The Eight-fold way to the Truth (which is out there, somewhere....)

Hi,
Welcome to XQZ. Since it's long overdue, and since Hrishi's been haunting my nightmares :), I've decided to go ahead and post the answers to set Eight. Hopefully I'll soon get around to including the names of the people who got them right. In the meanwhile, you can entertain yourself by trying Set Nine, and by writing in and rating this set and previous ones, both on Quality and Toughness. The rating scheme is described in the first posting Ground Zero.

If you're new to XQZ, check out the first posting Ground Zero.
for an idea of how this quiz blog works. Your can always try answering the previous sets and sending in your rating of them. But for now,

To the answers!

8.1
Bill Gates. Easy, but wierd.

8.2
The Old Man of the Mountain. Unfortunately, despite attempts to stabilise it, it collapsed a few years ago.

8.3
The answer is 'microsoft' - note the small 'm'. The extract is taken from the cyberpunk classic, Neuromancer, which was written after Microsoft came into existence, so Gibson wasn't the first to think of it, but it's probable that the company hadn't yet hit big time.

8.4
Ghost in the Machine.
a) cover of album by The Police
b) British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who coined the phrase as a derogatory way of referring to Descartes' idea of mind-body dualism. dualism. The phrase was introduced in Ryle's book, The Concept of Mind, written in 1949. The phrase was meant by Ryle to emphasize that mental activity is of a different category from physical action, and that their means of interaction are unknown.
c)Arthur Koestler, who wrote a book by the same title, focussing on mankind's movement towards self-destruction, particularly in the nuclear arms arena. One of the book's central concepts is that as the human brain has grown, it has built upon earlier more primitive brain structures, and that these are the "ghost in the machine" of the title. Koestler's theory is that at times these structures can overpower higher logical functions, and are responsible for hate, anger and other such destructive impulses. His book is said to have inspired the Police album.
d)Rene Descartes
e) Sci-fi B-film in which a killer gets absorbed into the power network.... fun.

8.5
Shibboleth. The Ephraimites could not pronounce the 'sh', and said 'sibboleth'.

UUBQ answer:
Rotate 13: rotate the alphabet by the 13. Has the advantage that the decryption and encryption algorithms are the same.

8.6
Major William Martin of the Royal Marines, the 'Man Who Never Was'. No one knows who he actually was, but he was given the name of Major Martin and his body was dumped in to the sea with misleading information that led the Germans to believe that the Allies would invade the Balkans and Sardinia. In fact, the Allies invaded Sicily, the smoothness of the operation being in no small part due to the misinformation spread by 'Martin', in 'Operation Mincemeat'. The extent to which the British paid attention to details in order to make the body look like that of a genuine Major who died at sea is incredible.

8.7
These two awareness ribbons are:
Pink: Breast Cancer
Puzzle piece: Autism

8.8
Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch, and Jeffrey Archer, who based his novel 'The Fourth Estate' on the lives of these two media barons.

8.9
These ladies were all Mahesh Bhupathi's partners when he won various mixed doubles Grand Slams. Of course now you can add Martina Hingis (2006 Australian Open) too. The ladies are:

1)Elena Likhovtseva (2002 Wimbledon)
2)the very lovely Daniela Hantuchova (2005 US Open)
3)Ai Sugiyama (1999 US Open)
4)Mary Pierce (2005 Wimbledon)
5)Rika Hiraki (1997 French Open)

8.10
Tiananmen Square, 1989. This photo is of the unknown hero who stood in the path of the approaching tanks, and refused to move aside. As some articles point out, though, there were in fact two heroes there - the man, and the tank driver who refused to run him over.

That's it for now. Don't forget to write in and rate the Q&As.

Cheerio!