Lederberg Discussion

[Sima Guang Hater]

Thanks to everyone for sticking around and playing my event; it was really great to see that tournament played after working on it for that long. Feel free to discuss it here.

[Cheynem]

I'm not sure who wrote what, but I know Bruce wrote the "Soviet nuclear program" tossup and it had an entertaining Arthurian feel to it.

For a subject that I know nothing about, this was pretty fun to scorekeep/read/listen to. I felt good that I could actually "ten" the bonuses that had a very easy part, and there was a lot of interesting stuff to it. I wrote some of the trash tossups (Maniac Mansion, Dr. No, Ghostbusters, Invisibility). Obviously, I can't comment on the science aspects of this set.

[Auroni]

I enjoyed the one packet of this set I got to play, and was happy to see some chem concepts that you learn in class (like inductive effects and hyperconjugation) make it into the set.

[Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat]

I had a lot of fun playing this. The questions were very well written, and seemed to be on interesting things. I noticed a surprisingly small number of repeated material, given that there were 80 answers per packet and the tournament was confined to purely science. There were plenty of times when something came up as an answer and later came up again as a clue (which seems fine to me), but I only remember a couple times when the opposite occurred. One tossup I was really excited to hear was on Flory-Huggins theory, which I am currently learning about in one of my classes. I really appreciate it when engineering-related answers come up.
I haven't played in any subject tournaments in the past, and this and the lit tournament left me with a really good impression of them (I didn't play arts or sports). I will definitely make an effort to play more in the future.
Thanks for writing it!

[Captain Sinico]

I had a good time on this set and would like the thank the writers very much. One thing I would have appreciated was more math, especially more stuff from areas of applied math, e.g. finite difference and other approximate methods, Monte Carlo methods, etc. I have the same reservations that I usually have about the amount of bio- and organic chemistry, especially relative to amounts of other types of chemistry. I also think the set could have done a better job describing the science of things rather than providing easy-to-rote buzz words, but maybe I'll always feel that way about everything. Certainly I don't think this set was egregious with respect to either of those two issues.

On a side note, it seems that in my zeal to remove Matt Weiner's odd boxes of old questions to my car, I left a small blue bag with all my various expensive soaps, etc. (i.e. containing pretty much nothing of any real value except my shaver) somewhere on the third floor of Coffman. I'm wondering if anyone from the tournament might have nabbed it, since it's not in Coffman's lost and found.

MaS

[Mechanical Beasts]

I wrote the chemistry bonuses for rounds four, five, six, seven, and eight, on pre-selected answer except in one instance. I'd very much appreciate feedback; in general I can say--seeing the answers Eric had chosen for those bonus parts--that the chemistry canon can ask for no better steward than he, if med school doesn't drag him away from quizbowl kicking and screaming.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

I don't have the final set, so I don't know how much of my stuff made it in, but I submitted the following to this tournament:

John Harsanyi
John von Neumann
Against Method
prostate cancer
Archaeopteryx
Nemesis
Soviet nuclear program
Forbidden Planet

I wanted to write more, but life got in the way, and I want to apologize to Eric for that.

[grapesmoker]

I concur with Mike Sorice's assessment. I think this was a good tournament overall with lots of interesting questions, but I would have liked to see a distribution that gave a little more play to the "other sciences." It felt like if you ran up against a chemistry specialist in this event, you were hosed unless you could somehow steal a question or two, which was kind of frustrating. The other aspect that I thought should have been done differently was the bonuses, especially in the physics categories; a lot of them felt too much like "name this named thing that has a name" and not really like something that was particularly important or that anyone really had a chance to know. I'll have more details on the specifics of this, along with some comparisons. Overall it was a good time, and I thank Eric and co. for their work on this, and especially whoever wrote the anomalous monism bonus, which, while only tangentially related to science, was the most pleasing 30 points I had all day.

[Gautam]

On a side note, it seems that in my zeal to remove Matt Weiner's odd boxes of old questions to my car, I left a small blue bag with all my various expensive soaps, etc. (i.e. containing pretty much nothing of any real value except my shaver) somewhere on the third floor of Coffman. I'm wondering if anyone from the tournament might have nabbed it, since it's not in Coffman's lost and found.

MaS

I have this in my possession currently. I'll see that it gets to you at FIST.

[Captain Sinico]

You're awesome, man; thanks a ton, that's two I owe you. Really, you should be a circuit hero. After all, if I can't keep up my rigorous beautification regime, I don't know what will happen (consider what I look like even with it!)

MaS

[Cheynem]

Heh--we found the bag immediately after you guys left, but were flummoxed as to which quizbowler it belonged to.

[grapesmoker]

You're awesome, man; thanks a ton, that's two I owe you. Really, you should be a circuit hero. After all, if I can't keep up my rigorous beautification regime, I don't know what will happen (consider what I look like even with it!)

MaS

You could grow a beard like much of the rest of quizbowl.

[Cheynem]

Continuing to add to the quizbowl jinx, by the way, Joseph Wiseman, the dude who played Dr. No, died yesterday, a day after being part of a Lederberg tossup I wrote.

[Crimson Rosella]

I haven't completely finished reading the set, but I saw something that reminded me of a neg I made a week or two ago in practice that I think may need addressing. Tossup 8 in packet 1 uses the "Chapman-Enskog equation" as a clue for viscosity. Indeed, there is an estimate for viscosity according to Chapman-Enskog theory. However, Chapman-Enskog theory describes transport phenomena in pretty general terms, so it can be used to calculate a few different things. I've had a bit of experience with fluid mechanics (no graduate level, but two undergraduate courses in addition to doing independent work on gas-phase reaction modeling), and I've never used Chapman-Enskog to describe the viscosity of gases. Google books turns up plenty of hits on it though, so I'm willing to believe that it's use is common, and just something that I haven't encountered yet.

The problem is that I have encountered several instances of the "Chapman-Enskog equation" (particularly in the seminal transport and separations processes text by Christie Geankopolis) to predict something else, diffusivity. It seems to me that, given that anybody who uses this textbook (or a host of others that mention "Chapman-Enskog" as a formula to predict diffusivity) has encountered it as such, this clue is both not uniquely identifying and potentially capable of punishing someone with legitimate knowledge. I dunno if it's usable with some clarification or something, but I just want to warn that using clues like "for dilute gases the Chapman-Enskog equation can be used to calculate it" may elicit negs from people who've learned about it outside of quizbowl.

[Mechanical Beasts]

So I've always been wary about clues like that; for example, if you give an algebra class the clue "d = r t can be used to calculate it" there's no reason why they wouldn't shout out "distance," "rate" (or "velocity" or "speed" or whatever I don't care), and "time" with roughly equal frequency. Because, like, depending on what you're given...

So with few exceptions, I'd imagine that the best way to do things is to present the expression that gives viscosity in terms of other stuff that you're given by Chapman-Enskog theory. And then say "Chapman-Enskog theory," and people will know that you're dealing with fluid mechanics, and they won't have an excuse to neg with term from fluid mechanics x.

[grapesmoker]

So with few exceptions, I'd imagine that the best way to do things is to present the expression that gives viscosity in terms of other stuff that you're given by Chapman-Enskog theory. And then say "Chapman-Enskog theory," and people will know that you're dealing with fluid mechanics, and they won't have an excuse to neg with term from fluid mechanics x.

This is a good suggestion. People should do this more often when writing science questions.

[theMoMA]

I'm going to get the scoresheets from Lederberg and input stats tomorrow.

[MicroEStudent]

I did not attend MO, but reading through the packets I enjoyed them. The clues based on semiconductor physics were chosen well and were about important topics. The only nit-picking thing is that MEMS are not "nanotechnology" as defined in the superlubricity tossup in Packet 6 (Tossup 11). MEMS by definition are "Micro Electrical Mechanical Systems" and the term NEMS "Nano EMS" has emerged for such systems that are smaller than 1 micrometer.

I can't speak for much other than physics, but the only other things I found "wrong" were two answers misspelled. "Heteroskedasticity" had a "d" where the first t is and "Wien's Law" was spelled "Wein's Law". I know that these are minor issues, but I'm just mentioning it so there is awareness.

[theMoMA]

Amusingly after Andy said "Alfred-Rochow" instead of "Allred-Rochow" for the MO bonus part, the Lederberg bonus part was misspelled "Alfred-Rochow."

From my impressions reading the set, it would have been quite enjoyable to play. There seemed to be a couple of really transparent questions, and a bunch of somewhat confusing typos, but I think this was probably the best science-only event ever put together. I'm looking forward to hearing the questions that I missed while driving Eric to the airport. I hope everyone didn't mind the earth science (and random other stuff, which may have just been one bio tossup now that I think of it) that I wrote too much, and apologies to Seth Teitler for the vague leadin to the pole reversal question.