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Sir Thopas

[my first name] at brown dot edu

Sir Thopas

Without delving too much into the arguments in this thread, which others have argued far better than I could, I'd just like to remind everyone that choosing academically important topics can be difficult for those who haven't been steeped in academia for some amount of time. While I (for one) of cou...

Sir Thopas

Not That Kind of Christian!! wrote:
Sir Thopas wrote:I, too, have had no problems with OpenOffice, but I am also of the opinion that every tournament should have each round in .doc and .pdf.

Also, no Calibri.
I give this post an A-. A would suggest Gentium.

Can't be that pushy about it, though.

...yet

Sir Thopas

I, too, have had no problems with OpenOffice, but I am also of the opinion that every tournament should have each round in .doc and .pdf.

Also, no Calibri.

Sir Thopas

I'd reject them outright and hold another HS tournament in the QU one's stead.

Sir Thopas

I also had an extreme distaste for the tossup on "speaking," which seemed to beg you to with "tape loops" when it started talking about the Steve Reich clues; I negged on a clue that was describing a piece I had listened to earlier this week. Yeah, this one was my bad. If I had ...

Sir Thopas

Especially since many of the clues were referring to the times when it was coterminous with New York City, I think it's fine to call it a polity. At any rate, to this day, it's coterminous with New York County.

Sir Thopas

Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote:Magin bafflingly was able to convert La Wally.

Yeah, he was totally talking about it in the chat room a few months ago. He almost wrote a tossup on it for Gaddis II.

Sir Thopas

Journey to the Planets wrote:What is going on here?

Conjecture: Andy Watkins.

Sir Thopas

Edward Powers wrote:Where will ACF Winter be held---has this been decided yet? Can HS Teams register for ACF Winter, as they did for ACF Fall?

We played ACF Winter last year, so yeah.

Sir Thopas

Sign me up!

Sir Thopas

Inkana7 wrote:
Sir Thopas wrote:
Inkana7 wrote:
Cheynem wrote:Good to see two high schools at EFT yesterday. Eden Prairie has especially strong Megashark knowledge.
Megashark vs. Giant Octopus?
Yessir.
That's brilliant. If you wrote that, props to you.

Thanks!

Sir Thopas

Inkana7 wrote:
Cheynem wrote:Good to see two high schools at EFT yesterday. Eden Prairie has especially strong Megashark knowledge.
Megashark vs. Giant Octopus?

Yessir.

Sir Thopas

they're nowhere easy enough in the same tournament as a tossup on Otto von Bismarck where well-known and, as a bonus, memorably named thing the Reptiles Fund is in the second line. If you're going to make a gratuitous knock on an easy question, you can surely do better than a clue which has come up...

Sir Thopas

The tossups I remember feeling a little flummoxed by were the ones on Beethoven's Ninth and the Wife of Bath's Tale, if you could possibly post either of those. I may have just been listening badly, though. 10. In “Getting Down Off the Beanstalk,” Susan McClary claims that the first movement of thi...

Sir Thopas

TheKingInYellow wrote:Will Stuyvesant even have a traveling team? I was under the impression that their club lost funding

I'm pretty sure they never really had any.

Sir Thopas

I'm on an iPod now, and can't do any heavy lifting, but Hunter sent the same team to both in 2008, so there's a datum to check out.

Sir Thopas

What questions (and question format) will be used?

Sir Thopas

jonah wrote:The QBDB server, it seems, is made of Twizzlers; it's down again.

Since when have they made Twizzlers in ginseng flavor?

Sir Thopas

Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:Also, it will have better science than last year's.

better always = harder right

Sir Thopas

If you want to be a ridiculously, unbelievably good player, get a job at Barnes & Noble or Borders. The people who work there know everything there is to know about literature. Once I went into a Borders and saw The Tale of Genji filed under Shikibu. Fair enough. Although a lot of people who kn...

Sir Thopas

tk447 wrote:If you want to be a ridiculously, unbelievably good player, get a job at Barnes & Noble or Borders. The people who work there know everything there is to know about literature.

Once I went into a Borders and saw The Tale of Genji filed under Shikibu.

Sir Thopas

My overall thoughts for the tournament fall between Magin's and Andy's (I'm not a science player, but the distribution and difficulty swings were wacky); I just wish the tournament had been a bit cheaper. Chicago Open 2008 was about $11 per guaranteed game, at the absolute latest packet deadline. Th...

Sir Thopas

Can I at least persuade you to pull together a name that tune with like 50 pieces of varying levels of known-ness and time periods, and have all us music folks fill out like a worksheet with titles and composers to get points? I enjoyed doing that at HSNCT one year and think it could be enjoyable t...

Sir Thopas

In 21 years of hosting two very large high school tournaments a year, not one person has ever asked me to explain what our social studies category means. (I have received questions about myth being under lit and geology being under science, though). I am not the least bit bothered by answering that...

Sir Thopas

Aren't Egyptian and Indian generally as deep for answer space (at least) as, say, Australian or Native American? Or is this your canon-expansion desires showing through, or something? I would only plan on writing maybe one or two "Native American" questions, leaving the rest of that secti...

Sir Thopas

The answer is, of course, both. Very true. However, from my experience, quizbowl people tend to be a smidgen less sociable than others. But, that's just from my experience. This gets falser the less in high school you are. I don't mean this as an insult in any way, but the type of people who associ...

Sir Thopas

Having twice as much Brit lit as European AND world lit combined is a poor choice.

Sir Thopas

I'm uncomfortable anytime we start saying that people who study things a certain way should be getting tossups over people who study things a different way. Until you can figure out how to reward players who merely listen to a piece, the solutions are somewhat unsatisfactory. Note: this is probably...

Sir Thopas

I like the idea of it being scaled up ACF nats, and would also add the (perhaps obvious) fact that experimental tournaments are becoming more and more frequent, to the extent that these satisfyingly (at least for me) replace any void a slight scaling back of Chicago Open would open.

Sir Thopas

People in this thread need to realize that there are less than a dozen people in quizbowl who have truly outstanding music knowledge. Music is one of the least-accessible of the humanities categories because many of the clues require a lifetime of music education to fully understand. I think it's p...

Sir Thopas

The trash questions found in College and High-school packets are usually edited to be very accessible to a specific audience. Sometimes, they can end up being hastily-written niche filler relegated to the end of a packet. I realize that these things can be fixed by a decent editor, but with trash p...

Sir Thopas

Captain Sinico wrote:
Sir Thopas wrote:
MichaelKearney wrote:questions about He Hate Me and Joe Millionaire are way less answerable than they were 5 years ago.
They should probably stop being written, then.
Please read the things you're trying to criticize before you criticize them next time.

I did, dude.

Sir Thopas

MichaelKearney wrote:questions about He Hate Me and Joe Millionaire are way less answerable than they were 5 years ago.

They should probably stop being written, then.

Sir Thopas

jrbarry wrote:I am unsure of the reason as to why you would make that remark without knowing the history of James Island's participation in tournaments over the years.

I'm pretty sure Chris is referring to Meek's refusal to take JI to HSNCT and NSC, forcing them to go to NAC instead.

Sir Thopas

wd4gdz wrote:Get ready for VETO 2010:
http://www.amazon.com/Louis-Riel-Comic- ... 336&sr=8-1

Man, they had this at Hunter's library! I showed it excitedly to people but nobody else knew who he was, and I didn't get to read it.

Sir Thopas

Of course, of course. I didn't mean to imply anything exclusionary about PACE, just that in the past, NAQT has had more of an international flavor. I would argue that PACE questions are more inclusive to Canadians. NAQT has a nontrivial portion of trash, geography, and current events (although fort...

Sir Thopas

grapesmoker wrote:Shorter Charles Meigs

INCONCIEVABLE

Sir Thopas

moreover, what previous VETO scores have been, you are all not being fair to the editors in claiming that they made this set too hard - the answers are far easier than what would have resulted if VETO were left untouched. This. I'm entirely unsympathetic to any claims of difficulty when nobody seem...

Sir Thopas

Ukonvasara wrote:I will read for your tournament, sir.

Sir Thopas

Do you find that practicing is done better when it is done separately by each individual and consists of actual studying, or when it is done in a group, where it is rather a bombardment of questions? I think it depends on the person, really. Some people learn stuff by hearing it; for others, they n...

Sir Thopas

I'll take up this gauntlet. I thought Jonathan Magin's fetish for William Gaddis was quite well-known; therefore, it seems unfortunate to include a tossup on Gaddis' third-best-known work, on which no one has a chance of beating him. From talking to you after the match it seemed like you were just ...

Sir Thopas

Dan Passner, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think your crazy cheap hotel room at The Legacy in Rockville is, by a freak of miscommunication, still up for grabs. Andy and I booked a crazy cheap room in the same hotel assuming we'd have a ride because the Pinyan caravan would be staying there,...

Sir Thopas

Faiyad wrote:Who cares what century the Gothic style began flourishing in Europe, who cares what color Sodium burns, who cares when the transcontinental railroad was built?

None of these are actually asked for in good quizbowl!

Sir Thopas

So there should be no reason to reject a tossup on ookpik or a bonus on the musical career of Charlie Angus. I can think of like 10 good reasons to reject those questions, and certainly hope Jerry does so for everyone's sake. I hope they get replaced with tossups on Okot p'Bitek and Charles Mingus.

Sir Thopas

This only proves that there is a one-to-one relationship between a given probability and its corresponding odds. A 1-to-1 relationship does not imply equivalence. I'm sure you can also show that the natural numbers and rational numbers can be placed in a 1-to-1 correspondence, but no one would try ...

Sir Thopas

We talked about Influence of Sea Power Upon History in my AP US History class. While I probably wouldn't have powered it, I would have definitely gotten this TU on either Great White Fleet or Mahan. But I agree it's probably a tad bit too tough for an IS set, although a question on Mahan referencin...

Sir Thopas

But odds and probabilities are different, so 1/18 isn't a mathematically correct and equivalent answer. It isn't a "stupid trick", it's the definition of odds. odds /ɒdz/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [odz] Show IPA –noun (usually used with a plural verb) 1. the probability that something ...

Sir Thopas

The Toad to Wigan Pier wrote:I recently read an article which has many parallels with this discussion.

I love that article!

Sir Thopas

Of course, quizbowl's goals do not necessarily include emphasizing practically-applicable knowledge, though this is not universally accepted. But as to the question of utility in real life, I think you're dead wrong. By "real life", amusingly, I meant "the study of mathematics"....

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