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: https://forms.gle/vMRVH4umCE1WNLzw7. Like most trivia, the answers can be readily found via Google, so you’re on the honor system (i.e., do not use external resources to help you answer any of the questions). The SIXTH question of each set is designed to be a question that cannot be easily Googled; correct answers to those will be tracked and recognized in the next newsletter. The answers, and the next set of questions, will be published on Mondays and Thursdays.
1) Ida Noddack, a German chemist and physicist, is generally credited (together with Walter Noddack and Otto Berg) with discovering WHAT element, the last stable element to be discovered? Bordering tungsten and osmium on the periodic table, its symbol is the same as what is generally taught as the second syllable in the system known as “solfège” used to learn Western musical scales.
2) On November 12, 1986, the King Fahd Causeway was opened and became the longest causeway in the world outside of the United States. The causeway linked (and continues to link) WHAT NATION, the third-smallest nation in Asia, to Saudi Arabia via an artificial island called Passport Island?
3) Adam Richard Wiles, who topped Forbes' list of the world's highest-paid DJs each year from 2013 to 2018, is better known by WHAT stage name? Whether or not it’s a force field, you might say that [he] wears [his] heart upon [his] sleeve, like a big deal.
4) NAME the poet whose name is obscured by the black box in the image below. Named the “Writer of the Decade” by The New Republic in 2019, she initially rose to fame for posting her poems on Instagram; she has also published three collections of poetry, most notably Milk and Honey in 2014.
5) A geometry student would know WHAT word to mean a line touching (for example) a circle or an ellipse at only one point? Outside of mathematical contexts, the word is synonymous with a digression, a deviation, or an aside.
6) WHAT is the only U.S. state capital that, based on the theme of this newsletter, shares a specific property with the following incomplete list of world capitals? Asunción, Paraguay; Bratislava, Slovakia; Lomé, Togo; Maseru, Lesotho; Rome, Italy; Vientiane, Laos.
Here are the answers from last time:
1) NAME the systemic narcotic analgesic, isolated in the early nineteenth century by Friedrich Sertürner, that is generally believed to be the first active isolation of an active ingredient from a plant. It is a Schedule II drug in the United States (together with drugs such as codeine, cocaine and fentanyl), and as an injection is sold under brand names such as Duramorph.
This is MORPHINE. Your best hint was probably “morph” in “Duramorph.” The Department of Justice, your best source for what the kids are saying these days, says that common street names for morphine include the following: Dreamer, Emsel, First Line, God’s Drug, Hows, M.S., Mister Blue, Morf, Morpho, and Unkie.
2) Each of David Childs, Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, Kevin Roche, Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Jørn Utzon is a notable name in WHAT specific profession?
Each of these is an ARCHITECT. We’ll go fast:
David Childs, chairman emeritus of the big-deal architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was the architect of the new One World Trade Center.
Le Corbusier (whom it should be noted has generally been embroiled in controversy for his political affiliations) is a key figure in the field of urban planning; seventeen of his works were collectively named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Oscar Niemeyer designed many of the cities in Brasília, the capital of Brazil, when it was developed in the 1950s; he also helped design the United Nations headquarters.
Kevin Roche has been the architect for many buildings in the United States, likely most notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. (The Chicagoans among you may also know his building at 35 West Wacker, the Leo Burnett Building.)
Denise Scott Brown has been greatly influential on the academic side of architecture; she and her firm have helmed many university campus planning projects in the past few decades.
Robert Venturi, Scott Brown’s husband, co-led the same architectural firm and worked on many of the same projects. In 1991, the Pritzker Prize in Architecture went solely to Venturi and not Scott Brown, despite their partnership, which led to great controversy and claims of sexism, which to this day the Hyatt Foundation has chosen not to rectify.
Jørn Utzon designed the Sydney Opera House. He and Niemeyer (for the city of Brasília) are the only two persons to have their works declared a World Heritage Site during their lifetimes.
3) For a brief time in the early 1950s, a certain “Automatic Computer and Logical Engine” used in a certain science-forward city in the eastern portion of Tennessee was the fastest computer in the world. WHAT six-letter acronym was this all-knowing machine known as?
This is the Oak Ridge Automatic Computer and Logical Engine, or ORACLE. ORACLE’s paper tape and vacuum tubes were able to perform 14,000 or so math problems in one second (as long as they were addition problems; multiplication took longer). Today, the Summit supercomputer (also located in Oak Ridge), the second-fastest supercomputer in the world, was the first computer to be able to do a quintillion operations in a second (this unit of measure is called an “exaflop”). According to my math, that is at least three times as fast as ORACLE.
Here’s another question: In 2014, the Department of Energy kicked off a joint project among three of their National Laboratories, and they gave the project the acronym CORAL, with the “C” standing for “Collaboration.” One of the laboratories is the Oak Ridge National Laboratory; WHAT are the other two laboratories? The answers are at the end of this newsletter.1
4) Andrei Rublev is almost certainly the greatest medieval Russian painter of Orthodox Christian icons, and almost certainly his greatest icon, also known as The Hospitality of Abraham, is better known by WHAT title, as it depicts the silent communion of three angels at the center of the composition?
This work is known as TRINITY. Both existing copies of the work are kept in Trinity Cathedral in Sergiyev Posad, a city in Russia about seventy kilometers northeast of Moscow. A trivia tidbit that comes up sometimes: the word for a metal cover protecting an icon is a riza.
5) The following are the initials of the titles of all nine feature-length films directed by a certain director (who is himself sometimes known by an initialism): HE; BN; M; P-DL; TWBB; TM; IV; PT; LP. NAME the director of these films, the first of which came out in 1996 and the last of which came out in 2021.
These films are Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, The Master, Inherent Vice, Phantom Thread, and Licorice Pizza, and so the director is PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON, sometimes called “PTA.” Those films have been nominated for a combined twenty-five Academy Awards (only Punch-Drunk Love was not nominated at all) and have won three (There Will Be Blood for Best Actor and Best Cinematography, and Phantom Thread for Best Costume Design).
6) NAME the (single) film that fills in both blanks in the following ordered list; the answer is related to the theme of this newsletter: Patch Adams, A Civil Action, Varsity Blues, She’s All That, Payback, Message in a Bottle, Payback, 8mm, Analyze This, Forces of Nature, [BLANK], Life, [BLANK], Entrapment, The Mummy.
This is a partial list starting from the first week of 1999 for films that were #1 in the domestic box office, and the missing film is The Matrix because it led the box office for the weeks of April 4 and 11, lost the #1 spot to Life in the week of April 18, and then regained it for the week of April 25. (If the list had kept going, it would have hit Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace next.)
Question #1: “Morphine” sounds like “Morpheus,” the major Matrix character played by Laurence Fishburne.
Question #2: “The Architect” is a character first appearing in The Matrix Reloaded.
Question #3: “The Oracle” is another Matrix character.
Question #4: “Trinity” is Carrie-Anne Moss’s character in The Matrix.
Question #5: “Thomas Anderson” is in PTA’s name, and is also Keanu Reeves’s character’s name at the start of the film before he is retrieved from the Matrix.
The title of the newsletter was “#1,” meant to get you to think both of #1 films at the box office and also of “The One,” what the protagonist is prophesied to be within the films.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
“CORAL” stands for the Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Livermore, so the other labs are Argonne National Laboratory (in Lemont, IL) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (in Livermore, CA).