Geo Oddities
The only landlocked country in Southeast Asia.
Laos.
The only standard amino acid with no chiral center.
Glycine.
The 14th-century traveler whose Rihla chronicles a 70,000-mile journey.
Ibn Battuta.
The first non-English language film to win Best Picture.
Parasite (2019).
The annual report U.S. public companies file with the SEC.
Form 10-K.
The only national flag that isn’t a quadrilateral.
Nepal.
Superconductors expel magnetic fields via this effect.
The Meissner effect.
The only woman to rule China in her own name as emperor.
Wu Zetian.
Master of Suspense” who never won a competitive Oscar.
Alfred Hitchcock.
Conglomerate chaired by Warren Buffett, trading under tickers BRK.A and BRK.B.
Berkshire Hathaway.
A sea defined by currents and seaweed, with no land boundaries.
The Sargasso Sea.
The two letters that never appear in any official chemical element symbol.
J and Q.
The 1958–62 campaign that precipitated China’s Great Famine.
The Great Leap Forward
The MPAA ratings system replaced this earlier set of moral guidelines in 1968.
The Hays Code (Motion Picture Production Code).
Management thinker who coined the term “knowledge worker.”
Peter Drucker.
The sovereign state is entirely enclosed within South Africa.
Lesotho.
In CRISPR–Cas9 editing, the short DNA sequence immediately downstream of the target that enables Cas9 binding.
The Protospacer Adjacent Motif (PAM).
The 1648 settlement that entrenched state sovereignty in Europe.
The Peace of Westphalia.
Editing principle showing viewers infer emotion from context between shots.
The Kuleshov effect.
Economist who wrote the 1970 essay “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.”
Milton Friedman.
This Ecuadorian volcano’s summit is the point farthest from Earth’s
Chimborazo.
Process by which energy can be extracted from a rotating black hole’s ergosphere.
The Penrose process.
The Bronze Age civilization that used Linear B to write early Greek.
The Mycenaeans (accept Mycenaean civilization).
1951 film whose stock scream became famous as the “Wilhelm scream.”
Distant Drums. (Nickname came later via The Charge at Feather River*, 1953.)*
The 1911 Supreme Court case that ordered the breakup of Standard Oil.
Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States.