We have finally decided to give guest quiz masters a point for their questions. From now on, you need not have to worry about losing a point or cracking your run-length if a question you sent in gets posted.

We will give points even for the older guest questions, but since our back-end needs you to post a comment to get a point, post a comment under the post which contains your question.

The scores should become upto date over the weekend. So, post a comment under your question before that!

Those of you who want to send in questions, you can mail it to [email protected]

Greetings, fellow time-travelers! Arbitrary as all conventions may be, we’re quite attached to them. And, in the spirit of the season, here’s wishing you a very happy new year! We hope you’ve enjoyed the ride so far in the 4th dimension, and will continue to do so over this notch on the time axis.

We’ve had a blast racking our brains (and Wikipedia :-) for those crazy little details that make things so much more interesting. From music to sci-fi, we’ve managed to land on quite a few strange lands and plan to touch on many more in 2008. We’ve barely scratched the surface of geekery.

Now, on to the regular schedule.

Today is another interesting occasion. Udupendra has scored a 100 points on BoiledBeans! Congratulations! This occasion definitely deserves a w00t. To celebrate this century, here’s a perfectly-formed guest question from this King of Nerds - all hail! (The Q came to us complete with post-title clue… Guess you’ve been spending lots of time here dude :-).

Identify this scientist (who has a unit named after him):

And connect him to this album cover:

Cracked by: madhur, bs, bobo, Dibyo, Keerthi Kiran M, Rohan, gammafunction, Ranjana Ninan, jayanth, prasanth, Prasad, nishas thambi, Tathagata Chatterjee, nishansolo and shashank.

madhur, bs, bobo, Dibyo, Keerthi Kiran M, Rohan, gammafunction, Ranjana Ninan, jayanth, prasanth, Prasad, nishas thambi, Tathagata Chatterjee, nishansolo, shashank and udupendra

Show Answer

The scientist in the picture is Emile Baudot (of “Baud rate” fame) . The second picture is the cover of Coldplay’s album X&Y. The strange glyphs on the cover are, supposedly, the values X&Y written in Baudot Code.

It has been more than a month since we did anything “different” on boiledbeans, so, this post is an attempt to re-seed the random number generator. We have a bunch of great questions sent in by bb users, which has been compiled into a multi-shot post.

Rules:

• UPDATE: For this special post only, contributors of the question also get a point. But you need to post a comment to get your points (its back-end requirement)
• This post will be open for 3 days
• You get one point per right answer(For users who have contributed questions, you will get points for right answers to questions other than yours.)
• Post all the answers in one comment. Please collate all answers and post it as a single comment. In case you need to re-post, please copy, paste the answers of all the other questions you have answered along with your new answer.

1. Courtesy sidsen

Caricature of which principle/person?

2. sidsen again

This sort of diagram is named after whom?

3. sidsen’s hattrick

This happens to be one of the first known representations of what?

4. Varun asks you to connect these images

5. Vinod PV asks you to identify the dude using the other two pics as a hint

6. Abhishek Krishnan’s question ( My Favourite )
   Who connects
   

Cracks/Scores:
nishansolo: 2
bobo: 4
gammafunction: 5
udupendra : 5
shenoyvarun86: 1
Dibyo: 4
nishas thambi: 6
sidsen: 6
Tathagata Chatterjee: 5
Shashank : 3
jayanth: 5

Answers: As sidsen said:

1. Occam’s razor the principle named after the friar William of Ockham.

The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as
few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in
the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. Also
known as the “law of succinctness”.

BTW cbse students most definetly studied this in physics in class 8 or 9.

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_Razor

2. The Pythagoras tree is a plane fractal constructed from squares. It is
   named after Pythagoras because each triple of touching squares encloses a
   right triangle, in a configuration traditionally used to depict the
   Pythagorean theorem.

more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras_tree

3. Count the dots and do the maths
   1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9 = 45
   number of coloumns/rows = 3
   45/3 = 15

15
/

4 9 2 = 15

3 5 7 = 15

8 1 6 = 15

|| || ||
15 15 15 15

for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_Shu_Square
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_square

4. The opening sequence of Time from the album Dark Side of the Moon was
   played as a wakeup call for the crew of space mission STS-69

5. John Kanzius

6. John Perry Barlow - lyricist for grateful dead, author of a declaration
   of the independence of cyberspace, co-founder of EFF

nishas thambi(6), sidsen(6), gammafunction(5), udupendra(5), Tathagata Chatterjee(5), bobo(4), Dibyo(4), jayanth(4), Shashank(3), nishansolo(2), shenoyvarun86 and jayanth

Our friend Keerthi Kiran M came up with a suggestion that we start maintaining “profile” pages of bb users so that he can get to know his fellow “geeks”. As a first step towards that, you can now add a picture to your profile and it will appear next to your comments, like this

To set up your profile pic, click on “My Profile” link which you can see at the top right of the screen when you log in to bb.

In the “Your Photo” section, browse to(or type (considering the audience :) ) ) the path to the pic and click update profile.

NOTE: Please upload your pictures only.

Mahesh Herle has sent in some more screen shots of boiledbeans taken on his iPhone.

More fanfare:

HE IZ NEAT. NO?

Thanks a lot maga!

Why did we have the theme round?Just to celebrate, in our peculiarly own geeky way, that we’ve posted a hundred questions!

The question titled 0x64, was the 100th question posted on Boiledbeans, and therefore we chose it to be the last question of the theme round.This post is just a shout out to say, we’ve had one amazing time doing the hundred questions, and it’s great seeing all of you answering them!

We promise you lots more Drama, Intrigue and Geekiness in the questions to come. Here’s hoping you’ve enjoyed it too :)

And with that previous question, we wrap up the theme round :-)

The answers
Question 1: Heisenberg
Question 2: Benoit Mandelbrot
Question 3: Neils Bohr
Question 4: Schrodinger
Question 5:Eric S Raymond

What connects this strange bunch of people?

Bugs.

Eric S Raymond is the current Maintainer of the Jargon File (A glossary of commonly used hacking terms). The clip in Q5 has ESR talking about bugs. The Jargon File defines four classes of bugs:

Heisenbug: A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it.
Mandelbug: A bug whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make its behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic
Bohrbug:one that manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions
Schroedinbug:A design or implementation bug in a program that doesn’t manifest until someone reading source or using the program in an unusual way notices that it never should have worked, at which point the program promptly stops working for everybody until fixed

Lots of people guessed the Unusual Computer Bugs part of it right. None got the jargon file connection :-) Read through the answers for some interesting guesses

Not that boiledbeans was not showing up on the iPhone before this, but now, another version optimized for the iPhone has been added. This version shows up automatically when you visit http://boiledbeans.net from your (or someone else’s…) iPhone.

This makes us the first Science and Technology trivia/quiz page sporting a special iPhone version*. WE IZ NEAT. NO? ;)

“Screen Shot” :

(I know the quality of the photo is bad.. But, we will have to do with this steam-punk method of actually taking the shot of a screen until Apple decides to release an SDK or at least a screen shot utility. )
*We claim to be :)

Has anyone else felt the standings have been a little too static for a long time? Like all good geeks, we like to shake things up a little every now and then. So here’s what we’re planning to do:

The next five questions will form a Theme round.

The format is this: all of the five answers are going to be related in some way. This common thread between all of them is the theme. You need to figure out what the theme is and post it.

For example, if the answers to the 5 questions are Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, John Bonham and Peter Grant, respectively, then the “theme” is that they were the founding members of Led Zeppelin. So, for each question, you answer with the actual answer, and the theme (in separate posts). If you give us that theme, you get the points.

Scoring:

1. You get your usual 1 point for the answer, if you get it right
2. Additionally, you will get

• 4 points if you get the theme from the first question

3. 3 points if you get the theme from the second question
4. 2 points if you get the theme from the third question
5. 1 point if you get the theme from the fourth question
6. and no points for getting the theme from the fifth question, but your name will be mentioned.

And no negative points at all. We’re throwing away points :-)

Rules:

Please post the theme answer and the regular answer in separate posts! Do not make them a part of the same post. I cannot emphasize this enough!

• You’re allowed one attempt at the theme in each question.
• Any number of people can get the theme

We will hide all the theme answers till the end of 5 days. If you crack the theme before that, we’ll announce your name and give you the points.

The theme comes out at the end of 5 days.

Now, you can get your own boiledbeans web badge! Like the one below

This badge is for “yaksha” who’s score is shown on the badge.
Get yours by entering your boiledbeans username (you know, the name which you use to post answers..) and hit the button. Simple.
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If you don’t want to show off your score, here are a few other badges

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2. 
3. 
4.