The Answers

Just a heads-up, she's not in the entertainment business. Identify her.

Marissa Mayer, The new CEO of Yahoo

This company was started by the husband-wife team of Tim and Nina in 1979. The idea germinated over dinner with friends when they discussed the shortcomings of restaurant critics in the newspapers. Thus began the idea of surveying people on this topic on a variety of dimensions (today, the survey has a 30-point scale). Google recently acquired this company, for their content and brand. The company's name is the same as the couple's last name. Which company?

The second self-funded space tourist and the first South-African in space. Identify this guy.

Mark Shuttleworth,The founder of Canonical(makers of Ubuntu OS)

Recently, he was spotted in the French Rivera with a bevy of models, and ran up 50,000 dollars tab on the bar in St. Tropez. He also features on the list of the Forbes billionaires list at no. 782. Who is this reclusive billionaire?

Eduardo Saverin.

Among the five, the first three are lucky enough to have names. The first one (known since 1978) is called "Charon", a boatman of the dead in Greek mythology. The next two were found together, in 2005, and are called "Nix" (the mother of "Charon" and the goddess of night) and "Hydra" (the mythical nine-headed serpent).The last two have the eminently boring identifiers of "S/2011 (134340) 1" and "S/2012 (134340) 1", denoting when they were found. "S/2012 (134340) 1" was located in July 2012. What are these five?

The satellites of Pluto, the dwarf-planet-formerly-known-as-a-planet.

Identify.

The Paypal Mafia.

Identify The Designer of this ring.

WTF

Mark Zuckerberg designed this ring for his wife Priscilla Chan.

GNU software is copy righted, but not in the same sense as other software you might own. Software created under the GNU Public License is free to reproduce and use but carries certain restrictions. What is this concept called?

WTF

Copyleft…. :P

According to X’s founder Drew Houston ,he conceived the idea after repeatedly forgetting his USB flash drive while he was a student at MIT. He says that existing services at the time "suffered problems with Internet latency, large files, bugs, or just made me think too much." He began making something for himself, but then realized that it could benefit others with the same problem. Houston founded X Inc. in 2007. Id X.

Connect/Identify: WTF

The guy is Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot and the word which is blanked out is Carnot

The famous X was produced by Musikvergnuegen and written by Walter Werzowa from the Austrian 1980s sampling band Edelweiss.X has since undergone substantial changes in tone since the introduction of the ______________________________________, yet keeps the same jingle. Id X

The Intel Jingle.

It is one of the most sophisticated pieces of malicious software ever discovered. It has about 20 times as much code than Stuxnet. It is built with some 20 modules - researchers still don't understand the full purpose of most of them. Kaspersky Lab, which claimed credit for uncovering it, believes the virus may be the work of the same nation or nations that built the Stuxnet worm that attacked Iran's nuclear program in 2010. Which virus??

WTF

The Flame virus.

Identify the blurred personalities.

Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning.

This graphic novel, issued in 2011, is written by Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by Leland Myrick. The subject is a non-fictional biography of a legendary twentieth century figure, known for his contributions to physics,education, and for popularising science. He was also an amateur musician and painter. Who is this book about?

Richard Feynman

X(blurred out in the above xkcd comic) is a microblogging platform and social networking website. Id X.

BITCH PLEASE!!!!

Id this guy.

Yao Ming, a professional basketball player

While filming one of his films in 2006, actor X came up with the idea for a simple wordplay site where people could respond to a daily wordplay topic in an attempt to "one-up" each other in the cleverness of their response. However, as he knew nothing about the web, the codes or design, he turned to his first cousin 1 for help. So although the basic idea behind this website is X's, the site was designed, built and is run entirely by 1, who worked as Social Design Strategist at Y and hence, the userbase of this website is built solely off Y. X also shares another special connection with Y's founder.

1

Identify X and Y.

X-Jesse Eisenberg Y-Mark Zuckerberg

Why are these scientific publications of recent

interest?

Hurley, I; Hershlag, N; Woodward, J (October 1998). "A Simple

Method to Demonstrate the Enzymatic Production of

Hydrogen from Sugar". Journal of Chemical Education 75 (10):

1270.

Baird, AA; Kagan, J; Gaudette, T; Walz, KA; Hershlag, N; Boas,

DA (August 2002). "Frontal lobe activation during object

permanence: data from near-infrared spectroscopy".

NeuroImage 16 (4): 1120–6. doi:10.1006/nimg.2002.1170. PMID

12202098.

WTF

The "Hershlag, N." refers to Natalie Portman( she is probably the only Oscar winner with an Erdos number.)

Quoting from Wikipedia, the definition for this

two word term from aeronautics is:

an aerial maneuver in which an airplane makes a

complete rotation on its longitudinal axis while

following a helical path, approximately

maintaining its original direction. It is

sometimes described as "a combination of a

loop and a roll".

This term became part of an internet sensation

in November 2011. What term and why the

hooplah?

The term is "barrel roll". Google revealed a new "easter egg" in which one could type "do a barrel roll" on the Google search engine (on reasonably modern browsers such as Chrome or new Firefox versions) to cause the page to imitate a "barrel roll".

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is named after Ernest Lawrence (a Nobel laureate for Physics) and is situated in Livermore, California, in the United States. On the other side of the former Iron Curtain, the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions is part of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, and is located in Dubna, near Moscow. This one is named after Georgy Flerov, a Russian physicist. They recently became neighbours in a particular way. Explain?

Two synthetic chemical elements, numbers 116 and 114, have been named Livermorium and Flerovium respectively, in honour of these two institutes where they were discovered.

Which website is housed in this bomb-proof underground nuclear-shelter-turned-datacenter?

WTF

Now infamous cover. Who?

WTF

Kevin Rose,an American Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Revision3, Digg, Pownce, and Milk.