Cerebrum 3.0 Prelims

QM: Mahendra Mohan Das

Universal rules for the quiz:

• Quizmaster is God. And he doesn’t play dice

(used to play when he was a child).

• Hints will be given like charity. But the same

cannot be said about time. He has a train to

catch. Plan accordingly.

• Arguing with a sleep-deprived quizmaster is

injurious to health. “Janhit mein jaari”.

Rules for prelims

• 25 questions. No negatives. I love guesses.

• 16-20 are starred questions, to resolve ties.

• Using electronic devices (or printed or hand-

written notes, too, to be clear) will lead to

immediate disqualification. And yes, keep

cellphones in silent mode.

1)

• The Bombay Natural History Society, founded

on 15 September 1883, is one of the largest

NGOs in India engaged in conservation and

biodiversity research. The BNHS logo is a bird

named William, who lived on the premises of

the Society from 1894 until 1920.

• This bird is more famous among the people of

North-East India for something that takes place

in Nagaland in the first week of December

every year.

• Which bird?

Hornbill.

2)

• The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)'s one-

off digital theatre project (a variation of the

name of a Shakespearean play ____ ____ ____

____) took place live in Stratford-upon-Avon and

online, in collaboration with Google from 21st-

24th June, 2013.

• Which play? And why 21st June?

• (Screenshot on the next slide)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

• 21st June: Midsummer.

• Longest day of the year.

• The production was Midsummer Night’s

Dreaming.

3)

• Humphry Davy is best remembered today for

his discoveries of several alkali and alkaline

earth metals, as well as contributions to the

discoveries of the elemental nature of chlorine

and iodine; as well as the inventor of the Davy

lamp, a variant of the safety lamp.

• He, however, is supposed to have claimed

“something” else as his greatest discovery.

• “What”?

Michael Faraday.

• Faraday sent Davy a three-hundred-page book

based on notes that he had taken during the

lectures of Davy. Davy's reply was immediate,

kind, and favourable; and later appointed

Faraday as his secretary.

4) • Her father studied her horoscope and predicted

that she would remain and unmarried. To avoid

this fate, he ascertained an auspicious moment

for his daughter's wedding and to alert his

daughter at the correct time, he placed a cup

with a small hole at the bottom of a vessel filled

with water, arranged so that the cup would sink

at the beginning of the propitious hour.

• He put the device in a room with a warning to

her to not go near it. In her curiosity though, she

went to look at the device and a pearl from her

bridal dress accidentally dropped into it, thus

upsetting it. The auspicious moment for the

wedding thus passed unnoticed leaving a

devastated father.

• Who was she? Who was her father? Or, how was

she immortalized by her father?

Lilavati.

5)

• Ouroboros is an ancient

symbol depicting a

serpent or dragon

eating its own tail.

• What was inspired by a

dream a certain

individual had figuring a

similar creature? Who

was the person?

Kekulé.

• The structure of the benzene ring.

6)

• Upon arriving at Princeton, this person was

invited to Dean Eisenhart’s office. The dean’s

wife greeted him and offered him a cup of tea.

The following dialogue ensued:

• Dean’s wife: “Would you like cream or lemon in

your tea, Mr. _____?”

• He replied (without thinking): “I’ll have both,

thank you.”

• What did the lady famously reply?

7)

• Established in 1959 and

beginning operations

in 1968, it is Ecuador's

first national park and

a UNESCO World

Heritage Site (whose

logo is shown in the

picture); and has

many famous visiting

sites, including Tortuga

Bay.

• Name it.

Galapagos national park.

8)

• What is being

celebrated? Give

the exact term for

full points, or the

funda for half

points.

Newtonmas.

• Sir Isaac Newton’s birthday.

9)

• According to Google Calculator, “___ ___ ___" is

equal to 1.16699016 × 10-8 hertz. The hertz is a

unit of frequency (one per second), and thus if

the mean length of time between ____ ____

(2.7145 years according to Google) is

metricated and converted to a frequency (by

calculating the multiplicative inverse), it can be

expressed in terms of hertz.

• Explanation of which English phrase?

Once in a blue moon.

10)

• First produced in 1935, by Wallace Carothers at

DuPont Experimental Station, it is one of the most

commonly used polymers. Many individuals and

corporations worked diligently during the first few

months of World War II to find a way to replace

Asian silk by it in parachutes. In 1940, John W.

Eckelberry of DuPont stated that the first letters of

the name were arbitrary and the last two letters

were copied from the suffixes of other fibers; and

the name has nothing to do with two city names

as many of us have read in our childhood.

• What?

Nylon.

• No, it’s not abbreviation of New York and

London.

11)

• In chaos theory, the _____ effect is the sensitive

dependency on initial conditions in which a

small change at one place in a deterministic

nonlinear system can result in large differences

in a later state. The name of the effect, coined

by Edward Lorenz, is derived from the

theoretical example of a hurricane's formation

being contingent on whether or not a distant

_____ had flapped its wings several weeks

earlier.

• What is the effect called?

The butterfly effect.

12)

• “I trust, you remember me as a fellow-traveller

on your voyage from Japan to Chicago. I very

much recall at this moment your views on the

growth of the ascetic spirit in India... I recall

these ideas in connection with my scheme of

Research Institute of Science for India, of which

you have doubtless heard or read…”

• This is a part of a letter written by X to Y, after

which, Y endorsed the project, and Z was set

up.

• Solve the variables.

• X: Jamsetji Tata

• Y: Swami Vivekananda

• Z: Indian Institute of Science

13)

• This is the trailer of Heartless, a 2014 Hindi movie

released a few weeks ago. The directorial

debut of Shekhar Suman got average ratings

by various newspapers and magazines. Which

medical condition is this film based on?

Anesthesia awareness.

14)

• The animal XY, despite their common name,

are neither in the Y family, nor are they from X,

being a famous example of misnomers.

• These animals played a major role in the

establishment of germ theory in the late 19th

century, through the experiments of Louis

Pasteur, Émile Roux, and Robert Koch. They

have also been launched into orbital space-

flight several times, first by the USSR on the

Sputnik 9 biosatellite of March 9, 1961 – with a

successful recovery.

• Which animal?

Guinea pig.

15) • This is an example of an anechoric chamber.

Situated at Orfield Laboratories, Minnesota, USA,

what record does this room hold?

World’s most silent room.

16) What is this a list of? Also, FITB.

Most no. of patents.

17) • In 1909, Mark Twain is quoted as saying:

• “I came in with ____ in 1835. It is coming again

next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will

be the greatest disappointment of my life if I

don't go out with ____. The Almighty has said, no

doubt: Now here are these two unaccountable

freaks; they came in together, they must go out

together.”

• His prediction was accurate; Twain died of a

heart attack on April 21, 1910.

• What was he talking about?

Halley’s comet.

18)

• Discovery of Ta(2) has a famous story. These

numbers are called ____ numbers, owing to the

fact that the one of the persons involved with

Ta(2) saw the number on a ____ and reported it

to the other person. The subsequent ____

numbers were found with the help of

computers.

• What are they called? FITB.

• Also, give Ta(2).

• (picture on the next slide)

Taxicab numbers; 1729.

• As told by Hardy about the Hardy-Ramanujan

number:

• I remember once going to see him when he

was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi-cab

No. 1729, and remarked that the number

seemed to be rather a dull one, and that I

hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. “No”,

he replied, “it is a very interesting number; it is

the smallest number expressible as the sum of

two [positive] cubes in two different ways.”

19) Connect.

Same genus and species name.

• Lynx lynx.

• Bison bison.

• Gorilla gorilla.

• Hyena hyena.

• Indicator indicator.

• Iguana iguana.

20) • The distance between the earth and sun is __

times the sun’s diameter. The distance between

the earth and the moon is __ times the moon’s

diameter. The diameter of the sun is __ times the

diameter of the earth.

• In ayurvedic practice, it is believed that the

body has __ pressure points where consciousness

and flesh intersect to create life.

• These are two of the many explanations given

by __rockstarguitars.com about why they chose

this particular number.

• Which number is being talked about?

• Hint: in Assam (and many other states), this

number is now more famous for something else.

108.

21) • Connect the

cities to an

institute.

• The structures

will be identified

(except the last

one) as a hint, if

everyone

agrees.

Indian Statistical Institute.

22) • Designed by NASA, where is this spacesuit

inspired from?

Buzz Lightyear.

23) • Who designed the structure of Montreal

Biosphere? (bigger picture next slide)

Buckminster Fuller.

24)

• Elise Andrew is a British blogger, social media

specialist, science communicator, and a

webmaster. She founded something over

Facebook just for fun, which immensely became

very popular and resulted in her being called

“the Neil deGrasse Tyson of Facebook”. It was

then expanded and went on to be a website

and now also has a merchandise site.

• What did she found?

I Fucking Love Science!

25)

• After his most famous discovery, he was

confident of winning the Nobel Prize in Physics,

but was disappointed when the Nobel Prize

went to Richardson that year and to de Broglie

the next year. He was so confident of winning

the prize the next year that he booked tickets in

July, even though the awards were to be

announced in November, and would scan

each day's newspaper for announcement of

the prize, tossing it away if it did not carry the

news. He did eventually win that year’s Nobel

Prize in Physics.

• Who?

C V Raman.

Finals starting in half an hour***

***Terms and conditions applied.

• See you in the finals. It’s going to be legen… wait for

it… dary!