Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Trivia #15 : My name is now a cricketing verb

1. I am an Indian cricket player.

2. I am an all-rounder. My equally commendable performances in both batting and bowling earned me the distinction of being the only Indian player and one of the only 3 non-English players whose name features in both the batting and bowling honour boards at Lord's.

3. Myself and Pankaj Roy's partnership of 413 runs against New-Zealand in 1956 was the world record for an opening partnership in Tests for 52 years.

4. I am one of the 3 players in Test history to have batted at every batting position.

5. Now comes my unique distinction. I ran out an Australian batsman Bill Brown during the second test of India's tour to Australia in 1947/1948 in a peculiar manner. This earned me the wrath of the Australian press though I had not contravened the rules of cricket. My sportsmanship too was questioned.
But I was finally vindicated when Sir Don Bradman in his autobiography defended me and my action.
As a result of my action, my name has become a verb in the cricketing jargon (of course informally) which denotes the action I did.
Like using Google has become Googling or Googled.

Who am I and what was my action?

Monday, April 16, 2012

Trivia #14 : Guess me by Connecting the dots

Hi Guys,
Blogging after an extended hiatus.
Ok. Lets get straight to the point.
Here's the trivia of the day.

1. I am a consumer electronics device and the technology behind me was invented by Zeev Zalevsky, Alexander Shpunt, Aviad Maizels and Javier Garcia.

2. My company code named the project which developed me "Project Natal", as my company has a convention of code naming development projects after cities.

3. As an off-shoot, I am being used even in the field of robotics, surveillance, medicine etc.

4. Ok here comes my claim to supremacy.
I am the "fastest selling consumer electronics device" as per the people at Guinness.
You guys have bought 8 million of me in the 1st 60 days after my launch.

Who am I?
Ok. I give this too.
I am not an Apple product.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Trivia #13 : Pictures That Tell a Tale

A Pictures That Tell a Tale trivia about India.

Photo 1 :


It is evident that the above photo captures a construction work. What is being constructed there ?

Photo 2 :


The above photo is an iconic one which brought out the tragic effect of a man made disaster. What man made disaster are we talking about ?

Photo 3 :


Who is the foreigner sitting beside Mahatma Gandhi ?

Photo 4 :


The man in the center who is an Indian is being escorted by two foreign policemen after an assassination. Who did he assassinate?

Photo 5 :


Identify the object in the photo.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Answers to Trivia #10 : Pictures That Tell a Tale

Foto 1 is the pic of Lyndon B. Johnson being sworn in as The POTUS on board Air Force One after just 2 hours and 8 mins of John F. Kennedy's assassination. Standing next to him is Jacqueline Kennedy.

Foto 2 is the pic of a dramatic event that took place in 1957. In 1954, as a consequence of the US Supreme Court's judgment in Brown vs. Board of Education, segregation in public schools was declared unconstitutional. But Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus defied the judgment and went to the extent of deploying the state national guards to deny the 9 black students entry to Arkansas' Central High School at Little rock. That event captured in that foto is , in order to ensure that the landmark judgment is implemented President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to escort those 9 students into the school building. This foto captures their entry into the school.

Foto 3 is the pic which captures an event during the Cuban Missile Crisis. On October 25, 1962 an emergency meeting of the Security Council was convened to deal with the crisis. In that meeting Adlai Stevenson, US Amassador to UN confronted Valerin Zorin, Soviet Ambassador to UN by asking him whether USSR had installed any nuclear missiles in Cuba for which a negative answer was given by Zorin. Then Stevenson took out the satellite photos showing the location of Soviet missiles in Cuba and displayed it to the gathering and stunned the world. This event is called as the Adlai Stevenson moment.

Foto 4 is the pic which captures a game of chess during the World Chess Championship in 1972 between Bobby Fischer of USA and Boris Spassky of USSR during the cold war. Fisher won the World championship that year and till now remains the only American to win the World Chess Championship. The guy sitting to the right is Bobby Fisher.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Trivia #12 : The Indian who impressed Einstein

When I was talking to a close friend of mine about this blog and solicited his advise regarding how it could be bettered he immediately retorted back by asking me to post some trivia related to India. I had been posting trivia about American history, a Dutch queen, an Argentinian revolutionary and even about an African first lady but nothing about India yet. This had to be amended. And here it has been.




Our Guy is a legendary Indian scientist who stands next to Jawaharlal Nehru in the above picture.

He was born in Kolkata and studied physics under Jagdish Chandra Bose, who is considered to be one of the fathers of radio science and Prafulla Chandra Ray, who is the founder of India's first pharmaceutical company.

He was interested in Einstein's works from his college days. This led to him to write a research paper in which he derived the Planck's Quantum Radiation law without any reference to classical physics. But unable to get his paper published in any journal he then sent the paper to Einstein himself. Einstein who was impressed with it translated it into german and submitted it to a reputed science journal of that time on Our Guy's behalf and got it published.

This turned out to be the turning point in Our Guy's career. He then traveled to Europe and started to collaborate with the likes of Einstein, Marie Curie etc.

We would have heard about the serendipitous discovery of Penicillin by Alexander Fleming. Our Guy too had his moment of serendipity.

While delivering a lecture on photoelectric effect in the University of Dhaka, Our Guy while trying to show that the current theory is inadequate to explain the concerned phenomenon committed a mistake in applying the theory. But the predictions given by the wrongly applied theory were proved experimentally. This led Our Guy to write a seminal paper on it, but as usual he was not able to publish it as it was thought to be a borne out of a mistake.

Here too Einstein came to Our Guy's rescue by asking a reputed science journal to publish Our Guy's paper along with his own, on the same topic. This led to the formulation of "Our Guy's name"-Einstein statistics. Then Einstein extended this statistics to atoms and predicted that certain subatomic particles would exist altogether in a different state of matter under certain conditions.

The ultimate recognition for Our Guy's work came when that subatomic particle later proved to exist, was named after him.

Our guy was the President of Indian Science Congress in 1944. He was also a Fellow of The Royal Society of UK.

Who is Our Guy?

Friday, April 3, 2009

Trivia #11 : Magazine name : Electronics; Quantity : 1; Price : $10,000

I am an American who co-founded a major electronics company which is world famous.

California Institute of Technology popularly known as Caltech is one of the institution in which I studied. Later on, I became the Chairman of board of trustees of Caltech. In 2001, I donated a whopping sum of $600 million to Caltech, making it the largest donation ever to an institute of higher education. In 2007, I donated an amount of $200 million to Caltech and University of California for the construction of the world's largest optical telescope.

The library at the Center for Mathematical Sciences in the University of Cambridge is named after me and my wife.

Here starts the interesting part of this trivia.

I wrote an article in Electronics, a magazine published by McGraw-Hill in April 19, 1965. That article outlined some of my predictions of the electronics industry which turned out to be prophetic.

In order to commemorate the 40th anniversary of me publishing that article the company which I founded put up an online auction in eBay.com on April 11, 2005. That announcement offered a reward of $10,000 to anyone who gives them the original copy of Electronics in which I had written that legendary article, as I myself was not in possession of an original copy.

This put the library copies of that magazine in danger and in fact one of the two copies of that magazine in the engineering library of University of Illinois was stolen. This prompted my company to announce that library copies of that magazine will not qualify for the reward.

David Clark, an engineer from UK, who had somehow preserved years old magazines under his floorboard turned out to be the winner.



The bloke in the above photo is David Clark and the magazine which fetched him $10,000 is in his hand.

1. Who am I ?

2. Which company did I co-found ?

3. What did I outline in that article ?

Thursday, April 2, 2009

One Happy Announcement

Ladies and Gentlemen. Ahem. I feel glad to let you guys know that this blog has been added to the Quizzer's Paradise which bears the URL
http://www.quizblogs.com/
I, on behalf of you, would like to thank the people of quizblogs especially Mr.Naveen Giles for the consideration shown.
Guys and gals interested in blogs similar to this one will find quizblogs.com, a one-stop-shop for trivia of all types extremely helpful. A link to the same is provided in the blogroll too.
Adios amigos.