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yoda4554

I'm proposing only that choosing a Sandra Bullock movie from, say, the last ten years might give me some reasonable chance of getting 10 points. I don't care about 30; I just want a chance at 10. As a college-age male, you have a moral imperative to be able to answer any and all questions on Demoli...

yoda4554

There have been a few comments about the trash (bonuses) being inordinately hard--I'm curious which ones people had in mind. In the rounds I read (in DII and then in the bottom bracket of DI) my impression is that the trash was getting converted somewhat better than the academic stuff.

yoda4554

Let me restate this flatly and unconditionally:

yoda4554 wrote: I'll happily admit my error and let the discussion move on.

yoda4554

I don't want to get caught up in the technicalities either (there's a lot of the set yet to discuss). My impression, from both my own studies and from what I checked up while writing, was that anyone who'd actually studied this stuff would naturally respond with Zorn, because it just makes more sens...

yoda4554

[Zorn's lemma, the axiom of choice, and the well-ordering principle] aren't quite the same... I disagree. In ZF, those things are, in fact, exactly the same (equivalent, to be exact; c.f. this .) By definition, that means that literally any result you can prove with one, you can prove with the othe...

yoda4554

Writing a tossup on Zorn's lemma and not accepting, at the minimum, the axiom of choice or the well-ordering principle, is kind of silly. I wrote that one, and "axiom of choice" was promptable; well-ordering wasn't, and perhaps it should've been, but I don't think any of the clues actually apply fo...

yoda4554

As I think I've mentioned in the past, there are seriously over 60 teams on LI alone (see here: http://www.regionalquizbowl.org ; there's also a TV show and a Nassau league that add more to this) who play local league type stuff. I think the thing to focus on is getting them into some more stuff lik...

yoda4554

It would seem to me that having Matt's tournament at CO would be the most efficient way to recompense the people who didn't get to play last time, but obviously I'll yield to whatever Matt's wishes are on that front. I'd also be happy to contribute to Matt's tournament, though if his sense of ethics...

yoda4554

I mentioned I'd be interested in chipping in for writing this in the general CO thread, but as the other side tournaments are making their own threads, I suppose this should have its own, too. Is there interest in it happening at all? Has a general editor come forward? If not, are there several peop...

yoda4554

I'm happy to chip in writing the trash tournament, as I don't plan on being at the Open, so long as there are a couple other people in on it as well.

yoda4554

If I can dig up a competent sciences partner, I'm in too.

yoda4554

If you've gotten no bites on this yet, I may as well offer my hand, since that looks like a pretty nice distribution for my interests. Email me at dletzler [at] temple dot edu and we'll work things out.

yoda4554

Brief results: Though Hunter went 11-0 in the prelims, in the advantaged final, Wilmington Charter A, whose only loss had been to Hunter, won two straight games (290-240, 400-275) to take the tournament. Stuyvesant, Moravian A, and Charter B were tied in third with 8-3 records through the prelims. H...

yoda4554

The final email is out. See everyone tomorrow.

yoda4554

I'd like to set a registration deadline for next Monday, the 25th, for this tournament. If you're planning on coming but haven't registered yet, please let me know over email what your plans are, generally.

yoda4554

I prefer untimed rounds, as I am sure many do, but there is a problem with untimed NAQT tournaments. NAQT states that if not enough clocks are available a round should be played in two halves of 10 questions. An NAQT packet is 24 questions, not 20 questions. Playing only the top 20 questions may pu...

yoda4554

Incidentally, for those who care: The setup was that Delaware and Maryland broke their teams into two for an 8-team round robin, after which they recombined for a 6 team round-robin (with the exception of Charles, who joined a lonely Trevor Davis to fill out CMU's team). Out of this muck, Maryland's...

yoda4554

Bump for field update. We've got a field of at least ten, without all of the question marks added in. And may I say that it's impressively cosmopolitan: we've got at least four states represented (Bergen from NJ, Stuy from NY, William Tennet from PA, and Charter Wilmington from DE), with a possible ...

yoda4554

Bonuses on more niche things like indie music should be much more lenient with how they bash you over the head with the answer than canonical things. Like, from Penn Bowl...if you're going to write on shoe designers, make sure there's a part that people only cursorily aware of shoe designers can ge...

yoda4554

yoda4554

yoda4554

There were a host of bad question writing principles in this set. For example, one question mentioned the author of a novel still in power. Others were fond of placing stock and trivia clues (i.e. "this guy died doing this amusing thing that has nothing to do with what he's important for") before t...

yoda4554

My apologies for not responding to these yet: I've had assorted college qb and administrative issues to deal with. Updates: First, UPenn will probably be helping us staff--they have my thanks. The tournament will likely take place in Anderson Hall, which is at 11th St. and Berks Ave. in North Philad...

yoda4554

I doubt it will end up mattering, but a point of curiosity on behalf of my alma mater: since it seems like there were more than four UG teams, and since Maryland had a grad student, there should have been a separate UG champion declared, who would receive an automatic Nationals bid. Princeton seems ...

yoda4554

I doubt it will end up mattering, but a point of curiosity on behalf of my alma mater: since it seems like there were more than four UG teams, and since Maryland had a grad student, there should have been a separate UG champion declared, who would receive an automatic Nationals bid. Princeton seems ...

yoda4554

I also emailed you guys some time back to say that Temple's bringing a team.

yoda4554

Also, there were some bonuses that were very easy. I'd put forth my bonus on integration as one that was made very easy; I had Riemann (easy) / Stieltjes (hard) / Lebesgue (medium) as my three answers, but this got turned into integration (easy) / Riemann (medium) / Lebesgue (hard). Perhaps the way...

yoda4554

My feelings on the set was mixed: it certainly wasn't a bad set (it was certainly better-written overall than, say, TRASH Regionals), but there were more irritating things in it than I would've liked. The good: I was happy that people wrote a lot on non-program pieces of music, and that they general...

yoda4554

I think in terms of basic effectiveness for qb, I tend to agree with Ryan. Particularly in the humanities, having more than cursory knowledge of a topic requires reading a book, listening to a symphony, spending a long time lingering on a painting/building, etc. etc., and doing enough of that to rea...

yoda4554

Ok--actual information now: Temple University Quiz Bowl, in the heart of North Philadelphia, will host THS 1138 for high school teams on Saturday, March 1st, 2008. This tournament will use NAQT's IS-74 for questions. Here is the fee structure: +$80 first team from a school +$50 each subsequent team ...

yoda4554

A comment toward all of the people who have suggested that six-line tossups are insufficient to really delineate successfully between teams at a typical invitational. I've just looked over the packets of Titanomachy, a six-line tossup invitational I played last fall where my team ended up toward the...

yoda4554

Just for clarity, the point I was trying to make about the Milton tossup is precisely the one Jerry makes here, not that the tossup was transparent (I think it's quite good) nor that transparency is never a problem. My comparison for that was with questions like the Michael Vick one, which also requ...

yoda4554

Look, your logic is astoundingly ridiculous. We can define transparency outside of games between various people in the state of Maryland, and suggesting that the game outcomes of whoever played there somehow affect that definition is outlandish. Only joining in this in response to the invective. Th...

yoda4554

EDIT: Ignore; I missed Mike's post.

yoda4554

The title of this, incidentally, should list the date as 2/08, if a mod can fix that...

yoda4554

For teams in the Mid-Atlantic, we at the newly-born Temple qb team would like to hold an NAQT IS tourney for you all at some point at the start of our spring semester, likely in early February. A) Is there interest, and if so how much?. B) Is there a particular weekend that would work best? You can ...

yoda4554

Even third parts of bonuses should be plausibly gettable They should be, and they were, since many were converted by the most knowledgable people at the tournament: there were multiple people at the Maryland site that did indeed remember the name of the carnival. Similarly, I think there are enough...

yoda4554

Just about all of the stuff that Jerry mentioned was, granted, third parts of bonuses; Spectres of Marx came after Of Grammatology and Derrida, for instance. And much of what people have noted was too hard I would argue isn't: a guy on my team playing his first tournament described the "Something Wi...

yoda4554

Critique of Pure Reason is Kant's title (in translation), no? There's a pretty clear authority to that, and I'm perfectly fine with the convention that author's titles should be accepted exactly. I don't believe (I may be wrong) that Nichomachean Ethics is Aristotle's title--my memory from my freshm...

yoda4554

I also thought this was better than the last TRASH I attended, ~3 years back, which is not to say that I thought it was an eminently good set. I would like to second Bill's point about verbiage: people on this board tend to define question depth in terms of line-length, but that should be shorthand ...

yoda4554

Mike, your argument is somewhat different than that of Matt, Jerry, and the answer sheet: I would doubt that the work has ever been exhibited as "Anatomy Lesson Tulp," though answering that would technically have been accepted. In the case of the latter argument, I don't see why one wouldn't prompt,...

yoda4554

Someone can correct me if I'm mistaken about this, but the Rembrandt work wasn't officially titled, I don't think. If you want the full common title, you'd have to force people to get "Nicolaes" in there as well, and I've seen differences on whether people call him Dr. or Prof. or without an honorif...

yoda4554

Lu Xun was far, far from the hardest thing in the set. I'm curious to know if the harder-end stuff--e.g., Anne Finch, The Mandrake, Richard Eberhardt, Leucippe+ Clitophon--was converted, though stats seemed to suggest that most games had relatively few dead tossups.

yoda4554

A couple observations from having worked on the CO and IO Lit. tournaments. I don't hold positions either way on this, but just to bring them up... ACF/mACF tourneys typically request that no more than 3 of the 10 lit. qs in a packet be from a single century. Without having done stat crunches on thi...

yoda4554

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/world ... ?ref=world

Everyone get to work on those Canopus in Argos tossups...

yoda4554

The Band indeed had four Canadians, to one American. But the music's as all-USA as one can get. Incidentally Steely Dan = Reelin' in Years = Gag me with a horse turd... Indeed, you misspeak. To correctly expresses this mathematically: Steely Dan c [properly contains] "Reelin' in the Years" which is ...

yoda4554

I think it's clear that Steely Dan and (if we are to use a loose definition of the term "American") The Band take down everyone else so far mentioned in terms of sheer scope and quality of compositional and technical chops.

yoda4554

I'm also glad people enjoyed the tournament, and want to cheer Jonathan's competence as a solid chief editor who I believe spent an ungodly amount of time doing last-minute editing over the past week. For curiosity's sake, I was wondering what the people playing thought: of the lit. crit. tossups, w...

yoda4554

I'm curious as to what people mean by this "under the surface," and by what criteria someone like Bradbury is categorically working there while an Asimov is categorically not. Asimov, at his best (which, granted, he is frequently not at, if memory serves), plays out interesting literary thought expe...

yoda4554

If you can get a copy of the last CO Trash tournament, I think the "powers" tossup came up around Round 7 or 8, using the poem constructed for you based on "This Is Just To Say" from the ACF website as one of its final clues. I recall being befuddled for most of it and knee-jerk negging, based on th...

yoda4554

I certainly agree with the Matts, and have some vaguely similar experiences in being made aware of stuff I hadn't known about previously through quiz bowl--in fact, my own experience with Ibsen is similar to, if less extensive than, Weiner's. But I would think the part to be emphasized in terms of "...

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RESULTS--THS 1138 (3/1/08), Philadelphia PA

Lit. distribution

Nobel in Lit to Doris Lessing