The Quizbowl Resource Center

grapesmoker

I've been away for a while and I want to address all the points that have been made so far with regards to my previous post. The basic objection to these questions seems to be "we don't learn about this stuff in real science classes, so it shouldn't come up." To a certain extent, I sympath...

grapesmoker

First off, I enjoyed many of the art tossups. The questions on Brancusi, Velasquez, and Gainsborough, for example, did a great job of taking easier answers and making them both challenging and pyramidal on a high level. I also enjoyed seeing a tossup on Et in Arcadia Ego. However, the harder end of...

grapesmoker

a tossup on Mobius that (as far as I can recall) was devoid of useful science content between "barycentric calculus" near the start and "twisted a strip of paper" at the end. This was my biggest gripe about the science questions. There were three science tossups on physicists or...

grapesmoker

I'd be happy to answer any questions regarding Berkeley, quizbowl-related or otherwise.

grapesmoker

I was afraid "fluctuation-dissipation theorem" was a bit on the hard side, but I was trying to come up with non-obvious stat mech / condensed matter questions to offset my personal bias toward particle physics / field theory, and the theorem does seem to be among the more important result...

grapesmoker

suds1000 wrote: So somebody tell me...how hard were they?

This was certainly the hardest tournament I've ever played in. To me it seemed even harder than Manu.

grapesmoker

Where's all the predictions? Here's my completely ignorant picks for the top ten: 5. Berkeley -- no Teitler = no title I won't be so presumptuous as to nominate my team for the title, nor will I deny the importance of Seth to our team last year. I would, however, like to point out that 3 of the 4 p...

grapesmoker

I've been thinking of doing something similar on the Berkeley site, but haven't had time. I was considering using a php/HTML frontend and a SQL backend; php and MySQL integrate pretty flawlessly and the Berkeley servers that host our site are already set up for it. One vision I had for this was that...

grapesmoker

I recently announced that BLaST, J'Accuse, Terrier Tussle, and the Harrisson Bergeron open will all be participating in a packet swap for their respective tournaments in late April. Astute observers will have noted that two of the four aforementioned tournaments are being held on April 23rd. While I...

grapesmoker

I'm guessing Seth and I, due to our shared experience, are going to have mostly similar views on these topics. More thoughts on science... WKB approximation: This one also feels like a pretty hard question.... Anyway, huzzah for real quantum mechanics, and down with particle physics. Seconded. I eno...

grapesmoker

Actually, reading Frankel's original post, I'm now very curious to know who will be on Berkeley's team at ICT. If anyone knows, hearing it would be great. The Berkeley team will consist of Paul Lujan, Kenny Easwaran, David Farris, and myself. Regretably, due to financial and time concerns, Jeff Hop...

grapesmoker

While I'll comment on the rest of the set later, I'd like to mention that despite not being a philosophy major (my interests in it are purely recreational), I answered the Austin tossup off of the clue on "Other Minds." Though I'm in no position to judge the relative importance of Ayer vs....

grapesmoker

Hello, Berkeley's Late Spring Tournament, VCU/Virginia's J'Accuse tournaments are officially going to do a packet swap. In addition, the University of Texas and Boston University and will be holding tournaments on April 23rd and 30th, respectively, and will also be included in the packet swap. Final...

grapesmoker

Mike, thanks for doing a great job on the science questions. I thought that this was a uniformly excellent set in terms of science.

grapesmoker

Berkeley checking in.

grapesmoker

For several reasons, I am willing to give a lot of credibility to NAQT on the issue of lower-finishing teams qualifying ahead of higher-finishing teams on the basis of the S-value, but the reliability of any statistic goes out the window when one has to make an essentially arbitrary correction for ...

grapesmoker

As far as teams' records go, the S-value assigns a statistical score to each team based on their tossup performance (adjusted for opponent strength) and their bonus performance (unadjusted). For the sake of argument, let's say it's on a scale from 0 to 100. For teams where the bracket rule doesn't ...

grapesmoker

As I've said before, I think this year's SCT was far better than last year's or that of the year's before last. Overall, there was less "cuteness" and fewer academic subjects transformed into non-academic tossups. I agree with a couple of Matt's points, especially those regarding flag bonu...

grapesmoker

Not that I have any pull with NAQT, but I wouldn't mind if all of quizbowl went on strike with regards to the writing of hockey questions until the NHL returns. I knew something was missing this year, and I couldn't quite pinpoint it, but that's it. There were mercifully few hockey questions (maybe...

grapesmoker

You don't seem to be saying that it wasn't really pyramidal, just "step-pyramidal" where everyone knew the same part. The first part was clearly harder than the giveaway. I think elements of J.P. II's literary career are pretty well known, though the question could have been better had it...

grapesmoker

John Paul II could have considered been any number of things, I would guess--religion, history, current events, literature, miscellaneous, etc.. It wasn't really a bad question, I didn't think. It doesn't really matter what category it falls in, it's just a poor question. I can understand using som...

grapesmoker

Overall, I was generally happy with the quality of the SCT questions, and I ordinarily prefer ACF, for what that's worth. I was pleased by the superb organization of the USC folks, who not only kept everything on schedule but got us through an average of 22 or 23 tossups per round. One flaw that I d...

grapesmoker

Hello, Last year's BLaST distribution seemed to work quite well for everyone, so I am staying with it (with one minor exception). It is detailed below. Packet Distribution Literature 5/5 Science 5/5 History 5/5 Religion/Mythology/Philosophy 2/2 Fine Arts 2/2 Social Science 1/1 Geography 1/1 Pop Cult...

grapesmoker

Hello everyone, The University of California, Berkeley Quiz Bowl Club is please to announce the second installment of its Berkeley Late Spring Tournament, BLaST II: Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash. This tournament will take place on the UC Berkeley campus on April 30th, 2005. Last year's BLaST even was ve...

grapesmoker

All Shakespeare is worth knowing (although whether it's all accessible, especially in high school, is debatable). The amount of scholarship and copies in circulation of even "King John" or "Two Noble Kinsmen" places the "obscure" works of Shakespeare in the highest ech...

grapesmoker

Name dropping might be useful. Probably Fred, you are the only person at your school who has heard of Kevin Olmstead, but probably almost everyone has heard of Ken Jennings. Drop the name, make the connection, and suggest if they work hard and learn stuff, they can not only compete with the Ivy Lea...

grapesmoker

Everyone's heard of the people in your first list. I'm a pretty decent generalist, and I never would have heard of anyone on your second list (except Bulgakov) if I didn't have an archive of old hardcore tournament packets to read; in fact I've actually only heard of Akhmatova, Bloch, and Brodsky i...

grapesmoker

I have been keeping a short list of things that I hear too much about relative to their importance. This is not to say that these things are completely unimportant, just that they are overrepresented. This is mostly just my subjective impression but I haven't posted it in a while. It also includes ...

grapesmoker

I'd like to start a general discussion on the question of which topics people feel are either over-represented, under-represented, or mis-represented in quizbowl, with possible solutions certainly welcome. This might end up being an agitation for expanding the canon, so I'm not really interested in ...

grapesmoker

Better get in on the act... I'm applying to a bunch of physics departments: U of Chicago, NYU, Columbia, Berkeley, Maryland, Brown, Northwestern, UIUC, and Michigan, with that being roughly my order of preference. I sucked it up my first two years so I don't know how likely I am to get into any of t...

grapesmoker

The claim that Chicago will not succeed on Yaphe's questions is absurd: if anything, Subash certainly knows enough of both the ACF canon and Yaphe's pet question topics by now to be ridiculous on this set, and he'll have excellent science/mythology help from Teitler. I hope that this will not be th...

grapesmoker

Seeing as how I'm being flattered in this thread for no good reason, I feel obligated to reply with several points. 1) I don't think Farris reads this board (and I'm sure Pennington doesn't), but I think the rumors concerning their retirements are not exaggerated. The feeling I get from Farris is th...

grapesmoker

(I should note one exception: in algebraic topology, two very good texts that exist in print are fully available online, Allen Hatcher's at http://www.math.cornell.edu/~hatcher/ and Peter May's at http://www.math.uchicago.edu/~may/CONCISE/ConciseRevised.pdf . In the unlikely chance that anyone read...

grapesmoker

I'm not voting in the poll because the national tournaments are too far in the future to figure out what the lineups are going to be, and my vote is therefore variable. If either Andrew or Subash play with Chicago, my vote would have to be for them. Otherwise, I'd vote for Berkeley. I don't know who...

grapesmoker

Do you by any chance have handy a chronological distribution of the questions? If not, I'll try to go through them and post it here; it would be interesting to see.

Jerry

grapesmoker

I would agree that grammar and spelling are important, and in a single packet, it's pretty easy to catch any problems. However, when it comes to editing a big tournament, and you don't have time to read every packet really carefully, I can see how these kinds of errors can just slip through under th...

grapesmoker

Hello, It's now roughly 24 hours before the ultimate deadline I set for SM packets. I currently have 9 packets in various stages of completion, 5 written by me and 4 submitted by participating teams. I'm expecting at least one or two more packets from the field, and there are several teams that have...

grapesmoker

Matt Weiner wrote:Uh...ok. Well anyway, since no one seems to know who is in charge of the Chicago version, I'll post here saying that I'm available to read, and if it's needed to balance the schedule, I am willing to play on a comedy terrible-at-science team.

I believe Sudheer is running the Chicago mirror.

grapesmoker

Matt Weiner wrote:Is there some sort of incentive for moderating at this event?

What, like a cookie? The tournament's free, so there's no incentive in the sense that if you moderate, your team gets a discount.

grapesmoker

Dan Suzman and I will be playing together. -Frank Are you guys going to send me a packet? It would be greatly helpful if you did, or at least if you get in touch with me and work something out if you're having trouble writing. Either you or Dan should contact me at jerry_v at berkeley dot edu. Jerr...

grapesmoker

The second issue comes to mind with the way that academic tournament announcements on the Yahoo board seem to have to compete constantly with excessive announcements for novelty trash tournaments (e.g. Tournament by the Sea) and irritating posturing for publicity from TRASH itself over every little...

The Quizbowl Resource Center

Search found 4641 matches

Re: difficulty

BLaST deadline clarification

Berkeley/J'Accuse/etc. mirror announcement

BLaST II: packet guidelines

UC Berkeley announces BLaST II: Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash

over-, under-, or mis-represented topics in QB

Re: online physics/mathematics

Science Monstrosity update

Re: The Obvious