How is this imaginary fish related to the world of finance?
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Draft Red Herring Proposal, a document filed by a company that intends to issue an initial public offering (IPO) in India. The document is named after an expression which means to mislead, which in turn is named after a non-existent fish. Read More about the original expression.
X is a 2010 bestselling fiction book, the fifth in its series, that edged out former US President George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points (which was released on the same day) in sales in its first week of publication.
What book is this?
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Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth, the fifth book in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney. Ugly Truth sold 548,000 copies in its first week of publication, compared to Decision Points' 437,000 copies.
First time X was observed by the ‘outside world’ was when a group of French sailors happened to enter a town & saw the event. The person was bathed, dressed in white robes, and served his favorite foods for a last meal. He would also prepare by writing a poem. What am I talking about?
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Harakiri (or Seppuku), the ritualistic suicide performed by Japanese samurais. Read More
In his 1631 treatise Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae orientalis, Dutch physician and explorer Jacobus Bontius wrote, of a tribe he’d encountered in the jungles of what is now Indonesia, that “the Malays informed him that the X could talk, but preferred not to, lest they be compelled to labor.”*
Bontius’ mention of X was the Western world’s first introduction to the name of this tribe, a word that passed from Dutch to Portuguese to English and is still used today in slightly modified form – ironically, even speakers of modern Malay and Indonesian use the European corruption of the name, even though its etymology lies in Old Malay.
Who are the X?
*Considering Bontius was there as part of a Dutch East India Company expedition, this was probably a very good idea.
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Orangutans. Orang hutan ("forest person" in Malay) originally referred to just people that lived in the forest, but had shifted in meaning to include the apes who shared the forest with them by the time Europeans showed up. The name was passed on from Dutch to Portuguese to English, losing the h and coalescing into a single word in the process. Modern Malay and Indonesian stole it right back, so native Indonesians also call them orangutans now.
The name of what casino, famous in its own right, took on another use in work by mathematicians John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1940s?
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The Casino de Monte-Carlo in Monaco lent its name to Monte Carlo methods, a type of computational algorithm that enables mathematicians to counter-intuitively use randomness to solve problems that do not involve any randomness. Ulam and von Neumann's work on these algorithms was classified at the time and required a codename, so they used the Monte Carlo, where Ulam's uncle was an avid gambler.
-a particular cut of meat, usually veal, used in Italian and French cooking, usually cooked in wine or other sauces, or
-a type of bivalve mollusc that is prized both for its meat that is sold as seafood and for its symmetric, fluted, fan-shaped shells?
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Scallop.
The cut of meat is known as scallopine in Italy and escalopes or médaillons in France.
Scallop meat is highly sought after by seafood aficionados, and some are farmed in aquaculture. The shells with their radiating, fluted ornamentation have been used since ancient times as motifs in art, architecture, and design.
This publication is known for its unique & sharp writing style. Over the period of years, it has coin or popularized many terms like “pundit”, “socialite”, “tycoon”. It is even credited with streamlining the terms “World War I” & “World War II”. Identify the publication.
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Time Magazine. The magazine has had a very specific style of writing sometimes called "Timestyle". Read More about the contribution of the magazine over the years.
In 1943, noted philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre released what is commonly considered his most influential existential philosophical work, a monolithic 722-page tome bearing the equally weighty title of Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.
One might expect that, with that name and that subject matter, the book would be nigh unknown to the general public, likely only finding an avid audience in tweed-wearing, high-thinking, pipe-smoking professorial types frequenting smoky salons, quaint libraries, and lecture halls — and yet, Being and Nothingness was (relatively) a runaway success upon publication, gaining purchase even among grocers and shopkeepers, and most notably, women*.
What peculiar reason caused the unforeseen popularity and amazing sales of this book?
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The book weighed almost exactly one kilogram, and was therefore sought out to serve as a measure of weight at home and in shops -- the Nazis had confiscated and melted down the regular brass and copper weights to use in munitions.
*Bear in mind that this was in 1943, a time when women's intellectual prowess was not exactly respected in higher academic circles.
In the early to mid 19th century, multiple advances in the field of agricultural machinery were made more or less in parallel by inventors in Scotland, the US, and Australia, all working (mostly) independently of each other. These developments coalesced into a single large, complex, and massively convenient piece of farming equipment that went through several stages of evolution, first horse-drawn, then steam-powered, then tractor-drawn, and eventually fully self-propelled and self-contained, complete with cameras and sophisticated yield monitoring and field mapping systems.
At its core, this machine merges the farming tasks of reaping, threshing, gathering, and winnowing grain into a single activity, and is commonly known by a deceptively simple name.
In Hawaiian, the word X means “to bake in the ground” – it can also be used to refer to the Hawaiian food (usually containing pork or turkey) cooked in this manner that is often served at feasts and has since become a major tourist attraction.
X is not to be confused with the very similar-sounding but completely unrelated Y, which is a coffee liqueur made from rum, Arabica coffee, and sugar. Y serves as a key ingredient in several cocktails, some more prominent than others.
What are X and Y?
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X: Kālua, in which the food is cooked in an underground oven called an imu
Y: Kahlúa, which means "House of the Acolhua People" in Nahuatl, spoken in Veracruz, Mexico, where the drink originated
In the 1800s, with Britain’s Industrial Revolution in full swing, English workers and craftsmen began to find themselves in increasingly tight competition with the advanced mechanization and factories that enabled mass production of goods, combined with underhanded labor practices implemented by the top bosses in control of those factories to squeeze out as much product as possible.
Naturally, some of them expressed their resentment by going on a violent rampage against the machines that were destroying their livelihoods. Most legendary of these was “X”, who as the tale would have it, smashed two knitting frames in “a fit of passion” — an action that would result in his name being used for the entire movement. The name is still used today to refer to individuals who find themselves particularly opposed to modern technology and its ubiquity.
Who is X?
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"Ned Ludd", a mythical figure most likely based on a weaver called Edward Ludlam who probably did actually smash up some textile machinery.
Disaffected members of the 19th-century English working class banded together to protest unfair working conditions and rapid industrialization without labor protections (notably, they were not against industrialization itself), and the movement came to be known as the Luddites.
Decode the clues and connect them to a common theme: Sesame + Jaggery Capricorn Festival A dish whose name means ‘to boil over’
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Winter Harvest festivals in India Lohri - is the amalgamation of two Punjabi words - 'Til' meaning sesame and 'Rorahi' meaning jaggery - 'Tilohri' over the years became Lohri. Makar Sakranti - “Makar” refers to Capricorn, and “Sankranti” denotes the movement of the sun into a new celestial orbit. Pongal - Pongal is also the name of the dish made and eaten during this festival. It is a mixture of boiled sweet rice. It is derived from the Tamil word pongu, which means “to boil over”.
A juggernaut is a literal or metaphorical force regarded as merciless, destructive, and unstoppable. The word entered the English dictionary in 1600s, inspired by the procession of a Hindu God. Name the God.
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Jagannath The word was inspired by the procession at Puri, in which devotees allowed themselves to be crushed under its wheels in sacrifice. From here, it was used by authors like Mary Shelley, RL Stevenson & HG Wells to to mean an 'unstoppable force'. Read More
The man on the left is an ornithologist who wrote the book on the right, which was used by an author and became a symbol of masculinity the world over in a certain way. Can you identify the ornithologist’s name?
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James Bond Birds of the West Indies was a book owned by novelist Ian Fleming, who used the name for his own fictional British secret agent character. He later explained that the author's name was "brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon, and yet very masculine – just what I needed."
The number __ is especially significant to fans of science fiction and have tried to speculate the meaning behind it for years. In 1993 the author came clean and said –
The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ‘__ will do’ I typed it out. End of story.
Which number am I talking about? And what’s the funda behind it?
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42, The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Read the full story
Robert Nivelle, one of the French Generals at the Battle of Verdun famously told his troops – “They shall __ __”, urging his troops not to let the enemy through. A soldier, fighting in the Battle of the Somme, used this years later as something one of his characters says before his ‘death’. Id the soldier & the quotation.
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JRR Tolkien, "You shall not pass" said by Gandalf the Grey
