This leader sent disabled or homeless children to children’s homes in places like Cighic and Siret. As a result of this leader’s Decree 770, women who gave birth to ten or more children were declared “heroine mothers.” In this leader’s final speech, a crowd taunted him by chanting “Timisoara,” in reference to a recent uprising. This man urged for an intensification of socialist ideology in a 1971 speech that was named the July Theses. This man succeeded Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej as the head of his country’s Communist Party, and he employed the Securitate secret police. This man and his wife Elena were executed on live TV on Christmas Day 1989 after attempting to flee the country. For 10 points, name this dictator who led Romania from 1967 to 1989.
This leader settled homeless children in places like Cighic and Siret. This leader’s Decree 770 declared mothers of ten or more children “heroine mothers.” In his final speech, a crowd taunted him by chanting “Timisoara." This man urged an intensification of socialism in a 1971 speech named the July Theses. This man succeeded Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej as the head of his country’s Communist Party, which employed the Securitate secret police. He and his wife Elena were executed on live TV on Christmas Day 1989 after attempting to flee the country. For 10 points, name this last Cold War dictator of Romania.
An uncommon stereochemical result in reactions following this mechanism is explained by Saul Winstein’s concept of intimate ion pairs. For ambident nucleophiles, this is the reaction mechanism followed by the more [emphasize] electronegative atom, according to Kornblum’s rule. This is the mechanism followed by reactions involving benzyl or allyl triflates. Experimentally, reactions with this mechanism proceed faster at (*) tertiary carbons than at secondary carbons. This mechanism typical works best in polar, protic solvents, such as ethanol or water, since those solutions speed up solvolysis in this mechanism’s rate-determining step. Reactions with this mechanism are best run with weak nucleo·philes, and they produce a mixture of retention and inversion products. For 10 points, name this nucleophilic substitution mechanism in which a carbocation intermediate is produced.
For ambident nucleophiles, this is the reaction mechanism followed by the more [emphasize] electronegative atom, according to Kornblum’s rule. This is the mechanism followed by reactions involving benzyl or allyl triflates. Experimentally, reactions with this mechanism proceed faster at (*) tertiary carbons than at secondary carbons. This mechanism typically works best in polar, protic solvents that speed up solvolysis in this mechanism’s rate-determining step. Reactions with this mechanism are best run with weak nucleo·philes, and an initial deprotonation step forms a positively charged intermediate. For 10 points, name this nucleophilic substitution mechanism that produces a carbocation intermediate.
I think it's in fact more tiring to listen to a set of six line questions that are a series of short declarative sentences than a set of eight line questions that have a certain natural-natural-language flow to them.
I find long tossups more fun, as you said you do too. We're certainly not alone in this. Sitting through things you don't know and are not going to know is a pretty important skill for most quizbowlers, and if you can't develop it early then perhaps this is not a game for you.
heterodyne wrote:I definitely agree with what both Auroni and Stephen said. In addition to the important gameplay effects of that linguistic "padding", I think there's a less important but still real aesthetic effect. I think it's in fact more tiring to listen to a set of six line questions that are a series of short declarative sentences than a set of eight line questions that have a certain natural-natural-language flow to them.
I'm on mobile, so I can't quote efficiently, but I don't think cutting leadins because they "just distinguish Maryland from Yale from Stanford" is a good idea. Sure, most of your clues shouldn't serve that purpose, but if this is a regular difficulty set your clues should serve that purpose just as they distinguish between Minnesota and Chicago B later in the question. If you have multiple leadin clues then you have a problem, sure, but one clue you think is only buzzable by a few teams isn't the end of the world.
As a larger point, I think that there should be a limit to how much we as a community change our practices to accommodate those who don't like quizbowl all that much - as evidenced by the fact that these hypothetical people are put off by fairly standard college tossup lengths. I find long tossups more fun, as you said you do too. We're certainly not alone in this. Sitting through things you don't know and are not going to know is a pretty important skill for most quizbowlers, and if you can't develop it early then perhaps this is not a game for you.
Auroni wrote:had I not been called out by the opening post.
"Two characters flip a coin only to find it repeatedly comes up heads at the beginning of a play by this author named for those two characters. That play is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead."
"Two characters repeatedly flip a coin heads at the start of his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead."
heterodyne wrote:I'm on mobile, so I can't quote efficiently, but I don't think cutting leadins because they "just distinguish Maryland from Yale from Stanford" is a good idea. Sure, most of your clues shouldn't serve that purpose, but if this is a regular difficulty set your clues should serve that purpose just as they distinguish between Minnesota and Chicago B later in the question. If you have multiple leadin clues then you have a problem, sure, but one clue you think is only buzzable by a few teams isn't the end of the world.
Yus vs. Jews wrote: (perhaps not coincidentally, about 100 characters of 10 point TNR fits on a single line). Finally, I calculated the average tossup length for a couple commonly mirrored high school tournaments this year.
IS set: ~4.25
DI SCT: ~5.00
WHAQ: 5.48
HFT: 6.00
EMT: 7.45
EFT: 7.55
Penn Bowl: 7.80
Terrapin: 7.85
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:The best college teams answer a large majority of regular questions against other top teams in the first half of the question - see Terrapin for example.
Yus vs Jews wrote:Most of the top teams powered less against other top teams. There are two reasons I can think of that could explain this: one, that teams compete more for powers in certain categories and overall power rates drop as a result, or two, that teams play more cautiously when playing closer games. To try to disprove the second reason, I looked at neg rates vs. top teams - if teams played more cautiously, I thought that neg rates should drop as well (it is also possible that they neg less because questions are powered too quickly before they neg, but I’m not as convinced about that reason). I found that negs did decrease across the board for games played between top teams. The conclusion I drew was that top teams play more cautiously when playing other top teams, and as a result, have lower power rates. My point is that games between top teams see powers on a majority of questions in spite of decreased power rates, so I don’t know if one can confidently assert that top teams play "better" against other top teams.
Yus vs Jews wrote:I don’t care about teams ranked 1 through 14 at regular difficulty, who gives a crap if they get eighteen successive tossups by the third line.
Yus vs Jews wrote:In games between teams at the very bottom of the top 20, I’ve shown here that at least fourteen out of twenty tossups per game have multiple lines in the powermarked section just whizzing right by.
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:Yus vs Jews wrote:I don’t care about teams ranked 1 through 14 at regular difficulty, who gives a crap if they get eighteen successive tossups by the third line.
The answer is that a lot of people in those top 14 teams do care, and for the most part they're the people who write tournaments.
Rococo A Go Go wrote:Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:Yus vs Jews wrote:I don’t care about teams ranked 1 through 14 at regular difficulty, who gives a crap if they get eighteen successive tossups by the third line.
The answer is that a lot of people in those top 14 teams do care, and for the most part they're the people who write tournaments.
Even if that were completely true (lots of editing teams appear to rely on retired players like yourself...) I don't think this is a positive way to think of the quizbowl community. Or maybe you just don't need the other teams and want them to go fuck off...but for some reason I suspect that if all the other teams stopped hosting or attending tournaments that are clearly not meant for them, you would find yourself scrambling to change your tune.
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