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The Never Ending Quiz

I'm pleased to announce the availability on the World Wide Web of a new
application of CL-HTTP, The Never Ending Quiz.

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http://vulcanus.arc.nasa.gov/quiz
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The Never Ending Quiz is a Lisp-based web server that generates
questions about planetary statistics on the fly.  Following are some
typical examples.  Feel free to play with it.  But I'm hoping it will
get heavy use from schools once the space and education pages are linked
to it, so please avoid using it during school hours across the U.S.
I'm running it on an old Symbolics 3653, and I don't know how well it
will perform under load.

Also, it's probably best not to tempt me with neat suggestions for
improvements. I probably won't have time to enhance it anytime soon, or
fix any but the most trivial and critical bugs, because I'm very busy
writing tools for the flight software team of an upcoming automated
space mission.  (I'm using CL-HTTP for part of that, too.)

Sample questions and answers:

True or False:
Callisto is more massive than ________. 
    (a) Uranus 
    (b) Earth 
    (c) Enceladus 
    (d) Jupiter 
    (e) All of the above. 

    [Sample response to an answer:
        "Your answer: (b) Earth.
         No, that's incorrect.
         Earth is 56 times more massive than Callisto."
    Since mass is related to size, it then shows images of
    Earth and Callisto to scale, if the browser is Netscape 1.1
    or later.]

Which of these has the shortest day? 
    (a) Pluto 
    (b) Venus 
    (c) Neptune 
    (d) Mercury 

    [Answer justification generated: "Venus's day is 4.1 times longer
    than Mercury's. The day of Venus is 5,832 hours, and the day of
    Mercury is 1,408 hours."]

Which of these things is not like the others?
    (a) Neptune 
    (b) Mercury 
    (c) Jupiter 
    (d) Saturn

    [Answer justification generated: "Of the four planets listed,
    Mercury is the darkest (least reflective), closest to the sun, least
    massive, densest, and smallest; and it has the warmest average
    surface temperature, longest day, shortest year, and weakest surface
    gravity."  Since size is related to the question, then then shows
    images of the four planets to scale, if the browser is Netscape 1.1
    or later.]

Rhea's minimum surface temperature is cold enough to condense water
(at Earth's sea-level pressure). 
    (a) TRUE 
    (b) FALSE 

    [Answer justification generated: "Water condenses at 373.16 K.
    At Rhea's minimum surface temperature of 53 K, water is a solid
    (at Earth's sea-level pressure).]

-- 
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Bob Kanefsky                                Caelum Research Corporation
        NASA Ames Research Center     Computational Sciences Division
http://ic-www.arc.nasa.gov/ic/projects/bayes-group/group/people/kanef/