The Quizbowl Resource Center

Excelsior (smack)

(sample science bowl questions) "Here are 4 things; order them by some property" questions are the second-best thing about science bowl from an anti-fraud perspective, and can probably be implemented as quizbowl questions if carefully constructed. This sort of thing would've worked wonder...

Excelsior (smack)

This seems like a really silly distinction to make. Conceded, I guess. You could learn about homeopathy in the context of history, in the context of rigidly scientific or medical courses where it's ridiculed in a five minute aside, or in the context of "history of medicine." Also true, bu...

Excelsior (smack)

Having been the person who raised the point of pseudoscience, I'd like to clarify that I did not mean that there should not be questions on pseudoscience. Rather, questions on pseudoscience should both 1.) exist; and 2.) not be in the science distribution. I can see where you're coming from, but the...

Excelsior (smack)

Matt Weiner and/or anybody else who thinks that science history should be in the science distribution: why do you think this? Of the science history questions I heard, none of them were bad (well, the horses tossup sounded like "Quack quack FTP Equus", but I guess a bunch of those things w...

Excelsior (smack)

Nobody (at least, nobody I've ever talked to) actually wants packets to be truly random, since that results in clustering of categories. I do not understand the randomization complaints. If the order is truly random, why does it matter that there are three science questions in a row? You're going t...

Excelsior (smack)

I got the impression that there was a little bit of Wikipedia abuse in the writing of the science in this tournament (and possibly other areas, but I'm not qualified to comment on those). Examples: "isothermal THIS calorimetry" in the leadin to "titration"; "pole of geograph...

Excelsior (smack)

People played Eyes that Do Not See after the tournament. We would've played during lunch, but we spent all of lunch waiting for the file to download because nobody had downloaded it ahead of time. (Suggestion to Mike Bentley: maybe separate out the individual PPTs rather than [or in addition to] hav...

Excelsior (smack)

I think consistently using non-gendered identifiers is a great idea, and I think more tournaments should do it, but I'm not sure that MO is actually the best place for them. Using "this <descriptor>" adds verbiage to a question relative to using "he"/"she", which makes ...

Excelsior (smack)

"Name these two scientists who showed that anyone, even Chris Ray..." "Name this physicist who suggested the existence of M-theory and showed how anyone, even Chris Ray..." "This confection, inscribed with the names of the deceased, is also offered on the Day of the Dead, bu...

Excelsior (smack)

Because mathematicians, and math grad students [know hard things] How many of these do you think exist in all of quizbowl? I don't know for sure myself, but I'm guessing the number of quizbowl-playing mathematicians + math grad students is maybe around ten; at most, twenty. I don't think I could na...

Excelsior (smack)

Eleventh-hour travel shenanigans are most likely going to require Yale to drop to two teams, as I have already informed Graham by email.

Excelsior (smack)

Once the tournament starts, live statistics should be available at http://srivatsa.org/staaaats/fact2012. I am not going to be the statsperson for this tournament, so if this stops working for whatever reason, so crumbles the cookie. EDIT (9:35am): The tournament is underway, with round 1 in progres...

Excelsior (smack)

Well, if that's what you're referring to, it's bizarre to say that its use is "customary", because that use of "ga" is grammatically necessary.

Excelsior (smack)

I'm also no linguist, and I'd love to hear what people actually in the field have to say on the topic, but here are my two cents: it doesn't seem like a good idea in general to write linguistics questions on particular questions languages using "linguistics" clues. Non-linguists aren't goi...

Excelsior (smack)

2012 SCT: 22/8/0 over 226 tossups 2012 ICT: 35/10/0 over 288 tossups Penn-ance: 31/5/2 over 220 tossups Josh Alman is really really good I hope you will all agree with me now. (Aside: by ICT, it seems that Josh will have a power/ten ratio of 8.5. I know this must be true because I did a linear regre...

Excelsior (smack)

For reference it's the symmetric difference operation from set theory. Ah, okay. I now see that you're trying to allude to "the this difference operation" without actually saying that by saying "difference of elements", but I still don't know what the isolated phrase "diffe...

Excelsior (smack)

I only actually read three rounds of this, so my comments are going to be somewhat cursory. Packet 1 The first clue in the tossup on "symmetric" is thoroughly impossible to parse. I spent a good three minutes staring at it and could not figure out what you meant by "...it implies A an...

Excelsior (smack)

This tournament ended. The Yale house team cleared the field, with Columbia and Penn A tied for second. The top individual scorers were Nolan Esser (88 PPG), Yogesh Raut (74 PPG), Saajid Moyen (73 PPG), Daniel Brach-Neufeld (72 PPG), and Aidan Mehigan (59 PPG). Complete stats are available at (http:...

Excelsior (smack)

Stats from the tournament will be available approximately live at (http://srivatsa.org/staaaats/ift2012) once the tournament is underway. As usual, the bracket names are Matt Jackson's fault. Stats will be migrated to the DB after the tournament is over. EDIT (9:47am): The tournament is now underway...

Excelsior (smack)

Somebody from each school that is attending this tournament should have received an email from me just now, with some logistical information and so forth. If you are registered for this tournament and did not receive an email from me, please contact me immediately.

Excelsior (smack)

I'll be sending out an email a bit later today with format information and so forth; as of now, it seems likely that we'll have 2 brackets of 9 rebracketed into 3 brackets of 6, plus finals.

Excelsior (smack)

Since Columbia has reduced from 2 teams to 1, and we've been unable to scare up a second house team, there are now two open spots in the field. Please let me know by noon on Friday if you'd like to register.

Excelsior (smack)

With the registration of a second UPenn team, the field for this tournament is full, pending any drops. If you would like to be placed on a waitlist for this tournament, let me know.

Excelsior (smack)

As noted in the original post, the start time of this tournament has been officially moved to 9:30 am (from 9:00 am) in order to accomodate public transportation schedules. Please note that we are doing this to accomodate teams who do not have control over their own travel schedules. We do not inten...

Excelsior (smack)

Now that Dartmouth has emailed me to register two teams, the field for this tournament is half full. New England quizbowlers who have not yet registered should do so sooner rather than later to be assured of a spot in the field.

Excelsior (smack)

Just an update: I would say an unaffiliated team from my school will be there with 70-80% certainty even if it is only two people. Is there any sort of discount for 'being shorthanded or a new team? UPDATE: All teams from schools that are new to quizbowl (i.e. have not played a quizbowl tournament ...

Excelsior (smack)

Yale will be hosting a mirror of the Illinois Fall Tournament on Saturday, October 6, 2012 . This tournament is a housewrite by members of the UIUC quizbowl team, and as such, packet submission is not required for this event. Matt Jackson will be the tournament director, but I will be handling regis...

Excelsior (smack)

18. This man accused an opponent of engaging in “political metaphysics” in a speech in which he aroused controversy be proclaiming that “Superior races have rights over inferior races.” He split with Emile Ollivier after having an affair with Ollivier’s wife Blandine. He gained the nickname “la-Fam...

Excelsior (smack)

The Lazarus method for simulating these events, partially based on the Teukolsky equation, was succeeded in 2005 by a derivative of the BSSN method which treats the participants in these events as mobile “punctures” on a grid. These events are followed by ringdown, in which oscillations are exponen...

Excelsior (smack)

The “climax” of this process occurs when TR-RXR dimer concentrations are at their peak. It does not occur in neotenic Ambystoma, because they lack thyroid-stimulating hormone. This process sees synthesis of argininosuccinate lyase and carbamoylphosphate synthase, enabling urotelic excretion. The op...

Excelsior (smack)

...the computer science seemed to be by far the weakest. I'm not an expert in it, but it seemed to be either impossible or confusing most of the time, and the people I talked to who know more about it than I do seemed frustrated too. This stems from an ill-executed effort to write on "exciting...

Excelsior (smack)

This was quite possibly the most enjoyable quizbowl-related thing I've played all year. Many thanks to Will for writing this set.

Excelsior (smack)

"Beta" shouldn't have said it's contrasted with alpha or whatever the heck it said. I don't really know anything about finance, but I do know that there's a lot of Greek letters that mean things (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeks_(finance) ), so I don't think that was a binary choic...

Excelsior (smack)

I think it's worth decoupling discussion of science from discussion of everything else because I essentially wrote the science for this tournament entirely separately from everything Kurtis and Will wrote (basically, I looked at Kurtis's questions and tried to divine what his target difficulty was b...

Excelsior (smack)

Cutting out a giveaway that "steps outside the question" is something that I think is reasonable at hard events - for example, it should have been done on that "trans effect" tossup. That's a fine really hard thing to write about - but it shouldn't end by saying to the player &q...

Excelsior (smack)

Vernon Lee Bad Marriage, Jr. wrote:So I don't have anything to contribute to this discussion except to note that I negged "A Theory of Interstellar Trade" with "The paper in which Hari Seldon proposed psychohistory."

I think that this firmly establishes Matt Bollinger as the greatest quizbowl player of our time.

Excelsior (smack)

I'm playing this.

If we're running it as doubles, you should team up with me if you want a teammate who can occasionally answer questions about Hinduism, Japan, and cryptids.

Excelsior (smack)

Saajid negged that with "rebuilding the temple" too, I think.

Excelsior (smack)

In my packet for CO, I wrote a tossup on zircon that ended up in the final set (if it was terrible, this was mostly my fault and I apologize). I don't have the edited version, of course, but the salient point here is that the giveaway was something like this: ...For 10 points, name this mineral, the...

Excelsior (smack)

Excelsior (smack)

kdroge wrote:Mainly because I wouldn't feel comfortable writing 40/40 science at this level. If someone would want to step up and write that amount of science, I'd be more than willing to collaborate.

If nobody more qualified than me volunteers, I'd be glad to collaborate with you on this.

Excelsior (smack)

I was working on a general academic tournament without science that I was going to try and finish to run as a Sunday event for VCUO for at least the Michigan site. I think we could certainly run a series of events (including my event) on August 4th, maybe extending into Sunday, in Michigan. My tour...

Excelsior (smack)

mithokie wrote:Out of curiosity, does it look like these will be ready in May or is it looking more like a 2012-2013 restart?

Thanks!

Ah, sorry for the late response. At this point, you probably won't be surprised to learn that I'm not going to restart this until the 2012-13 school year.

Excelsior (smack)

All mirrors of BHSAT XXI (2012) are complete. As such, it is cleared for discussion and available for download. We hope that this set will prove useful as study material for teams who are preparing for HSNCT or NSC in the coming weeks. Until the set has been uploaded to quizbowlpackets.org, it may b...

Excelsior (smack)

I chose not to count some places in Ohio that might be a little lean on the grounds that as a whole their state has a pretty extensive reach to teams in each area What areas in Ohio do you think lack enough good high school quiz bowl? EDIT: I know Ohio doesn't have high-quality tournaments in every...

Excelsior (smack)

A few problems I noticed: Round 1, bonus 16: Wikipedia claims that carbon has more allotropes than sulfur. I suspect it's correct. In any case, this merits further investigation, and if sources disagree the clue should probably be removed. Round 10, bonus 9: The second part's first sentence refers ...

Excelsior (smack)

It looks like the packet/document from which tiebreaker questions were taken wasn't included in the zip file of the set. Would it be possible to upload that document somewhere? If not, could someone post the tossup on I think "cooling" which was read as a replacement in the finals?

Excelsior (smack)

I don't really have a full ballot to submit; just one point I'd like to make: Any ballot that lists me and not Josh Alman from MIT is doing it wrong. Ludicrous ICT statlines like 35/10/0 over 13 games (as near as I can tell, that's more 15s per game than everybody besides Eric and Bollinger [though,...

Excelsior (smack)

Can I see the tossup on Runge-Kutta? If I'm remembering correctly, the leadin was something to the effect of "This algorithm can be made adaptive by allowing its timestep to vary" or something. This clue sounds like it could apply to pretty much any numerical algorithm that solves equation...

Excelsior (smack) · Re: MUT at MIT (4/28/12) Where do you recommend we park?

Where do you recommend we park?

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