2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Dormant threads from the high school sections are preserved here.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Captain Sinico »

Since it's been left as the only sensible position by recent developments, let me again call for NAQT to remove trash from its national tournaments. In conjunction with this, I will here promulgate my latest observation on trash, which I made up immediately after reading a Sunday round of HSNCT and which I have decided to call The Iron Law of Trash.
The Iron Law of Trash wrote:All trash that you play on sucks, because it's pop culture stuff other people like and it is well-known how sucky the pop culture stuff other people like is.
This is the reason that nobody seems to like the trash at any tournament, with the possible exception of some trash tournaments where almost everyone expects going in that they'll loathe or, at best, actively ignore a huge fraction of the topics. This is manifested in the phenomenon of people spending hour upon hour complaining about trash in academic tournaments, the least enlightened about specific trash topics or even answers ("NOT ENOUGH ANIMU! (;)_______(;)", "Did you really have to write a whole bonus on triple lutzes?" etc.) and the somewhat-more-enlightened-but-still-unenlightened about the general character of the trash ("Skewed too old!","I'd have liked a better balance of sports to movies..." etc.) However, even if you could change the trash distribution to how you'd like it, it would just piss everyone else off. After all, your preferences are stupid, too!
Now that you're all in on the secret, I hope you'll understand from now on that trash is always going to make most people unhappy and the only solutions are to stop caring about the tournament it appears in altogether, to accept that those questions are always going to suck on average, or to work to get them removed. I hope that for national academic tournaments, you'll join me in the latter course.

M
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Rufous-capped Thornbill »

Arsonists Get All the Girls wrote:A lot of people watch anime in high school and college >_>. I think in terms of trash, comic books are a little dated while anime and manga have been gaining a steady following. Ideally, there's no trash in HSNCT or any national tournament. But, while there is still trash, I don't understand why comic books can be represented but not manga or anime.
People know Spider-Man. People do not know random anime character from random anime magazine X.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by AKKOLADE »

This is the 2010 HSNCT discussion thread, not the "writing questions on animes theory" thread.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by kayli »

Serious question: how do we get rid of trash?
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Frater Taciturnus »

Inkana7 wrote:
Arsonists Get All the Girls wrote:A lot of people watch anime in high school and college >_>. I think in terms of trash, comic books are a little dated while anime and manga have been gaining a steady following. Ideally, there's no trash in HSNCT or any national tournament. But, while there is still trash, I don't understand why comic books can be represented but not manga or anime.
People know Spider-Man. People do not know random anime character from random anime magazine X.
Hey this builds on something I literally just expounded on.

1. Quizbowl is played almost entirely in America, mostly by Americans
2. when a comic book is really good in america, it gets made into a movie that grosses $200 million plus, and may get a serious major oscar nod- Last I checked, the dozen naruto, bleach, and deathnote movies could not even muster a widespread american release.
3. the maximum potential for any anime/manga to make it in america is Spirited Away- a cult classic whose following is acknowledged by the rest of us with a consolation award (best animated film)

There really is just no expanded market for anime or manga around here- its why while DC and Marvel are increasing prices by a dollar an issue to combat a slight downturn in readership, the past month has seen multiple major manga US distributors go belly up/come to the verge of joining the others.

Keeping to actual HSNCT discussion, as I told Jeff on the way to lunch, I thought after the first few rounds that this was among the best tournaments NAQT has ever produced, and despite a few disappointments here and there, I still think that assertion continues to hold true. The removal of computational math tossups was a welcome relief to both myself and a signifcant amount of teams I read for over the weekend (when I informed a team in scrimmage rounds that they would not hear math comp tossups in my room because they were not being used in the real tournament they started cheering.)
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Stained Diviner »

Arsonists Get All the Girls wrote:Serious question: how do we get rid of trash?
You have my permission to necro this thread. (My permission doesn't mean much, but here it is.)
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Ben Dillon »

My team does well on trash, especially pop music, but I wouldn't be averse to removing it. Especially when I perceived this weekend that there were very few questions about what I consider to be a vital topic for the future, economics.

It's difficult to predict with certainty what items that are currently classified as trash (current novels, movies, TV shows, probably not any anime but can't rule it out, songs, albums, art) will years from now be considered canon. For example, I think Washington Irving's stuff is pure entertainment with almost nothing about it that could be characterized as great literature, but it's now canon. The Beatles are now treated more reverently (both inside quiz bowl circles and out) than twenty years ago. Not saying we can't predict at all, just not with certainty.

But since it's difficult to predict, we should opt to throw out the baby with the bath water in these cases. Save for obvious historical current events and people, such as contemporary politicians, and those honored for obvious historical talents such as Nobel prizewinners in Literature, let's "take out the trash".
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

Both should be represented if trash should be represented at all. Though basically every vague statistical claim made in this thread so far (manga/anime is more popular than comic books for those under thirty, the manga/anime crazy ends at thirteen) is drastically off base.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Important Bird Area »

Stats are up, and both the tossups and the bonuses from this tournament were easier than last year's.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by samer »

Ben Dillon wrote:My team does well on trash, especially pop music, but I wouldn't be averse to removing it. Especially when I perceived this weekend that there were very few questions about what I consider to be a vital topic for the future, economics.
I agree with the part in bold (and would expand it to include topics that might be considered "business" or "finance").

One of the reasons that the social sciences are represented at their current levels, though, is that, in general, they aren't explicitly studied in depth in HS. The two most widely studied are econ and psychology (which got 4/3 each), and even in those cases I don't know that the majority of players have studied them.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by nobthehobbit »

samer wrote:
Ben Dillon wrote:My team does well on trash, especially pop music, but I wouldn't be averse to removing it. Especially when I perceived this weekend that there were very few questions about what I consider to be a vital topic for the future, economics.
I agree with the part in bold (and would expand it to include topics that might be considered "business" or "finance").

One of the reasons that the social sciences are represented at their current levels, though, is that, in general, they aren't explicitly studied in depth in HS. The two most widely studied are econ and psychology (which got 4/3 each), and even in those cases I don't know that the majority of players have studied them.
But since NAQT publishes its distribution, they could announce an increase in the Social Sciences part of it, at least for HSNCT. Teams looking to do well at that tournament would then study such topics more, which would benefit them not only in quizbowl, but in other endeavours. HSNCT shouldn't confine itself to topics "studied in depth at HS"; it should reward teams that go above and beyond that academically.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by jdeliverer »

Kay Li wrote:Sort of off of topic, but why are there questions on comic books
should have stopped there.
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Ice Warrior wrote:several critical quizbowl theorists would be quick to point out that almost everyone playing HSNCT is also over the age of 13, which is when they should have outgrown the anime/manga craze
But then you're discriminating against the seventh grader!
I believe the HSNCT is allowed to do such things :party:
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Huang »

samer wrote:The two most widely studied are econ and psychology (which got 4/3 each), and even in those cases I don't know that the majority of players have studied them.
Either way, both economics and psychology deserve a far greater share of the distribution than trash considering the fact that they're both AP classes that are widely taken by many high school students.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by samer »

Huang wrote:Either way, both economics and psychology deserve a far greater share of the distribution than trash considering the fact that they're both AP classes that are widely taken by many high school students.
That's a great argument for saying there should be more questions on each, but I don't see how that automatically makes them more worthy of "a far greater share of the distribution than trash." [For the record, the # of students taking those exams in 2009 were 74K for macroeconomics, 46K for microeconomics, and 151K for psychology; by comparison, the most popular exam, US History, was taken by 360K students, and the most popular STEM exam, Calculus AB, was taken by 230K.]
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Huang »

samer wrote:
Huang wrote:Either way, both economics and psychology deserve a far greater share of the distribution than trash considering the fact that they're both AP classes that are widely taken by many high school students.
That's a great argument for saying there should be more questions on each, but I don't see how that automatically makes them more worthy of "a far greater share of the distribution than trash." [For the record, the # of students taking those exams in 2009 were 74K for macroeconomics, 46K for microeconomics, and 151K for psychology; by comparison, the most popular exam, US History, was taken by 360K students, and the most popular STEM exam, Calculus AB, was taken by 230K.]
Unless there's a secret AP Popular Culture test, I'm not sure why it's not obvious that econ/psych should have a greater share of the distribution relative to trash. Not saying quizbowl should build its distribution around "X number of people take this AP exam so therefore these questions should come up Y number of times," but I don't believe one could effectively argue that econ/psych "aren't explicitly studied in depth in high school."
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Joe Romersa »

For econ, is the askable high school canon large enough to have enough quality answer choices?
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Dan-Don »

Huang wrote:
samer wrote:
Huang wrote:Either way, both economics and psychology deserve a far greater share of the distribution than trash considering the fact that they're both AP classes that are widely taken by many high school students.
That's a great argument for saying there should be more questions on each, but I don't see how that automatically makes them more worthy of "a far greater share of the distribution than trash." [For the record, the # of students taking those exams in 2009 were 74K for macroeconomics, 46K for microeconomics, and 151K for psychology; by comparison, the most popular exam, US History, was taken by 360K students, and the most popular STEM exam, Calculus AB, was taken by 230K.]
Unless there's a secret AP Popular Culture test, I'm not sure why it's not obvious that econ/psych should have a greater share of the distribution relative to trash. Not saying quizbowl should build its distribution around "X number of people take this AP exam so therefore these questions should come up Y number of times," but I don't believe one could effectively argue that econ/psych "aren't explicitly studied in depth in high school."
"X thing has an AP test and Y doesn't, therefore X should be represented more in the distribution" is a pretty bad argument to make. Notable other things that do not have AP exams:

*Religion
*Mythology
*Philosophy
*Astronomy
*Earth Science/Geology
*Dance
*Art film
*Linguistics
*Geography
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Down and out in Quintana Roo »

Dan-Don wrote:*Geography
Certainly not true, although Human Geography is a little different than NAQT geography. Still.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by samer »

Huang wrote:Unless there's a secret AP Popular Culture test, I'm not sure why it's not obvious that econ/psych should have a greater share of the distribution relative to trash. Not saying quizbowl should build its distribution around "X number of people take this AP exam so therefore these questions should come up Y number of times," but I don't believe one could effectively argue that econ/psych "aren't explicitly studied in depth in high school."
To clarify what I meant by that: for the vast majority of students, economics and psychology are generally senior-year electives (especially economics), while US History and World (primarily European) History are generally required.

And, BTW, at the ICT, the proportion of questions devoted to economics is not vastly higher (4/4 out of 18 packets).
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Bender Bending Fernandez »

SnookerUSF wrote:
I think NAQT does need to do something more formal with moderators, like maybe some kind of qualification process, or at least a formal training session on the Friday night.
Forgive me from dragging this discussion away from anime, but this is a good idea. The Friday night scrimmage I thought was essential in shaking off the cobwebs and getting ready for the next day, and I imagine inexperienced moderators would benefit from it a lot more. Perhaps something a little more structured coupled with a reiteration of basic tips like packet separation.

In regards to evaluation, number of questions read should highlight potential problems, but should hardly be the sole means of evaluation. Evaluation sheets haven't been popular in the past apparently, but perhaps a stripped down version would work. Why not try something simple like just blanks for room number and moderator name, followed by the numbers 1 to 10 for them to circle.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Down and out in Quintana Roo »

Bender Bending Fernandez wrote:Evaluation sheets haven't been popular in the past apparently, but perhaps a stripped down version would work. Why not try something simple like just blanks for room number and moderator name, followed by the numbers 1 to 10 for them to circle.
Why haven't they been popular? Do most coaches/teams not care about moderators? I'm a coach and i sure as hell care that we were only read 18 tossups in a game, and that some teams heard just 15 on occasion!! It really isn't that hard to make this survey, is it? Last year's HSNCT had fine surveys and i was frankly very disappointed not to get them this year. In retrospect, i should have just taken notes and created my own and attached it to the survey about math later on. But the fact that NAQT didn't take the time to make these moderator surveys made me believe that they wouldn't take the time to care to read the one that i would have made... so i didn't bother.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

Carangoides ciliarius wrote:
Bender Bending Fernandez wrote:Evaluation sheets haven't been popular in the past apparently, but perhaps a stripped down version would work. Why not try something simple like just blanks for room number and moderator name, followed by the numbers 1 to 10 for them to circle.
Why haven't they been popular? Do most coaches/teams not care about moderators? I'm a coach and i sure as hell care that we were only read 18 tossups in a game, and that some teams heard just 15 on occasion!! It really isn't that hard to make this survey, is it? Last year's HSNCT had fine surveys and i was frankly very disappointed not to get them this year. In retrospect, i should have just taken notes and created my own and attached it to the survey about math later on. But the fact that NAQT didn't take the time to make these moderator surveys made me believe that they wouldn't take the time to care to read the one that i would have made... so i didn't bother.
As Joel pointed out upthread, very few coaches ever filled out moderator surveys or did so in a way that was useful.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Stained Diviner »

As a coach, I always think surveys are a good idea, but as the day goes on they become a low priority, I get tired and/or interested in other things, and I often end up not getting around to filling them out. Also, my opinion of most moderators I hear is that they are pretty good, and I often don't have much more to say about them. If NAQT wanted a high rate of surveys getting filled in, they probably would have to collect a moderator card and hand out a moderator card to each coach at the beginning of each round--that is, when you walk into a match you hand the moderator your number card and a card rating your last moderator, and that moderator would give you a card to rate him/herself. There would be some situations where you have two matches in a row in the same room, so you are giving the card to the moderator you just rated, but there are simple ways to deal with that. At the end of the day, NAQT would have 2000 cards to sift through, for better or for worse.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Rufous-capped Thornbill »

It's irrelevant now, but in our first game against Russell, there was a tossup on Ionesco. I waited on it and buzzed when the moderator started to say "Rom-" However, instead of saying "Romanian" he said "Roman" forcing me to change my answer in mid thought to "Juvenal," because I thought I had made some mistake and they were in fact asking for a Roman playwright. However, after I was negged, it turned out that the question was in fact about Ionesco. Everyone in the room, Russell and South Range alike, heard "Roman" This is inexcusable in a 20 point game. Luckily Chad took over as reader after that game and it was a pleasant reading experience from then on.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Huang »

Dan-Don wrote: "X thing has an AP test and Y doesn't, therefore X should be represented more in the distribution" is a pretty bad argument to make.
Notice how I said, "Not saying quizbowl should build its distribution around 'X number of people take this AP exam so therefore these questions should come up Y number of times.'" In short, we're in agreement that quizbowl shouldn't be based on the AP curriculum. I simply disagreed with Samer that econ/psych weren't being studied in depth in high school classes.
samer wrote: To clarify what I meant by that: for the vast majority of students, economics and psychology are generally senior-year electives (especially economics), while US History and World (primarily European) History are generally required.

And, BTW, at the ICT, the proportion of questions devoted to economics is not vastly higher (4/4 out of 18 packets).
Well yeah, econ/psych should definitely come up less than history. I'm just confused by trash's higher share of the distribution when compared to many of the social sciences, especially econ/psych.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by cvdwightw »

samer wrote:To clarify what I meant by that: for the vast majority of students, economics and psychology are generally senior-year electives (especially economics)
Is this true? Economics (at least micro, I don't think we did macro) was a required senior-year course at my high school, and since there appears to be a good rationale behind making it a required course (functional high school graduate should have some basic idea of how the marketplace operates), I always assumed it was a required course at schools with non-wacky social studies standards.

(Then again, "X number of students take Course Y" or "Course Y is a required high school course for good reason" is always difficult to use to justify the inclusion or exclusion of a subject, because so many people using this argument are Computational Math Zealots who have difficulty distinguishing between "tossup questions that require you to know terminology necessary to do math problems at the high school level" and "finding d in ten seconds given that r and t are arbitrary two-digit numbers" that the argument holds no effective weight)
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by nobthehobbit »

cvdwightw wrote:Is this true? Economics (at least micro, I don't think we did macro) was a required senior-year course at my high school, and since there appears to be a good rationale behind making it a required course (functional high school graduate should have some basic idea of how the marketplace operates), I always assumed it was a required course at schools with non-wacky social studies standards.
Maybe this is because I'm from the same country where noted respected university the University of Toronto leaves it to quizbowl to teach people about the Diels-Alder reaction (at least initially, I'd hope!), but at my high school (in fact, this may be, or rather not be, in the provincial curriculum, I'm not sure), the closest you came to economics was in business courses. Social Studies courses at lower years (Vancouver has high school from grade 8-12) are half geography, half history, grade 11 Social Studies is half history, half government (or you can take a course called First Nations Studies 12), and at the grade 12 level there's courses on physical geography (as a social studies course), 20th century world history, law, and comparative civilizations (cultural anthropology? I don't know). I ended up doing courses in microeconomics and macroeconomics as part of my undergrad degree.

But as I said above, tournaments on the level of HSNCT shouldn't be confined to high school curricula, but should go beyond that to reward players who do so.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Stained Diviner »

cvdwightw wrote:
samer wrote:To clarify what I meant by that: for the vast majority of students, economics and psychology are generally senior-year electives (especially economics)
Is this true?
To my knowledge, Samer is correct. Illinois requires Consumer Ed, which students can test out of, but that's not Econ.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

This is the case in Missouri as well, on the off chance that your school does teach economics or psychology.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by jagluski »

etchdulac wrote:
jagluski wrote:I just went through the stats dump from the prelim 15 rounds. To answer Ahmad's question:

15 tu: 2
16 tu: 5
17 tu: 16
How many of these 23 games involved teams that were 6-4 or better?



Unfortunately, the answer is 7. One of them was in Round 1 when the pairings were a little more random, but that still isn't excusable.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Captain Sinico »

Actually, I'm not too surprised by that. The very slowest games are as a tendency between a competent, deliberate team and a not-very-good one; as has been noted upthread, excellent teams will buoy a moderator's TUH by getting tossups early and (at least potentially) tearing through bonuses, while bad teams will have a number of tossups go dead, such that TUH are high because of no need to read bonuses. Conversely, competent-but-not-excellent teams will tend to get many tossups, but few early. A secondary effect that also contributes is that teams' optimal strategy is generally to buzz earlier against opponents they feel are competitive.

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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by samer »

Westwon wrote:
cvdwightw wrote:
samer wrote:To clarify what I meant by that: for the vast majority of students, economics and psychology are generally senior-year electives (especially economics)
Is this true?
To my knowledge, Samer is correct. Illinois requires Consumer Ed, which students can test out of, but that's not Econ.
Connecticut requires neither, though it did, in 2004, begin mandating one semester of civics (government, justice, etc.).
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by btressler »

I would like to nominate this as the most likely neg bait of the tournament:
Packet 6 wrote:The "axiom of" this concept assets the existence of a set...
At this point about three buzzers went down and had I been playing, mine would have too. The answer was "axiom of infinity", not the much-asked "axiom of choice".
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by The Toad to Wigan Pier »

Bad Boy Bill wrote:I would like to nominate this as the most likely neg bait of the tournament:
Packet 6 wrote:The "axiom of" this concept assets the existence of a set...
At this point about three buzzers went down and had I been playing, mine would have too. The answer was "axiom of infinity", not the much-asked "axiom of choice".
While the axiom of choice does involve sets, the traditional statement of it asserts the existence of a function, not a set. There are however, variants and equivalent statements to the axiom of choice that do assert the existence of a set, but those aren't really the normal way of stating it. Thus it probably would not be neg bait for people who actually know what it is(unless they were being carelessly optimistic and aggressive), but I could see it as neg bait for those who really don't have a clue what the axiom of choice is, in which case they shouldn't be getting such a question anyway.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Steve Watchorn »

As the author of that just-mentioned question, I would like to point out that the answer was actually "infinity," of which "axiom of infinity" was the first clue (and acceptable as an answer until other clues were given). For completeness, here is the full question:

The "axiom of" this concept asserts the existence of a set containing the {natural numbers}, and the compactification of the real line involves adding a point representing it. Georg Cantor identified unequal varieties of it, and the cardinalities denoted by ~c~ and (*) {aleph-null} are assigned to sets exhibiting "{uncountable}" and "{countable}" varieties of it. For 10 points--name this concept, to which divergent sequences tend.

answer: _infinity_ (accept word forms; accept early _axiom of infinity_)
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by DrCongo »

Will the podcasts be posted any time soon? I'm just curious.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by master15625 »

The recorder broke.

So I don't think the whole lot will be posted.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

DrCongo wrote:Will the podcasts be posted any time soon? I'm just curious.
Not going to happen; as noted upthread, the audio equipment was on the fritz.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by SoLegit12 »

Could someone please post the Asturias bonus? I had a bye this round and I watched. For the third part, about The Banana Trilogy, the team responded Banana Republic and the reader said he could take it. I was surprised.

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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Rufous-capped Thornbill »

SoLegit12 wrote:Could someone please post the Asturias bonus? I had a bye this round and I watched. For the third part, about The Banana Trilogy, the team responded Banana Republic and the reader said he could take it. I was surprised.

Thanks for the poster
If I remember correctly, they were only asking what the trilogy was about. We gave "bananas" and it was accepted.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Down and out in Quintana Roo »

SoLegit12 wrote:Could someone please post the Asturias bonus? I had a bye this round and I watched. For the third part, about The Banana Trilogy, the team responded Banana Republic and the reader said he could take it. I was surprised.

Thanks for the poster
We actually said "banana plantation" for that answer and it was accepted. I didn't think it should have been, thinking about it later.

EDIT: Here it is.
Round 4, bonus 7, part C wrote: Asturias is also known for this trilogy of novels which began with Strong Wind; the books depict the treatment of natives on plantations that produce a certain fruit.
answer: The Banana Trilogy (accept Banana Republic trilogy)
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by SoLegit12 »

I wonder why Banana Republic would be accepted. Hmm...
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by Down and out in Quintana Roo »

Searching for "Banana Republic Trilogy" yields many more results than i anticipated. It does appear to be an acceptable alternate name.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by DrCongo »

Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:
DrCongo wrote:Will the podcasts be posted any time soon? I'm just curious.
Not going to happen; as noted upthread, the audio equipment was on the fritz.
Ok thanks.
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Re: 2010 HSNCT discussion thread

Post by SoLegit12 »

Carangoides ciliarius wrote:Searching for "Banana Republic Trilogy" yields many more results than i anticipated. It does appear to be an acceptable alternate name.
I will be more wary of using Wikipedia exclusively for this purpose in the future
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