The Quizbowl Resource Center

Chimango Caracara

-The prohibition bonus felt harder than most other AmHist. -I think the question on sarcophagi could have used a prompt on "tombs" I'm glad you enjoyed many of the questions you mentioned! The Prohibition bonus originally specified that Meyer Lansky was a leader of the Jewish mob, but I r...

Chimango Caracara

I remember being confused that tossup on "tragedy of the commons" used "this model" as a pronoun. I've always thought of the tragedy of the commons being more of a general scenario, which could be formally modeled in multiple ways. Sorry about that, while the tossup generally ca...

Chimango Caracara

First of all, I would like to apologize again for the problems with my questions mentioned here and in the other thread. I’m very sorry if any of these issues ruined your experience with the tournament. I’m also sorry that many of my bonuses were on the longer side; as a player I often dislike terse...

Chimango Caracara

I was also curious as to whether the "Light" question in science was physics, chemistry, or other science. Chemistry. I greatly enjoyed the vast majority of the questions in this set, but I was a little confused as to why there wasn't a prompt on either aldose or ketose on the bonus part ...

Chimango Caracara

There's no hard and fast rule. If all the philosophers were recent 20th century philosophers of science few people have heard of and then there's the cliff with Newton, the question would have problems; I think it'd be reasonable to complain about a hose or being unclear. (I feel this way a little ...

Chimango Caracara

I agree with Will Alston about the "freshness" of the questions. (I was particularly excited to see Old Europe coming up after hearing about it on Patrick Wyman's podcast .) I think the editors made it more difficult than Fall the correct way: have a good number of questions that wouldn't...

Chimango Caracara

I enjoyed reading this set! There were a lot more good ideas than I could list, but I remember particularly enjoying the bonus on fantasy coffins and the tossup on creoles. [10] In the guru–shishya system, students lived at gurukulam while supposedly using these scriptures to learn mathematics and ...

Chimango Caracara

I'm not sure if Olivia would agree with me here, but I think answers like "that time of the month" should just be rejected. To use a significantly more extreme example for rhetorical purposes, a hypothetical bonus part on black people would not accept or prompt on the n-word--all normal q...

Chimango Caracara

Could I see the bonus on Brahmans whose first part was flowers? The middle part confused us a lot - my teammates and I were under the impression that upanayana represent part of the transition to becoming a Brahmin, and we were quite confused when the answer was schooling. I'm not sure that the clu...

Chimango Caracara

(e.g. Ashalaho and Ashshipíte seemed similar enough to Ashkúale for a moderator to recognize a knowledgeable player's answer). This is illuminating and, I think, a very unusual philosophy of answerline acceptability. In general we give points for saying what's in the answerline, not for sounding kn...

Chimango Caracara

It’s not war, but Ammon Hennacy’s opposition to this practice led Dorothy Day to argue that Christians should defy it in The Catholic Worker. This opening clue would have baffled me had I been playing. I know that Dorothy advocated that the Catholic Worker houses not take advantage of the tax-exemp...

Chimango Caracara

My main concern with the set involved its answerlines, many of which were long and complex but did not address answers that a knowledgeable player might reasonably give. Often the answerline listed a lot of synonyms & related terms to the main answer, but didn't take the important step of consi...

Chimango Caracara

Here are the scores from tonight's reading of TBD's packet. Mike Sorice did extremely well! Mike Sorice: 9/3/3 150 Taylor Harvey: 3/1/0 55 Jon Pinyan: 0/3/0 30 Avinash Iyer: 2/0/1 25 William Golden: 1/2/2 25 Erik Christensen: 2/0/2 20 Michael Coates: 1/0/0 15 Kevin Lei: 1/0/0 15 Michael Zhuang: 1/0/...

Chimango Caracara

I will read the packet by TBD on the Discord tonight at 6:30 Pacific/9:30 Eastern.

Chimango Caracara

I was also confused by a number of odd pronoun choices or pronoun switching in tossups throughout this set, which I'm surprised that nobody else has commented on because I recall my teammates commenting on it a couple times. For example, martyrdom was described as a "practice" initially, ...

Chimango Caracara

A rather major error (ok, maybe I'm being a tad cartoonishly over-invested in my niche interests here in calling it "major) I noticed was in the religion question on Iran (I think it was a religion question). While I was over the freaking moon to hear a clue on Ibn al-Rawandi/Book of the Emera...

Chimango Caracara

stuff about chickens Nick, the chicken thing is an example of a model organism that I would argue is famous but not as knowable as other ones we tossup like, say E. coli. As far as I can tell, I was responding to John's point with that example. I don't know why you're even referring to Cane Ridge R...

Chimango Caracara

Sure, so I don't look at it like "is this the 7th hardest tossupable answer on Gass*" or not. While I certainly do factor in giveaway difficulty into account, I ask myself if the topic is knowable. Personally, my (gambling) gut tells me that very, very, very few people know anything about...

Chimango Caracara

Joseph Conrad I don't want to pick on this particular question too much, but maybe the thought process it reveals reflects on the rest of the tournament. I wrote a question for the seeding packet in last year's Gorilla Lit on "Typhoon," because I'd seen it around a great deal, read it and...

Chimango Caracara

Will and Ike, you both raise good points, and I know how frustrating it is to only retroactively recognize a clue from a book you've read, especially one you liked. I tried to make all my clues both evocative and interesting, both to help players who have read the works recall them, and to interest ...

Chimango Caracara

I have to agree that many of the common links were excessively hard. The vision for this tournament that John laid out was to have common links which would have early clues about works that are worth knowing but that don't come up much, but later clues about canonical works, in order to incorporate...

Chimango Caracara

Anyone who would like to have the cleaned-up Modern World questions, for this or other events, can email me to get a copy. There are 10 packets of 20 tossups and bonuses and one additional packet of 20 tossups. I tried to salvage as many questions as possible, but I apologize in advance if I overloo...

Chimango Caracara

I can get rid of the problematic Modern World questions and organize the hopefully-not-terrible ones into new packets for anyone who is interested in them.

-Nick

Chimango Caracara

Stats will be posted as soon as I have all the files in my possession. Thanks to everybody who helped staff this event. I have heard from multiple sources that Blake, Bruce Arthur's non-quizbowl playing friend, was threatened during the first round by a member of Matt Weiner's team after that playe...

Chimango Caracara

Hi everyone, I'm very sorry that this tournament was such an unpleasant experience. While I am gratified to hear that people apparently liked at least some of my questions, I do feel responsible for failing to fix all the problems with other questions in the set. I spent a long time editing Kirk's q...

Chimango Caracara

I can't really defend my actions. For fairly petty reasons, I made a bad decision that ended up inconveniencing a lot of people, and I'm very sorry about that. I hope that everyone can move on from this incident and not let it tarnish a tournament that, question-wise, was one of the most interesting...

Chimango Caracara

I apologize to the teams to the teams who were impacted by our team forfeiting. I would like everyone who is angry at Cameron to note that he had to drive us to New York on Friday, got less than 6 hours of sleep Friday night and then didn't get back to the hotel until about 1 AM last night. He need...

Chimango Caracara

I apologize to the teams to the teams who were impacted by our team forfeiting. I would like everyone who is angry at Cameron to note that he had to drive us to New York on Friday, got less than 6 hours of sleep Friday night and then didn't get back to the hotel until about 1 AM last night. He neede...

Chimango Caracara

I thought there were a lot of cool answerlines in this tournament. I especially liked the questions on gene duplication, the TCR, calmodulin, hybrid sterility and C-H bonds.

Chimango Caracara

It looks like I'll be able to make it to CO. I like writing quizbowl questions better than playing quizbowl, so if you'd like someone else to write your entire packet (except music, probably) for the earliest deadline, you should put me on your team. I can't promise great things in terms of playing,...

Chimango Caracara

I was coming here to comment on the heavy weighting of protein/molecule-related questions (I wasn't even going to touch the ecology distribution...), but it looks like the Berkeley mirror unfortunately just didn't get to some of the more physiology-based tossups (hearing, phagocytosis, PSI). I do t...

Chimango Caracara

Just as a note, Sinan and I brought up the difficulty of the bio and chem bonuses several times in playtesting. I'm not sure if any of the bonuses were changed with our feedback, but it'd be a bit frustrating if they weren't. I did make several bonuses (e.g. the neurobiology one, the trp operon one...

Chimango Caracara

What exactly did people neg with on the protein trafficking tossup? I buzzed when I heard some heat shock proteins (hsp70 and BiP?) and orientation and decided to answer with something along the lines of inserting transmembrane proteins. This can partially be attributed to me mixing up consecutive ...

Chimango Caracara

I was coming here to comment on the heavy weighting of protein/molecule-related questions (I wasn't even going to touch the ecology distribution...), but it looks like the Berkeley mirror unfortunately just didn't get to some of the more physiology-based tossups (hearing, phagocytosis, PSI). I do t...

Chimango Caracara

I'm by no means an expert on evolutionary biology, but I thought that the clues in the eusociality tossup made it very difficult to distinguish between the answer you wanted and closely related concepts like altruism and kin selection. Those were both promptable throughout. Here is that tossup: In ...

Chimango Caracara

So, I don't know that much about chemistry or biology, but I felt like the bio and chem bonuses shaded significantly harder than the rest of the questions. It hurt us at the end of the day to lose Richard Yu, who was the one person on our team who really had deep chemistry knowledge; without him, w...

Chimango Caracara

I might post something more later, but one complaint I had with tossups on the LUMO and Photosystem 1 was that these tossups made it very clear to me pretty early that it was one of two possible answers in both cases (HOMO or LUMO, PS1 or PS2). If I'm playing against Billy Busse, Ashvin or Eric, I'...

Chimango Caracara

There are some problems with the early clues in the T cells tossups. CLIP and MHC class II presentation are features of professional antigen-presenting cells (dendritic cells, Langerhans cells, macrophages, B cells and some weird epithelial cells like those in the thymus). The TCR of CD4+ T cells IN...

Chimango Caracara

I've thought about the microstates bonus part a bit, and I still don't think there's any way I would be able to come up with "microstates" after hearing that. This might just be because I'm dumb, though, so maybe check with some other people to see what they thought about it? I used prett...

Chimango Caracara

I've thought about the microstates bonus part a bit, and I still don't think there's any way I would be able to come up with "microstates" after hearing that. This might just be because I'm dumb, though, so maybe check with some other people to see what they thought about it? I used prett...

Chimango Caracara

I guess future tossups on chickens can talk about disordered hyperuniformity.

Chimango Caracara

I enjoyed the increased proportion of EEB questions in this tournament, but at the same time would be opposed to seeing those topics receive significantly increased representation in all tournaments. Your questions on these topics were very interesting, and the ones I knew anything about seemed goo...

Chimango Caracara

I wrote all of the Biology and Chemistry for this tournament. Gautam gave me a lot of helpful feedback on my questions, but mostly allowed me the freedom to write them as I intended. Obviously, this tournament's Biology distribution had a greater proportion of ecology and evolution than is typical. ...

Chimango Caracara

The splicing bonus part should say "post-transcriptional" rather than "post-translational." Sorry for not catching that.

Chimango Caracara

Here is my packet in case anyone else is interested in it.

Chimango Caracara · Re: Triacontakaipentagonline (12/21/13) My packet is essentially done.

My packet is essentially done.

Chimango Caracara

It's looking like we won't have a full team, so you can play with us, Ted.

Chimango Caracara

9. The zombie effect must be accounted for when studying the remanie or derived types of these objects. William Smith pioneered the identification of strata using them, whose namesake principle of succession is essentially an application of the principle of superposition. The field of taphonomy is ...

Chimango Caracara

I can write some questions for this.

Chimango Caracara

I think you have to distinguish between the accessibility of clues and the accessibility of answerlines. For example, "bladder" is a really easy answerline, but I would say it's one of the less accessible organs to toss up in terms of clues because (in my experience) you don't learn about ...

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