Minnesota/Penn Open IV Discussion

[Cheynem]

This is clear as there is no other mirrors. I don't have the questions, so someone else can post them or whatever.

In general, Rob did the literature and fine arts, I did the European and American history, Eric did science and world history (although due to time crunch, I think I did about half of the world history), and the RMP/SS/trash was kind of a mishmash between Rob, Eric, me, and Bernadette. Andrew Hart wrote a few questions in various topics. Auroni Gupta chipped in a couple, I believe, social science questions. Matt Bollinger wrote two myth questions. James Lasker wrote some science questions. Patrick Liao wrote a few, mostly history, questions. Saajid Moyen wrote several literature and fine arts questions.

I'll let others comment on their work. I thought my portions were okay, but could have been better. There were certainly a number of questions that ended up having misplaced clues or general transparentness, particularly when I was trying to fill out portions of the history or social science that I was not overly familiar with. In regards to my general philosophy regarding the history, I wanted to produce challenging questions that were in the end gettable and interesting, which explains I guess the large preponderance of "event" or "country" tossups (although there were also a lot of people). There were some very, very hard "have you heard of this?" questions, but I tried to keep those to a minimum and instead go deeper in historical topics I think people study. I also wanted to explore some sort of underasked portions of history. I also attempted to use more concrete clues than last year. I was more or less satisfied with the bonus structures, although I did believe I cranked some hard parts way too hard.

[Gautam]

I had a great time playing this tournament. I thought some packets were significantly more difficult than others but, of course, such are the vagaries of submitted packets.

I did notice that a couple of bonus parts had already come up as answers at previous MOs. I don't really have a problem with that happening at tournaments per se, but it could have given me a slight advantage, what with me having written several questions for previous MOs. Specifically the Isambard Kingdom Brunel bonus comes to mind. This wasn't a major issue, though; by and large the answer choices were newer and interesting, or had good clue structuring to neutralize whatever putative advantage packet-studying/writing for previous would have conferred unto me.

I think MO continues to achieve a good balance between staying the course of the canon and introducing new 'real-world' things. I am hesitant to impute evaluations of tournaments unto others, but it seemed like my teammate Alex, who is a fairly well-read person but seems not to be super-invested in studying for quizbow/the canon theory/whatever, had good fun picking up some of the humanities stuff. He had a couple of great early buzzes, too, which I was happy to see. If a tournament of this difficulty can allow folks to do that, I say it has done a good job of being accessible.

[The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus]

In retrospect I had a couple really bad ideas for this tournament, but overall I'm very happy with how it turned out. I await people's criticism.

[Cheynem]

There's been a lot of tournaments this year talking about "going back to the classroom," and I'll attest that for a lot of the history, that wasn't my goal at all. While I respect and admire and think that such a goal is needed in many tournaments, I tried to pick a lot of topics that you might not study in the classroom but that if you like or are interested in history, you'd learn or know things about (so tossups on criminals, the west, disasters, etc.).

The copy editing proved to be pretty sloppy (and this is a self-slam because I was one of the copy editors). We definitely didn't have enough time as I would have liked to do another once-over of all the questions. Sorry about that.

To the surprise of no one, I wrote the tossup on the Tipton Hotel, even though it was in Bruce's packet.

[Kenneth Widmerpool]

Auroni Gupta chipped in a couple, I believe, social science questions.

I chipped in the tossups on Menelaus, Taliesin, Lacan, Edmund Phelps, Monadology, and Fichte last minute.

[Charbroil]

Could someone post the packets? Thanks!

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

Mike Cheyne and I are notably not fans of each other's work; when I heard that he was editing most of the history, I accordingly adopted minimal expectations for this tournament. They were far exceeded. Apart from a few wacky ideas (On to Ottawa, March on Versailles), a few transparent questions (Revolutionary France, Empire of Brazil), and a few really famous clues that were placed early (assassination of Nicholas II), I can't really find much to complain about.

Also, I have criticized Eric Mukherjee history in the past for having too many questions on really hard Asian things, and I found that was mostly absent from this set. Did Eric Mukherjee really write a tossup on the Hongwu emperor? A few years ago he would have never written on anyone that famous in an open tournament. That would have been a tossup on some Champa emperor in 2009.

[grapesmoker]

Quick impressions: I thought this was a very good tournament. One of the things I want to commend the editing team for, which I usually bitch about, is the quality of the science (at least in my areas). Overall the quality of the science and the answer selection was very good, if also quite hard at times. I think tossups on Emile Post are not a great idea in general, but that was one of the few questions that I thought was problematic. Specific comments will have to wait until I have the set in hand, but the one real complaint I have about the questions is that some of them had very, very steep difficulty cliffs. I understand and approve of the idea of writing deep questions on canonical answers like G.E. Moore, but you have to give people something that they have a chance of having read, instead of five or six lines of very deep clues and then a really easy clue from Principia Ethica. I can't tell whether this problem affected any particular categories, but the tossups on Moore, Taliesin, and Fichte all seemed to have this issue, and I noticed it in other questions as well.

[PISTOL SHOOTING FOR LADIES]

Quick impressions: I thought this was a very good tournament. One of the things I want to commend the editing team for, which I usually bitch about, is the quality of the science (at least in my areas). Overall the quality of the science and the answer selection was very good, if also quite hard at times. I think tossups on Emile Post are not a great idea in general, but that was one of the few questions that I thought was problematic. Specific comments will have to wait until I have the set in hand, but the one real complaint I have about the questions is that some of them had very, very steep difficulty cliffs. I understand and approve of the idea of writing deep questions on canonical answers like G.E. Moore, but you have to give people something that they have a chance of having read, instead of five or six lines of very deep clues and then a really easy clue from Principia Ethica. I can't tell whether this problem affected any particular categories, but the tossups on Moore, Taliesin, and Fichte all seemed to have this issue, and I noticed it in other questions as well.

The Fitche question I take the blame for, since I toyed with moving a title early, never moved it back, and forgot to fix it up. Sorry about that. I do disagree with your assessment of the Moore tossup for the most part, though; the first couple of clues describe and then state Moore's paradox. The clue that straddles the powermark is from "A Defence of Common Sense", which, from what I've read, is a rather important essay, and doesn't really call for being labeled a "very deep" clue. Looking back, I do agree that I could have included another clue from the Principa, but I had hoped that the yellow example would be as easily remembered by others who had read it as it was for me.

[RyuAqua]

On the whole, this was a pretty fantastic tournament which had plenty of interesting, standard, hard, easy, new, and old topics -- all covered at a reasonably intense difficulty. I noted a pretty major discrepancy between the harder difficulty of editors' material and the easier difficulty of the submission-heavy packets (at least in number of tossups going dead), so it'll be interesting to see if stats actually bear that out.

There were more instances of "have you heard of this? ANSWER: _no_" bowl than I would have wanted, particularly in biology but a little in other sciences and categories as well. I'm sure janus kinases are Important to some subfield of biology, but when there's really only one or two elite biologists playing this tournament (Selene, Gautam) wouldn't it be better to write six lines about them in a ten-line tossup on "kinases" broadly construed than to write a tossup on what's literally called just another kinase in some scientific literature? Post correspondence, SRP, and GPI all went similarly dead at our site, despite the questions imploring us to figure them out at the end. I'd be interested to see what one of those two people thought of the science in this set, and whether equally-Real tossups on more gettable answer lines would have been just as good for everyone.

[Magister Ludi]

Quick impressions: I thought this was a very good tournament. One of the things I want to commend the editing team for, which I usually bitch about, is the quality of the science (at least in my areas). Overall the quality of the science and the answer selection was very good, if also quite hard at times. I think tossups on Emile Post are not a great idea in general, but that was one of the few questions that I thought was problematic. Specific comments will have to wait until I have the set in hand, but the one real complaint I have about the questions is that some of them had very, very steep difficulty cliffs. I understand and approve of the idea of writing deep questions on canonical answers like G.E. Moore, but you have to give people something that they have a chance of having read, instead of five or six lines of very deep clues and then a really easy clue from Principia Ethica. I can't tell whether this problem affected any particular categories, but the tossups on Moore, Taliesin, and Fichte all seemed to have this issue, and I noticed it in other questions as well.

The Fitche question I take the blame for, since I toyed with moving a title early, never moved it back, and forgot to fix it up. Sorry about that. I do disagree with your assessment of the Moore tossup for the most part, though; the first couple of clues describe and then state Moore's paradox. The clue that straddles the powermark is from "A Defence of Common Sense", which, from what I've read, is a rather important essay, and doesn't really call for being labeled a "very deep" clue. Looking back, I do agree that I could have included another clue from the Principa, but I had hoped that the yellow example would be as easily remembered by others who had read it as it was for me.

I think the clue about "esse et percipi" is from Moore's "The Refutation of Idealism" which is probably his third or fourth most famous essay. Like Jerry, I thought this was an excellent tournament and I'll post later about all the great things this tournament did, but it's one flaw was a lot of the tossups on thinkers/writers/creators that were overly deep and top-heavy. For example, the Moore tossup had a bunch of leadin clues for 3-4 lines, a couple clues about The Refutation of Idealism" and then one clue about Principa Ethica and then the most famous fact about Principa Ethica, so it would have played better if there were a couple more clues from A Defense of Common Sense or Principia Ethica. And I think this problem affected playing experience, so when I heard the question title drop Vocation of Man midway through the question I hesitated because the other thinker questions had been so deep. I'll have to look over the set to see how valid my initial reaction was for the rest of the thinker questions, but this issue was only a small flaw in an otherwise excellent tournament.

[PISTOL SHOOTING FOR LADIES]

Oops, my bad (again).

EDIT: I have a feeling I could reply again and we could go back and forth debating about the relative famousness of Moore's ideas and essays, including the ones I cited in the question, but that would derail the discussion a bit further. I think we can both agree that it could have used another middle clue to play out better for higher level philosophy players.

Thanks for the critiques; it helps me become more aware of what people actually learn in philosophy classes that are different from my own/don't have syllabi or other such literature available online.

[No Rules Westbrook]

I thought this tournament was very well done, and I appreciate the editors pumping out 16 packets of well-written stuff. I'm happy to have made it out for this set.

Like Bruce, Mike Cheyne's history is not the most beneficial for my knowledge base, but apart from some of the more adventurous ideas, I don't really have any complaints. The "Vocation of Man" error-in-placement really only stands out because there weren't too many other clearly erroneous decisions on clue placement. (cue Hart jibing that I'm now reviewing qb tournaments on a clearly erroneous standard).

Also, I nearly got kicked in the head during a spirited riot on Minneapolis public transport. Ask me about it sometime. It's a qb wiki-worthy hoot.

[RyuAqua]

One more thing: If the "according to Wikipedia" throwaway gag wasn't a dead horse already, I certainly feel like hearing it for the sixth time in one day certainly doesn't help me want to keep it alive.

[Matt Weiner]

Most of the questions in this tournament were good. Some were not. Some smacked of an elementary mistake in writing where the writer fell too in love with his awesome answer line idea and wouldn't let it go even after it became obvious that it's unwritable; the tossup on "stereotype threat" that went "here's a bunch of unimportant names who worked on this thing, it's a social science thing that has to do with race, ftp buzz now" is an example of that.

B-, would play again.

[grapesmoker]

So, I generally enjoy the social history questions, but one in particular struck me as a problem, and that was the tossup on the "march on Versailles." On that question, Yale negged with "the storming of the Bastille," the question went to the end, and I believe I said something like "the bread riots at Versailles." I was ruled incorrect as I guess "march" was required; I lodged a protest but it didn't end up mattering so it was never resolved. I'm wondering if questions of this type really need such restrictive answer lines. I know I learned my lesson on this issue with the overly demanding answer line on the tossup on army desegregation at Nats last year, and it seems to me that this is somewhat similar. I recognize that a march did indeed take place (as did the rioting) but this strikes me as a case of a colloquial name and requiring it is excessive. This was especially odd since the SAVAK tossup explicitly instructed the moderator to accept either the name or the description of the answer, which seems like the exact opposite of what should happen.

[Cheynem]

The march on Versailles is an example of me radically underestimating something's difficulty in that I thought it was accessible (which, it seems like it wasn't) and had a fairly recognizable "name" (the [Women's] March on Versailles). I should have included something in the answerline like "accept anything that indicates a protest or social disturbance at Versailles." That was a mistake on my part (I noticed a few other examples of such answerlines cropping up in the stuff I wrote too--this can be tricky for things that have no name, although it's up to the writer to include detailed answerlines in that instance).

For SAVAK, this was an example of me falling in love with an answerline and then I got cold feet that it was too hard and wimped out. In effect, this I think made it too easy in that if you realized it was Iran, it was fairly easy to fraud.

[RyuAqua]

The women's march on Versailles is plenty accesible at an event like this; it gets a solid few sentences in most high school AP Euro textbooks and people who learn more about them will know more. I was an idiot for negging it. Jerry is nonetheless correct that he should have gotten 10 for knowing that such an event occurred.

[Gautam]

What was the econ distribution for this tournament, by the way? I am sure there were a few questions, but I can only recall a tossup on Phelps... which, by the way, was hard. I unfortunately negged with Phillips, but it wasn't converted on the rebound.

[grapesmoker]

Yeah, I didn't have any problem with the answers themselves, just to be clear about that. It's just that the answer lines seemed... miscalibrated. A point for future reference, as it were.

Also, and I say this though it totally helped me a lot, but I thought there was a lot of astro in this tournament. Seems like maybe a little more math or other science could have been used here.

[Cheynem]

I think econ ended up being one of the casualties of the fact that social science was one of the last topics written. Bernadette and I were trying to finish it off and neither of us knows much economics, so that also explains the preponderance of tossups on "essays I've read" as well as on faux social science tossups like "Larry Summers" (which did have an econ clue).

I'll keep in mind the point about answer lines. Thanks for the feedback on that.

[SirT]

Also, and I say this though it totally helped me a lot, but I thought there was a lot of astro in this tournament. Seems like maybe a little more math or other science could have been used here.

I did notice a general paucity of Earth Science in this tournament, which was rather saddening.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

The women's march on Versailles is plenty accesible at an event like this; it gets a solid few sentences in most high school AP Euro textbooks and people who learn more about them will know more. I was an idiot for negging it. Jerry is nonetheless correct that he should have gotten 10 for knowing that such an event occurred.

I'm sure most people know that there were all sorts of protests and marches during the French revolution, many of them involving destitute or repressed groups like the poor, laborers, women, etc. But I dispute that most people are aware that there was an event called "The Women's March on Versailles". My claim is that this simply isn't sufficiently reified for quizbowl. It would have been much better off as a common link tossup on women, for example, or a common link on Versailles that discussed several events that happened there, or something like that.

Common-link tossups in general are just a great way to use interesting clues about things that don't have names, or whose name-having status is unclear or disputed.

[grapesmoker]

I think econ ended up being one of the casualties of the fact that social science was one of the last topics written. Bernadette and I were trying to finish it off and neither of us knows much economics, so that also explains the preponderance of tossups on "essays I've read" as well as on faux social science tossups like "Larry Summers" (which did have an econ clue).

Oh yeah, so about that Larry Summers tossup: the first clue of that question is very poorly worded:

While serving in one position, this man’s institution paid millions to protect an employee and friend, economist Andrei Shleifer.

This basically means: "this dude was someone at Harvard." Now, I guess I don't know many other members of Harvard's econ department (I would have been put out if this had been a tossup on Mankiw) so I pulled the trigger there, but that's a really, really bad way of pointing to Summers (and if you're going to mention LTCM obliquely, why not mention it explicitly?). Actually, now that I look at it, that whole question is pretty bad, with his "ladies R dum" comments squarely within power and a whole bunch of weird and obscure clues surrounding it.

[Cheynem]

Yeah, that was a classic example of a last minute tossup. The lead-in was something of a weasel phrase--I'm not sure why I didn't say "while president of one institution" or something like that, nor am I sure why I didn't say LTCM.

I'll argue the other clues aren't that obscure--they're about him arguing with Cornel West, which at least in my admittedly American Studies biased world, was more memorable to me than Summers talking about women Driving Like This as engineers. Apparently to many others (especially scientists!), the latter is more memorable. I'll admit I was wrong.

[Ukonvasara]

I'll have fuller remarks and thanks and stuff later, but I just wanted to pop in to apologize to everyone for fucking up the Mictlan tossup by having a late-night space-out and adding a clue about Xibalba to it. That's 100% my fault, and to anyone that was unfairly screwed by it, I'm sorry.

[grapesmoker]

The clue about Pritchett is not something that rings any bells for me, and obviously I don't know the name of West's album. I do know about the controversy between him and West, but pretty much everything that isn't "this guy had a spat with Cornel West" is more or less noise to me. I don't want to be all "I don't know this so it isn't important," but I'm just not sure who those clues are useful to. Seems like there's plenty of information out there about stuff that Summers has done, so having half the question be about his thing with West and then having players decipher the indirect references within those clues seems suboptimal.

[Cheynem]

Sure. Again, it was kind of thrown together and mostly intended to ask about his spat with Cornel West.

[Tees-Exe Line]

I enjoyed the tournament, and predictably I'll join whatever chorus is lamenting the lack of econ. I also negged Phelps, inexcusably since he was tossed up at MO last year. In my defense I'll argue that he's not among the famous economists whose own research is still read by grad students. I, for instance, only know that he won a Nobel Prize recently and that stuff originally attributable to him is categorized in my mind under either "the Solow/NCG model" (Golden Rule savings rate) or "the Phillips Curve/Lucas Islands Model" (adaptive/rational expectations-adjusted Phillips Curve). Altogether, let's have more econ, and less Phelps.

As for Summers, I powered it, and the reason why is that I had read this excellent article, which gives a detailed account of one instance of the corruption that pervades my own field. I provide it because I'm both benevolent and self-hating.

http://janinewedel.info/harvardinvestig ... torMag.pdf

[Mike Bentley]

The set was a lot of fun. Except for the science (which seemed too hard, although I generally feel that science is too hard in most tournaments compared to the rest of the set) it did a good job of keeping things both interesting and reasonable.

I think some of my interests in history match those of Mike's, so I enjoyed most of the history in the set. There were a few clunkers (the Brazil tossup really narrowed the possible answers by describing the country as an Empire) but also a lot of good questions and clues.

It seemed like the other arts distribution had more tossups on musical works than visual works (i.e. opera rather than architecture), but I haven't gone through and counted. I'd encourage arts editors to try to balance this better, as this is something I've observed in a few tournaments.

[Thundercougarfalconbird]

Okay, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, but over the course of the entire tournament I heard only two math tossups and zero math bonuses, a situation that is really kind of shocking to me, because I've always thought math to be at least as important as, say, physics or chemistry, each of which was 1/1. Was there a conscious effort made to reduce the amount of math in the distribution at this tournament? If so, why? And if not, how did it math end up having an average distribution of 0.17/0?

[The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus]

There was 3/4 math out of 16/16. Math is a minor science in quizbowl.

[Masked Canadian History Bandit]

I wrote the following questions, mostly Commonwealth-related, with some editing by Mike Cheyne. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Was the Canadiana too hard and/or inaccessible? Was the Group of Seven bonus too egregious? Was the On-to-Ottawa Trek too obscure? Were there neg baits for better known Canadiana stuff? I know one of my 3rd Ypres clues neg-baited Matthew Chan from Princeton to buzz in with Vimy since both had the Canada Corps using a creeping barrage on a namesake ridge, because I didn't feel the need to differentiate since almost no one outside from Canada knows about and would therefore buzz in with Vimy.

Tossups

History
On-to-Ottawa Trek (Editors 3)
Winter War (Editors 4)
Romanos IV Diogenes (Editors 4)
Third Battle of Ypres (Editors 5)
Nepal (Editors 5)
New Democratic Party of Canada (NDP) (Editors 7)
U2 Crisis (Editors 8 + NYU)
Aurelian (Illinois/Yale)
Sir Wilfred Laurier (Maryland)

FA
Moishe Safdie (Editors 4)

Bonuses

History
Uganda-Tanzania War/Idi Amin/Nakivubo Pronouncement (Editors 1)
Operation Gladio/Aldo Moro/Italy (Editors 4)
Corinth/Periander/Cypselus (Editors 5)
Beersheba/Australia/Ismet Bey (Editors 6)

Lit
Water Margin/Song Jiang/Fang La (Editors 8 + NYU)

FA
Group of Seven/Pine tree(s)/Fauvism (Editors 3)

Trash
Italian Wikipedia/Internet Watch Foundation/Jimbo Wales (Editors 5)

[Masked Canadian History Bandit]

Okay, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, but over the course of the entire tournament I heard only two math tossups and zero math bonuses, a situation that is really kind of shocking to me, because I've always thought math to be at least as important as, say, physics or chemistry, each of which was 1/1. Was there a conscious effort made to reduce the amount of math in the distribution at this tournament? If so, why? And if not, how did it math end up having an average distribution of 0.17/0?

Math has to share the 1/1 Other Science sub-distribution with stuff like Earth Science, Geology, Statistics, Oceanography Astronomy, CS, and other sciences. I was responsible for the randomization of packets and I'm pretty sure that there was no trend of putting Other Sciences to the end (in fact, I tried to make sure that Other Science would not end up in the last handful of bonuses).

There were probably some bonuses that were on math but weren't heard because there weren't enough answered tossups in your room.

[Tees-Exe Line]

There was 3/4 math out of 16/16. Math is a minor science in quizbowl.

Which answer lines are you counting as math? Because as Ben said, it seemed to us that there was much less pure math and CS. How many astronomy questions were in the tournament?

Obviously the presence of various disciplines will vary with their representation on the editing team, and I don't want to become a distribution Nazi. But the lack of math, CS, and economics obviously disadvantages my team, and I don't want this kind of bias to become excusable at, say, ACF Nationals. Furthermore, the notion that Canada is more important than Mathematics is just obviously wrong.

[SirT]

Which answer lines are you counting as math? Because as Ben said, it seemed to us that there was much less pure math and CS. How many astronomy questions were in the tournament?

3/4 math is just fine for 16/16 other science. I count 3/2 math just in my notes and I didn't write down everything and probably didn't even hear all the bonuses.

I don't want to become a distribution Nazi. But the lack of math, CS, and economics obviously disadvantages my team, and I don't want this kind of bias to become excusable at, say, ACF Nationals.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

Regarding Canadiana, I almost certainly would have negged the 3rd Battle of Ypres tossup with "Vimy" if I had not already foolishly negged it with "Gallipoli" on the ANZACS/artillery clue. I don't know about other Americans, but I know that there is something called Vimy Ridge that Canadians are extremely proud of for some reason, even if I don't really know the reason.

I thought the Laurier tossup was a good idea, even if I got beat to it by Jerry.

[The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus]

Here is the other science, separated by category:

CS:
Emil Post
XOR
Knapsack problem
Hidden Markov Model / Bayes Theorem / Viterbi Algorithm
pancake sort/knuth/SAT
Halting problem/ oracle machine/ Chaitin's constant
IP/ UDP/ SOAP

Math:
Joseph Liouville
Feit-Thompson Theorem
Central Limit Theorem
Lagrange Multipliers
Complete graph/ four/ Turan's theorem
Cosets/Lagrange's theorem/ normal subgroup
Torus/ KAM theorem/ quasiperiodic
Null hypothesis/ false-discovery rate/ Neyman-Pearson Lemma

Astro:
Space Dust
Galaxies
Star formation
Venus' Atmosphere
Hubble constant
Kepler Mission
Termination Shock/ RTG/ IBEX
Sloan Digital Sky Survey / CCDs
Two-stream approximation / Radiative Transfer / Eddington

Earth Science:
Mica
geochemistry/ Gouldschmidt/ pyroxenes
Metallicity K40/ Inner Core/ Remnance
basalt/mid atlantic ridge/tablemount
geostrophic/isobar/baroclinic

Stuff I hate:
Bats
plesiosaurs/gastrolith/liopleurodon

[Cheynem]

Besides the American and Euro history (of which Patrick, Eric, and Rob wrote some questions too), I wrote the following:

World history--Pizarro family, Akbar, P. Diaz, Noche Triste bonus, source of the Nile bonus, SAVAK, Nabonidus bonus, Rajiv Gandhi, fall of Baghdad.

Literature--Jim Casy, Jack London, Graham Green bonus, Inherit the Wind

Fine Arts--Tracey Emin bonus, Thomas Hart Benton bonus, Louis Sullivan architecture bonus, Lawrence of Arabia, Dorothea Lange bonus, Truffaut bonus

RMP and SS--Lazarus bonus, Curse of Ham bonus, Bah'ai, Peter, Revolutionary France, Wilberforce-Huxley debate, Jonathan, Barthes bonus, 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Young Man Luther, Lonely Crowd bonus, Lewis H. Morgan, The Clash of Civilizations, Elizabeth Loftus, Larry Summers, Pedagogy of the Oppressed bonus, Notes on Camp, Arthur Schlesinger

Trash--SF Giants bonus, J. Fred Muggs bonus, Lemmings, Buddy Ryan, Red Skull, Bye Bye Birdie, The Godfather Part II, TIpton Hotel, CCNY basketball bonus

Tiebreakers--Manderley, Philippine Sea bonus, Sinclair Lewis bonus, Spencer Perceval bonus, F. Scott Fitzgerald bonus, Nathaniel Hawthorne, black power bonus, John Osborne bonus, SLA

[grapesmoker]

I wish that Kepler tossup hadn't begun with "These totally Scandinavian people are in charge of it." Maybe this didn't actually help anyone (I only processed this after the fact) but it felt gimmicky. The bonus on the KAM theorem was great, as were the tossups on metallicity and the quadrupole.

edit: on the other hand, tossups on Romanus Diogenes IV seem misguided.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

Here is the other science, separated by category:
Stuff I hate:
Bats
plesiosaurs/gastrolith/liopleurodon

For the record, yes, I did get all 45 possible points on this.

[Masked Canadian History Bandit]

Regarding Canadiana, I almost certainly would have negged the 3rd Battle of Ypres tossup with "Vimy" if I had not already foolishly negged it with "Gallipoli" on the ANZACS/artillery clue. I don't know about other Americans, but I know that there is something called Vimy Ridge that Canadians are extremely proud of for some reason, even if I don't really know the reason.

I thought the Laurier tossup was a good idea, even if I got beat to it by Jerry.

My tossup was already pretty long when I wrote it, and I didn't think any Americans would know what Vimy was, or else I would've added something like "A modified version of the "Vimy Glide" creeping barrage was used by Sir Arthur Currie's Canada Corps..."

Apologies to Matthew Chan and anyone else who negged with "Vimy Ridge."

And for those who care: "We went up Vimy Ridge as Albertans and Nova Scotians. We came down as Canadians" - anonymous Canadian veteran.

It was the first time all four Canadian divisions fought under the banner of the Canada Corps in WWI. With Sir Arthur Currie's "Vimy-glide"- an extremely close-knit creeping barrage, they took a defensive ridge in less than half a day that both the French and British had failed to take for at least a combined four times . It's kinda like the Canadian version of Gallipoli for the Australians/New Zealanders or (to a lesser extent?) Concord for Americans.


At what point was Laurier powered in your room?

on the other hand, tossups on Romanus Diogenes IV seem misguided.

I was given the answerline to do. All of the clues except for one or two dealt either with the Battle of Manzikert or its immediate aftermath. It might've been better off just being on Manzikert, which is more well known.

[Cheynem]

Marshall Steinbaum got Laurier off of the first clue, but the question seemed fine to me.

[Pilgrim]

Feit-Thompson Theorem

This seems like a a terrible idea for a tossup. I have taken two classes on group theory, one at a graduate level, and this was never even mentioned in either of them. I also am amused by the fact that this set also contained a group theory bonus in which all three parts are several orders of magnitude easier than this answer.

This is another subject entirely, but I'm part of the crowd that thinks giving math equal footing with the minor sciences results in it being grossly underrepresented.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

At what point was Laurier powered in your room?

Jerry recognized the first clue, and then spent the next few clues trying to remember where he knew the first clue from before buzzing in and receiving 15 points.

[Masked Canadian History Bandit]

At what point was Laurier powered in your room?

Jerry recognized the first clue, and then spent the next few clues trying to remember where he knew the first clue from before buzzing in and receiving 15 points.

That's a really, really impressive buzz. Anything on the Crow's Nest Pass Agreement is pretty obscure, even for Canadians (though I expect most would be able to pin down the general era and get it off the second or third clues, but couldn't be able to get the PM off the bat).

EDIT: Grammar

[Tees-Exe Line]

I had never heard of the Crow's Nest Pass Agreement, but Clifford Sifton was mentioned and I know who he was. He is, in fact, extremely important in Canadian history, though by virtue of his being Canadian, unimportant altogether.

[Ukonvasara]

First, I wanted to thank everyone who helped pull this tournament off--Eric, Saajid, Patrick, and James from Penn as well as Mike and Bernadette, especially everyone who stayed up late filling in gaps and randomizing packets; Andrew Hart, Matt Bollinger, and Auroni Gupta for donating their time and energy to give us some questions; and all of the teams who played, for submitting generally solid questions and for continuing to support this tournament.

Here's what I wrote from scratch, not including the 30 lit bonuses in the editors' packets (all but the Graham Greene and Water Margin ones):

American Lit: A Few Figs from Thistles, Ferlighetti, The Recognitions, The Long Goodbye, James Weldon Johnson bonus*

Brit Lit: "Batter My Heart, Three Person'd God", Julian Barnes, Finnegans Wake, "As I Walked Out One Evening", Titus Andronicus bonus*

Euro Lit: The Weavers, Cela, Sheridan le Fanu

World/Other Lit: Tripmaster Monkey, Waiting for the Barbarians, Gentleman from San Francisco, Oe, A. Desai, Petals of Blood, Time of the Hero, Lady Aoi*, Achebe bonus

History: John Hancock

Science: Emil Post, pancake sort/Knuth/SAT (yes, I also edited the plesiosaurs bonus, though I only changed one part of it)

Painting: Boucher, Jupiter and Thetis, Kanso/Durer bonus, Bonheur, Canaletto bonus, Feast of the Gods, Jacob wrestling with the angel common link, Friedrich bonus, Delacroix, Les Nabis, Reynolds/Kaufmann/Zeuxis, fairy painting bonus

Music: John Adams, Ma/Lark Ascending/Tartini, Bruckner symphonies, Schubert bonus, Haydn string quartets, "modern Finnish composers" bonus, Liszt, Ives/Glazunov/Bazzini, Verdi's requiem, Bach secular works bonus, Spohr/Handel/Judas Maccabeus, carillon bonus

Other FA: Tristan chord bonus, Kokoschka, Romeo and Juliet/Macmillan/Nureyev, jazz operas bonus, Elixir of Love, Prince Igor, Mucha/Art Nouveau/Tiffany, Henze, Leaning Tower of Pisa bonus, Philip Johnson, Girl of the Golden West, IM Pei bonus

Myth: Iktomi, Tyche/cornucopia/Palamedes, Muses fucking you up bonus, Gefjon/Heimskringla/Freyja, Hrungnir, Ullikummi/yokai/Typhon, turning into a bird, Heliopolis/Khnum/Khepri, 400 in Mesoamerica bonus, Simurgh, American folklore bonus, animals in Celtic myth bonus (I also added that perhaps-ill-advised part on the Yasakani to the Shinto bonus, among other things)

Religion: Swedenborg, Marprelate bonus, Hildegard of Bingen, Dasara bonus

SS: Naomi Klein bonus, habitus bonus, self-esteem bonus, Might is Right bonus, Naomi Wolf bonus, Herbert Spencer bonus, educational theorists bonus, Munsterberg bonus*

Phil: Hegel bonus, Categories/Porphyry/Boethius, Bertrand Russell, Bergson bonus, qualia bonus, Todorov bonus

Trash: Wiz Khalifa, Colossal Cave Adventure, Isambard Kingdom Brunel bonus, "I Fought the Law", Old Man Murray bonus, Rubaiyat bonus, ? and the Mysterians bonus, families in the NFL bonus, Weezer's Blue Album, fictional mountains bonus

The asterisk means I converted it from a tossup to a bonus or vice versa.

[The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus]

This seems like a a terrible idea for a tossup. I have taken two classes on group theory, one at a graduate level, and this was never even mentioned in either of them. I also am amused by the fact that this set also contained a group theory bonus in which all three parts are several orders of magnitude easier than this answer.

Yes this was a really bad idea on my part, and I wouldn't write about something of this magnitude again.

This is another subject entirely, but I'm part of the crowd that thinks giving math equal footing with the minor sciences results in it being grossly underrepresented.

How would you propose to divide it?

[setht]

I wish that Kepler tossup hadn't begun with "These totally Scandinavian people are in charge of it." Maybe this didn't actually help anyone (I only processed this after the fact) but it felt gimmicky.

I'm not really sure what this means. Could you clarify?

I wrote the Kepler tossup and after seeing it play in one room and talking with some people in other rooms at the Minnesota site I think it probably wasn't a good idea for a tossup, but for reasons that don't seem connected with Jerry's note here. Did anyone get this one before the giveaway?

-Seth