The Quizbowl Resource Center

Sam

Robyn - Dancing on My Own vs. LCD Soundsystem - dance yrself clean In terms of lyrics, I like "dance yrself clean" more, and yet...nine minutes... Daft Punk (ft. Pharrell Williams & Nile Rodgers) - Get Lucky vs. Kendrick Lamar - m.A.A.d. City Kanye West (ft. Pusha-T) - Runaway vs. Alv...

Sam

Robyn - Dancing on My Own vs. Perfume Genius - Queen LCD Soundsystem - dance yrself clean vs. Tame Impala - Let It Happen Daft Punk (ft. Pharrell Williams & Nile Rodgers) - Get Lucky vs. M.I.A. - Bad Girls Bad Girls is nothing compared to the Genius.com annotations of Bad Girls, which very sinc...

Sam

Kanye West (ft. Pusha-T) - Runaway vs. Sky Ferreira - Everything is Embarrassing Gotye (ft. Kimbra) - Somebody That I Used to Know vs. Lorde - Royals Janelle Monáe - Make Me Feel vs. Alvvays - Archie, Marry Me Vampire Weekend - Hannah Hunt vs. Flying Lotus (ft. Kendrick Lamar) - Never Catch Me Taki...

Sam

Lana del Rey - Video Games vs. Courtney Barnett - Pedestrian at Best Childish Gambino - This Is America vs. Weyes Blood - Movies Much as Will Nediger loves the movies, I love America. Which is what "This Is America" is about. Pretty sure. This was another match-up where, even though I end...

Sam

Kanye West (ft. Pusha-T) - Runaway vs. IDLES - Danny Nedelko Hadn't heard Danny Nedelko before; it was good but this wasn't a particularly close contest. Sky Ferreira - Everything is Embarrassing vs. Ariana Grande - thank u, next Gotye - Somebody That I Used to Know vs. Danny Brown - Really Doe I d...

Sam

About 5/8 across the tournament was primarily analytic phil (TUs: monism, Nagel, mathematical realism, counterfactuals, Kant; Bonuses: secondary qualities, coherentism, quus, Haugeland , Korsgaard, Will to Believe, Bradley, arguably Davos). In ACF Nationals 2011, there was a tossup on Hubert Dreyfu...

Sam

Thanks to the editors and staff for a great tournament! Between this, Age of Empires, and Scattergories, it was impressive how consistently good everything was, from the proofreading (at least from the player's point of view) to the content of the questions, to the skill of the teams, to the logisti...

Sam

This may be the best tournament Will has produced, and is certainly one of the best side events I've played in the last few years. Andrew Hart was comparing it to Ike Jose's myth tournament from 2012 or 2013, in that both are interesting even to those who are not normally excited about the topic. Si...

Sam

Maybe it captures a mood that a lot of people between the ages of 13 and 23 feel frequently? That mood, of course, is "being Mr. Brightside". It's a testimony to my lyric comprehension (and, I guess, my suitability in talking about music at all) that I had to look up the lyrics to remembe...

Sam

The local public radio pop music station had a "Most Essential Songs since 2000" vote recently. Listeners sent in top 10 lists and they drew up a ranking based on that. Since my theory is that the listener demographics of 89.3 FM are the demographics of quiz bowl aged fifteen years, I thou...

Sam

Science Man here giving my thoughts on Science People: Geoff is #1, and it's not close. Look at his PIANO and ICT stats if you don't believe me--dude is a monster with high potential to become the GOAT in undergrad. I never see people play enough to have something smart to say in these threads but ...

Sam

I was intending to post here the same time I did in the logistics thread and for some reason never got around to it. Mostly I just wanted to thank the editors for an excellent tournament. I was especially impressed that so many people on the editing team were relative newcomers, at least in terms of...

Sam

]Rule F.2*, as presented in its entirety at the staff meeting, requires that there be no unnatural pauses in amending an answer, so the situation as written-up would not allow the player to gain any advantage. If the player answers and the moderator pauses to rule on the answer, then the player has...

Sam

I don't know enough about tournament direction or production to say anything about the format, but I was really impressed with the overall logistics of the tournament. Conor already said most of this, but the general tournament infrastructure (working buzzers set up on time, schedules printed in rea...

Sam

It may be simpler to just start a "Post here if you are not going to Illinois for school next year (Collegiate 2019)" thread.

Sam

This was a great tournament; thanks to Andrew and all the other writers for the set. The current events criticism is appropriate, though I don't know if this is a recent development--it feels like ICT always has had a handful of "Bozo of the Week" type questions. I actually thought this ye...

Sam

This is a good observation. I'll add that, in the context of tournament discussions, people choosing to vent in private has the unfortunate effect of removing discussion from the public sphere so that the editors of the tournament, or other editors and writers who are interested in people's feedbac...

Sam

EDIT: See Jacob's more concise post below.

Sam

Would also recommend this show, it's excellent. Old podcasts are on a different show called The Fall of Rome . The Harper interview is there and well worth listening to. I didn't see some others; according to his Twitter account they are now at something called "Stitcher Premium" which un...

Sam

Last fall I started listening to Tides of History , which is a hodgepodge of late Roman Empire and early modern Europe history. What's great about this podcast is the host, Patrick Wyman, spends time discussing the sources and historiography of the topics he covers. (For that reason it also doubles ...

Sam

There was something odd going on with the Uranus tossup. Rob Carson took down a note so maybe it's been fixed already. I think "beliefs," "jobs," and more than any question I can remember in recent memory, whatever that nonsense about making mistakes when you speak and saying the...

Sam

Would there be any interest in Mike's film tournament, maybe right after NASAT? I don't know how many will have seen it at Illinois already.

Sam

Cheynem wrote:There seemed to be a fair amount of Minnesota content in the set as well (but perhaps I'm exaggerating).

A quick survey reveals nearly all Americans currently reside in Minnesota, so this makes sense.

Sam

This was a great tournament. It was also quite long. I'm not sure if questions were longer or maybe just more were answered near the end, but the recent CO goal of finishing before 9 seems a worthwhile one. Logistically, everything ran pretty smoothly. Thank you to everyone who staffed, especially t...

Sam

Also, I reversed your grievous error from 2013 of throwing out a David Harvey tossup in favor of a dry geography tossup on Tanzania by keeping a Harvey submission and writing zero dry tossups on African countries. A tossup which was, at least in our room, answered much earlier than the Tanzania tos...

Sam

Could you explain a little more why this is a problem? Intuitively it seems true that there shouldn't be any sudden jumps in the tournament, but as long as everyone hears the same questions I'm not sure I can articulate why. Sorry, to be clear, are you asking why I think the "two tournament&qu...

Sam

Where it becomes a problem is only if one half of the tournament seems to systematically reward one skill / knowledge base, while the other half rewards another. This is especially true of any format in which some of the games played in the first half are carried over (and this is almost every curr...

Sam

Given quiz bowl's newfound love of cooperative game theory, something that may be close to you what Andrew is describing is the Shapley value. (No link because I'm on a phone, but it's on Wikipedia.) The idea is to consider all the possible coalitions that can be formed without a given player, seein...

Sam

In general, I thought the Saturday logistics were a real problem—being told that we were eating lunch so incredibly late to avoid waiting half an hour, and then waiting something like an hour and a half for tiebreakers wasn't my favorite thing in the world. (I am aware that I had a personal stake i...

Sam

I typically tend to be very activist in my editing, and I was in this tournament as well, but having not previously edited a tournament that had so many editor packets, I don't think I accounted for just how much idea selection plays a role in a tournament's feel. If we had another month to edit th...

Sam

Generally, I don't think "make everyone else's friend" is really being proposed. But like Bruce said, a good way to break insularity is to just talk to people. Doesn't have to be much. I'll never forget when I was an undergrad and our team got beaten badly by one of the great early 2000s ...

Sam

When the original poll was posted, I voted "Too insular" and "Lack of professionalism." With this post I'd like to offer my opinion on why I think college quizbowl is too insular, as someone who hasn't really been involved in college quizbowl for that long and whose time (and, u...

Sam

Would anyone be interested in putting together a collective food order of some sort? I would like this to begin by 8PM so that we can finish by midnight or so. There will be ten packets, with 24 tossup questions and zero bonuses per packet, and I'd like to give people a chance to play as many of tn...

Sam

EDIT: Even messaging Vasa last year saying "hey, I could write some questions for EMT" was terrifying to me. Actively soliciting writers is the right thing to do, and even then it's scary to put yourself out there! I was actually going to post a thread about how great collegiate quiz bowl...

Sam

I should note that I really like the creation of a "Thought" category. I think John makes some good points about trying to explore different topics in a more user-friendly manner. To be clear, my issue is more of the general feeling that thought-based questions tend to dominate hard tourn...

Sam

How did other people feel about the epsilon-delta tossup? I knew most of the clues in the second half but was utterly thrown off by "this statement" (which I guess I took to mean "this result"). Is there any pronoun that's even more neutral? Maybe "this method" or &quo...

Sam

[*] As Erik said, a fair number of history questions on peripheral topics like pirates, gangs, criminals etc. This is writing history like the mythology questions that give that category a bad name (basically "pop" version of an "academic" subject). [*] A "core" almost...

Sam

The tossup on "National Security Council" calls it an "agency" throughout. That seems misleading, at best, though admittedly I'd be hard-pressed to think of a good filler word that doesn't immediately give the game away.

Sam

Thanks to Berkeley and friends for writing this. I've been thinking lately about how much average collegiate quiz bowl quality has improved since I began playing in 2009, which wasn't even really the Dark Ages of good quiz bowl. It's encouraging to see house sets produced by a group of relatively ne...

Sam

It will be funny the day in summer of 2021 when we realize Fred is just slowly listing every song composed in the 1970s in this thread.

Sam

(5) The reality of time. Our experience of time may be highly subjective, but the actual duration of five seconds is not. You, as TD, may feel stupid explaining to a room of adults (or near-adults) how to count off five seconds. But your discomfort is outweighed by the distress of your players when...

Sam

It's a movie about a person who tries to ditch the suburbs for the glamor of city life. I guess that's just the Ur-Myth of "caveman leaves cave," but I think it's done in Lady Bird in a way that resonates with trying to make it big in LA. (Maybe La La Land is just still on my mind, and I'...

Sam

"Hey Ya!"

Sam

Mr. Brightside by The Killers vs. Paper Planes by M.I.A. Hey Ya! by Outkast vs. Hurt by Johnny Cash - For most of the voting I've just gone with whichever I thought was the better song, regardless of its cultural importance / nostalgia / how emblematic of the 2000s it is. I'm not sure I can say for ...

Sam

I may be misremembering but I think the question on "money supply" mentioned some clues on deriving the demand function for money, which is a little confusing.

Sam

Tibetan literature wrote:Mr. Brightside by The Killers

Chicago by Sufjan Stevens

Hey Ya! by Outkast

Hurt by Johnny Cash

Ditto

Sam

Crazy by Gnarls Barkley vs. Mr. Brightside by The Killers -- A little surprised by my choice here, but after repeated listens it is what it is. Jesus Walks by Kanye West vs. Toxic by Britney Spears 99 Problems by Jay-Z vs. Paper Planes by M.I.A. -- Early in the video, M.I.A. is shown cutting baguett...

Sam

Hey Ya! by Outkast vs. Time to Pretend by MGMT One More Time by Daft Punk vs. Bad Romance by Lady Gaga Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand vs. Dog Days Are Over by Florence + The Machine Lose Yourself by Eminem vs. Rehab by Amy Winehouse Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes vs. Feel Good Inc. by Goril...

Sam

Crazy by Gnarls Barkley vs. Wake Me Up When September Ends by Green Day Mr. Brightside by The Killers vs. Since U Been Gone by Kelly Clarkson Jesus Walks by Kanye West vs. Wake Up by Arcade Fire Toxic by Britney Spears vs. Get Ur Freak On by Missy Elliott 99 Problems by Jay-z vs. Hips Don't Lie by ...

Sam

Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes vs. Fidelity by Regina Spektor Maps by Yeah Yeahs Yeahs vs. Feel Good Inc. by Gorillaz Yeah! by Usher featuring Ludacris vs. Cry Me a River by Justin Timberlake Idioteque by Radiohead vs. American Boy by Estelle featuring Kanye West Fallin' by Alicia Keys vs. D...

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