Nonsentia Dear narrow minded, easily offended reader with a misplaced

sense of righteousness and a misguided pride, kindly stop

reading right here. This issue of Nonsentia might offend quite

a few people. No, we are not doing this intentionally and no,

we are not going to target people. However, it is important to

mention that facts will be presented in a manner which should

be taken light heartedly. We emphasize that the aim is never

to offend anyone, but to inform everyone. Kindly do not take

any offence, we only intend to entertain. Also, the information

provided here is in no manner reliable. Therefore, do not refer

to Nonsentia as a Conscientia fact sheet.

Open Sesame As the old saying goes, feeling grat-itude without expressing it is like wrapping paper and not gifting it. Indeed, we are grateful to Dr. AS Kiran Kumar for spending a few hours with us during the inaugural day as the chief guest, his speech enabling IISTians to challenge Wikipedia on its ISRO entry, kick-starting offline Conscientia events and providing an excuse to blare mostly terrible music across the campus. The opening ceremony was concluded by a single flying Japanese lantern. And had you hung back after that, you’d have been benefitted by a couple of dance performances, performed to a mostly non-existent audience. Meanwhile, Dhanak publicity post-ers have not-so-subtly started showing up in strategic places. Masochist First round was a written round which was basically a brush up of AE 214: Manufacturing Technolo-gy I and a bit of Machine Drawing for the Aerospace students. There

were two finalists from second year and two from fourth year. While the second year guys strug-gled to find their bearings in a vaguely familiar realm called me-chanical lab, the fourth year guys raced ahead about their complex job to be done thanks to their final year project experiences. Needless to say the prizes were swiped by the experienced senpais. Justice Premier League Presen-tations

Coming to the highlight of Consci-entia 2k15 - the event with 4 ses-sions, perhaps the highest number participants and a budget which can easily swamp the whole of Conscientia. JPL has offered (read someone might actually go there this time) internships to a fortu-nate student of each branch of the 3rd year. This event proved that when there is determination and a big enough bait anyone can be made to bunk all the lectures in a day. The participants once and for all silenced all questions on the efficiency and dedication of this

year’s organizing team pulling off a detailed report and assignments in-spite of a hard, unstrategically placed deadline. Although this event destroyed more relations than Monopoly, some bargains have to be made for the greater good. Nobody-Turned-Up Performed by a self-proclaimed employee of some company called ISRO, overused sexist jokes, hard disk jokes and cat jokes were made to the extent that a first year ended up disoriented about his own gender identity. The jokes reached new depths of lame when the definition for superman by IISTian standards was defined:

1. Must be in Avionics. 2. Must be a guy. 3. Must have a CGPA of great er than 8.5. 4. Must have a girlfriend.

5. Must have gotten a memo at some point in college life.

I

Coord Organizers of the Day 1: For their

remarkable quiz conducting skills.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————--

NO SPACE FOR ROUGH WORK

March 16? 15? 22?, 2015

Volume N/A Issue 1

A TSR LOL Initiative

Cyber Bullying by Intergalactic Spiders

While everyone was still recovering from the nightmares of last year’s Astronomia, it was ex-pected that the organizers (and front-runners in criticizing the previous edition) of this edition will have much better game to offer. While it was bet-ter than before, they did get everybody to realize that Online Hunts are no longer meant to have hardcore cryptic clues (They thought there is al-ready an event for that, so why bother). Or else why would they put an image of Wow! signal and keep the answer ‘thewowsignal’. As rightly point-ed out by an early post on astronomia page that you indeed need to use your brain. That brings us to another highly hyped happening of the year (It was twice this academic year). Webbed over the last few years is like career of Jennifer Lawrence. She got a great start with big breaks. But then there was an unfortunate hacking scandal. Now all she does is The Hunger Games. And there is no better way to compare Webbed with something other than the Hunger Games. They form groups, play together initially and yet everyone knows that at the end, only one person wins. All this is fine and acceptable if each level are not filled with ridiculously illogical set of im-ages which you need to somehow interconnect. While most questions were answered with no idea how the answers were related, one question brought this to a completely different level. The answer was solved using hints given on the Webbed page and “No part of the actual question was used for solving the answer” to which Neil Manthorp tweeted “I am offended, no one googled me :(” . No, we are not that patriotic space enthusi-asts that the answer of an ISRO rocket engine would just calm us down.

Wor Meshin

People were seen standing on batteries, chairs (why is that frowned upon? Have you seen the view from up there? Why do we neglect the ob-vious solutions? What is the world coming to? Why are there so many questions?), cement blocks, chanting “Push! Push!”. Five steps from inverter batteries, sat the arena for Bots Up, a cage that seven robots entered, seven robots left, and they found The One Bot to pummel them all. Several cliched doubts were raised about the mega-ness of Megamind’s mind which were resolved when they pinned IIST’s Ex-Wife right into labour. The other two teams from IIST did good, that is, one of them simulta-neously lost its wheel and immobilised the oth-er one. One could also witness the hopeless ef-forts made by one of the commentators to get IISTians cheering their comrades. Rockannions won the competition, beating Megamind in a very interesting final round of Who Has a Big-ger Battery.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————--

NO SPACE FOR ROUGH WORK

JarSat This workshop one once again proved that the IIST Standard time is two hours behind the Indian Standard Time. An extremely interactive session held by The Xovian, praises were sung and History Channel documentaries were shown on how awe-somely avant garde ancient Indian tech was. On the second day, the participants finally got around to building their satellite in a can in a jar. Unfortu-nately, due to non-availability of a full fledged rocket, the participants had to take a leap of faith and throw their satellites off a building.

Hail Hydra

Participants who didst not knoweth the wrath of air bubbles, were in for an unpleasant shock. Aimed at using Pascal’s Law to make a stack of wooden boxes, this event saw a participation of seven teams. A situation rose when the size of wooden boxes to be stacked where changed from nobody cares to 'Seriously, Nobody Cares!’, which startled the teams a little bit. The team from MIT (Madras, not Massachusetts), Tamil Nadu won, successfully stacking six boxes in a moment of achievement, while some of the other teams struggled to stack four.

Flappy Bird

Participants received balsawood, butter paper and other fabrication items and a step-by-step guide for fabricating an ornithopter. Marks were promised to those rebels who disobeyed the fascist instructions of the manual (that is measuring 0.1785 inches with your random scale) and managed to attain a respectable flight time. Seven teams participated, very few of whom could successfully flutter around. Peo-ple kept chipping their balsa wood in attempts to loop paperclip through it. This was widely regarded as karma for all those times they made fun of Clippit, the MS Word Assistant. .

Tubelight Mob

(Aka the 15 minute medley of dances already per-formed at Konchords and Abhyuday.)

A Facebook post promised us 'fun at 5pm on the basketball court'. But it was at 5pm IIST Standard Time - that the mob from the Amphibot arena was unwillingly dispersed in the middle of the event and dancers flashed a Dhanak2k15 poster after dancing to popular Hindi, English and Telugu num-bers. That was the only thing which justified the 'flash' aspect, as the organisers took a good 5 minutes to clear an area and prodded the audience to cheer. A huge thumbs-up for the initiative, though. After the well-placed MUN-related ques-tion in Webbed, this Conscientia seems to be all about opportunistic publicity. Cocoa Clash

I wish I could tell you that there was cutthroat com-petition. I wish I could tell you that the organizers had become seasoned quizmasters after all their ex-perience in the Astro club. But really, there are only a few things that happened in the event -

1. The sole purpose of the questions appeared to make the participants tremble like a fretful porpentine at the mention of Astronomy Quiz. 2. A couple of first years whipped the fourth years’ backsides. 3. One quizmaster did not know the rules of the quiz. 4. The other cared too much about the chocolates that were to be distributed to the audience. 5. Fifty percentage of the audience (read one of the two) just wanted the chocolates. 6. The volunteer distributing the chocolates ate most of them.

I’m Batman

After a preliminary round (which struggled to reach double figure of number of participants) held under the midday sky, five teams were selected for round two in front of the fully darkened admin block (not to be confused with D2 rooftop). The finale featured obscure hints, more obscure hints and even more obscure hints. The confoundment in the organizer’s voice was quite apparent when the questions were still answered with ease. Though there were some minor glitches like stars disappearing below the hori-zon before they could be appropriately hunted, the participants, volunteers and spectators at least went to bed knowing the Latin word for small female goat.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————--

NO SPACE FOR ROUGH WORK

Yer a Wizard, Harry

The finale of the Science-Technology-Business Quiz was the only event in the entire day which started on schedule (and by schedule we mean twenty minutes late, but yes, minimum delay), de-spite the domino-effect of late beginnings caused due to the events which took place in the morning. Five of the six teams were from IIST, with many refusing to believe they reached the finals. The fi-nals was probably one of the most dramatic events to unfold during the day. Round one seemed nor-mal where all teams were within each other’s reach. Enter Round 2, the gaps between the score differences had expanded exponentially. Round 3 was where things got interesting when the team in 2nd place played catch-up while the leader played hold-on. The fight for the title was amazing, with the runners up ready to snatch the victory but missed it by only 2.5 points. Kudos to the winner, who played lone wolf and took the quiz by storm. The chocolate fiasco, of Cosmic Clash fame, repeat-ed itself to - yes - nobody's surprise. As expected, there were A.R Rahman questions and Kinder Joy questions (very age appropriate). All the pop-culture references gave a sense of Quiz Club deja vu, and of course there was some more opportun-istic publicity.

Do Not go Mental into the Dark of Night Meanwhile, someone had the brainwave of replac-ing Govinda's music with Matthew McConaughey booming across the speakers. Interstellar was screened for a group of people, jobless for the night who had gathered in the canteen, and the audio feed was connected to the college speakers. Nobody knows how this could have been a potential threat to safety, but girls were asked to go back to their hostels before the movie ended, which was simply unfair to the girls as well as the movie. Removal of curfew timings is long overdue in IIST.

Alpha Q

Apt to its name, Alpha Geek was the first event of Conscientia 2k15. It spanned over two days and three

rounds. First round was a trip down the memory lane to the days of JEE and the sort, which almost created

a feeling of nostalgia. It was followed by a round where the participants had to explain the various scien-

tific phenomenon showed to them on a projector screen, which turned out to be quite interesting. The last

round was really a fusion of science and engineering where the finalists had to not only correctly figure

out what was happening in a device shown (a Pythagorean cup) in a video, a working model of the same

was also to be fabricated. In the words of the winner, "Even if you are Alpha Geek, you still remain a geek."

But who are we, a college of shattered IIT-aspirants, to complain?

UnImagine Your Imaginations

Whether the organizers realized that we completed class 12 two years (on an average) ago or no, no one knows. because they questions were JEE and nothing else. The prelims were considered irritat-ing for most and the time constraint in the event which was held for 20 minutes (30 questions, mind you). Justification given was that you should have 3 members in your team. For those with no friends, it’s your fault. Just accept it. Let’s just hope the fi-nals is something which is tried and tested by the organizers or at least deemed possible.

Clash of the Titans

Mismanaged schedule setting, similar genre of events and delays put the organizers and partici-pants alike in a conundrum on the 3rd day. Making use of the differently timed prelims of AstroABC, ImageIn and Panchmantra, some students took part in all of them and got qualified for the finales, which, as fate would have it, clashed. Add to that the fact that the organizer of PhyKnight stubbornly had its finale postponed to the final day. So this turned into an ugly competition of Who Has The Highest Prize Money and least no. of finalists amongst the four of these events. Dripping Wet

The Aero club showed full participation in the Wa-ter Rocket event, be it by launching rockets or be-ing hit by them. Two-liter coke bottles were con-verted into weapons of mass destruction and were made to zoom around in front of Admin block. The organizers and volunteers, with their military-level coordination, came through. While most rockets made safe landings (read glorified littering) on tops of trees and roofs, others victimized guys riding rickety cycles from Junkyard Wars on the road to within an inch of their demise.

Yes, Kill me now.

Lord of the Junks

Munch vending machines. Creaky tricycles (not ones you rode when you used to soil your pants) with tyres which had no tubes. People welding stuff in the basketball court, which is the most populated area in the entire campus during evenings. So yeah, basically a load of junkies playing with junk to make more complicated junk. We assume more things happened, but we were too lazy and other-wise occupied by the food counters to cover this properly. Not for Polite Company

Consisting of three rounds, this event re-enforced faith in friendship. Participants were asked to un-screw a hard disk and point vaguely in directions of specific parts then put the screws back on in the least possible time. Those who could get in on rec-ord that they did it in less time, progressed to the next level where they were spotted unscrewing an old table fan. MH370

In an attempt to overcome the challenge that goes by the name of drawing a 30 cm straight line, par-ticipants were asked to devise a mechanism that went about drawing straight lines when you pulled it around on paper. On the second day, organizers were met with blank stares as they asked people to make the Phantom Blade without Google. They then had a change of heart and lifted the Google ban following which several cool catapults were designed, fabricated and tested. Astro-Deflections-of-Context

The event miraculously received double digit regis-trations. But then 8 people submitted the abstract and 6 came up with posters made on whatever they thought qualified as Astronomy. Posters made on trains with seemingly nothing more than Wikipedia ended up getting prizes. But the highlight of the event was a poster of an artistic impression with-out any text. The presenter posed us with the ques-tion, “What will happen if a black hole passes through our Solar System?”. Apparently, it will swallow up all the text.

Coord of the fest

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————--

NO SPACE FOR ROUGH WORK