ankurb – Page 252 – Ankur Banerjee's personal blog

Sorry for posting this late, folks. I’d the quiz package uploaded on my servers on 4th September itself, but there was a short-circuit at home which got rectified today – and only then I could come online. Don’t even ask on how I had to get things back on track screaming at BSES / CPWD morons for past two days.

Phew. So then, the Inter-DPS Zonal Contemporary India Quiz 2008 got over today. For the uninitiated (pretty much everyone of you), it was an inter-DPS (obviously) event organized under the aegis of the DPS Society. We had 13 teams coming (well, actually only 12 turned up – and one of those too late to participate), and it was one helluva quiz. I’d been researching and preparing for this stuff for around a week now, and I’m glad it’s finally over. It was a fun experience too – because I’m totally pathetic when it comes to quizzing related to Hindi movies and songs, and had to really work to get this bit done.

By ‘contemporary India’, the brief I got from the school was past 3 decades. Oh BTW, we tried to get quite a few alumni together for this, but it didn’t work out. Our school even tried to get Quizcraft for this, but that didn’t work out either. So it was up to 6by9media then. Finding a co-host was also an issue, with most people being busy, but finally Pony – who’s in India right now on a break from Aston Univ – agreed to help out. Always a nice and helpful guy.

To cut the long story short, it was held on 4th September at school – with two quarter-finals on stage consisting of 6 teams and 5 teams, respectively; one semi-final of 7 teams; and one final of 5 teams. Among the surprises was DPS RKP not turning up because of their being two hours late because of a) their driver drinking tea b) their car broke down. Still, the quiz was close, with Heritage India Quiz Delhi Zone winners DPS Dwarka putting up a good fight with the home team DPS Vasant Kunj. VK and Dwarka were pretty much leading throughout the quiz, but DPS Rohini’s team gave a tough fight and came runners up. VK seems to be on a roll this year – coming runners up at the Columban Open et al – and finished first today; answering the sort of questions which I totally expected to go unanswered. Another fun thing was the chairman of the DPS Society himself saying he only knew one answer out of the bits of the quiz he saw (the final), and tried to think up answers for the rest but got them wrong. That’s being REALLY frank – walking up to the podium in front of a school audience which he’s the chairman of and admitting he didn’t know the answers.

You can download the whole Inter-DPS Zonal Contemporary India Quiz 2008 (two quarter finals, one semi-final, one final) by clicking here. It’s a 13 MB zipped file containing all the different rounds and related media, plus the solutions. The solutions / instructions are present in the PDF files. The presentations are in Microsoft Office 2007 PPSX format – that’s because certain elements used in that can only be edited if in the PPSX format – if you export it to PPT / ODP, then it’s converted to an image. Portability shouldn’t be an issue, because OpenOffice 3 (already in beta, to be released in a few weeks) can handle Office 2007 formats. Special instructions for crossword round are included in the PDF file. Also, the videos have been reduced to 320×240 resolution at 15 FPS to reduce filesize; the MP3 bitrate has also been reduced to 96kbps. Of course, higher quality files were used in the actual quiz.

Errata

In the answer script for the ‘6by9 round’ of the finals, the answers for the ‘Education’ category haven’t been included. Please use the browser-based round format included to get the answers. The inconvenience is regretted.
Also included in the finals is a question on Aslam Sher Khan being the only ex-Olympian Parliamentarian. This is (most probably) incorrect, as there appears to be another Olympian named Jaipal Singh who was also a Parliamentarian. (Thankfully, this question was an extra.)

Okies, the credits for the quiz…

Prannoy ‘Pony’ Sablok, for waking up at 6am in the morning, and actually turning up and helping me out – when nobody else could. He also did a brilliant job as a co-host, letting my jaws rest for a few rounds which he conducted. And for providing entertainment, when he started giving direct questions and passes in a buzzer round! 🙂 Anyway, Pony’s help during the day of the event was indispensable.

Prateek Vijayavargia, whose excellent archive of questions helped me out of a tight corner when I was running out of ideas – of course, used with his permission.

Bhavika Aggarwal, for coming up with a nice set of questions, and being on the first person to send them in long before the day of the quiz – that really helped ease pressure as I could include quite a few of them into the quiz.

Prashanth Kanduri, whose inputs helped a lot with the Bollywood-related stuff in the quiz. And when I say ‘a lot’, I mean a LOT. He helped out even when his exams were going on, and although he couldn’t contribute much directly because of shortage of time, his inputs provided me a base on which I could start research for the Bollwood section.

Rachit Agarwal, for Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V-ing Prateek’s archives and sending them to me. The ‘thank you’ is for going through the archives and selecting relevant questions.

Arjun Attam, for helping out with a few technical queries. Even though I finally went with my own code, I still thank him for taking time out to help me.

I hope you’ll enjoy the quiz package I’ve uploaded. Feedback is welcome. All I can say is that it was far more exciting on the day of the quiz. Really REALLY fun 😀

My rating of Discovery Channel’s Smash Lab: 9.9 / 10 (The only reason it isn’t getting a 10 / 10 is because THAT is reserved for the old seasons of Junkyard Wars.)

The Discovery Channel has been showing this new series (‘new’ at least in India, I reckon that it’s already in its second season in the US) called Smash Lab for the past few weeks – and it’s really fun! The basic premise of the show is to take some accident scenario – a bomb exploding in front of a building, a car breaking through traffic dividers on a highway, a speedboat on collision course, a lifeboat being ejected at breakneck speeds – or a hurricane hitting a mobile trailer. What amazes me is how over-the-top this series is, and how much money they burn up each episode. Sure, they product placements, but the episode today – the hurricane one – really dazzled.

What they did is to take a mobile trailer home, and then cover it with carbon fibre to see if it could stand hurricane-force winds. And guess what they did to generate that? Since Hollywood-level wind machines weren’t enough to produce that strong winds, they hired a friggin’ Boeing 737 and used it’s jet exhaust to try and blow apart their reinforced home! And astonishingly, the carbon fibre worked – the whole home turned turtle but it stayed in one single unit. Plus, along the episode, they also trashed 3-4 more trailers, just to make a point.

If bringing in a jet plane wasn’t enough, consider this – in one episode they constructed a whole building, and then coated it with a special kind of polymer paint which has very high tensile properties. Then, they loaded up a car with dynamite, parked it right in front of the house – and blew it up. Oh, and BTW, before that? They also blew up 2-3 pickup trucks before they did this, just to ‘analyse the forces involved in impact’.

I’m pretty sure their budget would rival that of at least some mid-level Hollywood movies. It’s not just the over-the-top approach – what makes the show exciting is their totally crazy ideas which they work on and actually make to work, in most cases. Like another episode, in which they made a sand pit which could be turned into a fluid mass at the flick of a button – as a security measure to stop a, say, bank robbers’ getaway vehicle at a bank. As far as the coolness factor goes, Smash Lab is right up there with other Discovery Channel classics like Junkyard Wars and Future Weapons. You can read about their episodes on the Smash Lab blog too.

I noticed one more thing. Discovery Channel had an India-specific site earlier at discoverychannel.co.in; but if you visit it these days, it simply redirects you to the International page of Discovery Channel UK! Talk about cost-cutting measures!