Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Test Your Knowledge: The electromagnetic spectrum

Name the 7 main components of the electromagnetic spectrum.

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Monday, October 27, 2008

Test Your Knowledge: Presidential Surnames

A little sneakier and harder: how many distinct Presidential surnames have there been?

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Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Test Your Knowledge: Napoleon

When and where was Napoleon's final battlefield defeat?

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Monday, September 29, 2008

Test Your Knowledge: the Sun and the Moon

Within 10%, in the units of your choice (but not AU), how far away are the sun and the moon?

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Test Your Knowledge: Population of the Permanent Five

What are the populations (within 10%) of the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council?

Really, it's two questions, but the first one should be trivial.

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Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Test Your Knowledge: Einstein's Miraculous Year

For a long time, I've been wanting to post a sampling of things that I think you should know off the top of your head if you consider yourself well educated. Test Your Knowledge, or, Things Y'oughta Know. I know, it's rather presumptuous. Who am I to say? Of course I'll pick things that I already know. But you're here, so...

First up, Albert Einstein's "annus mirabilis," 1905. In that year, Einstein published not one, not two, but four amazing and ground-breaking papers in physics explaining physical phenomena or proposing new theories. What were the topics of at least two of the four papers? I only remembered three; only when I was checking my answers on Wikipedia did I learn of the one published September 27. I'm reading a book that mentioned the second one listed in the Wikipedia article, which prompted this post, but I would have known that one anyway.

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