What's the Code? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Angels Memorial Hospital

"Code Black" is a medical drama television series that ran for three seasons from 2015 to 2018. It is set in the fictional Angels Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles and follows the high-stakes and intense environment of their emergency room.

Code Black in this setting is more an administrative call than the usual medical code. It is referring to a state where the overcrowding, understaffing and lack of adequate medical supplies has met a crisis point where medical care is or is going to become compromised.

In severe circumstances it can lead to staff having to make choices over which patients get treatment. An extreme example being a lack of ventilators and no staff to physically 'bag' the patient - a call must be made as to which of the patients will receive this lifesaving device.

It is based on a 2013 documentary of the same name made by an emergency physician, Ryan McGarry, who was also the executive producer on the show.

Cook County General Hospital in Chicago was the setting for "ER", New Jersey's Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital was where House reigned supreme and Sacred Heart Hospital in Sacramento, California was the setting for "Scrubs".

Answer: Coupons

Colour codes are a visual coding device that lets us understand the meaning of something from colour alone. Traffic lights are the most basic form of these found all over the world. Green means go, amber means prepare to stop and red means stop.

Rubbish bins are also colour co-ordinated; the colours and meanings may change around the world but they are standard colours within the community they are used. Recycling, garden, organic, hazardous and medical are common categories.

Electrical codes are an example of a code known to a particular group of people or an occupation. A normal electrical cord has three coloured wires within it indicating a live wire, neutral wire or a ground wire. Electrical resistors are more complex having usually four or five bands representing the resistance value in ohms and tolerance levels.

Coupons definitely have codes but they are usually letters or numbers that are presented, scanned or inputted to the corresponding company to receive some form of goods or service that are free or discounted.

Answer: White Tie

Dress codes enable us to know what to wear or what is acceptable to wear to a particular place or event. They do vary throughout the world and start with very casual events where comfort is the main criteria.

Business wear can vary but in professional or corporate environments it often requires suits, ties and dress shoes and the equivalent for women

Cocktail is semi-formal wear for evening events, men will often wear a suit and women typically opt for a knee length dress. In some countries the hour of the event will signify whether dress is cocktail or formal wear.

Black Tie is for more upscale evening events. Men are required to wear tuxedos and women wear long elegant gowns.

White Tie is reserved for highly prestigious events. Men usually wear a tailcoat, white bow tie and formal accessories. Women typically wear full-length formal gowns and expensive jewellery.

White tie is mostly reserved for royal events and state dinners although it can be required for very formal weddings, debutante balls, philanthropic galas and opening nights of a major cultural event such as an opera or ballet.

Answer: Telegraph

Semaphore is the use of an apparatus to create a visual signal transmitted over distance. A semaphore can be performed by something as simple as moving arms or with devices including smoke, fire, lights, flags and sunlight.

Fire signals, known as phryctoriae, were one of the earliest forms of semaphore over a long distance. Towers were built on mountain tops approximately 30 kilometres apart. A fire would be lit in the first, the second would see it and light theirs and then the next in line and so on until it was received by the intended recipient.

Sunlight is used by using a heliograph, a device that included mirrors and shutters. It was used to produce flashes of sunlight by either pivoting the mirror or interrupting the sunlight with the shutter. This was often used in conjunction with another code like Morse.

Flag semaphore conveys messages via their positioning; the best known is probably the flag semaphore used by the navy where coloured flags were held in each hand and used in different positions for different numbers or letters. Semaphores are still in use today.

The telegraph system involved a network of telegraph poles, wires and telegraph operators to pass sound messages over a long distance. Originating in the 19th century it played a crucial role in communications. Any code could be used as long as the receiver and sender were aware of it but in general information was passed on in Morse code.

Answer: Mercury Rising

"Mercury Rising" was a 1998 movie that also starred Miko Hughes as Simon, a young severely autistic boy, who inadvertently deciphers a top-secret government code. The code, named 'Mercury,' is a cryptographic algorithm designed to maintain the security of the United States.

Willis is an FBI agent who finds Simon after his parents are killed and takes on the task of protecting him as people connected to the code are killed. Willis discovers that the agency he works for is willing to go to extreme lengths, including eliminating the child, to protect the secrets contained in the code.

Baldwin plays the agent who is hunting them down and has the moral conviction that it is better for a few to die than put the US soldiers it is designed to protect in danger.

Answer: Reveille

Reveille is a bugle call that is associated with the military in many counties. The word itself is derived from the French word meaning 'to wake up.' As such it is played in the morning to signal the start of the day and to wake up the troops. It is also played during ceremonies and events that mark the beginning of military activities or exercises.

'The Last Post' is a bugle call that holds significance in the United Kingdom and its Commonwealth. It is often played as part of remembrance services, including military funerals and commemorative events. The Last Post has a solemn and poignant character, symbolizing the end of the day and, in the context of military funerals, the final farewell to a fallen comrade. 'Taps' is the US version of this call.

'Boots and Saddles' is a traditional bugle call used in the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries. It is associated with cavalry units and is used to signal the preparation for mounted troop movements. Its usage in common time has obviously diminished but it is still used in ceremonial services.

Answer: YYZ

There are three types of IATA codes. A 3 digit code that represents a country, a 2 or 3 letter code assigned to airlines and the 3 letter codes assigned to airports around the world. These codes play a crucial role in simplifying communication and documentation in the aviation industry. They are used in flight schedules, boarding passes, baggage tags and other air travel-related documents. IATA codes are standardized globally allowing for consistency and ease of reference in international air travel.

Canada is the only country that has its own code for all its airports and all Canadian airports begin with a Y. This is a historical naming system. For safety and landing purposes it used to be important to know whether the airport had a weather/radio station located on its premises. If it did the letter Y, for yes, was added to the beginning of its existing radio code.

The 'YZ' dates back to the Morse code railway stations along the Canadian National Railway. YZ was the code for the station in Malton, Ontario which is where Toronto's airport sits today. So YYZ is for Lester B. Pearson International Airport.

The others are JFK for New York's John F. Kennedy airport, CDG is for Paris' Charles de Gaulle and LPL is for Liverpool John Lennon Airport.

Answer: Deception Point

Dan Brown is an American author best known for his Robert Langdon series which consist of mystery-thriller novels centered around the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon. They often feature a blend of art, history, symbology and conspiracy theories. The novels have been adapted into successful films further contributing to their popularity.

The first five of these, in order, are "Angels & Demons" (2000), "The Da Vinci Code" (2003), "The Lost Symbol" (2009), "Inferno" (2013) and "Origin" (2017).

His first book was a standalone novel called "Digital Fortress" published in 1998.The second, "Deception Point", was in 2001, in-between the first two Langdon novels.

Answer: Medical emergency

Hospital emergency codes are coded messages often announced over a public address system of a hospital to alert staff to various classes of on-site emergencies. The use of codes is intended to convey essential information quickly and with minimal misunderstanding to staff while preventing stress and panic among visitors to the hospital.

Unfortunately they do vary around the world but most countries seem to have at least co-ordinated the codes across their own states or territories.

Code Blue, however, seems to be fairly consistent across many countries. Medical Emergency usually refers to a respiratory or cardiac emergency. The UK is an exemption because they do not use colour coding for all their communication. They do use Code Red which is a patient emergency code but a lot of the rest of their codes are numbers.

As an example the Australian code is as follows:
Code Black: Personal threat
Code Blue: Medical emergency
Code Brown: External emergency (Disaster or mass casualties events)
Code Orange: Evacuation
Code Purple: Bomb threat
Code Red: Fire
Code Yellow: Internal emergency

Many hospitals also have a code to indicate an impending medical emergency where they can get a team of medical staff to respond quickly before the patient reaches a critical condition and aggressively treat the patient to prevent them going into a life-threatening event.

Answer: Caesar shift

The Caesar shift is a simple and classic encryption technique named after Julius Caesar who is historically credited with using it to encode his private correspondence. It is a simple substitution cipher where each letter is moved up or down the alphabet by the same number. All that is needed to decode it is the number and an increase or decrease symbol.

Alberti's cipher wheel is an early cryptographic device attributed to the Italian Renaissance polymath Leon Battista Alberti. The device consists of two concentric disks with the outer disk containing a mixed alphabet and the inner disk having a fixed one. The outer disk can be rotated to change the alignment between the two alphabets, allowing for different substitutions each time.

The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 during Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt. The stone is a slab of black basalt with a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BE. The same text is inscribed in three scripts: Ancient Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphs and a cursive script known as Demotic. Knowing the language of one of the scripts enables the reader to understand the other languages.

The Enigma machine was a complex electro-mechanical device used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages. It was widely used by the military and intelligence agencies of several countries, most notably by Nazi Germany during World War II.

The Enigma machine used a series of rotors and electrical connections to perform a substitution cipher. Each keypress would set the rotors in motion, changing the encryption for each letter.