Xquizzite

Fresh lease of airBy Uday Bhanu Satapathy

The video of this 3D animation character, one of the earliest examples of an Internet phenomenon, became popular in 1996-1997 after being distributed widely over the Internet. This character was developed while testing the 3D character animation software product "Character Studio" that is used with 3D Studio Max. This character’s video and its variations have appeared in a broad array of mainstream media, including television dramas such Ally McBeal, commercial advertisements, and music videos.

Which character? Think on your feet!

ANSWER

The dancing baby

Costa Coffee, which sells 108 million cups of coffee worldwide each year, has come out with a special insurance policy with Lloyds of London for Gennaro Pelliccia (see pic). This insurance is worth a whopping $ 14 million!!! What’s this insurance all about?

ANSWER

Insurance for the chief coffee taster’s tongue!!!

The practice is said to have begun as a variant of an earlier internet prank known as duckrolling, in which a link to somewhere (such as a specific picture or news item) would instead lead to a thread or site containing an edited picture of a duck with wheels. The user at that point is said to have been "duckrolled".Nowadays the same prank is done by linking it to a music video “Never gonna give you up”, with the message “You have been ________”

What is this practice called and why?(Youtube fans must have come across this at least once)

ANSWER

RICKROLLING

Rick Astley recorded "Never Gonna Give You Up" on his 1987 album Whenever You Need Somebody. The song, his debut single, was a Number One hit for him on several international charts, including the Billboard Hot 100, Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks and UK Top 40 charts.

In a laboratory at University of Cambridge, the coffee pot (see the pic) was located in one of the rooms, to which people working in the lab used to come to have a sip. But very often the trips to the coffee pot used to become useless, as it was found to be empty.This problem was solved by the invention of a new technology. Guess!!!

ANSWER

The web camera

A Hungarian, Péter Guzli took a photo on November 28, 1997, and was also responsible for its initial edit. He edited the image for a few friends, not realizing it would spread so quickly across the Internet. The picture became one of the most widely known examples of Internet humor. People included him at the sinking of the RMS Titanic, at the John F. Kennedy assassination, the destruction of Air France Flight 4590 and at the Hindenburg disaster. Other pictures show him present at disastrous events in movies, like the destruction of the White House in Independence Day or as the bus driver in Speed.

Which photo?

ANSWER

The tourist guy or the accidental tourist

Monty Python (sometimes known as The Pythons) is a group of comedians who created Monty Python's Flying Circus, a British television comedy sketch show that first aired on the BBC in 1969. The term X (in its present use) comes from a popular Monty Python sketch, first televised in 1970. In the sketch, two customers are trying to order a breakfast from a menu that includes the processed meat product in almost every dish. The menu was ("X, X, X, X, X, baked beans, X, X, X and X").Which term? Guess!!!

Hormel developed America's first canned ham (''Hormel Flavor-Sealed Ham'') in 1926, and eleven years later developed the first canned meat product that did not require refrigeration. It was marketed as “Hormel Spiced Ham”. Hormel Spiced Ham got off to a slightly rocky start. Other meatpackers began to introduce their own canned luncheon meats, and Hormel lost its controlling share of the market. Soon, however, they came up with a cunning plan to rectify this situation - they would give Hormel's luncheon meat a truly catchy name. Toward this end, they offered $100 for a suitable appellation. The winning name was, of course, _______ and a legend was born.

What’s the name?

ANSWER

Spam

• Standard & Poor's (S&P), a financial services company, is a division of X-Y and publishes financial research and analysis on stocks and bonds.

• Which company is X-Y?

ANSWER

The McGraw-Hill Companies

James H. McGraw

John A. Hill

During World War II, X worked at a shipyard in Massachusetts, where he claimed to have used a phrase to mark rivets he had checked. The builders, whose rivets X was counting, were paid depending on the number of rivets they put in. A riveter would make a chalk mark at the end of his or her shift to show where they had left off and the next riveter had started. Unscrupulous riveters discovered that, if they started work before the inspector arrived, they could receive extra pay by erasing the previous worker's chalk mark and chalking a mark farther back on the same seam, giving themselves credit for some of the previous riveter's work. X stopped this practice by writing this phrase ________ and a figure at the site of each chalk mark.This figure became a phenomenon across the world represented as graffiti everywhere. An urban legend says that that Adolf Hitler believed the figure was of an American super spy because the graffiti kept turning up in secure Nazi installations. Another states that Stalin wanted to meet the person personally.Which phrase? Which figure?

ANSWER

Kilroy was here

From 1949-1952, X was employed by the Ampex Corporation. In his spare time he studied at the Stanford University. Later, he moved to Cambridge University where he got his doctorate in physics. In 1963, X accepted a UN commission to India.

X has received Oscar, Emmy and Grammy awards.

Who?

ANSWER

Ray Dolby

• Founded Dolby Laboratories• Revolutionized the music and movie sound

technology.• In excess of 850 million Dolby licensed

products have been sold all over the world.• Dolby has about 50 patents and thousands of

trade names assigned to his name.

The very earliest known examples of the graphic are attributed to Harvey Ball, a commercial artist in Massachusetts. He devised the face in 1963 for an insurance firm that wanted an internal campaign to improve employee morale. Ball never attempted to use, promote or trademark the image; it fell into the public domain in the United States before that could be accomplished. As a result, Ball never made any profit for the iconic image beyond his initial $45 fee.

The figure has become iconic throughout the world. Which figure?

ANSWER

Smiley

What is art with a ball pen called?

ANSWER

Biro Art

Based upon Laszlo Biro, the one of the first innovators and patent holders of the ball point pen. In fact, a ball point pen is called a BIRO in British and Australian English.

What was the controversy behind this widely circulated image of a girl? One major brand lies in the background of this controversy.

ANSWER

The iPhone girl

A British iPhone customer turned on his new iPhone only to discover this picture. Meanwhile in China the story captured the attention of Internet users. Interested Chinese Internet users took it upon themselves to track the factory worker down to Shenzhen, China and the company Foxconn, a Taiwanese company that makes iPhones for Apple. Questions abount her firing were raised. She also went into hiding.

The origin of this word comes from Greek history when a trap or a stone used to be placed intentionally to trip an enemy. This trap could also be a situation which would give rise to moral stumbles.

Which word?Think politically!

Answer

Scandal

The Student’s t distribution is a family of curves in which the number of degrees of freedom specifies a particular curve. As the sample size (and thus the degrees of freedom) increases, the t distribution approaches the bell shape of the standard normal distribution. The t distributions were discovered by William S. Gosset in 1908. Gosset was a statistician employed by company X which had stipulated that he not publish under his own name. He therefore wrote under the pen name ``Student.'‘ Which company?

ANSWER

Guinness brewing company

____ was a brand of cigarette introduced in the UK in 1991 by entrepreneur BJ Cunningham, who established a company calling itself The Enlightened Tobacco Company. It marketed itself as the only brand that was completely honest about the dangers of cigarette smoking.

What was so enlightening about it?

ANSWER

Death CigarettesIts taglines were like:• Let us be the nail in your coffin• Too bad you're gonna die

____ represents the next generation of customer digital interaction. Designed with retail, automotive, financial services, health care and the hospitality industry in mind. ____ will forever change the way your customers interact, shop, dine, and play. In short, this technology turns an ordinary tabletop into a dynamic surface that provides interaction with all forms of digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects.

Name the company and the technology

ANSWER

Microsoft Surface

• This technology is called Surface computing technology.

When X was asked “Why do you want to _____?“

He famously answered, “Because it is there!”

These four words are in fact considered the most famous ones in this field.

Who said these famous words?

ANSWER

George Mallory

• “Why do you want to climb mount Everest?”

Tell me what’s happening?

ANSWER

Tendulkar’s measurements being taken for his wax statue at Madame Tussauds

Daisy Bell

This song was played in a certain way in 1961. Arthur C. Clarke was so impressed by the demonstration that he used it in the climactic scene of his screenplay for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick’s movie on the same novel also features this song towards the end.

What am I talking about?

ANSWER

First song sung by a computer

• In 1961, this performance was generated on an IBM 7094 computer at Bell Labs.

• Movie connection: Driven mad by conflicting instructions, HAL 9000 , the supposedly “perfect” computer featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey, sings this Victorian Music Hall song as he is dismantled by Bowman, the last surviving human member of The Jupiter Mission.

Pac-ManPac-Man is an arcade game

developed by Namco. Immensely popular in the United States from its original release to the present day, Pac-Man is universally considered as one of the classics of the medium, virtually synonymous with video games, and an icon of 1980s popular culture.

The question is: What is Pac-Man defense strategy in finance?

ANSWER

Pac-Man defense is a defensive tactic used by a targeted firm in a hostile takeover situation. In a Pac-Man defense, the target firm turns around and tries to acquire the other company that has made the hostile takeover attempt.

This term comes from the Pac-Man video game. In the game, once Pac-Man eats a power pellet he is able to turn around and eat the ghosts that are chasing after him in the maze.

He was a naval aviator, flying ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers. During the Vietnam War, he nearly lost his life in the 1967 USS Forrestal fire. In October 1967, while on a bombing mission over Hanoi, he was shot down, badly injured, and captured by the North Vietnamese. He was a prisoner of war until 1973.

The picture shows him being captured by the North Vietnamese after he parachuted out of his damaged plane. He later became famous in a very different field. Who?

ANSWER

John Mccain• He was the Republican nominee for president in

the 2008 United States election.

X was amongst the first companies to employ cricketers. Amongst them were famous names such as Rusy Mody, Ramakant Desai, Madhav Mantri, Bapu Nadkarni, Dilip Sardesai, Polly Umrigar, Sunil Gavaskar and Karsan Ghavri. In the 1960s and 1970s, more than half the Indian test cricket team were X’s employees.

Which company?

ANSWER

ACC

Baud Telecom Company

• The company was established in 1975• In 1999, the company was restructured and

was given the contemporary name, Baud Telecom Company. However, it is widely known on a day-to-day basis as BTC Networks

• The website doesn’t mention anywhere what was the name of the company between 1975 and 1999. Why?

ANSWER

Bin Laden Telecommunications • In an attempt to avoid any association with the

suspected terror mastermind, one of the Bin Laden group's subsidiaries changed its name in 1999, from Bin Laden Telecommunications to Baud Telecommunications Company (BTC)

What are these apparel for?

ANSWER

Save PlutoDemonstration against Pluto’s demotion as

a planet