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Apeks, Atomic Aquatics, Cressi, Mares, Sherwood, and Zeagle are all popular brands of scuba regulators — but arguably the oldest and best known is another brand that shares its name with a famous 1971 rock “concept” album (and its title song).
What brand?
In 2003, electronic games company Radica released X, a handheld game device which is a hardware-based offshoot of a 1996 website with the same name that itself is, in essence, a computerized version of a much older, free-form party game. X (both the device and the website) has gained cult status in certain circles for being “scarily accurate”, owing to the way it was designed – the website is built upon an early AI neural network that actually enables it to learn and fine-tune its strategy as it plays, and the handheld device is loaded with a smaller version of the neural network that limits its ability to “learn”, but is very accurate regardless.
What are we talking about here?
Prior to his most famous match, X announced that he would win by a margin of 5-0, or 4-1, in the 5 game series. The match did end up with a 4-1 result, only it was in favour of X’s opponent. He later said of the match (after his win in game 4)
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt so good after winning just one match. I remember when I said I will win all or lose just one game in the beginning. If this had really happened ― I won 3 rounds and lost this round ― it would have had a great bearing on my reputation. However, since I won after losing 3 games in a row, I am so happy. I will never exchange this win for anything in the world. I, X, lost, but mankind did not.”
Id X.
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?
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.
What is this massively labor-saving invention?
How are these animals related to the world of technology?
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?
X is:
-the name of author Ian Fleming’s Jamaican estate, now a major hotel and resort, located right next to the aptly named James Bond Beach,
-the name of the first James Bond film to not be based on any of Fleming’s James Bond novels, named after the estate,
-part of the name of the videogame based on the film, often regarded as one of the greatest videogames ever made.
Name X.
There is a trend of, technology reaching a larger audience faster. One way to measure this is to look at the time taken to reach 100 million users. Which service launched in 2023 broke all previous records & reached 100M users in just 5 days?
| Rank | Platform | Launch | Time to 100M Users |
| 1 | ? | 2023 | 5 days |
| 2 | ChatGPT | 2022 | 2 months |
| 3 | TikTok | 2017 | 9 months |
| 4 | 2011 | 1 year, 2 months | |
| 5 | 2010 | 2 years, 6 months |
1879 turned out to be a damn good year for chocolate, when chocolatier Rodolphe Lindt supposedly (possibly accidentally) left a chocolate mixer running over a weekend and came back to realize he’d created a chocolate that tasted far smoother and richer than ever before, owing to the cocoa butter mixing evenly over granules of cocoa.
What is this process called (and why’s it called that)?
Program tapes of early computers had an option of creating holes and especially pasting paper sections to tweak the programs according to the needs.
What terminology did this coin?
In its latest environmental report, Microsoft disclosed that its global water consumption spiked 34% from 2021 to 2022 (to nearly 1.7 billion gallons, or more than 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools), a sharp increase compared to previous years.
Google reported a 20% growth in water use in the same period.
What is the cause of this sudden spike in water consumption for these tech companies?