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Ian Pickus from the WAMC receives a message from the Mike Nothnagel questionnaire.
The challenge of last week
Start with the name NANCY PELOSI. Rearrange the letters and you can spell a current country name and an old country name. What are they?
Reply: SPAIN, CEYLON.
CATEGORY OF THIS WEEK: THE ARECIBO MESSAGE
Questions about the airwavesOn November 16, 1974, an interstellar radio message called Arecibo message was sent to a group of stars in the hope that extraterrestrial life would receive it. Named after the Puerto Rican radio telescope that transmitted it, the Arecibo message contains information coded on numbers, chemical elements, DNA, human, solar system and the Arecibo telescope itself. Since the message will take about 25,000 years to reach the intended goal, it is seen more as an example of technological capabilities than as an attempt at real communication. To commemorate the Arecibo message, this week our questions are about topics in the Arecibo message.
1. A description of the Arecibo observatory is included at the bottom of the Arecibo message. The observatory has featured several times in popular culture, including "Little Green Men," a television episode starring Fox Mulder visiting the observatory to further his quest for extraterrestrial life. "Little Green Men" was the first of the second season of which series?
2. In addition to a representation of a human being, the Arecibo message contains an illustration that can be translated to the average height of one man, and another that can be translated to a value of 4,292,853,750, which was the time, the transmission of the message, what?
3. The graph in the Arecibo message describing the solar system shows the sun and the nine planets (at the time), with the Earth slightly shifted upward to indicate the source of the message. In August 2006, the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as an object known under what designation in two words?
4. The numbers one to ten are encoded in the Arecibo message in binary format, which uses ones and zeros to express a numeric value. Each place in a binary number represents a power of two, similar to how each place in a number in base ten represents a power of ten. Which number would be written in binary notation like 111?
5. The five elements that make up the components of DNA are represented in the Arecibo message by their atomic numbers. The five elements contain one-letter symbols in the periodic table: H, C, N, O and P. What are these five elements?
Additional credit
1. In September 2017, what event caused damage to about 30 of the 38,000 aluminum panels that make up the Arecibo telescope's main plate?
2. The Arecibo message also contains illustrations representing the four bases contained in the nucleotides of the DNA. These bases are commonly represented by which four letters?
This week's challenge
Start with the word ARECIBO. If you change a letter to D, you can rearrange the result by spelling out the name of two words (two letters, five letters) of something you can use to convey a message. What is the thing?
ANSWERS
Questions about the airwaves
1. The X-Files
2. Human population
3. dwarf planet
4. 7
5. Hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus
Additional credit
1. Hurricane Maria
2. A, C, G and T
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