The Quizbowl Resource Center

grapesmoker

I wanted to flag one more question that I thought was problematic. Bonus 1 in Packet 2, last part, reads: [10m] Recent models of cognition tend to use a framework drawing on the work of this mathematician, promoted by Joshua Tenenbaum and others. Stan and BUGS are common softwares for implementing a...

grapesmoker

With regard to that question on the Internet: I was more or less sitting on that answer from the get-go because the opening clue made it sound like information was being transmitted with light beams. But I also know a bunch of stuff about Loon for professional reasons so I would likely have buzzed t...

grapesmoker

I wrote both these questions, so sorry about that. Of course the Barkley one was meant to be a bait and switch while the other was just meant as a joke leading into a normal CE bonus; you will get your 2011 Mavs tossup next time hopefully. Hey, I can neg on many different NBA tossups! For example, ...

grapesmoker

I really enjoyed this tournament; one can always quibble with this or that clue in some individual questions (and I have) but overall this was a very polished, high quality set and I'm very glad to have been able to come out to NW and play it. It definitely bore the stamp of its authors; I didn't mi...

grapesmoker

I would like to register a minor complaint about the tossup on the d'Alembertian. On the following clue: In classical field theory, applying this operation to some function of the wavenumber, k, is equivalent to multiplying the function by negative k squared. I buzzed in and said "Laplacian.&qu...

grapesmoker

Shoutout to whomever wrote that tossup on SBF that allowed me to directly translate being too online into 15 points. Also loved the "Frog and Toad" answer in, I think, the same packet; everyone else on my team was definitely confused at what was going on but that's because none of them hav...

grapesmoker

Which building is the tournament going to be in?

grapesmoker

I'd personally be willing to pay a higher fee so that more can go towards a mirror fee given that quiz bowl tournaments are generally pretty underpriced for open teams given th amount of work that goes into writing and editing. Same. I'm very inelastic with respect to time but very elastic with res...

grapesmoker

My friends, this is thin gruel indeed. I understand that one can be frustrated with slow payments or even whatever stunt Will pulled, but that seems like hardly the sort of thing that should lead you to revoke a mirror that you've already granted. So setting that aside as not really a serious reason...

grapesmoker

Emerging for a brief moment from my eternal slumber, I would like to say: this fucking sucks. I don't know anyone at UMD and I'm not going to speculate on anyone's motives, but to announce a mirror, have people make plans to attend, and then retract it (and without actually coming in personally to e...

grapesmoker

More importantly, I am looking for a team to play on so if your team is missing people and/or you would like someone to regale you with old-timey stories between matches, get in touch.

grapesmoker

We are now playing with Connor and Jakob.

grapesmoker

Dallas Simons and I are looking for teammates.

grapesmoker

Well, this is unfortunate. I'll try to ping various people that might be able to help out but no promises.

grapesmoker

If it's in NYC, I'll play whatever whenever.

grapesmoker

jonah wrote:Monday Begins on Saturday, and Sunday Comes Afterwards

I approve of this team name.

I don't suppose anyone has any plans to mirror CO, say, maybe in the greater NYC area? You know, for those of us (me) who got rekt by the airlines.

grapesmoker

Hi friends! I wrote and edited all of the jazz and computer science in this set (with the exception of a guest submission from Ike). This was my first time doing this much work at this high of a level, so I'm looking forward to hearing about what people thought- always feel free to PM/DM me in addi...

grapesmoker

dang it someone play this tournament with me

grapesmoker at gmail dot com

grapesmoker

Also it's hard for me to have this much sympathy for ACF when most of what you're doing is taking questions that teams wrote and repurposing them. This is one of the most remarkably ignorant things ever posted on this forum. /awakens from slumber It's not merely ignorant; it's downright disrespectf...

grapesmoker

wcheng wrote:Jonathan Magin and I have formed a team and are looking for two more players to join us. A science player would be greatly appreciated!

sup

grapesmoker

I would like somebody who was on the Berkeley team in the early to mid 2000's, when it was organized along the lines of the Roman Republic with Consuls and Praetors and such, to come post in this thread. Apparently I have been summoned in my official capacity as An Old. This organizational structur...

grapesmoker

I'm curious about the motivation behind answer lines like "photography books by Robert Frank" and "essays by George Orwell" -- especially the latter, since Robert Frank hasn't really done much else, as far as I know. Why not just "Robert Frank" or "George Orwell&q...

grapesmoker

For whatever my old man thoughts are worth... Yeah, this set was hard. Was it some crime against quizbowl? Nah. It's not the CO I most cherish, but I appreciate that Ike had the opportunity to put his vision into practice. I thought that there was a lot in this tournament that was neat and interesti...

grapesmoker

Hey, is it too late to get in on this?

edit: ah, nevermind, can a mod delete this please

grapesmoker

This is still happening at Hamilton, right?

grapesmoker

Unfortunately I can't actually make this event. Sorry to be missing it.

grapesmoker · Re: Virginia Summer Open – 8/5/17 I'm tentatively interested.

I'm tentatively interested.

grapesmoker

Let's say it is free-riding (I'm not convinced but let's suppose for the sake of argument). What then? Is it inherently a terrible situation? It doesn't seem to me like quizbowl is in dire straits because of it, so even if NAQT is free-riding somehow, what does this entail and why should we be conce...

grapesmoker

A number of people in this thread have said a thing that I don't think is correct, which is that NAQT questions are somehow sufficiently different from normal circuit questions that not having them to practice on constitutes a disadvantage. In fact, NAQT's questions are more or less the same as othe...

grapesmoker

Ok, putting my ACF member hat on, here are two things: My team was threatened with sanctions from ACF! ACF's structure is pretty amorphous and allows a wide latitude for discretion to the head editor, but just to be clear, no single individual has the authority to speak on behalf of ACF in this mann...

grapesmoker

Ok, at this point, everyone who attended either Nationals or Regionals should have received an email with the survey link. We'll be taking responses for another week (that is, until Friday, May 5th), at which point I won't close the survey but I'll probably stop checking it every day, and ACF will s...

grapesmoker

At 20 packets, this year's Nationals set was shorter than the past several. I'm curious as to the reasoning behind writing a shorter set and I'm interested in opinions as to whether Nationals sets should contain closer to 20 or 25 packets. This is part of the survey I put out; so far it seems most ...

grapesmoker

While maybe it's not a good idea to dramatically increase difficulty in finals packets, I think it's wrong to say that teams don't expect that to happen. Finals packets are hard, you know they're hard, you know playing in the finals is going to be difficult and you'll be up against a tough opponent....

grapesmoker

If you came to Nationals, you just received an email asking you to fill out a survey. If you didn't come to Nationals but could potentially have (i.e. you played Regionals but either didn't qualify or turned down your bid), we'd appreciate it if you also filled it out. It shouldn't take you more th...

grapesmoker

If you came to Nationals, you just received an email asking you to fill out a survey. If you didn't come to Nationals but could potentially have (i.e. you played Regionals but either didn't qualify or turned down your bid), we'd appreciate it if you also filled it out. It shouldn't take you more tha...

grapesmoker

2010 winner with Stanford Kristiaan de Greve is Belgian, I believe.

grapesmoker

In what has become an annual tradition, I'm happy to post videos of a few games, including the final. Unfortunately this year I wasn't able to get as many as I usually am, but hopefully people will still enjoy these. Thanks to Dylan Minarik for acting as official ACF videographer while I was reading...

grapesmoker

But seriously, I don't think one additional game over two days is a huge ask. If a lot of people think this truly a terrible imposition, we can revisit this question, but given that most teams were pretty happy to play these games, that doesn't seem super unreasonable to me.

grapesmoker

Cheynem wrote:Am I parsing Jerry correctly to note he never gets tired? I guess that's why he's sadistic.

MORBO HAS NO USE FOR YOUR CONCEPT OF FATIGUE

grapesmoker

hi this tournament was very good kthx

grapesmoker

Aaron Manby (ironmaster) wrote:What are the roadblocks with ACF Nationals moving to a hotel?

the fact that we're not made of money

grapesmoker

I'm not sure anyone is upset about more quizbowl. We didn't have to break these ties, but since we already had ties we did have to break, there was no additional time needed to run these games. Quiz bowl is always better than the lack thereof. What has gotten into your head, Mr. Reed? Have you ever...

grapesmoker

I mean that ICT has more schools, total. So if one school fails to bring buzzers, there are still more schools that might do so. And in fact we did end up relying on a smaller proportion of teams to bring a larger number of buzzers, so when those teams didn't bring them we were much more vulnerable....

grapesmoker

In that case, I think it would make more sense for ACF to just figure out why NAQT doesn't have the same issue with teams not bringing buzzers to nationals. That seems much easier than coming up with complex schemes about buying/storing thousands of dollars' worth of buzzers and then funding those ...

grapesmoker

We were constrained by the number of teams that wanted to come (and the number of packets). We had a 3-stage format for 42 teams. As the field dropped to 40 teams, I drew up a 2-stage limited single-bye schedule for the tournament. (A format I will write up at some point.) Is there any thing in par...

grapesmoker

I'm not suggesting this as the only plan of action for solving the buzzer dilemma, but perhaps a section of the site selection process could be devoted to buzzers. Just add a section to the bid form asking "how many house buzzers do you have?" and "are there local high schools with w...

grapesmoker

I was a little confused by the scheduling. Barring travel mishaps that aren't the fault of any team or ACF, the total number of teams seemed an odd choice. Was the tournament constrained by the rooms available? Originally, we had a schedule worked out for a 42 team field, which is what we thought w...

grapesmoker

As a spectator, I really enjoyed the tossup on "venture capital" firms, which I thought was testing just the right kind of mix of historical and contemporary knowledge. Good job, whoever wrote that.

grapesmoker

Cody wrote:
grapesmoker wrote:2014 PADAWAN
2015 Claude Shannon
2015 VCU Open
The first two are only available in LaTeX. I can probably generate a docx of 2015 VCU Open soon-ish.

Actually, you can just send me the LaTeX; I strip out all the doc stuff anyway in processing.

grapesmoker

Continuing my search for packets in Word format:

2014 PADAWAN
2015 Claude Shannon
2015 CO visual arts
2015 Feynman's BONGOS
2015 RILKE
2015 SHEIKH
2015 VCU Open
2014 VCU Open
2014 College History Bowl
2014 Modern World

Send 'em if you got 'em.

Search found 4636 matches