The Quizbowl Resource Center

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

After some of the issues at this tournament completely unrelated to the questions, I think some basic rules about running a tournament need to be stated. I'm sure Jerry can list these as well as anyone, but they were not followed this weekend and led to unnecessary delays and confusion. I hope and e...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

First, I would like to thank the editors and everyone else involved for a tournament that was fun to play. However, I also agree completely with what Evan said. The tournament, especially the editors rounds, was too hard because almost all of the questions were extremely hard. Perhaps nearly every t...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I believe this is correct: Yale and Minnesota reached a one-game final at 5-2 in the top bracket, with Yale winning with a score of somewhere around 200-150. Illinois, Chicago A, Brown, and Michigan were tied at 4-3, with both Harvard and UVA at 1-6. Illinois was 3rd based on statistical tiebreakers...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast wrote:Topic revival, but if there aren't going to be any more mirrors from what it seems, could I have the set?

EDIT: Or at least post the file(s) somewhere for download?

I would like it as well if possible.

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I'm looking for teammates. I'm pretty good at chem and decent at other parts of science. I'll also probably have a few decent buzzes on books I have read and classical music. Mike, the Grand Rapids area seems to be on the shortest route from Midland, so I would be happy to carpool with you. Sounds ...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I'm looking for teammates. I'm pretty good at chem and decent at other parts of science. I'll also probably have a few decent buzzes on books I have read and classical music.

Mike, the Grand Rapids area seems to be on the shortest route from Midland, so I would be happy to carpool with you.

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

Well, this thread is about a page long and I haven't seen much related to what I wrote. Any specific comments on the chemistry? There were probably more clues / answer lines related to polymers and industrial chemistry than normal, since those are topics I find especially interesting, but I don't th...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

Does anyone have tips on how to write science questions quickly? My speed right now is torpid because I haven't learned nearly enough to write half a question off my head, especially at higher levels, and at times it's very hard to figure out what exactly my sources are saying. I've found some succ...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

Only one question really bothered me, and that was the one in the VCU packet I think, where it said an aldehyde was a type of ketone. I'm pretty sure this isn't right. It was confusing enough that I didn't get it at the end of the question. An aldehyde is a ketone where one of the R groups is H, so...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

Here's the polymerization tossup: One mechanism useful in this process includes an intermediate coordination complex containing an alkene and is named for Cossee and Arlman. A cyclic molecule is used in the ring-opening form of this process and includes less shrinkage. This process may be intiated ...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

Overall, I enjoyed the tournament quite a bit. The questions generally seemed well written, and though there was more math than I'd prefer, that was as advertised. Could someone post the polymerization tossup? I negged it with "metathesis" off what I think was description of ring-opening m...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I'm curious what sort of alternate answers were acceptable for "metastable". I negged with "excited state" on the population inversion clue, which seemed to be saying that more electrons are metastable than stable during population inversion. I have no background besides my quiz...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

Ok, so here's the thing with the Germany question: It was kind of meant to suck. It was meant to be a well (or at least quasi-decently) written tossup with a godawful answer line. My point in this: Questions that require one to name a country or nationality suck. It seems that these sort of tossups...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

Charlie beat me to it, but I don't see what the problem is with a coach reading in a room for her own player unless there is some sort of bias that factors into the match. Do you have a problem with, say, a player on an A team letting a moderator take a break and reading during their bye round for t...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

Cheynem wrote:I accept Mike Bentley's offer--other Mikes should join us.

Assuming I can make it to ICT, this sounds fun. Would you be interested in me being the third?

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

Welcome to the boards. It's good to see some people from the Michigan quiz bowl frontier. I'm assuming you are not playing a lot of NAQT, and potentially not a lot of good quiz bowl. Really, if you want to go to the state tournament which you are referring to, just hit up the organizer Melissa. You...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

The giveaway on the Surprise Symphony tossup seemed misleading, since the "surprise" chord is played by the entire orchestra, not just the timpani, and another famous Haydn London Symphony (Drumroll) takes its name from the timpani opening. Mit dem Paukenschlag [POW-kin-shlahg] is a common...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

itsthatoneguy wrote:We are coming with 3 teams, 2 DI and 1 DII

Corrected

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I don't recall the exact source I used for that clue, but http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5052473&abstractAccess=no&userType=inst describes the usage of a Kerr cell to measure voltage by examining a phase shift. My understanding is that a Kerr Cell is a specific appl...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I thought the tournament was generally ok, but there were a few problems I noticed in science. I felt like numerous times, a question contained a clue the author misunderstood or didn't fully understand. The best example I've seen of this was caught by Libo in the Equation of State tossup. One examp...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I seem to be the only person from Michigan even moderately interested in this. Sorry.

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I ask as someone who hasn't read the book, is he a major or minor character? Godot does not appear in Waiting for Godot but I don't think anyone would argue with a question on him. If this is a major character in the the sense that he appears in the book all the time (where by "appears" I...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

VCU Saturday Packets have been sent to George for posting.

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

The tossup on Schiff bases also was kind of a poor idea. Anytime in that question before "imine" was mentioned, imine should have been an acceptable answer. Beyond that, there's nothing wrong with ending the question saying "a substituted imine named for a German chemist" or som...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

Agnus Dei/Magnificat/Kyrie However, a true requiem mass will always begin with the Introit, which is the hymn "Requiem aeternam," and usually the Kyrie section will be the second movement, although occasionally it is combined into the first movement. Because the first thing I heard was th...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I would appreciate feedback on the following questions from Saturday: Tossups: Science: FAD(H2), Langmuir, cycloid, enol(ate), micelle, Schiff Base, Eddington, ribozyme, silicon, nitric acid, extraction, CO2, von Neumann Music: Ginastera, Balakirev Lit: Terra Nostra, Nausea Bonuses: Science: zeta po...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

Nicklausse/Muse wrote:
I can't name any player who is an electrical engineer
Aaron Rosenberg?

I had no idea. Apparently Cody from VCU is as well.

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

HI can't, since I doubt that the members of the Harvard team have such broad knowledge bases that they know what is important in every discipline. Have you ever seen the Harvard team play, or played an HI? If anything, the problem with HI and HI2 is that it was written by a team of specialists who ...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

There don't seem to be many ok-but-not-great players saying that this tournament was a fine difficulty, and that concerns me somewhat. I don't have any experience playing other incarnations of CO to draw on, but the set was exactly the difficulty I was both expecting and hoped for in the categories ...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

ok then what would be a good set of questions for using for a novice tournament.. Move it 3-4 weeks up and mirror the ACF Collegiate Novice tournament, which is a really difficulty-appropriate set being edited by Andrew Hart. A few weeks later, and there's traditionally a set called Delta Burke ava...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I really enjoyed this tournament, and our travel/hotel difficulties didn't prevent it from making this an awesome weekend. I really liked some of the more unusual answer lines in science like the "two-dimensional" one, since they test knowledge much better than common things people know to...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I know almost nothing about Trash, so I won't make any attempt to label this as a good or bad set. It did seem that everyone enjoyed playing it though. The one problem I noticed with the set was that it seemed like many of the questions left the first pronoun until the end of the first sentence, mak...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I will have a laptop.

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I think I said I can staff this, but I would be just as happy to play if someone needs a teammate and there is an excess of staffers.

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I'll echo the thanks to everyone who made sure this tournament actually happened. It was a lot of fun, and the questions were very good. Thanks to everyone for coming!

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

Were any of those non-powered tossups in rounds where the top teams all had byes? I don't remember how byes in the card system work. If all the 3-0 teams had byes in the same round, for example, there would be a lot fewer teams likely to power something.

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I'd like to play both side events, but I am willing to staff either/both if needed.

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

Now, I would certainly appreciate NAQT releasing their questions, and can certainly imagine that college sets aren't very big sellers and (5+ year) old IS sets aren't very big sellers. However, would releasing old IS sets benefit anyone? I'm pretty sure that modern NAQT sets are much, much better wr...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

The Sunday tournament paired with VCU open shouldn't be especially hard. We are hosting at DCC; announcement here.

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

The Granny wrote:Because I enjoy being as lazy as possible, would it be possible to get sets into zips?

If you want to download a bunch of things at once, don't want to wait for a zip file to be posted, and you use firefox, there is an add-on called flashgot that works pretty well.

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I'll staff too.

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

If the goal is just to make it easier to find Y in an answer line of [prompt on X before mention of Y], you could just highlight Y in some unobtrusive color. http://i.imgur.com/MGUUx.jpg I'm not sure if that's any better than without the highlight, but it seems simpler than using the comment tool an...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

Yeah, we misread it the same way, and will have the packet to you tonight. For those of us who didn't read carefully enough and expected the date in the post to correspond to the date the packet needed to be turned in on, can you be lenient and make a -$90 discount or something? Your post is clear, ...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

Based on our trip to College Park for ACF Nats, the drive from Maryland to Ann Arbor isn't bad at all. The route you would take to get to Chicago is mostly the same, and I think it would be hard to get lost before Chicago even for a tired driver. There are a rather large number of tolls on the route...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I had a lot of fun playing this, and thought it was a very good set overall. It was certainly a great experience for my first ACF Nationals. The tournament ran pretty smoothly, but I felt like the breaks between rounds on Saturday were a bit longer than necessary. Maybe that is just something that h...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

Cheynem wrote:Anybody traveling from Michigan:

Do you guys have full teams? If not, I would be happy to team up with any combination of you.

We have one full team from Michigan figured out, and other people are still figuring out their plans. We'll let you know when they decide something.

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I had a lot of fun playing this tournament, but I think that was more because of the field than the questions. I had the impression that there were way too many questions that were basically "There is a (reaction, law, formula...) named for this guy and ___. There is another (reaction, law, for...

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

We may have people there. I really want to go, but I don't know what my schedule will be like. Surya was also interested. We'll talk about it at practice next week.

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

[email protected]

Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat

I mean, the consensus so far has been Jerry posting twice, so it's a consensus of one. Not to say that the set was without its issues, but I think there were some very good questions in this set. There were certainly some very good questions in this set. There were also a lot of questions that seem...

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