The Quizbowl Resource Center

Nabonidus

[Whoops, I didn't see that power/neg ratios were already included in the OP. Please delete this post.]

Nabonidus

In terms of state capitals in which to have your Greyhound bus catch on fire, Montpelier's got to be pretty low on the list.

Nabonidus

McGill's history/math/econ/art player, Sam Baker, couldn't play this year because he forgot to apply for his student visa.

We replaced him with Daniel Lovsted (our top DII scorer) for ACF Regionals, but he couldn't make it to Nats.

Nabonidus

I agree with Rob. In addition to the Shakespeare clue (which gave me the unfortunate experience of having "Kenneth Branagh!" shouted into my ear from a distance of several inches) the dentistry scene from Marathon Man is really famous and I actually thought the middle part of the question ...

Nabonidus

Here's the tossups in Editors' Six: Fifth Column, Candida, Baudolino, malaria, Oberlin College, Black and Tans, Licinius, Abydos, cross section, arrythmia, metric space, coupling reactions, the Seven Sages, Baba Yaga's hut, A System of Logic, Delacroix, concerto grosso, Great Britain, inflection, G...

Nabonidus

Oh, I don't disagree from an in-game perspective. By "odious" I merely mean "boring, time-consuming and probably not useful outside of quiz bowl".

Nabonidus

Well, I agree with Marshall. I'm not a history player, but the notion of "list-based studying" sounds pretty darn odious to me.

Nabonidus

I would just like to point out that Bela Tarr is one of the most lauded directors alive - Satantango even made it into Sight & Sound's poll of the top 50 films ever - and I'm actually quite surprised that multiple people in this thread consider him more obscure than some of the other stuff in th...

Nabonidus

That moment when you punctuate your last tossup at ACF Nationals by waving a physical copy of Dictionary of the Khazars at the reader.

Nabonidus

15 minutes ago, when I discovered that none of my teammates knows what a fig is.

Nabonidus

The Last 20 Stanley Cup Winners wrote:I'm staying at McGill to do a MSc in Human Genetics.

Copycat.

Nabonidus

Thanks both to the tournament runners and for WUSTL for accommodating us at the last minute. It was fun playing with you, Will and Vinay!

Nabonidus

The Last 20 Stanley Cup Winners wrote:
Windows ME wrote: MCGILL
Underrated team
Thanks, but I don't think we can impress you at nats. We don't scale up well enough yet.

Joe snores like banshee /
His teammates get zero sleep /
"We don't scale up well"

Nabonidus

Sam said doesn't have it either. But if you're still looking for it, I think we can deduce from your first two guesses that the current owner is devilishly handsome.

Nabonidus

Here's a video which reflects my own feelings about the McGill team.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNO72aCnVr0

Nabonidus

Sorry if this is a bit off topic, but I'm not familiar with the American side of quiz bowl and can't be sure whether Bruce is simply being sarcastic. That said: You will get status, people will respect you in spite of other flaws you might have . . . if you stick with writing long enough, you'll get...

Nabonidus

Example of awesome: I gave McGill's Derek So a really cool book on what-ifs in American History as a prize a couple years back (we gave out double-prizes if a player won a scoring-prize and was on the winning team at that time). I would love to compete to try to win it back. I actually have no memo...

Nabonidus

Those figures count double majors twice, and McGill obviously isn't representative of universities in general . . . but I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio of budding biologists to callow chemists was somewhere around 5:1. I think the point Stephen Liu made in another thread is relevant: quizbowl ...

Nabonidus

For what it's worth now that we're throwing around theories of bio and chem distribution, in Fall 2014, McGill (the only school for which I have stats ready-to-hand, for obvious reasons) had: 378 generic Biology undergrad majors 275 Microbiology and Immunology 485 Anatomy and Cell Biology 356 Physio...

Nabonidus

Thanks for the tournament Nick et al.!

Nabonidus

I'm a bit confused about why something like Ukraine would be antipromptable for a question including clues about Roerich whereas - for example - several of us in Canada were straight-up negged for answering Samos to the Ionia question, on the basis that it included clues from elsewhere in the region.

Nabonidus

The United Stats of America wrote:nickname

I believe ours was Majorly Cute Guys Interested in Looking for Love.

Nabonidus

I'm not entirely sure, but I think a mod has edited a question addressed to me over my preceding multiple-paragraph post rather than simply editing it and responding to it. I'm assuming this is accidental...? I would never even have seen it if I hadn't come back to the thread to bookmark Joelle's li...

Nabonidus

Was there a tie for first? Two teams have the same record in what appears to be the final standings. Round 8 is not in the standings yet. There was still a tie for first, but McGill A won the tiebreaking final with a pretty lopsided score. Nice! McGill is like one of those proud shark parents where...

Nabonidus

http://hsquizbowl.org/forums/download/file.php?id=786 [ Moderator note: The above image shows the text that was in this post before I (Shan) accidentally edited rather than quoted it. Thanks to Victor Prieto for bringing back the post. In response to the post, I asked what Derek was proposing that ...

Nabonidus

This is a better resource for finding old questions, although it's not complete, either. I don't really understand why we want to get more people who don't know and don't want to know bio to "have more fun" on bio questions? Knowing who caught the heaviest pike is not testing bio knowledg...

Nabonidus

You are wrong when you say people don't write on interesting things. If biochem in general was uninteresting to me, I wouldn't be a student in the Department of Human Genetics. My observation was that tossups on animals often seem more engaging to club members "who don't normally do well at ty...

Nabonidus

Being in the middle of practice, I just polled our current batch of recruits and was told that "Questions where everyone knows what the thing in the answer line is feel like they involve more critical thinking." Because polls of the teeming masses should be used to decide the future of qu...

Nabonidus

I will be so happy if they ever tossed up something like Mothers Against Decapentaplegic, but as a science student, I couldn't care less about English kings. A history, literature, social science or RMP tossup is just as blank to me as a molecular biology tossup is to "your average humanities ...

Nabonidus

Being in the middle of practice, I just polled our current batch of recruits and was told that "Questions where everyone knows what the thing in the answer line is feel like they involve more critical thinking."

Nabonidus

As I wrote in my response to Eric, I don't claim that people in general have a greater amount of knowledge about zoology compared to cellular and molecular biology. This is pretty clearly not the case given the fact that so many club members study cellular and molecular biology. I do claim that, in ...

Nabonidus

To add another thought - since quiz bowl is indeed "a way of introducing academically important topics to a wider audience", we should probably be at least a little concerned that (according to Quinterest) hugely important keystone species like sea urchins and gray wolves have never appear...

Nabonidus

The Tom Clancy analogy is nonsense. Zoology may have more cachet in middlebrow culture than biochem does, but that has no bearing on its importance as an academic discipline. There is no inverse relationship between the two. Knowledge of the ecological problems posed by invasive species like the can...

Nabonidus

"This animal is easily devoured by meat ants, since they are immune to the toxin that provides its only defense against predators..." People who study molecular/cell biology and biochemistry will tune out if a tossup began like this. Average people may not tune out, and this defeats the p...

Nabonidus

I think zoology is a pretty good topic from a quizbo-utilitarian point of view, since it has the potential to be simultaneously much more engaging and much more susceptible to real knowledge from people who don't normally do well at typical bio questions. Compare, for example: "The CY707A gene ...

Nabonidus

Are you sure this wasn't just their polite way of telling you not to write questions on subtypes of pike? Yes. If "SONIC HEDGEHOG," "Abscissic Acid" and all the other commonly-asked about bullshit of the biology world can be asked about, someone should know something about a ver...

Nabonidus

Split from the writing prizes thread --Mgmt. I wrote a toss-up on Northern Pike (Esox Lucius) for ACF Fall 2012. It had some legitimate clues, like its hybrid with the Muskellunge (Tiger Muskie), its record specimen (caught in Germany), and its frequent deaths from choking on larger prey, but it al...

Nabonidus

I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to strike a balance between "fun" and "formal" if you kept names to pluralized nouns. I imagine most of them would end up being historical or literary references. You're definitely right about that trademark bit, though.

Nabonidus

I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to strike a balance between "fun" and "formal" if you kept names to pluralized nouns. I imagine most of them would end up being historical or literary references. You're definitely right about that trademark bit, though.

Nabonidus

Speaking of names, does anyone think the game might sound more "official" to certain interested parties if we had actual team names like in intermural sports? Weird idea, I know, but people already have lots of fun coming up with names for open tournaments. I don't see that expanding the p...

Nabonidus

Speaking of names, does anyone think the game might sound more "official" to certain interested parties if we had actual team names like in intermural sports? Weird idea, I know, but people already have lots of fun coming up with names for open tournaments. I don't see that expanding the p...

Nabonidus

To briefly return to something that was discussed a little earlier: I actually think the notion of "studying for quizbowl" presents a pretty negative image, at least to the extent it sounds like rote memorization rather than multipurpose leisure activities like listening to podcasts or re...

Nabonidus

To briefly return to something that was discussed a little earlier: I actually think the notion of "studying for quizbowl" presents a pretty negative image, at least to the extent it sounds like rote memorization rather than multipurpose leisure activities like listening to podcasts or re...

Nabonidus

To briefly return to something that was discussed a little earlier: I actually think the notion of "studying for quizbowl" presents a pretty negative image, at least to the extent it sounds like rote memorization rather than multipurpose leisure activities like listening to podcasts or rea...

Nabonidus

To briefly return to something that was discussed a little earlier: I actually think the notion of "studying for quizbowl" presents a pretty negative image, at least to the extent it sounds like rote memorization rather than multipurpose leisure activities like listening to podcasts or rea...

Nabonidus

Speaking once again as a devil's advocate, it's arguable whether superteams are "as much paying customers as the other players" if the latter are receiving significantly less value for their money. But even if we assume that it is equally rewarding to listen to other people do trivia, the ...

Nabonidus

It seems to me one's perspective on what one gets out of quizbowl alters one's perspective on superteams. If the goal is to win, then they obviously make a lot of sense (and, like any other team, people try to form the strongest teams they can). If the goal is to unite people who have often played ...

Nabonidus

This weekend was indeed quite fun. Thanks to everyone who helped make it happen, and also to whichever deity protects travellers who take rideshare offers from Craigslist.

Nabonidus

Yes, despite our team's initial Skype issues this was a very fun tournament. Kudos to everyone who put it together.

Nabonidus

I actually have always had the problem of not picking up and retaining character names at all well during movies; not sure if other people experience this. Obviously that renders watching adaptations a bit less useful for these purposes. I certainly experience that. I wonder if this occurs because ...

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