The Quizbowl Resource Center

grapesmoker

I read over the "normal modes" question and had a few thoughts: Additionally these entities can be solved by assuming solutions of the form of the exponential of i times omega times t and plugging them into the equations of motion. For a non-linear molecule with N atoms, there exist 3N-6 o...

grapesmoker

Get those bids while they're hot to make logistics planning easier!

grapesmoker

I honestly don't mean to be obtuse here, Jerry, but what about eliminating the clock potentially doubles the available staff? Is the idea that some otherwise qualified moderators won't/can't read at ICT because they can't consistently read more than 20 questions in the 20 available minutes? Or am I...

grapesmoker

As a long-suffering observer of the ICT qualification process, let me say a few things. First of all, this: I have no real qualms with them. On the other hand, I would very much look down at the Maryland club if their grossly-unqualified B team accepted a bid. is really fucking grotesque. It is beyo...

grapesmoker

Cheynem wrote:I hope you mean you're a free agent for everything but the main tournament!

Yeah, I meant to clarify that I have a team for the main event. I'm a free agent for the side events though. My bad.

grapesmoker

I'm a free agent, I'll play whatever (except the action packets) with whomever.

grapesmoker

I would also likely play this.

grapesmoker

As per the above email and additional conversation with Ben, I've been reassured that we're in good shape for Nationals. If we might make this Friday diversion into a positive object lesson for all: please don't do this. Don't run secret tournaments that make it look like your club isn't a normally ...

grapesmoker

Conan, what is good in life? Announcing your goddamn tournaments in a forums thread, that's what's good. It's cool, I didn't want to play an open set in my own backyard anyway! What the fuck? I have been led to understand that Columbia intentionally did not announce the tournament because they have...

grapesmoker

Conan, what is good in life?

Announcing your goddamn tournaments in a forums thread, that's what's good. It's cool, I didn't want to play an open set in my own backyard anyway!

What the fuck?

grapesmoker

A few questions:

* Where is the spreadsheet for the history tournament?
* Anyone interested in splitting a hotel room and/or cost of vehicle rental?
* When and where will the "festivities" alluded to in the announcement be taking place?

grapesmoker

Today, I view the fall of the packet submission tournament the way that my mother views the fall of Communism in Europe: as an amazing thing that I never thought would actually happen. It means that there has been a miracle: suddenly, there are a large number of people willing to put in the tremend...

grapesmoker

Cheynem wrote:How many packets does ICT require?

ICT has an entirely different writing model. I think there are very good reasons for why that model would be hard to replicate with Nats. That aside, I also think that writing questions has value for players and for the community.

grapesmoker

If ACF Nationals were not packet submission, the editors would have to write something on the order of 17 packets for even a standard-length Nats to occur, nevermind something like 25 for the multi-day Nats that we've had for the better part of the last decade.

grapesmoker

I'll play. Contact me if you want to play with me.

grapesmoker

Cheynem wrote:But you are a top trash player!

Will that help?

grapesmoker

I'm interested in playing this. I fucking suck at quizbowl these days.

grapesmoker

JOIN ME OR DIE CAN YOU DO ANY LESS

grapesmoker

I should add: sympathetic though I am to the cause of making people submit questions that don't suck, it's not like people writing CO packets are out to ruin your day in the first place. This whole scheme is based on a misunderstanding of how people approach question writing in the first place and a...

grapesmoker

Ok, so right now, I'm going to put on my discarded ACF Treasurer hat and explain why this fee system is a bad idea. Here's the thing: keeping track of what people owe you under a much simpler system is a huge pain in the ass. Even for a relatively small tournament like CO, you're still tracking ~15-...

grapesmoker

Thanks for all your hard work, Matt. The game is much better for your involvement. I have no intention of saying goodbye from the community for a while longer, but I wonder if, as my generation moves on, this might not be a time to assess the state of the game. Are we on a sustainable course? Are we...

grapesmoker

I think you should look into co-running this event with a larger, more conventional tournament, as this would almost certainly guarantee you a larger field. I'd love to play this, but I doubt I'll be attending too many things in person; however, if you were to co-host this with Auroni's open event, ...

grapesmoker

Actually if I have any complaints about this tournament (which I enjoyed immensely), it's the preponderance of biography and to a lesser extent, consumer products. I feel like an event of this sort has the potential to explore a lot of territory that is normally under-explored in quizbowl, and the f...

grapesmoker

How do we send the money?

grapesmoker

I'm a fan of the singular, gender-neutral "they" in ordinary use, but it makes sense only in situations where we either don't know the gender of the individual involved or someone has asked to be referred to by that pronoun. There's no real question about whether e.g. Burne-Jones was "...

grapesmoker

Cheynem wrote:John won the NBA set?

yes

grapesmoker

Cheynem wrote:1. My set will include college-related questions.

GOOD DAY, I SAY GOOD DAY, SIR!

grapesmoker

this is an event that happened

john lawrence won every tournament

grapesmoker

This was hella fun, thanks Mik! At the NYC site, we played all six packets shootout-style. I kept score as best I could and the following statistics were compiled which are probably mostly accurate. Player - 15/10/5 - total points Yi - 2/8/8 - 70 Richard - 2/7/4 - 80 York - 6/9/1 - 185 Jerry - 16/18...

grapesmoker

Here's a protip: don't use quizbowl questions as vehicles for linguistic change. The substitution of the correct pronouns with "they" in tossups is one of the most misguided things I have witnessed in recent qb memory.

grapesmoker

It would seem to make more sense to break the field into percentiles rather than raw counts.

grapesmoker

Regarding that "Simi Valley" TU, I was reading it (as a 15-year resident of Los Angeles) and wondering how anyone could answer it, especially since it doesn't describe where Simi Valley is in terms of the geography of LA (say, just west of the Valley). And wow, it was negged in 90% of the...

grapesmoker

In general, I'm definitely in favor of more computer stuff in quizbowl. I don't know that we should make it a required part of the distribution, but "real world programming" is definitely A Thing that we can ask about more than we do. These kinds of questions did show up occasionally in ol...

grapesmoker

When I say "fruitful areas" I don't mean necessarily that we should wholesale into Bantu myth or anything like that. I just mean that there are good ways of writing myth questions by focusing on things like rituals, cross-mythos clues, common links, and so on. This is sort of orthogonal to...

grapesmoker

The stripping bare of sources is something I was talking about a long time ago, when we started getting into the world of people writing these ridiculous questions on minor items that show up once in the Eddas or something like that. In fact, it's a symptom of a kind of hypertrophy in question writi...

grapesmoker

One of the best things about this tournament was the current events stuff and the way it was written. Both trash and non-trash events should use this set as an object lesson for how to write about current events and reward people who keep up to date with the news.

grapesmoker

This seems like a pretty good question on first reading; maybe there was some overlap or something? I can't see anything obviously wrong here.

grapesmoker

I was a pretty good myth player back in my day, though not to the extent of the Matts or Seth. I don't ever recall reading any myth specifically for quizbowl; I mostly read "the classics" because I was into it. I even took a class on Scandinavian mythology at Berkeley, which I'm not sure h...

grapesmoker

It seemed like the math at this CO skewed towards relatively exotic subjects, and it would have been nice if that had been tempered with some more accessible stuff, but you know, whatever. Physics was also strangely tilted towards particle theory for some reason, and should have been more diverse. I...

grapesmoker

Could someone post the text of the "Strong AI" tossup?

grapesmoker · Re: Chicago Open Trash 2016 (July 24, 2016) this was so much fun

this was so much fun

grapesmoker · Re: Side Event Tournament in NYC- 8/7/16 I will definitely be there.

I will definitely be there.

grapesmoker

I don't suppose there's some interest in running this in the NYC area in August?

grapesmoker

Yeah, that's a fair point. By "gradate Michigan A and Chicago A," I mean, it's not like giving them a packet of Collegiate Novice where most questions will be buzzer races on the first line. I just meant that for the most part, players with more knowledge will be able to buzz quicker--are...

grapesmoker

Maybe we should all write our questions and throw paper copies of them in a pile, burn them, and then dance nude around the pile while Jordan Boyd-Graber's quiz bowl robot reads us the questions and points out the ideal buzz points of each one at which point we all shake our heads in ecstasy sprayi...

grapesmoker

DO YOU LOVE... TERRIBLE LIGHTING?! DO YOU LOVE... INCONSISTENT CAMERA ANGLES?!! DO YOU LOVE... THE GNASHING OF THE VERY MOUTH OF HELL AS IT READS QUESTIONS??!!! THEN HAVE I GOT THE YOUTUBE PLAYLIST FOR YOU it here Golden moment THE FINALE OF SAID MOMENT the greatest quizbowl moment ever captured on...

grapesmoker

man answers own question, film at eleven

https://www.michigandaily.com/section/n ... ampionship

grapesmoker

Hey, I recall being interviewed by a student reporter after ACF Nationals. Anyone know what came of that?

grapesmoker

To be fair, Ray Luo benefited immensely from the "Virginia Woolf's brain"-heavy distributions of the early-mid 2000s. Ray knew about at least two other people's brains. Also, Kenny was the first person I'd ever seen answer music tossups from descriptions of the piece. You have to realize ...

grapesmoker

These posts about specialists interest me. I'm what you might call a hyper-specialist--outside of my categories (science and jazz), I usually only get like, 1-2 tossups per tournament, and even within science, the bulk of my points come from physics and chemistry. This is assuming I'm playing in a ...

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