About Blank - Chapter 6
We're back after a short hiatus!
Hi there! Hope all of you are doing well.
We at About Blank had to take a quick (read: really long I mean, I really don’t know what took us so long to write this next chapter) break between Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 due to some important personal commitments.
However, now that we are back, let us get the ball rolling with the answers to the previous trivia questions. As you may recall, we are currently covering the (w)t{d}a quiz and this chapter will have the remaining questions.
Answers to the questions in the previous chapter are:
@
& (Ampersand)
The Social Network (X - Mark Zuckerberg; Y - Eduardo Saverin)
Microsoft Assistant Characters
X - HAL; 2001 A Space Odyssey
Robot
Apple Command Key
Parabola
Web 3
App
I am excited to share the list of the next 10 questions with you all. If you are new here, this is how the newsletter works:
There are 10 trivia questions below; none of them requires studying a particular topic
I would suggest that you read and re-read the question; the answer is only your first guess away
You can if you want to, respond to this email with the list of answers that you think are correct
I will share the answers for this quiz in the next newsletter
Inside the About Blank (w)t{d}a Trivia Quiz - Part II
“It was the early ’90s – maybe 1992, 1993. I had a friend in the advertising business who was approached by X. They had just seven employees at the time and they asked if he could do a commercial for them. His initial response was ‘No, I don’t know who you are’. But they convinced him and he came up with this iconic intro.
And he called me up in Toronto and said ‘hey will you do this thing… for free?’ I said ‘Yeah, of course I will! I don’t even know what this is but I get a free trip down to see you, so for sure’. I recorded it and thought I would never, ever hear anything about it again. And now it’s this mega-brand. Pretty cool.
On how to enunciate the line:
“First and probably most important is volume. The first line of the intro is not something to be delivered lightly. It is firm. It is aggressive. It is your guts hurling through the air as you growl like a hungry dog on a T-bone. There is a swagger and it is the attitude that makes this line sing.”
What iconic intro are we talking about?In the 1960s when Japan entered its high economic growth period, supermarkets selling a wide range of commodities from food to clothing began to spring up in many neighbourhoods.
Cash registers that were then used at checkout counters in these stores required the price to be keyed in manually. The invention of barcodes provided a solution to this problem. Subsequently, the POS system was developed. As the use of barcodes spread, however, their limitations became apparent as well. The most prominent was the fact that a barcode can only hold 20 alphanumeric characters or so of information.
Users contacted Denso Wave who were developing barcode readers at that time to ask them whether it was possible to develop barcodes that could hold more information, saying, “We'd like the capability to code Kanji and Kana characters as well as alphanumeric ones.”
Encouraged by these enthusiastic requests, a development team at Denso Wave embarked on the development of a new two-dimensional code, all out of their sincere desire to accommodate users' needs.
What was the result of the research and development exercise carried out by Denso Wave?The invention of X occurred in the Johto region, where Apricorns grow; these fruits were cut apart and carved out, then fitted with a special device, and used to catch wild Y. Some trainers still use X made from Apricorns, while Kurt, a resident of Azalea Town, still constructs them.
It has been depicted that the first settlers of the X region, back when it was known as the Hisui region, used pre-modern X made of Tumblestone and Apricorns, with Professor Laventon claiming they were a more recent invention. According to Professor Elm, before the invention of the X, people would walk with their Y.Modern X are not normally made from Apricorns, with the exception of specialist X such as the Moon Ball. Modern X are manufactured by Silph Co., the Devon Corporation, and the Kalos X Factory.
What are X and Y?
There are several literary precedents to the X, which made its first appearance on the big screen in 1977, notably:
The Torah depicts a similar weapon in the story of the fall of Creation in the book of Genesis. In the story, God places "at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life."Edmond Hamilton's story "Kaldar: World of Antares" (published in 1933 in the April issue of The Magic Carpet Magazine). It was reprinted in one of Donald A. Wollheim's well-known and widely read science fiction anthologies, Swordsmen in the Sky, Ace Books 79276, 1964, and thus readily available to the science fiction reader community of the 1960s and 1970s.
Fritz Leiber's Gather Darkness (1943): the priests' "rods of wrath" (energy projections) only end where they cut into solid matter so that a single duel led to numerous casualties of bystanders and charred scores across all nearby walls.
Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr series (1952): The force-blade is "a short shaft of stainless steel" which can project a force field that can cut through anything, making it "the most vicious weapon in the galaxy."
Asimov's force-blade expands on his earlier invention of "a penknife with a force-field blade," first used in his Foundation (1951).What is X?
“That is the actual sound of the data being sent and received,” said Dale Heatherington, a co-founder of Hayes Microcomputer Products and the circuit designer of the first direct-connect X with a speaker.
In particular, the sounds you hear at the beginning of an X are the two Xs “handshaking.” Handshaking is the process of two X testing the waters, and negotiating settings, such as which speed and compression methods to use.What is X?
The below is an excerpt from the screenplay of a movie, identify X:
JOANNA: This--Guy Kawasaki in MacWorld--he accidentally got it right, didn’t he? You’ve been dragging your feet on the NeXT OS until you can figure out what Apple’s gonna need.STEVE: Even if that were true it doesn’t sound diabolical to me.
JOANNA: I’m your closest confidant, your best friend, your thing--what do you call it--work wife. This whole time, the last three years--when did you change your mind and start building the Steve Jobs Revenge Machine?
STEVE: You remember X? It was an unmanned satellite NASA sent up in the early ‘70s on an eight-year data-gathering mission. The thing is, when they sent it up they didn’t know yet how they were gonna get it back but they felt like they were close enough that in the eight years it was gonna be up there they’d figure it out. They didn’t. So after eight years it lost its orbit and came crashing down in a thousand-mile swath across the Indian Ocean. Little to the left, little to the right and somebody coulda gotten hurt.
I really wanted to build a computer for colleges. The technology just didn’t catch up as fast as I needed it to. And you know we’re outta money. But then Apple stopped innovating and I saw something better. Joanna, I know schools aren’t gonna buy a $13,000 dictionary with good speakers, you know I know that. But Apple will ‘cause Avie Tevanian is gonna build exactly the OS they need. And they’re gonna have to buy me too. For half a billion dollars in stock and end-to-end control on every product.
What is X?
Valve's first product, X, was released on November 19, 1998, for Windows.
Players control Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist at the Black Mesa Research Facility, where an experiment accidentally causes a dimensional rift and triggers an alien invasion.
Unlike many other games at the time, the player has almost uninterrupted control of Freeman, and the story is told mostly through scripted sequences.
X received acclaim for its graphics, gameplay and seamless narrative. It won over 50 "Game of the Year" awards and is considered one of the most influential FPS games and one of the best video games ever made.
What is X?
My dear Theo,
Thank you for yesterday's letter. I too cannot write as I would like, but after all we live in such a disturbed time that there can be no way of having opinions fixed enough to form any judgement of things.
Things are going well with me. You will understand that after almost half a year now of absolute frugality in eating, drinking, smoking, with two-hour baths twice a week of late, it's evident that it should steady me a lot. So it's all going well, and as for the work, far from wearing me out, it occupies and distracts me - which I am in great need of.
I despair of ever finding models. Ah, if now and then I had someone like that or like the woman who posed for “La Berceuse,” I'd do something very different yet.
At last I have a landscape with olive trees and also a new study of a starry sky. Though I have not seen either Gauguin's or Bernard's last canvases, I am pretty well convinced that these two studies I've spoken of are parallel in feeling.
The drawings - Hospital at Arles, the Weeping Tree in the Grass, the Fields and the Olives are a continuation of those old ones of Montmajour, the others are hasty studies made in the garden.
Do not fear that I shall ever, of my own will, rush to dizzy heights. Unfortunately, we are subject to the circumstances and the maladies of our time, whether we like it or not. But with the number of precautions I am now taking, I am not likely to relapse, and I hope that the attacks will not begin again.
Ever Yours, X
June 18, Saint-Remy
From the above excerpts from a letter, identify X
In 1984 Fred Cohen from the University of Southern California wrote his paper "Computer X – Theory and Experiments". It was the first paper to explicitly call a self-reproducing program an "X", a term introduced by Cohen's mentor Leonard Adleman.
In 1987, Fred Cohen published a demonstration that there is no algorithm that can perfectly detect all possible X. Fred Cohen's theoretical compression X was an example of an X which was not malicious software but was putatively benevolent.
However, professionals do not accept the concept of a "benevolent X", as any desired function can be implemented without involving an X.What is X?
Luxo Jr. is a 1986 American short film produced and released by X.
Written and directed by John Lasseter, the two-minute short film revolves around one larger and one smaller desk lamp.
The larger lamp, named Luxo Sr., looks on while the smaller, "younger" Luxo Jr. plays exuberantly with a ball to the extent that it accidentally deflates.
What is X?
I hope these questions send you on an enjoyable side quest during your day. As always, feedback is always welcome.
Thank you for taking the time out to read this; I look forward to seeing your responses in my inbox.
Sameer on behalf of About Blank