Questions and Answers from the Finals of the Tech Quiz -- Clockwise round that @venkyiimb and I conducted @kqaquizzes
1.
X was drawn to
develop alternatives to the traditional springs-and-shocks suspensions after his
experiences of owning a 1957 Pontiac with a fledgling air suspension, and a
1967 Citroën with an always-leaking hydraulic suspension.
The active suspension system
borrowed heavily on the technology used by the company that X created. This was
created as a skunkworks project inside his company, and was named Y, to hide
the true nature from the company’s accounting department.
It uses electro-magnetic motors
powered by electric power amplifiers and switches, which work together to make
the wheels bounce up and down over obstacles, while the body of the car remains
still. The technology received great acclaim technically for the ride quality
that it provides when it was launched in 2004, but never became a commercial
success.
Who was X?
What was the name
of the Project (Y)?
Why didn’t the
technology become a commercial success despite being the best available?
Amar Bose
Project Sound
The usage of special metals and a
powerful computer system made the system extremely heavy and unsuitable
for commercial cars
2.
Born in
Vermont, he trained to become a blacksmith in the mid-19th century
and moved to Illinois to ply his trade. Almost immediately after moving there,
he found that the cast iron plows were not working well in the tough prairie
soil.
He remembered the needles he had
previously polished by running them through sand as he grew up in his father's
tailor shop, and came to the conclusion that a plow made out of highly polished
steel and a correctly shaped moldboard would be better able to handle the soil
conditions with its sticky clay.
This plow became a great
success, selling more than 10,000 in a single year and is known by a moniker
that indicates the plow’s contribution to farming in the region.
Who was the
inventor of this plow and what is the moniker?
John Deere –“The Plow that
broke the plains”
3.
Before 1948,
clocks from other parts of the country, when used in Southern California would
lose 10 minutes every hour. When newcomers moved from outside the region, they
paid to have their old devices retro-fitted to work in SoCal, or simply bought
a new device that worked in SoCal. This peculiar issue is attributed to a
decision by Louis Bell in 1893.
SoCal itself regularly saw such
scenes from 1936 onwards after a particular ‘source’ went live.
What is happening
in the pictures and why did this start happening in 1936?
What was the
decision taken by Louis Bell in 1893 that led to these issues?
Resetting of Electric Clocks
from50Hz operation to 60Hz operations
1936 –Power
from Hoover Dam started flowing into SoCal at 60Hz, that required
re-calibration of devices
Louis Bell had decided to use 50 Hz
when the Mill Creek Plant (plant from which SoCal drew power) was installed
with 3-Phase transmission. This made SoCal an electrical enclave as the
Rest of the country worked at 60Hz.
4.
The Literary
Digest was a magazine
that is largely remembered for the circumstances surrounding its demise. In
1936, it had polled ten million individuals (of whom about 2.4 million
responded, an astronomical total foranyopinion poll), and had predicted
Alfred Landon’s win over Franklin Roosevelt. However, FDR won with more than
61% of the votes. The magazine was so discredited by this discrepancy that it
soon folded. One of the reasons for the failure of this poll is attributed to
sampling bias, given that they polled three wealthy groups, who turned out to
be outliers.
Which three sources
did they get the list of 10 million people to poll that led to sampling bias?
Their own readers, registered
automobile owners, telephone users all
of whom were wealthier than the average American at the time.
5.
The logo shown
below was created for a problem discovered by Jann Horn as part of his work for
Project Zero.
The problem gets its name
because of the root cause - speculative execution (a technique used by modern
CPUs) –and the fact that it was not easy to fix and would haunt the industry
for some time.
Name the problem.
Why is Project Zero
called Project Zero?
Spectre
It is Google’s Security team to find
Day Zero vulnerabilities (or vulnerabilities not yet discovered)
6.
An open source
system for automating deployment , scaling and management of applications, it
was originally designed by Google and donated to the Cloud Native Computing
Foundation.
Commonly referred as K8s it gets
its name from the Greek word for, ”helmsman or pilot”.
The original codename for this
was Project 7 to indicate that they were building a friendlier version of the
existing in-house system, referencing a TV series character, who was a
friendly, foil to the female captain.
What is the name of
this project and why was the codename Project 7 used for this project?
Kubernetes
The “Seven of Nine” borg from Star
Trek
7.
In exploring
different ways to increase the downforce in a Formula 1 racing car, this
designer took inspiration from the Chaparral 2J “Sucker Car”. The modification
was covered by a dustbin lid when not in use, but using the modification would
prove to be tricky as there was a rule banning moveable aerodynamic devices.
Who was the
designer?
What was the
modification?
How did they
overcome the rule to use the modification?
Gordon Murray
The Fan in
the BT46B “Fan Car”
Brabham claimed that the fan was for
cooling the engine, and not for improving the aerodynamics
8.
This machine
was primarily designed and used to calculate artillery firing tables for the US
Ballistics Research Laboratory.
However the first programs that
were run were to check the feasibility of thermo-nuclear weapons, and in the
development of Monte Carlo methods.
Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings,
Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman worked on these
machines, but were not recognized for over 50 years, and most historians termed
them, “Refrigerator Ladies”.
What is the name of
this machine ?
What work did these
women do?
What does the term
“Refrigerator Ladies” mean?
ENIAC
First
programmers of ENIAC
Historians mistook them as models
like in Refrigerator ads
9.
The system was
introduced to the Tour de France in 1937, greatly helping the riders faced with
changing gradients. The name of the system is technically incorrect as the
components either drive or are driven by a chain rather than being driven by
each other.
Campagnolo, SRAM and a Japanese
company are the major manufacturers of this system.
A British band’s 1967 album’s
title is a malapropism of this system’s name, and alluded to a 19thcentury
Prime Minister.
Name the system.
What was the title
of the album?
How did riders
handle the changing gradients before the arrival of this system in Tour De
France?
Derailleur Gears
–Shimano being the Jap company
Disraeli
Gears
The riders dismounted and changed
the wheels before the Derailleur gears were allowed.
10.
In 1963,
Robert Kearns was driving through a light rain, when something irritated his
already troubled vision. He went on to create a breakthrough that was modelled
on the human eye.
He showcased his creation to
Ford, Chrysler and General Motors, but they implemented it without giving him
any credit. Kearns fought against the auto industry, which argued that any
inventive act must come into the mind of an inventor as a kind of epiphany, and
not as a result of tinkering.
This specific argument in patent
law is known by a 3-word phrase that was effective from 1941 to 1952. The same
phrase is also the name of a movie about Robert Kearns’ struggle against the
auto industry.
What was the
creation? Please be specific.
What is the 3-word
Phrase?
Intermittent
Windshield Wipers
Flash of Genius
11.
This
subsidiary of Western Digital announced in 2013 that they had replaced air in
spinning hard drives to increase the spin speed, as well as the density of
drives, while reducing the noise and power consumption significantly.
The effect of this technology is
seen in the consumer market, with higher density drives with capacities of 10
TB/12 TB per drive at lower price-points and power consumption. The technology
however, requires a hermetically sealed compartment to ensure that the element
replacing air does not escape from the drives.
What was the
element that replaced air?
Helium
12.
An erroneous
example cited for perpetual motion is that of an overbalanced wheel. The wheel
consists of a cog and several spokes with weights on the ends. Hinges allow the
weights and spokes to move, altering the center of gravity of the device and
causing it to spin. However, as it spins, the spokes at the top of the wheel
flip down, adding to the momentum by keeping it off balance and cause the wheel
to turn indefinitely.
A variation of this kind of
wheel consisting of curved or tilted spokes partially filled with mercury, was
first suggested in the 12th century.
Who was the person
who suggested this or by what name is this hypothetical perpetual motion
machine commonly known ?
Bhaskara/ Bhaskara’s
13.
The French word
for whirlwind is an addition to the mechanics of a watch escapement to counter
the effects of gravity. This is normally done by mounting the escapement and
balance wheel in a rotating cage, to negate the effect of gravity when the
timepiece is stuck in a certain position.
While it was originally an
attempt to improve accuracy, these mechanisms are still included in modern
expensive watches as a novelty.
The first production of this
mechanism was in the 19th century.
What is the
mechanism called?
Who first produced
this mechanism and for whom?
Tourbillon
Louis Breguet created the first
tourbillon for Napolean Bonaparte
14.
This
instrument, displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, was operated
by the keyboardist of the band that performed the first concert with surround
sound. As he operated the joystick, the sound would move from one speaker to
another.
The instrument is a panning
control for a sound system consisting of four speakers (the equivalent of a
modern day 4.0 system). It derives its name from the Arabic word meaning,
‘direction’, and is also an angular measurement in a spherical co-ordinate
system.
What is the name of
the instrument and what’s the sound system called?
Which band
performed the first surround sound concert?
Azimuth Coordinator
Quadraphonic sound
Pink Floyd
15.
The industry
was a large employer in Chile employing 60,000 workers in the extraction of
caliche. Before the saltpetre from caliche was discovered, the Peruvian guano
was mined for the same purpose. Both these activities went into a severe
decline, due to a technical process that was developed 7000 miles away.
The process today consumes more
than one percent of humanity's energy production, and is responsible for
feeding roughly one-third of its population. This is rather ironic as one of
the inventors of the process, went on to play a major role in weapon-izing of
chemicals, and the creation of a cyanide-base gas that would kill more than 1
Million people in WWII. He would personally oversee the use of his chemical
weapons in a battle in WWI.
What were caliche
and Peruvian guano used for?
Who was this
“Father of Chemical Warfare”, and what was the trade name of this?
They were used to extract
naturally forming nitrates to use as fertilizers
Fritz Haber of Haber
–Bosch Process
Zyklon B
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