Of cabbages and kings

Of Cabbages and Kings

Feb 26, 2012
Balaji Srinivasan

• Though Mitt Romney appears to be the front
runner for the Republican nomination, the
race is far from over (he may not have enough
delegates).
Some republicans feel that Romney may not
be the best candidate to oppose Obama and
are trying to bring in another candidate or
decide the nomination during the convention.
What is this situation (when Romney may not
have enough delegates to get nominated)
specifically called ?

• From his IMDB bio:
• This gifted actor had a penchant for older women.
He was raised in Wandsworth, South London (beside
the River Thames) to a fairly conservative family.
When he was 16, he fell in love with his Mathematics
teacher, Geraldone Feakins, who bore his child in
1992.
• He was quoted in an interview later on saying that
"[his] father would call [him] a prostitute" albeit
being famous at his school "for going out with a
maths teacher."
• He lives in Los Angeles, California with his girlfriend,
actress Barbara Hershey(who is 21 years his senior.)

• Caitlin Upton was a contestant in the trek
around the world, “The Amazing Race”, where
she finished third with her teammate. She has
appeared in a few TV series sporadically as an
actress. Her other credits include a "Pork and
Beans" music video. She owes some of her
popularity to a late night talk show host (not
Leno or Letterman). How do we know her
better?

• She earns an annual income of more than $30
million. She runs her own business and is a well
known celebrity. She raised a few eyebrows by
enrolling into the Harvard Business School and she
successfully graduated from there this week. Her
marketing professor at Harvard, Rohit Deshpande, is
now doing a case study on her business, so the story
of her laughing all the way to the bank will soon be
on the HBS curriculum. Which lady are we talking
about?

• X have been found on Earth in various forms. They
form as a gas from burning candles and exist as solids
in certain types of rock, such as the mineral shungite
found in Russia, and fulgurite, a glassy rock from
Colorado that forms when lightning strikes the
ground. In a test tube, the solids take on the form of
dark, brown "goo.“
• Astronomers using data from NASA's Spitzer Space
Telescope have, for the first time, discovered X in a
solid form in space (in news this week).
• ID X.

• John Glenn, standing next to his Friendship 7
capsule in which he made his historic orbital
flight, meets with President John F. Kennedy.

• Clifford Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" is a first-person account of
the hunt for a computer cracker who broke into a computer at
the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL). One of the
interesting mentions in the book is about Robert Morris (a
cryptographer and chief scientist at NSA) challenging Stoll to
crack this sequence: What is the next number in the sequence
1 11 21 1211 111221? Stoll chose not to include the answer to
this puzzle in The Cuckoo's Egg, to the frustration of many
readers.
• This sequence went on to become a famous puzzle, called the
Morris sequence, also known with another name that
immediately lets one find the pattern in the sequence.
• What is this sequence popularly known as and why is it called
so?

• Look and say sequence
• 1, 11, 21, 1211, 111221, 312211, 13112221,
1113213211…
• 1 is read off as "one 1" or 11.
• 11 is read off as "two 1s" or 21.
• 21 is read off as "one 2, then one 1" or 1211.
• 1211 is read off as "one 1, then one 2, then two 1s"
or 111221.
• 111221 is read off as "three 1s, then two 2s, then
one 1" or 312211.

• He was accused of helping Hindus in a communal riot in
Godhra.
• He wrote about this incident in his autobiography “The
story of My Life in a chapter” named “End of
government service”. He wrote, “I had received a notice
from the commissioner saying that the collector of
Panchmahals had asked for an inquiry into my part in the
riots. The burden of the issue framed by the commissioner
was that I was a communalist and that I supported the
Hindus against the Muslims.
• I was held guilty of acting in a partisan way on account of
communal bias. No reason were given for this conclusion,
But government also said that it did not think it necessary
to take any action against me in view of my good record of
12-year service.”
• Who?

• Scott Cousins studied at the University of San
Francisco in the mid 2000s. He was virtually
unknown in the bay area till last year. Now, he
is one of the most hated, thanks to something
that happened on May 25, 2011. What did he
do?

• The James Beard Awards are the oscars of this
industry. The semifinalists for 2012 awards were just
announced. Perusing the list, we see some Indian
faces:
• Ashok Bajaj, Washington, D.C.
• Vikram Sunderam, Washington, D.C
• Sai Viswanath, Bristol, RI
• Vishwesh Bhatt, Oxford, MS
• Anita Jaisinghani, Houston
• What world does this awards celebrate?
(Hint – It has nothing to do with Beards or any other
facial hair fundas).

• One doesn't see many witty memoirs from
astronomers. Mike Brown, a professor at CalTech,
has written a memoir that promises to be a good
read. Wall Street Journal, reviewing the book, has
this: "Mr. Brown narrates this entire story with so
little rancor and so much generosity to rival
astronomers that he can seem too good to be true.
He even keeps his cool, and his class, while his
research is plundered and his reputation attacked. It
turns out you can be a pretty nice guy."
• His book is titled "How I killed _____ and why it had
it coming". FITB.

• Bhargava, 58, is so under the radar that he barely
registers on Web searches. His paper trail is thin,
consisting primarily of more than 90 lawsuits. This is
his first press interview. Yet, his product has been a
hit for the past few years. In eight years it has gone
from nowhere to $1 billion in retail sales. Truckers
swear by it. So do the traders in Oliver Stone’s 2010
sequel to Wall Street. So do hungover students. It’s
$3 a bottle, and it has made Bhargava a fortune.
What does his company make?

• Caroleus Linnaeus invented this flower clock. Linnaeus
created the floral clock or horologium florae, as he called it in
his Philosophia Botanica (1751, pages 274-276). A detailed
and extended account of this in English will be found in
F.W.Oliver’s translation of Anton Kerner’s The Natural History
of Plants, 1895, vol.2, pages 215-218.
• Linnaeus’s idea was taken up by the French composer Jean
Fran aix in his composition L’horloge de flore (The Flower
Clock), a concerto for solo oboe and orchestra.
• What is special about this clock?

• Linnaeus observed over a number of years
that certain plants constantly opened and
closed their flowers at particular times of the
day, these times varying from species to
species. Hence one could deduce the
approximate time of day according to which
species had opened or closed their flowers.
Arranged in sequence of flowering over the
day they constituted a kind of floral clock

• In a memo addressed to state administrators across France
this week, Prime Minister François Fillon ordered the word
_____ banished from official forms and registries. This word
appears everywhere in France: opening a bank account,
shopping on the Internet or paying taxes, for instance.
Apparently hoping to avert waste, he instructed that old
forms should remain in circulation until the “exhaustion of
stocks.”
• No official estimates were offered on Wednesday as to when
those supplies might run out, but there were concerns among
some that, given the French state’s penchant for bureaucratic
paperwork, its current provision of forms might last some
time.

• 60 years after X published a hypothesis for pattern formation
(such as zebra stripes) in biology, using math and simple
diffusion, scientists have found evidence to support it. Like
the yin and yang of Eastern philosophy, X proposed
interactions between an activator (working over a short
range) and an inhibitor (working over long range).
• Excerpt from X's Abstract : “The purpose of this paper is to
discuss a possible mechanism by which the genes of a zygote
may determine the anatomical structure of the resulting
organism. The theory does not make any new hypotheses; it
merely suggests that certain well-known physical laws are
sufficient to account for many of the facts.”
• ID X.

• Geronimo. Operation Geronimo was the
encounter that nabbed Osama bin Laden.

• In March last year, Geographicus Rare Antique
Maps, a specialist dealer in fine and rare
antiquarian cartography and historic maps,
donated their collection of over 2000 digital
images to Wikimedia Commons. The pic on
the next slide is one of them. What is that a
map of?

• Plan de la Forteresse de Coylan, a rare 1756
map of the fort of Kollam, Kerala, on India’s
Malabar Coast.

• Who are these people, trying on goggles that
they created and patented?

• Amundsen’s team trying on goggles before
embarking on the journey to the South Pole.

• This word originally meant "something that
may be written on a vine-leaf". Now, it refers
to a short, impressionistic scene that gives a
quick insight into a character or a setting.
• In Philately, this refers to a central part of a
postage stamp.
• What word?

• He was one of the most successful superstars
in Classical music. He acquired and retained
more groupies than any one before or since.
His love letters could span several volumes. A
Polish Countess Plater said, “I would choose
Hiller for my friend, Chopin for my husband,
and _____ for my lover”.
• Nietsche famously summed him up thus:
“_____, or the Art of Running after Women”.
• Who?

The Edinburgh award was established in 2007, to
honour an outstanding individual who has made a
positive impact on the city and gained national and
international recognition for Edinburgh. The previous
recipients of the Edinburgh Award are:
Ian Rankin - 2007
JK Rowling - 2008
Sir Chris Hoy - 2009
George Kerr - 2011
Who won the award for 2012, for being the person
who caused one of the most expensive searches
ever?

Ovington's, a now-defunct New York store, ran the ad in the
December 1917 issue of Vanity Fair magazine. It was a two-
page Christmas promotion that spotlighted a number of fancy
household items as possible gift ideas. Item No. 365: a
mahogany tabletop tray that measured 16 inches in diameter
and cost $8.50.

This was no ordinary tray. Mounted on a mahogany base, it
revolved on ball bearings "to help you serve things easily."
The copywriter came up with a clever description: "$8.50
forever seems an impossibly low wage for a good servant; and
yet here you are; ______________ _________________,
the cleverest waitress in the world, at your service!"
FITB.

Roshan had a question last time about
Kurosawa/Coppola Suntory commercial. This
whisky commercial sequence in a movie in the
50s is also memorable. ID the actor.

Charlie Chaplin in “A King in New York”.

Of cabbages and kings

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