The Answer is 42 – Page 15

I was in a bad mood today, having had to rescue beautiful monsters from ravening princesses. To top off the vicious cycle, I decided to put up this splendid and worthwhile list from h2g2. Share and Hate.

There are 42 laws of cricket.
Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia were born in 1942.
Singer Elvis Presley died at the age of 42. So did his mother.
If you combine the number of dots, or pips, on a pair of dice, there are 42.
At the time of writing, Theodore Roosevelt was the youngest United States president when he was elected. He was 42.
Canines have 42 teeth.
There is a Broadway musical titled 42nd Street.
42 was the jersey number of Jackie Robinson.
If you rearrange ‘tea for two’ you get ‘for tea two’.
When sending a text message on a mobile phone, to punch in ‘h2g2’ you have to select 4 (press it twice), 2 (press it four times), 4, then 2 (press it four times).
Tiberius was born in 42BC.
In JRR Tolkien’s novel The Two Towers, Gimli the Dwarf kills 42 orcs in the battle at Helm’s Deep.
According to the Book of Revelations, ‘The Beast’ will hold the Earth for 42 months.
There are 42 lines on each page of a Gutenberg Bible.
It would take 42 minutes to ride the Gravity Sled.
In binary, 42 is 101010.
If you search answer to life, the universe and everything on Google, the calculator function will display ‘42‘.
In the 42nd Street subway station in New York City, there are large, white tiled columns with pretty 42s on each side.
Scientists calculated that the Hubble Constant, the rate at which the universe expands, is 42. (However, it will not stay at that rate always.)
An E-ELT, European Extremely Large Telescope, was built to probe the universe. It is 42 metres in diameter.
Washington was the 42nd US state to join the union.
Bill Clinton was the 42nd US president.
There were 42 Soviet missiles based in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The Orion Nebula is otherwise known as M42.
Element No 42 in the periodic table is molybdenum, a metal.
The numbers for the computer in the TV show Lost are 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42.
There were 42 generations from Abraham to Jesus.
11 February is the 42nd day of the year. Thomas Alva Edison was born on 11 February, 1847.
A day on Uranus lasts 42 Earth years.
Rosa Parks was 42 years old when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man.
Catch 22, the novel by Joseph Heller, has 42 chapters.
Queen Elizabeth II is the 42nd sovereign since the Norman conquest.
The tallest building in London is Tower 42.
There are 42.194988 kilometres in a marathon.
To create red light, light has to reflect off water at a 42 degree angle.
It takes light 10^–42 seconds to cross the diameter of a proton.

And with that that being that, I leave you in agony.

Access 2007 (caution: their site has a trojan downloader; proceed at your own risk) was held at Modern School, Barakhamba Road on 18-19 December 2007. Sigh, just thinking about it makes me feel sad AND happy at the same time. It’s a…real weird mix of emotions. Quizzing / competitions, and the Code Warriors have meant a lot to me, and it’s all coming to end now. Sigh. Hell, the past two years were so MUCH fun! Since I’m supposed to be studying for my pre-Boards, I’ll leave you guys to read the whole story at Vivek’s blog. For some individual notes, plod on…

We left on day one, and our lucky mascot bus was right there to cheer us up. Look at the bus number.

Access always had loads of sponsors. I asked Akshit Mohan, their computer club’s president about this…

Me: Dude, how much money on EARTH do you guys get in sponsorship?!
Akshit (in a humble tone): Just suffices to say that we could run Access on one-fifth of the money we get.
Me: Whoa! What do you do with all that cash?
Akshit: Put it in a bank.
Me: Cut the wisecracks, come on…
Akshit: We get good prizes. This year’s third prize is what we gave for first prize last year.

Never stop boasting eh? All those sponsors mean they’ve adverts strung around everywhere. Sample this advert on a desk in the school. I was giving the senior programming prelims – yeah, yew go laugh about me in a programming event. Which reminds me, that school is really Modern, even their event prelims were on OMR sheets!

Continuing the MS VV ‘no boundaries’ tradition, even Modern School, Barakhamba Roads toilets have no partitions in between. Geez, I wonder how people go for a leak. Maybe it’s all to cut down on time students spend in toilets.

I also discovered that Vivek and Karthick are perverted beyond their age. But it’s fun to share THOSE sort of jokes with people who understand at least. Me and Karthick for example spent a huge part of Access rolling around laughing like madmen at joke after joke. I’m sure quite a few volunteers (not to mention the chicks) would have wanted to hand us over to some mental camp.

Vivek and Karthick won the Audio Editing event too. You can download the crazy Crawling to a Bhangra tune here. IMHO, it was oh-so-fun, given the limited time and software they got to work with.

Day one was much maligned for the fact that we had to push a bus around in Lutyens’ Delhi. I must say, it’s not as hard as it sounds, especially when you have six other people pushing with you. Our bus ‘broke down’ in a roundabout, and we were called on by the Delhi Traffic police (‘With You, For You, Always’) since the PM’s cavalcade was supposed to pass through that place. After ‘working hard’ for some time, we finally managed to get it back to right where we started from, much to the policemen’s satisfaction. I even have a (small) video of it…

[yahoo 5596362]

A replacement bus did arrive two hours later, and that bus’ driver came aboard ours. Turns out that our #$%^@^&#&^& of a driver FORGOT to turn the gas valve on!

Day 2, well uh, I ruled the group discussion. I generally like to be modest, but what the heck, this is my last school event. I fucking deserve it with the number of trophies I’ve won this year. 😛 As usual, same judges like last year. Despite me giving more and better points, they didn’t take my excessive support of open source too kindly, and Maneel of JKPS won. Not that I’m sore for this year, but this the SECOND year in row they’ve given me second just because of my support of open source. Apparently, I don’t ‘change my views’ (their feedback after the GD both years). Yeah right.

The same judge saved us from certain doom though, because some madcap school we don’t know wanted to get us and DPS Dwarka disqualified because we’d mixed up students from different categories for the events. He was kind enough to let us participate, but WTF, again, DPS VK won the points tally, but was given overall runners up position because DPS RKP had too many people to stick to categories too. And to think it wasn’t our fault because Access used to allow that earlier and never made it clear this year. Anyway, I’m still thankful to Goutam sir and Varun Verma (the quizmaster) for letting us continue in at least the quiz and get individual prizes.

Ah the quiz. Junior Quiz, bagged loads of audience prizes. Some fun moments though…

Quizmaster (to JQ participants): What’s Gutsy Gibbon? [it’s the codename for Ubuntu 7.10
Abhimanyu (in the audience): What’s the answer Ankur? I think I’ve heard this term in Gears of War.
Boy that was funny. Vivek and Karthick came second in the JQ…

…with DPS Dwarka as the winners. Note that Karthick looks like he wants to jump on their necks a la Betaal (of Vikram-Betaal fame)…

Our JQ team were the runners up with 42.5 points. A close miss.

Senior Quiz. We OWNED the other teams, with us finishing more than twice the points of the second position team (Jimi Hendrix). Our team is the one on extreme right (that’s Lord Vader looking at the audience).

They say Access 2007 was a star-studded event. It was. A photo of Jimi Hendrix with Bruce Willis.

With that, I come to the end of my school quizzing career. Oh boy, the whole ride still brings back so many happy and not-so-happy memories, but it thoroughly enjoyed it. One request I made to the new CW team – to call Arjun as ‘Lord Vader’ next year when and if he becomes the CW president. That’ll be so fun. Arjun meanwhile, was getting as embarrassed as an Indian bride while I was saying this, with rosy pink cheeks. LMAO!!! Yup, it’ll be fun if students call him Lord Vader, and Arjun DESERVES it, totally ruling over the web designing scene this year.

Best of luck to the Code Warriors’ team for next year. We’ve proved this year that we’re the best, winning the biggest events of them all, and what’s more, having a such a high success rate too. Do the same next year, guys…

And to all my friends in other schools too, in the competition circuit, best of luck to you guys too… 🙂

Some old Access papers (no time to type out this year’s):