A Medley of Motley Miscellany [2] Quiz

Answer: Martin Luther

Holy Roman Emperor Charles V issued the Edict of Worms in May 1521. It declared Martin Luther an outlaw and heretic after he refused to recant his teachings at the Diet of Worms. If all this sounds overly vermicular to you, Worms is a city in Germany.

The edict banned Martin Luther's writings and effectively placed him outside the protection of the law. That meant that anyone could kill him without facing punishment, giving me the strong feeling that the emperor, at least, was not a fan. Luther had already been excommunicated by Pope Leo X earlier that year, so by the spring of 1521 he had managed to collect both a papal excommunication and an imperial ban.

If it sounds like he was running out of friends, rest easy. He had powerful supporters in Saxony. Elector Frederick the Wise arranged for Luther to be taken into protective custody at Wartburg Castle. Luther spent much of the next year there and translated the New Testament into German, helping make the Bible more accessible to ordinary German readers.

Answer: True

Lacrosse has a deep history in Canada. Indigenous peoples, including the Haudenosaunee, played forms of the game long before Europeans began settling the area. After a while, the sport became a part of what it means to be Canadian, along with Toonies and poutine.

Parliament passed the National Sports of Canada Act in 1994, giving lacrosse official status as the country's national summer sport. (You can guess the national winter sport, I'm sure.) Thus, Canada ended up with two national sports, and the Act received royal assent on May 12, 1994.

Answer: Tractor

The word "tractor" comes from the Latin "trahere", meaning "to draw" or "to drag." In English, "tractor" originally had a more general meaning than the machine folks drive around today. By at least the early 19th century, it could refer to anything that pulled or drew another object. Later, the word was used for steam-powered machines used to pull equipment.

Answer: Attention is All You Need

"Attention Is All You Need" was written by eight researchers, primarily at Google. The paper was submitted in June 2017 and presented at the NeurIPS conference later that year. It introduced researchers and tech people to the transformer, a neural network architecture based entirely on attention mechanisms. That just means it helps AI focus of the most important parts of data at any given time.

It was actually heavily focused on machine translation of human languages (English to German and English to French). Chatbots, image generators, and the messes created by them came later, all built on the transformer technology.

Answer: Sheep

Roquefort is made from sheep's milk. More specifically, it's made of raw whole sheep's milk. If you like your cheese moldy, this is a good one. It's a blue-veined variety, and its flavor and appearance come partly from "Penicillium roqueforti", the mold responsible for those blue-green veins.

The cheese has been around forever, but its official French recognition dates back to 1925, when it became the first French cheese to receive an "appellation d'origine" designation. So, it's only Roquefort if it comes from the village of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon in southern France.

Otherwise, it's just moldy cheese.

Answer: Saola

The saola is a large, forest-dwelling bovine that was first discovered by science in 1992. That's when researchers found strange, long-horned skulls during a survey in Vietnam's Vu Quang Nature Reserve, near the border with Laos.

If you're excited about the nickname, don't be. It has two horns.

This Asian BICORN then lives only in the Annamite Mountains of Laos and Vietnam, and yes, boasts a pair of long, parallel, gently curving horns. The nickname "Asian Unicorn" refers to its incredible rarity and elusiveness. Life is just one letdown after another.

Answer: Maya

The Maya were complicated. While it makes life easier to consider them a single unified empire, they simply weren't anything of the sort. Instead, the civilization consisted of numerous kingdoms and city-states spread out across what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Many Maya polities were conquered during the 16th century, but the Itza Maya of the Peten region held out the longest. Their capital, Nojpeten, stood on an island in Lake Peten Itza in modern Guatemala. Spanish forces finally captured it on March 13, 1697, bringing the last independent Maya kingdom under control of the Spanish. That final Spanish victory came more than 150 years after the conquistadors had begun taking over the Maya territories.

Answer: Bill Nye

Bill Nye's nickname was popularized from his popular educational show called "Bill Nye the Science Guy". It originally aired from 1993 to 1999. Nye hosted the show as a dorky, bow-tie-wearing science teacher. He made copious use of demonstrations, sketches, experiments, and goofy humor to explain topics from physics and biology to astronomy and chemistry.

The show was aimed primarily at children, but plenty of adults who happened to be hanging out near the television nearby learned a thing or two as well.

Answer: North Carolina

The Tuscarora War was fought primarily in the colony of North Carolina, beginning in September 1711, after years of ever-growing tensions between the Tuscarora people and European settlers. Land encroachment, dishonest trading practices, and the enslavement of Native Americans will do that. The immediate spark came when Tuscarora forces captured several colonists, including surveyor John Lawson, who was later killed. The fighting spread across the coastal region, with North Carolina receiving military assistance from South Carolina and other Native American allies.

The decisive battle occurred at Fort Neoheroka in March 1713, where colonial forces and their allies overtook a Tuscarora stronghold after several days of fighting. That was pretty much it for the war, such as it was, but some Tuscarora continued resisting until a final peace agreement in 1715.

Answer: Vacuum

Otto von Guericke demonstrated the famous "Magdeburg hemispheres" in 1654 to show the power of a vacuum and atmospheric pressure. It's an interesting experiment. He joined two hollow metal hemispheres, sealed the joint, and proceeded to pump the air out of the interior. With the air removed, the pressure inside the resulting sphere was far lower than the pressure of the surrounding atmosphere. This pressure from the atmosphere pushed the two hemispheres tightly together, so much so that teams of horses could not pull them apart. Once air was allowed back inside, the hemispheres separated easily.

Love may have played a part.