Heliodyssey 2008

Guest blogged by Anuj on May 10, 2008.

I just gave an online exam for qualifying for a scientific expedition to Russia, something called Heliodyssey2008. My first reaction when a dear friend told me about it was, wait did they just rip off 2001? Isn’t that logo suspiciously similar to the starting scene of 2001? Wait am I getting this right they expect us to pay how much for this? However, we didn’t know that the test was going to be online so we ended up paying Rs. 500/- for it.

Well the thing is that this was one bad investment, sorry it is a bad investment. I’ll tell you why, I am willing to bet that almost everybody who gave this test would have cheated on it with the help of something called the Internet, have you heard of it? Thought so to top it off the questions they gave didn’t help. They were pathetically easy. I mean some of them were so basic that 6th grader could have solved them, bah humbug.

After reading the question paper I realized one thing; these guys love Carl Sagan. Almost every question is pertaining to Cosmos in some way or another, sure there were a few exception. Some of them almost had Carl’s signature on them for e.g. there was a question on the cosmic calendar, which is a concept he created for Cosmos, I mean come on, I might as well have brought cosmos along with me. However there wasn’t any need to do so, without doubt Google should have provided the same result. It’s utter foolishness to keep an online exam for something like this, the merit being tested here is your Googling skills.

PS: This post was kept short because technically I shouldn’t be blogging. Oh yeah almost forgot, oil going up to uncharted highs while Myanmar is being destroyed due to their idiotic government? I told you so. You damned fools.