World Scholars Cup: Social Studies
Nostradamus - Answer- (1503- 1566)
-French
-Physician and Reputed Seer
-Published famous collections of prophecies
-Credited for predicting: The Great Fire of London, Rise of Napoleon and Hitler, 9/11
and others.
-Predicted a great comet, Nibiru, or rogue planet, Planet X, would impact the
Mediterranean on December 21, 2012 (or June/July 1999), causing great destruction
worldwide.
Prediction Quiz: (http://www.godandscience.org/cgi-bin/quiztest.cgi?
nostradamusquiz)
Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin - Answer- (Jan 1869 - Dec 1916)
-a Russian peasant, a traveler, a mystical faith healer, and trusted friend to last Tsar
Nicholas II
-advised Tsar's wife Alexandra Feodorovna, scapegoat for nationalists.
-heavy drinker, womanizer
-a lot of uncertainty
Cassandra - Answer- Fictional Character from Iliad
- her name is employed as a rhetorical device to indicate someone whose accurate
prophecies are not believed by those around them
- Trying to seduce her, Appollo gave her prophecy powers - but when she refused he
spat into her mouth and cursed her so that no one would believe her prophecies.
or
- she fell asleep at a temple and snakes (symbols of knowledge) whispered in her
ears so she could hear the future.
- She predicted the fall of Troy and death of Agamennon, no one believed her. Ajax
dragged her from Athena's altar and raped her. Athena sank most of Greek ships.
Later she fell into Agamennons possesion and was murdered with him.
Robert Fitzroy - Answer- (July 5/ 1805 - April 30/ 1865)
-Navy officer, scientist, meteorologist
- Made accurate weather predictions, named "forecasts"
- Created primary version of Met office, and taught sailors and fisherman to predict
weather.
- directed design and distribution of barometer
Michio Kaku - Answer- (Janurary 24/ 1947 -)
- theoretical physicist, futurist and science popularizer.
- Written several books about the future.
Ray Kurzweil - Answer- (Feburary 12/ 1948 -)
-author, computer science, invertor and futurist
, -wrote books on a variety of topics and is involved in fields like text to speech
synthesis, speech recognition, etc.
-public advocate for futurist and transhumanism movements.
-predicted that, in 2005, supercomputers with the computational capacities to
simulate protein folding will be introduced, it happened in 2010 with a small amount
of protein.
Nate Silver - Answer- (Janurary 13. 1978 -)
- staistician and writer, basebal and election analyst
-editor in chief of ESPN's FiveThirtyEight and correspondent for ABC news
- developed PECOTA, which predicts the prefeormance and career of major legue
players, which he later sold and managed from 2003-2009
- predicted 2008 election outcome in 49/50 states
-named one of Time's 100 Most Influencial People
Nate Cohn - Answer- (~1989)
-NYT Predictor
-After Nate Silver moved from NYT, Nate Cohn was hired as his replacement and
while he is not as famous, has held up a good record
Hari Seldon - Answer- (fictional character from Isaac Aasimov's Foundation Series)
-develops psychohistory, an algorithmic science that allows him to predict the future
in probabilistic terms
-Using psychohistory, Seldon mathematically determines what he calls The Seldon
Plan—a plan to determine the right time and place to set up a new society, one that
would replace the collapsing Galactic Empire by sheer force of social pressure, but
over only a thousand-year time span, rather than the ten-to-thirty-thousand-year time
span that would normally have been required, and thus reduce the human suffering
from living in a time of barbarism.
* first ever mention of encyclopedia galactica
Paul the Octopus - Answer- (January 26, 2008 - October 26, 2010)
- octopus, used to predict results of association football games.
-accurate predictions of 2010 World Cup
-predicted by eating from boxes labeled with different flags
- rivaled by Mani the parakeet from Singapore
Yoda - Answer- Impossible to see, the future is." - Yoda
Here, Yoda reminds us that it's pointless to try to predict the future. Better to just set
your intention and focus on the present.
Sybil Trelawny - Answer- (fictional character)
-teacher at Hogwats
-often considered a fraud, yet most of her predictions came true
-
Pāora Te Potangaroa - Answer- (?-1881)
-a Maori prophet
