Esoteric Knowledge Quiz #4

Do your friends, family, and coworkers accuse you of being a repository of useless information? (Mine do.) Here's your chance to test your knowledge of obscure but interesting tidbits...


  1. Mt. St. Helens, the Alaskan stratovolcano that famously erupted in 1980,
    was named for which person?

    1. Helena of Constantinople

    2. Helena of Skövde

    3. Alleyne FitzHerbert

    4. Helen of Troy



  2. Which of the following is not the title of a book by Lillian Jackson Braun?

    1. The Cat Who Wasn't There

    2. The Cat Who Ran Amuck

    3. The Cat Who Sniffed Glue

    4. The Cat Who Turned On and Off


  3. It seems all the cool kids these days are using SATA hard drives instead of the old IDE kind.
    SATA stands for Serial ATA, and the old kind are sometimes now called PATA for Parallel ATA,
    but what does the ATA part stand for?

    1. Asyncronous Tandem Attachment

    2. Asynchronous Throughput Attachment

    3. Advanced Technology Attachment

    4. Adaptive Terminal Attachment


  4. In the standard model of sub-atomic physics, which of the following is not considered to be a lepton?

    1. photon

    2. electron

    3. muon

    4. tau neutrino


  5. 2nd Timothy chapter 3 gives a list of character traits people will have in the last days. Which of the following is not on the list?

    1. disobedient to their parents

    2. stingy

    3. ungrateful

    4. lovers of pleasure

    (Wording taken from the NIV translation.)



I'll post the answers in the comments at some point.


If you have questions to contribute to future quizzes, send them in to jonadab@NO SPAM THANKS ANYWAYbright.net with the phrase Esoteric Knowledge Quiz in the subject line (or. if you are on the Wheeitology list, you can just post them there). Thanks!


Past quizzes: 1, 2, 3

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3 comments:

  1. philipSeptember 21, 2009 at 1:35:00 PM EDT

    I think Mt. St. Helens ia in Oregon, not Alaska.

    ReplyDelete
  2. philipSeptember 21, 2009 at 1:35:00 PM EDT

    I meant "is".

    ReplyDelete
  3. JonadabOctober 19, 2020 at 2:46:00 PM EDT

    Mt. Saint Helens is actually in Washington State. Also, I just noticed I never posted the answers to this quiz. Let's rectify that now...

    The mountain is of course named for the Baron St. Helens His personal name was Alleyne FitzHerbert.

    Oddly, Lilian Jackson Braun never wrote a book called The Cat Who Ran Amok.

    Technically, ATA directly stands for AT Attachment, because it was an expansion slot designed to attach add-on cards to the AT bus, which was introduced with the IBM PC/AT. But the AT originally stood for Advanced Technology.

    In the standard model, leptons and quarks are particles with half-integer "spin" (fermions). The photon has integer "spin", so it is classified in the other major category, bosons. The photon is significantly more famous than the other elementary bosons. Note that the word "spin" here, although it sounds like it might refer to rotation on an axis (and does refer to a form of angular momentum), does not imply that these "particles" have a detectable directional orientation in space at each instant in time like a macroscopic object would. Sub-atomic physics is weird.

    Stingy would fit right in on that list, but it's not there; although it does say that people will be "lovers of money".

    ReplyDelete