Below are six trivia questions. If you’d like to participate, you can either reply to this e-mail or submit your answers via Google Forms by using the button below. You can find our rules and guidelines by following this link.
1) WHAT song is the first song on the first album by the Beatles, Please Please Me? Believed to be the only song by the Beatles that all four members performed on stage during their respective solo careers to any extent, the first verse contains the line “you know what I mean” and not Paul McCartney’s original suggestion of “never been a beauty queen.”
2) The deadliest airliner shootdown incident in history occurred on July 17, 2014, when a Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down while in the airspace of WHAT country?
3) WHAT highly reactive chemical element can appear as a yellow-green gas, and indeed was named by English chemist Humphry Davy after a Greek word meaning “greenish-yellow”?
4) NAME the individual who, following a trial taking place from March 5 to May 26, 1868 regarding violations of the Tenure of Office Act, was acquitted.
5) A lone kireji with a kigo and some on can be found in WHAT?
6) The title of WHAT U.S. magazine best relates to the theme of this newsletter?
Trivia Newsletter CLVII Recap
1) The reverse of New Zealand’s fifty-cent coin features WHAT ship? It reached New Zealand in 1769, becoming the first European vessel to do so since the Heemskerck and Zeehaen in 1642.
This is the HMS ENDEAVOUR.
Jeopardy! will occasionally prompt you for a particular bay visited by Cook—below is an example. WHAT BAY is the correct response to the below prompt? The answer is at the end of this newsletter.1
RED-LETTER DAY, $2000: On April 29, 1770 Captain James Cook arrived at this bay in present-day Sydney, Australia, naming it Sting-Ray Harbour.
2) WHAT word has been omitted from the following excerpt from the Platonic dialogue Timaeus? “…[T]here lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together … Now in this island of [BLANK] there existed a confederation of kings, of great and marvelous power, which held sway over all the island, and over many other islands also and parts of the continent.”
The missing word is ATLANTIS.
“But afterwards,” the dialogue continues as it uses Atlantis as an allegory to warn about the dangers of hubris, “there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.”
3) On March 30, 2023, the Vatican issued a statement repudiating a doctrine known by WHAT one-word name? The doctrine, which can be traced back to various fifteenth-century papal bulls authorizing European powers to conquer non-Christian lands, is also discussed at length in the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark opinion with respect to Johnson v. McIntosh (1823).
This doctrine is generally known as the doctrine of DISCOVERY. Here’s more from that repudiation:
5. It is in this context of listening to indigenous peoples that the Church has heard the importance of addressing the concept referred to as the “doctrine of discovery.” The legal concept of “discovery” was debated by colonial powers from the sixteenth century onward and found particular expression in the nineteenth century jurisprudence of courts in several countries, according to which the discovery of lands by settlers granted an exclusive right to extinguish, either by purchase or conquest, the title to or possession of those lands by indigenous peoples. Certain scholars have argued that the basis of the aforementioned “doctrine” is to be found in several papal documents, such as the Bulls Dum Diversas (1452), Romanus Pontifex (1455) and Inter Caetera (1493).
6. The “doctrine of discovery” is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church. Historical research clearly demonstrates that the papal documents in question, written in a specific historical period and linked to political questions, have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith. At the same time, the Church acknowledges that these papal bulls did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of indigenous peoples. The Church is also aware that the contents of these documents were manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial powers in order to justify immoral acts against indigenous peoples that were carried out, at times, without opposition from ecclesiastical authorities. It is only just to recognize these errors, acknowledge the terrible effects of the assimilation policies and the pain experienced by indigenous peoples, and ask for pardon. Furthermore, Pope Francis has urged: “Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others, or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others.”
4) Logan, Blair, Scott, Sherman, Anna J. Cooper, Thomas, Dave Thomas, and half of Chevy Chase are, in a certain sense, all in WHAT CITY?
These are circles that are found in WASHINGTON, D.C. Chevy Chase Circle may have been your big clue, as it straddles D.C. and Chevy Chase, Maryland.
“Why did they name the circle and city after that SNL guy Dan Harmon hates?” Not quite:
The name, which [Francis G. Newlands] subsequently adopted for the entire new subdivision, can be traced to the larger tract of land called “Cheivy Chace” that was patented to Colonel Joseph Belt from Lord Baltimore on July 10, 1725. It has historic associations to a 1388 battle between Lord Percy of England and Earl Douglas of Scotland. At issue in this “chevauchee” (a Scottish word describing a border raid) were hunting grounds or a “chace” in the Cheviot Hills of Northumberland and Otterburn.
5) Jack C. Taylor, the founder of a company originally known as Executive Leasing Company, subsequently gave the company the name by which it is today known in honor of WHAT aircraft carrier on which Taylor served during the Second World War?
The ship is the USS ENTERPRISE and the company is Enterprise Rent-A-Car.
In the United States, it's a common misconception that drivers have to be at least 25 years old to rent a car. Don’t take it from me; take it from Hertz, who says that “It's a common misconception that drivers have to be at least 25 years old to rent a car.” (They’ll just charge you a bunch more for insurance.)
6) WHAT WORD completes today’s theme?
The missing word is CHALLENGER, as we wanted you to think about the six Space Shuttle orbiters built for flight by the United States: Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour. Enterprise was used for testing, and the other five were used for missions to space. Our newsletter title, “Accede,” is a little mnemonic I made up once for those times you need to remember all six space shuttle names in no particular order.
On January 28, 1986, the Challenger exploded about a minute after launch, killing its seven crew members. A presidential commission sometimes called the Rogers Commission (its chairman was former Secretary of State and Attorney General William P. Rogers) was charged with investigating the disaster. The Commission’s task was clear:
“Whatever you do,” Reagan had told [Rogers], “don’t embarrass NASA.”
The chairman had no plan to do so. “We are not going to conduct this investigation in a manner which would be unfairly critical of NASA,” he announced at the commission’s first session, “because we think—I certainly think—NASA has done an excellent job, and I think the American people do.”
The commission had some big names—Neil Armstrong, Sally Ride, and Chuck Yeager were members, for example—but perhaps no one figured as prominently into the investigation than theoretical physicist Richard Feynman.2 This whole appendix to the report with Feynman’s thoughts on the risk profile of any given shuttle launch is fantastic, but at least read the conclusion:
If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of originally conservative certification criteria designed to guarantee a very safe vehicle. In these situations, subtly, and often with apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered so that flights may still be certified in time. They therefore fly in a relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent (it is difficult to be more accurate).
Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers.
In any event this has had very unfortunate consequences, the most serious of which is to encourage ordinary citizens to fly in such a dangerous machine, as if it had attained the safety of an ordinary airliner. The astronauts, like test pilots, should know their risks, and we honor them for their courage. Who can doubt that [Christa] McAuliffe was equally a person of great courage, who was closer to an awareness of the true risk than NASA management would have us believe?
Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty of the projects. Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
The last part (“nature cannot be fooled”) is sometimes compared with a portion of a letter by Galileo:
It is not within the power of practitioners of demonstrative sciences to change opinion at will, choosing now this and now that one; there is a great difference between giving orders to a mathematician or a philosopher and giving them to a merchant or a lawyer; and demonstrated conclusions about natural and celestial phenomena cannot be changed with the same ease as opinions about what is or is not legitimate in a contract, in a rental, or in commerce.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The bay we were looking for in the recap is BOTANY BAY.
If you, unlike me, saw Oppenheimer (2023), then you may have noticed that Feynman in that film is played by nepo baby and breakout star of The Boys (2019—) Jack Quaid.