Gifting items from a smallpox infirmary as gifts to Native American emissaries with
the hope of spreading the deadly disease to nearby tribes
Q2. Knows many tongues

While conventional computer use binary “bits” (0 and 1) as the processes for calculation,
a quantum computer uses quantum bits, knows as qubits – which can exist in both states
simultaneously, as well as many other states in between. Qubits exhibit properties of
quantum entanglement – a phenomenon that means pairs, or groups, of particles, cannot
be measured or described independently of each other – they are “entangled” and their
state depends on that of other particles in the group.
Due to factors which are still not fully understood despite the best efforts of Einstein,
Schrodinger and many others since, it appears that particles linked in this way can
transfer information between each other, even though, theoretically, they could be an
unlimited distance apart.
One possible explanation for why quantum computers work involves what popular
science fiction(or reality) trope?
Answer

Parallel/Multiple universes
Q3. Popping

Stock prices and X production are apparently inversely related. This indicator
suggests that when the market is rising, fewer people need to “heal” from
market-induced damages. So, lower X sales should indicate a rising market but X
has nothing to do with the Australian Stock Price Riskless Index Note.

What’s X?
Answer

Aspirin
Q4. French monsters

Citron is one of the three fundamental types of citrus fruits, from which several
citrus fruits are said to be evolved. Although it has the capability to fertilize other
nearby plants, this is uncommon in nature.

This led to the speculation that the fruit X, is unlikely to have evolved naturally and
may very well be the result of artificial breeding since the ancient times. This lays
waste to a proverb about optimism, involving X.

Give the proverb.

Answer

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade

THANKS