Race Conditions
Barriers
Signals and Threads
Physical Memory
A Category filled with "OS"
200

First held in 1911, this famous 805-km racing event is a Hoosier State special at an oval Motor Speedway on the Sunday before Memorial Day.

What is the Indianapolis 500?

200

The futile student-led demonstrations during this 1989 massacre are perhaps best epitomized by a single student, "Tank Man," standing defiantly in front of 4 tanks

What is the Tiananmen Square Massacre/June 4th Incident?

200

Writing THE OS, this Dutch computer scientist and mentor of CS Honors Advisor, Calvin Lin, used a stoplight-like semaphore data structure to control resource access.

Who was Edsger Dijkstra?

200

Foundational to deep learning are artificial networks built off these biological cells that communicate through their dendrites.

What are neurons?

200

This fruity operating system was written in C, C++, Objective-C, Swift, and Assembly and has served billions of smartphone users since 2007. 

What is the iOS?

400

Perhaps the most iconic racecar from this franchise is Vin Diesel's 1970 black Dodge Charger. The 23 years since the first movie have really zoomed by!

What is Fast and Furious?

400

Off the Australian coast, this natural ecosystem is home to nearly 3000 polyp systems and is visible from outer space, though conservationists worry about the impact of human use on the structure.

What is the Great Barrier Reef?

400

In the famous song "Do-Re-Mi" from The Sound of Music, this is considered a needle-pulling thread.

What is a sew [So]?

400

Many philosophers have advocated for tabula rasa, the belief that all humans are born "pure" with a "blank slate," including this Austrian psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist.

Who was Sigmund Freud?

400

Whether it's a friendly one like Casper, or Snapchat's logo, this phantom is not as scary as it seems.

What is a ghost?

600

The law of conservation of energy might serve you well to remember what 11.186 km/s represents. I'm sure members of Apollo missions would've known this speed by heart.

What is the [Earth's] escape velocity/speed?

600

This US President famously said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" in 1987 at the Brandenberg Gate, Berlin.

Who was President Ronald Reagan?

600

In this language, your leading three fingers openly gestured toward your mouth is a signal for "water," and crossing the index and middle fingers means "bathroom."

What is American Sign Language (ASL)?

600

Not at all related to artificial intelligence or architectural registers, this theory of memory implies that people who study while drunk will only remember that content while drunk....

What is state-dependent memory?

600

Do your part to help save our Earth and its resources by recycling organic matter in this environmentally friendly method.

What is compost[ing]?

800

Dutch-Belgian racer Max Verstappen became the youngest driver in Formula One history in the 2015 Australian Grand Prix, at this age.

What is 17?

800

The Demilitarized Zone between two nations on the 38th parallel of this peninsula has been enforced since the 1950s and is yet another example of a lasting proxy war.

What is the Korean Peninsula?

800

This cipher is a generalization of Caesar cipher, with a different cipher applied on each letter. Since it is just a shift on each key, the cipher can be represented using modulos and number theory.

What is the Vigenère cipher?

800

Upside down on a rollercoaster with your eyes closed? Well unfortunately, this "seventh sense" (including kinesthetics) will make you feel the gravity even when sight fails you.

What is the vestibular sense?

800

I hope you remember this trigonometric function that is undefined at 0 radians and is the multiplicative inverse of sine.

What is cosecant?

1000

Germany's Michael Jung and Jessica von Bredow-Werndl both won gold in this sport at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

What is equestrian (horse riding)?

1000

This famous English aircraft first broke the speed of sound in 1969, but its commercial flights have been grounded since 2003 because of exorbitant costs.

What is the Concorde?

1000

Predating Mao Tse-Tsung's Little Red Book by millennia, the lunar matchmaker god Yuè Lao guides people to their destined "one true love," in this East Asian myth.

What is the Red Thread of Fate/Marriage?

1000

The patellar reflex or knee-jerk is a stretch reflex that is used to test this portion of the central nervous system's spinal cord. 

What are the lumbar vertebrae?

1000

Also the title of a famous 1915 Franz Kafka novel, this process is important for non-nymph insects, especially from their pupa or chrysalis, though sometimes humans might also transform internally.

What is metamorphosis?