The Quizbowl Resource Center

Edmund

I no longer have quizbowl on my resume, but back when I did and interviewers asked me about it, my go-to talking point was that it taught me how to work with difficult people. I would explain how quizbowl programs can't succeed unless they cooperate, then I described some of the difficult personali...

Edmund

Thanks, Bruce, for this. The next time I need to explain why someone is not to write a question straight out of Wikipedia, even though it's probably factually accurate, I will direct them to this post. I don't think that Medieval Times has a footing in Europe, but I have been here . It was my friend...

Edmund

I think An Introduction to Thermal Physics by Schroeder is a great choice for thermodynamics because it's a very readable undergraduate text and most of it is understandable with just some basic physics background. Just about all the thermo topics that come up in the canon are explained in here. I ...

Edmund

I would recommend Atkins for all-round physical chemistry - pretty much everything with a name in the subject is in there. I would also recommend Clayden ahead of Maitland Jones for organic chemistry simply because it's a more fact-oriented textbook. Clayden was my organic textbook, but a lot of th...

Edmund

I would recommend the BIOS Instant Notes series of books. They are absolutely hopeless and counter-productive if you wish to learn science as a subject, but excellent for learning quizbowl science. The same is true for any book with "Introduction to..." in the title. As a career scientist ...

Edmund

Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:"the spin quantum number isn't a thing, and so only one electron per orbital."

I think what you are really testing is: do you know the atomic numbers of H, He, B and Ne? Which is no bad thing to ask, but a different approach is required!

Edmund

Having just played this set, heavily adapted by Kyle Haddad-Fonda, in the UK British Student Quiz Championships, I would first like to say that I enjoyed it very much. That said, I am a very long way from being the high schooler it was written for. I have one specific gripe that doesn't seem to have...

Edmund

This tournament was actually one of the most fun that I have ever attended, since people seemed to be having a good time and there were a lot of really close games with high scores. I thought that the HSNCT set was, for better of for worse, exactly the right level of difficulty for this tournament,...

Edmund

Ok, so the first problem was that I misheard "Landau" for "Landauer" which set me thinking about modern statistical mechanics. I also just hit the buzzer on "Shannon theorem" because Shannon is synonymous with entropy, and if we were talking about "information"...

Edmund

In any case, I wrote a bunch of bio, chem, painting and other art and a handful of questions in other categories for this thing, and I'd be glad to hear any feedback on those subjects. After all of five days, I'm afraid I'm struggling to remember specific questions. But my feeling was that these su...

Edmund

Rather than attempt to organize an entirely new international tournament because it is too expensive for Oxford to fly over twice a year, it's a possibility that the University of Gujrat might be able to attend ICT. I will point out on the part of my club that at present it's too expensive for Oxfo...

Edmund

Oh, man, it's great that we're having this discussion because nobody can do obsession with one's own country's unremarkable painters like the British. My personal favorite was the UC bonus on Ford Madox Brown. The part about it that I liked was that it came right after a bonus about mythological ra...

Edmund

A few of the easy parts seemed a little on the ludicrous side. I can't bring a particular example to mind right now. I think you're referring to bonus parts on answers like "Troy" based on a description of "This city was sacked by a Greek expedition" after naming some famous Tro...

Edmund

For what it's worth, the Canute tossup was buzzer-raced on the first clue in our room in the UK and I imagine it was in the two other matches. By and large I enjoyed the set very much indeed. The openings of a couple of the hard science questions were slightly ambiguous but then as a late-stage doct...

Edmund

This is pretty much all an accurate representation of the facts. Oxford B won with 8-2 and both Manchester A and Oxford A were 6-4. This was a very enjoyable tournament. It was a sunny day and a great pleasure to attend a tournament hosted outside Oxford. Tom Whyman TD'd with aplomb and his Briticis...

Edmund

Ok - I would say that macrocyclic comes in too early there. I've never even heard of a bite angle. Maybe that just reflects my background as a chemist, though. Good to include the template effect but I think the first part of the clue is confusing, because while a cation can direct the synthesis of ...

Edmund

I had figured that you just didn't know that; it would have been a great clue if it actually were a quotation. I think some of the rest of my team had some equally minor criticisms. I'll ask around. On the whole, I really liked the science, especially some of the physics and math (adiabatic theorem,...

Edmund

I wonder if I could just flag up what I consider to be an error in the Hideki Tojo tossup. The opening sentence mentioned him describing his starting something as "a leap from the verandah of Kiyomizu" - I don't have the exact wording to hand. The question writer obviously didn't know that...

Edmund

I think the low cloud in Chicago is causing chaos at the moment. One of our team is stuck in Denver. But we'll be down in the lobby at 8.30.

Edmund

Details on where to submit your packets will be forthcoming. I was wondering where this might be. Oxford are flying to the States on Wednesday and it would be nice to get this sorted before then as our internet access is bound to intermittent thereafter. Or would you rather I just bring a flash dri...

Edmund

Univ of Oxford will take part. We aim to produce a "British Dream Packet"; I hope this will be acceptable since none of us will play it.

Edmund

Since it doesn't like Oxford are going to be able to partition ourselves into different teams, we'll probably enter as a four and write a packet. I'll confirm in the next couple of days.

Edmund

I think I can say with certainty that all four of the Oxford team will be interested. This was a great way to get to meet some bona fide Americans last year and those of us who took part thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. In the interest of being sociable and getting to know people, I think it might be m...

Edmund

EDIT -- Also, Tom has a way with words. The questions are from an American source and are unedited Be nice to Tom. I wrote that. I don't think any British reader will understand it to say that they weren't edited in the first place, rather, they haven't been edited since reaching us, in contrast to...

Edmund

the Goethe is rather more accurate than "Gerta", which I personally can't stand Yeah, I prefer "Gerta" with a British (non-rhotic) accent. It hadn't occurred to me there was more than one way to pronounce Gerta. In answer to Rob, clearly there is always room for refinement, but ...

Edmund

> An a not accompanied by an umlaut or another vowel is a schwa. Pronounce it like the a in, well, schwa. An a with an umlaut not followed by another vowel is a short a like in cat. I would agree that "a" is longer than a schwa, and more importantly, ä is more an "eh" sound, as ...

Edmund

Extremely useful. Thank you. I do not want to tread on Bruce's point about correctness being the enemy of comprehension, and there will be someone out there more qualified than I am to write the below, but, in brief, I hope this helps if there is an intention to compile these. I'm not quite sure how...

Edmund

Just popping in to say hello from Cambridge, and to thank the Oxford guys again for an excellently-run tournament. Hopefully the Varsity match will give us a chance to reciprocate. ... I should say thank you for the thank you, too. We're all looking forward to Varsity since it keeps getting more an...

Edmund

Those of us who are shortly leaving education would appreciate a regular open tournament in the UK, I think! Also I have been less down on American geography ever since I beat KHF and Minnesota to the Nevada question at ICT, based entirely on my knowledge of the locations of world speed record attem...

Edmund

How did this work? Was this a matter of changing "color charge" to "colour charge" and the like, or did the clues/questions change? We replaced 16/16 over the course of the set with house-written questions on British history and trash, with the intention of making the set more e...

Edmund

Preliminary results:

Oxford Pennyfeather (Peter Berry, Kyle Haddad-Fonda, Tim Hele, George Woudhuysen) win with 10-0.

Cambridge (captain Alex Guttenplan) and Oxford Belacqua (captain Simon Spiro) tie on 8-2, Oxford B beat Cambridge in second place play-off.

Full stats will follow in due course.

Edmund

What exactly people are "practicing" for each Monday night I have never totally understood. But it's not like our team suddenly ballooned in size -- it was huge long before I got here. What we were practising for was twenty minutes of competition every year vs. Cambridge, an engagement wh...

Edmund

edit: on a moment's reflection, I can imagine a similar thread where a hypothetical math/science person argues that we should write formulas using actual mathematical notation. Certainly anyone with a mathematics background will know how to read such a thing, but for the majority of moderators it w...

Edmund

As a first-timer there, I found the consistent and total mispronunciation of foreign languages by some moderators at the ICT (although some others were excellent!) to be one of the most difficult aspects of that tournament. I would be very interested in hearing any details you could provide about t...

Edmund

This is an interesting discussion - as someone who can pronounce German and most Romance languages, I find the regular exclusion of accents from packets extremely difficult because I am faced with a bunch of non-English options on how to say a name but if I'm not familiar with the clue, I won't know...

Edmund

...many of whose countries fought for their independence against Spain as distinct from precisely one who fought a War of Independence against Great Britain. Thank you.

"Latin American wars of independence..." if you prefer. I struggle to think of a better collective term.

Edmund

I'm genuinely curious about this. Could you elaborate? For what it's worth, American quizbowl does have definite and strong biases towards certain areas(modern Japanese literature in particular is heavily overrepresented) but not necessarily(although frequently) Central/South America. I would argue...

Edmund

Hi, to introduce myself before I weigh in with my tuppence worth, I'm one of the staff who moderated the SCT and I'm part of the Oxford team training for the ICT this year. I think what Kyle has said about bonus conversion issues in Europe is very much an issue of perspective and practice rather tha...

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Re: 2011 ICT Question-specific discussion

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Re: GUERRILLA III - Friday, 4/8/11 - ICT Hotel, Chicago

Re: GUERRILLA III - Friday, 4/8/11 - ICT Hotel, Chicago

Re: GUERRILLA III - Friday, 4/8/11 - ICT Hotel, Chicago

Re: GUERRILLA III - Friday, 4/8/11 - ICT Hotel, Chicago

Re: GUERRILLA III - Friday, 4/8/11 - ICT Hotel, Chicago

Re: Region 1 (Europe) SCT at Oxford (February 5th, 2011)

Re: A Moderator's Guide to Pronunciating Foreign Words

Re: A Moderator's Guide to Pronunciating Foreign Words

Re: A Moderator's Guide to Pronunciating Foreign Words

Re: British ACF Fall @ Oxford, 20/11/10

Re: British ACF Fall @ Oxford, 20/11/10

Re: British ACF Fall @ Oxford, 20/11/10

Re: British ACF Fall @ Oxford, 20/11/10

Re: British ACF Fall @ Oxford, 20/11/10

Re: Accent marks on foreign words

Re: Accent marks on foreign words

Re: Accent marks on foreign words

Re: Announcement: NAQT SCT Europe in Oxford, 6 Feb 2010

Re: Announcement: NAQT SCT Europe in Oxford, 6 Feb 2010

Re: Announcement: NAQT SCT Europe in Oxford, 6 Feb 2010