2020 Terrapin Open: Specific Question Discussion

[gimmedatguudsuccrose]

Please use this thread to discuss any specific questions from Terrapin Open. If you would like to see a question, please give a reason for why you would like to see it.

[a bird]

I want to apologize for not including some alternate answerlines in my categories. The most egregious issue was probably screening, which should have definitely accepted shielding. I know being negged for something like this can be very frustrating, so I'll try to correct all these issues for remaining mirrors.

[VSCOelasticity]

Not sure if this is the place to say this because it is the "specific question" discussion, but I don't wanna nitpick without first saying that I had a terrific time playing this set. It seemed like early parts of questions rewarded "real knowledge" of the material (as much as qb can), while staying interesting. Same goes for bonus hard parts, they seemed natural and knowable. I never felt like "why do I care about this...". Thanks to the editors for all their hard work :)

That being said, two physics bonuses stick out as lacking a true hard part

canonical transformations/Hamilton-Jacobi/action
I bungled the first part, but nonetheless it is much easier than most hard parts in the set. This easy part may be a bit tough too, idk.

Noether's theorem/charge/SU(3)
SU(3) being associated with QCD is relatively well known, even by non-science players.

[VSCOelasticity]

Oh, also, can I see the Markov chain tossup?

I want to double check because I believe the lead in referred to Markov blankets, which I don't think are really "blankets of Markov chains"

[touchpack]

Can I see the question on _ribose_? Wang and I protested after giving the answer "the 2' hydroxyl", and I'm not sure that was incorrect given what I heard.

[gimmedatguudsuccrose]

Can I see the question on _ribose_? Wang and I protested after giving the answer "the 2' hydroxyl", and I'm not sure that was incorrect given what I heard.

9. Versions of this moiety with a 2-prime O-methoxyethyl, or M-O-E, modification are used as ASO (“A-S-O”) compounds. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this moiety that in LNAs is modified with an extra oxygen-carbon bridge to lock it in the C3-prime-endo conformation, giving the molecule it is part of a preference for A-form duplexes.
ANSWER: ribose [or beta-d-ribofuranose; accept adjectival forms such as ribosyl; do not accept or prompt on “deoxyribose”]
[10] The 2-prime-MOE phosphorothioate antisense oligo nusinersen treats SMA by enhancing exon 7 splice efficiency of a gene named “survival of [this cell type] 2.” The Babinski sign in adults reflects dysfunction in this cell type comprising the corticospinal tract.
ANSWER: motor neuron [or motoneuron; or survival (of) motor neuron; prompt on neurons]
[10] The antisense oligo eteplirsen restores the dystrophin reading frame to treat the Duchenne type of this degenerative disorder characterized by progressive weakness.
ANSWER: muscular dystrophy [or DMD]
<JS, Biology>

[Justice William Brennan]

This tournament was the most fun I've had playing quizbowl in a long time, probably ever. I'm bad at pointing to general trends I like--in large part because I feel like general perceptions are mostly influenced by only a handful questions--so I thought I'd point out questions I thought were interesting because they had fun clues, interesting/creative conceits, or "real" content I was able to buzz on from non-quizbowl knowledge.

Rd 1
Jewish comedy bonus
Dali Lindbergh Baby bonus
peacocks in Hindu myth
Najaf

Rd 3
Sultanate of Women
Ozarks
Women spies in WW2
Veles (definitely made me feel like "that's cool, I want to learn more)

Rd 4
Rani Laxmibhai
Women of the Wild West
Rolls Royce jet engines

Rd 5
gay panic
ringing a bell
Wheeler / Indus / unicorn
Hetman

Rd 6
noma
syriac bible translation
faience at Abydos

Rd 7
Franco trying to create a fascist dynasty with Primo de Rivera's daughter
sovereign wealth funds
Paul VI
Vilna Gaon

Rd 8
Panchen Lama
Sackler Art

Rd 9
Castro lead-in
pulque
Lockheed Martin

Rd 10
pillars
Glasgow

Rd 11
Brown / Hopkins / Tuchman
Cathar historiography
Gazprom

[ValenciaQBowl]

SU(3) being associated with QCD is relatively well known, even by non-science players.

No.

[gimmedatguudsuccrose]

SU(3) being associated with QCD is relatively well known, even by non-science players.

No.

FWIW, there were 2 20's, 4 30's, and 1 0 on this bonus across all sites, and every team that converted Noether's Theorem appears to have converted SU(3) as well.

[ValenciaQBowl]

They probably have science players, Kai.

[Amizda Calyx]

Can I see the question on _ribose_? Wang and I protested after giving the answer "the 2' hydroxyl", and I'm not sure that was incorrect given what I heard.

Versions of this moiety with a 2-prime O-methoxyethyl, or M-O-E, modification are used as ASO (“A-S-O”) compounds. For 10 points each:

[10] Name this moiety that in LNAs is modified with an extra oxygen-carbon bridge to lock it in the C3-prime-endo conformation, giving the molecule it is part of a preference for A-form duplexes.

Chemical biology is definitely not my best subject, but my understanding is that C3' endo refers to the whole ribose. Perhaps I could make it clearer that the "it" being locked is the pronoun being asked for and not the oxygen-carbon bridge?

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

Can I see the question on _ribose_? Wang and I protested after giving the answer "the 2' hydroxyl", and I'm not sure that was incorrect given what I heard.

Versions of this moiety with a 2-prime O-methoxyethyl, or M-O-E, modification are used as ASO (“A-S-O”) compounds. For 10 points each:

[10] Name this moiety that in LNAs is modified with an extra oxygen-carbon bridge to lock it in the C3-prime-endo conformation, giving the molecule it is part of a preference for A-form duplexes.

Chemical biology is definitely not my best subject, but my understanding is that C3' endo refers to the whole ribose. Perhaps I could make it clearer that the "it" being locked is the pronoun being asked for and not the oxygen-carbon bridge?

It's a bit hard to parse at game speed since you're immediately then told the answer to the question is a part of a larger molecule which makes it easy to lose track of the pronoun (additionally the "it" in "lock it" could also be interpreted as referring to LNA?)

[Jet Fuel Can't Melt Steel Dreams]

Not sure if this is the place to say this because it is the "specific question" discussion, but I don't wanna nitpick without first saying that I had a terrific time playing this set. It seemed like early parts of questions rewarded "real knowledge" of the material (as much as qb can), while staying interesting. Same goes for bonus hard parts, they seemed natural and knowable. I never felt like "why do I care about this...". Thanks to the editors for all their hard work :)

That being said, two physics bonuses stick out as lacking a true hard part

canonical transformations/Hamilton-Jacobi/action
I bungled the first part, but nonetheless it is much easier than most hard parts in the set. This easy part may be a bit tough too, idk.

Noether's theorem/charge/SU(3)
SU(3) being associated with QCD is relatively well known, even by non-science players.

I am very confused by this, because when I playtested the questions, both bonuses had good, on-difficulty, hard parts. I question why both of them were changed so that the hard part was replaced with another medium part.

[touchpack]

Can I see the question on _ribose_? Wang and I protested after giving the answer "the 2' hydroxyl", and I'm not sure that was incorrect given what I heard.

Versions of this moiety with a 2-prime O-methoxyethyl, or M-O-E, modification are used as ASO (“A-S-O”) compounds. For 10 points each:

[10] Name this moiety that in LNAs is modified with an extra oxygen-carbon bridge to lock it in the C3-prime-endo conformation, giving the molecule it is part of a preference for A-form duplexes.

Chemical biology is definitely not my best subject, but my understanding is that C3' endo refers to the whole ribose. Perhaps I could make it clearer that the "it" being locked is the pronoun being asked for and not the oxygen-carbon bridge?

Ah, I see, we missed the word "C3-prime-endo" while conferring and thus were not sure how specific of an answer to give. I do think the phrasing "LNAs possess an extra oxygen-carbon bridge to lock this moiety in ..." would be somewhat clearer. You could also dabble with explicitly saying somewhere that the desired answer has 5 carbon atoms.

edit: after thinking about this some more, given the clues, I think this could be reworked into a bonus part on "the _2'_ carbon of _ribose_" (accept the _2'_ carbon of RNA_)--that way you can be a little bit more direct with the clueing (use the identifier "this specific carbon atom" and say "carbon atom and larger molecule required"). I'd also like to say that regardless of the way you go, I appreciated the content in this bonus, since LNAs are very cool.

[VSCOelasticity]

SU(3) being associated with QCD is relatively well known, even by non-science players.

No.

I'm not saying every non-science player knows it, but I bet quite a few have a card on SU(3) and QCD or just associate them from that fact having come up.

That bonus just has an unclear difficulty structure, and one that is not in line with the difficulty of the set. Like, presuming SU(3) is the hard, it takes significantly less knowledge to convert that based on the clues given (which mention QCD if I recall) than, say, four wave mixing or diffusing damping.

[TaylorH]

I really enjoyed this set. It really felt like it hit the sweet spot on difficulty and had tons of interesting content. My only gripe is with the set is: the 20th/21st century Thought distribution skewing pretty heavily toward analytic stuff at the expense of Continental topics/thinkers (it felt like something like 80/20 analytic/continental). I have only heard 2/3 of the set so it could be a packetization issue, but I wonder if this was a conscious choice or just an editing oversight.

[Auroni]

9. Versions of this moiety with a 2-prime O-methoxyethyl, or M-O-E, modification are used as ASO (“A-S-O”) compounds. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this moiety that in LNAs is modified with an extra oxygen-carbon bridge to lock it in the C3-prime-endo conformation, giving the molecule it is part of a preference for A-form duplexes.
ANSWER: ribose [or beta-d-ribofuranose; accept adjectival forms such as ribosyl; do not accept or prompt on “deoxyribose”]
[10] The 2-prime-MOE phosphorothioate antisense oligo nusinersen treats SMA by enhancing exon 7 splice efficiency of a gene named “survival of [this cell type] 2.” The Babinski sign in adults reflects dysfunction in this cell type comprising the corticospinal tract.
ANSWER: motor neuron [or motoneuron; or survival (of) motor neuron; prompt on neurons]
[10] The antisense oligo eteplirsen restores the dystrophin reading frame to treat the Duchenne type of this degenerative disorder characterized by progressive weakness.
ANSWER: muscular dystrophy [or DMD]
<JS, Biology>

I understand the science in the first bonus part, with the text in front of me, but was unable to parse this in-game because it’s significantly more jargon-y than the average science question in the set (or in quizbowl currently). Every question can be measurably improved by using clear, good prose — science questions are no exception. Incorporation of some non-scientific language could make it a lot easier for scientists, whose brains are merely human and are better at processing ordinary language just like anyone else's, to understand what’s going on in your question.

[a bird]

That being said, two physics bonuses stick out as lacking a true hard part

canonical transformations/Hamilton-Jacobi/action
I bungled the first part, but nonetheless it is much easier than most hard parts in the set. This easy part may be a bit tough too, idk.

Noether's theorem/charge/SU(3)
SU(3) being associated with QCD is relatively well known, even by non-science players.

Both of these bonuses were definitely easier than intended. In general I tried to make my hard parts fairly accessible, but in these cases I undershot quite a bit.

Oh, also, can I see the Markov chain tossup?

I want to double check because I believe the lead in referred to Markov blankets, which I don't think are really "blankets of Markov chains"

11. For a node in a Bayesian network, the node’s children and co-parents form a “blanket” named for one of these structures. Shannon’s noiseless coding theorem applies to sources modeled as one of these systems. Queuing theory models are based on a continuous time version of these structures. One of these structures has a uniform invariant distribution if and only if its (*) transition matrix is doubly stochastic. The Metropolis–Hastings algorithm exemplifies a class of probabilistic algorithms that use one of these structures. These structures are irreducible if every state is accessible from every other state. These structures are often defined in discrete time, and their transition matrix must be “memoryless.” For 10 points, name these mathematical structures that model stochastic processes as a “chain” of states.
ANSWER: Markov chains [or Markov process; accept Markov blanket; accept Markov after “chain” is read; prompt on stochastic process]
<GR, Other Science: Mathematics>

So my thinking was that the Markov blanket was named in analogy to Markov chains,* but that not be quite correct. Either way, I see how this could have been confusing.

*this review says that Markov chains are a special case of the Markov blankets.

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

I really enjoyed this set. It really felt like it hit the sweet spot on difficulty and had tons of interesting content. My only gripe is with the set is: the 20th/21st century Thought distribution skewing pretty heavily toward analytic stuff at the expense of Continental topics/thinkers (it felt like something like 80/20 analytic/continental). I have only heard 2/3 of the set so it could be a packetization issue, but I wonder if this was a conscious choice or just an editing oversight.

This was a deliberate editing decision. I wanted to make thought reflective of what students actually learn in philosophy and social science classes. I had planned to include more "continental" thought in Other Academic, but I ended up running out of time, and didn't realize that goal.

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

Allyl tossup was a little confusing since a lot of situations don't really treat allyl parts of molecules as a distinct functional group/synthon except for basically the things clued

Aerosol tu's electrospray clue was extremely confusing

The tossup on pillars seemed kind of problematic - every clue is very clearly a thin vertical object! The leadin literally says that the djed represents a spine!

[jinah]

The thought at this tournament was probably my favorite of any tournament I have played and was almost uniformly a delight to hear, in particular because virtually all of it save some of the historical content was on things I read or discussed in class. I do think the questions that were not 20th/21st century analytical struggled a bit — Mohism and Averroes stand out, as does the markedly flawed tossup on the subaltern — suffered a bit; the former two felt very perfunctory and stale, while the latter was transparent (having a clue about, IIRC, brown men and brown women in the second or third sentence). I also felt the set overweighted semantics at the cost of epistemology, and would recommend changing this for the next mirror.

This doesn’t necessarily belong in this thread, but as an aside I didn’t mind the lack of continental philosophy. I thought this set did an excellent job of picking out texts and concepts covered in the prototypical undergraduate American philosophy canon; on the other hand though, I think that other categories could have picked up the dearth if continental content a bit more - eg in religion, literature, SS, or arts.

I thought the econ was fun (Zucman and Saez is in particular a fantastic idea), but as I have already made clear to the editor and author of the question, I thought the monopsony question had a lot of issues. Aside from the memey or insidery concerns about cluing Marshall Steinbaum in the leadin, any quizbowler who has gone near Marshall’s twitter knows he loves antitrust, and the clue made it clear the question was about labor, a combination of topics that makes monopsony so obviously indicated that it seems like it must be an incorrect answer and which was also repeated in clue after clue. I also think IV regression is not a great idea for a tossup — I’m curious about its conversion rates.

Overall I thought easy and middle parts were a bit rough though hard parts were gettable, so if stats bear this out it might be good to soften the lower ends of bonuses conversion a bit.

EDIT: Loath as I am to say things are too easy, I felt the bonuses on WeWork and Susan Wolf (all three parts of each) were a bit softer than necessary. I also thought Melinda Katz was misplaced in the DA tossup.

[Amizda Calyx]

Can I see the question on _ribose_? Wang and I protested after giving the answer "the 2' hydroxyl", and I'm not sure that was incorrect given what I heard.

Versions of this moiety with a 2-prime O-methoxyethyl, or M-O-E, modification are used as ASO (“A-S-O”) compounds. For 10 points each:

[10] Name this moiety that in LNAs is modified with an extra oxygen-carbon bridge to lock it in the C3-prime-endo conformation, giving the molecule it is part of a preference for A-form duplexes.

Chemical biology is definitely not my best subject, but my understanding is that C3' endo refers to the whole ribose. Perhaps I could make it clearer that the "it" being locked is the pronoun being asked for and not the oxygen-carbon bridge?

Ah, I see, we missed the word "C3-prime-endo" while conferring and thus were not sure how specific of an answer to give. I do think the phrasing "LNAs possess an extra oxygen-carbon bridge to lock this moiety in ..." would be somewhat clearer. You could also dabble with explicitly saying somewhere that the desired answer has 5 carbon atoms.

edit: after thinking about this some more, given the clues, I think this could be reworked into a bonus part on "the _2'_ carbon of _ribose_" (accept the _2'_ carbon of RNA_)--that way you can be a little bit more direct with the clueing (use the identifier "this specific carbon atom" and say "carbon atom and larger molecule required"). I'd also like to say that regardless of the way you go, I appreciated the content in this bonus, since LNAs are very cool.

It's a bit hard to parse at game speed since you're immediately then told the answer to the question is a part of a larger molecule which makes it easy to lose track of the pronoun (additionally the "it" in "lock it" could also be interpreted as referring to LNA?)

I understand the science in the first bonus part, with the text in front of me, but was unable to parse this in-game because it’s significantly more jargon-y than the average science question in the set (or in quizbowl currently). Every question can be measurably improved by using clear, good prose — science questions are no exception. Incorporation of some non-scientific language could make it a lot easier for scientists, whose brains are merely human and are better at processing ordinary language just like anyone else's, to understand what’s going on in your question.

Thank you for all these great points! Reading it now, I see how the wording could be confusing and overly dense. I think I'll sparsify a bit and go with Billy's initial suggestion of rearranging some terms to more explicitly point to the pronoun, i.e.:

Name this moiety that, in LNAs, is locked into its C3-prime-endo conformation via an extra oxygen-carbon bridge. Restricting this moiety to its "North" conformation gives the molecule it is part of a preference for A-form duplexes.

[Duckk]

Could I please see the tossup on "descriptions"? I buzzed in near the clue about the iota operator with "referring expressions" and wasn't prompted. While they aren't exactly the same, they are probably similar enough for a prompt (I fully accept my neg, as I admittedly wouldn't have pulled "descriptions" in time even if I were prompted). A clue after I buzzed alluded to Strawson's "On Referring", which added to my confusion for why my answer was incorrect. If I recall correctly, the giveaway was about "On Denoting", which contains the string "description" precisely once.

[Mike Bentley]

I liked the women spies in World War 2 question.

The Ben-Gurion bonus had no discernible easy part. I guess it was on Ben-Gurion himself but those clues were not enough to make it one.

The prostitution question in Round 2 was a neat idea.

The Kehinde Wiley clue in the stained glass question seemed pretty hard to nail down at game speed. Wiley has lots of works based on Ingres paintings, for instance this one: http://kehindewiley.com/works/black-light/.

Dropping "African Game of Thrones" for Marlon James seemed pretty early to me. There was certainly a lot of hype for that book.

I thought the leadin to the Pete Seeger question was suboptimal. It mentioned he was a musician who was arrested in a protest. Since this tournament doesn't have trash, this narrows it down to a folk singer, and if you know the basics of Seeger's biography this becomes a pretty buzzable clue.

I liked the bell ringing question.

I felt the Claudel question got narrowed down much too quickly. It mentioned that it was looking for a sculptor who would have been hanging out with Debussy. This puts you in a time and place where I could only think of two notable sculptors, and my quizbowl intuition told me that you wouldn't put those clues that early if you were looking for Rodin.

The Homicide: Life on the Street clue seemed early in the Baltimore question. That was a big buzzer race in our room.

I liked the idea of the Mayan question.

What were those other calculators referred to in the Adding Machine question?

The Panchen Lama question seemed quite easy to figure out--I just couldn't remember the name. The clues all pointed to this being an office that the Chinese were interfering with, and the dates / number of people let you know it wasn't the Dalai Lama.

Wasn't the biggest fan of the Fidel Castro question. It was clued around wacky assassination attempts against him. The room seemed to have a collective "well that clue couldn't possibly be there" non-buzz for about two lines on this question.

The governess question seemed to narrow the answer space down considerably early on. It mentioned that this was a profession a woman could have in the 18th/19th century, and that she had a master. With an earlier question on Pamela, this mostly ruled out "servant" as an answer. I can't think of any other professions given these constraints.

Round 11 had 3 tossups on modern visual art (1990s, China, directors).

[Duckk]

I believe the lead in referred to Markov blankets, which I don't think are really "blankets of Markov chains"

+1. I know the first clue of that tossup only as a "Markov blanket", which was confusing since "Markov" isn't a structure ("Is there another term for this that I haven't heard of?"). Things made more sense at the queueing theory clue, after which the first clue clicked but only as much as they share a namesake and general notions of conditional independence (as do many things named for Markov).

[The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island]

The Kehinde Wiley clue in the stained glass question seemed pretty hard to nail down at game speed. Wiley has lots of works based on Ingres paintings, for instance this one: http://kehindewiley.com/works/black-light/.

Dropping "African Game of Thrones" for Marlon James seemed pretty early to me. There was certainly a lot of hype for that book.

I felt the Claudel question got narrowed down much too quickly. It mentioned that it was looking for a sculptor who would have been hanging out with Debussy. This puts you in a time and place where I could only think of two notable sculptors, and my quizbowl intuition told me that you wouldn't put those clues that early if you were looking for Rodin.

I'll definitely relook at the Wiley leadin and the James clues - those problems are well borne out by buzzpoint data. I'll also cut the mention of Debussy and Claudel hanging out together (as much as I like that story) and just clue him having her sculpture on his piano/mantel. These are all great points - thank you!

[Noble Rot]

The Ben-Gurion bonus had no discernible easy part. I guess it was on Ben-Gurion himself but those clues were not enough to make it one.

I had actually envisioned Ben-Gurion as the hard part (i.e. easy Nakba, medium New Historians, hard Ben-Gurion due to not mentioning the most famous things about him.) That bonus will for sure be changed, though.

[Tippy Martinez]

The Helen tossup in round 1 seems to have been classified as Classical lit, even though all the clues seemed to be American.

[VSCOelasticity]

The Helen tossup in round 1 seems to have been classified as Classical lit, even though all the clues seemed to be American.

Do you have access to the packets or stats? Because they have not been publicly disseminated as far as I know, and it seems weird that some people receive access to these things but not others.

[Tippy Martinez]

The Helen tossup in round 1 seems to have been classified as Classical lit, even though all the clues seemed to be American.

Do you have access to the packets or stats? Because they have not been publicly disseminated as far as I know, and it seems weird that some people receive access to these things but not others.

I do not, I just noticed that it seemed strange to have 2 American lit TUs in one packet at the time, since packet 1 also had a tossup on Salinger. I then double checked the distro and realized the Helen TU must have been categorized as Classical.

[VSCOelasticity]

The Helen tossup in round 1 seems to have been classified as Classical lit, even though all the clues seemed to be American.

Do you have access to the packets or stats? Because they have not been publicly disseminated as far as I know, and it seems weird that some people receive access to these things but not others.

I do not, I just noticed that it seemed strange to have 2 American lit TUs in one packet at the time, since packet 1 also had a tossup on Salinger. I then double checked the distro and realized the Helen TU must have been categorized as Classical.

Ah, gotcha, that makes sense.

[The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island]

The Helen tossup in round 1 seems to have been classified as Classical lit, even though all the clues seemed to be American.

It was classed as "misc" originally, when it clued from a wider range of things, but eventually all the clues got whittled down to just American and the tag never got fixed - - sorry!

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

What were those other calculators referred to in the Adding Machine question?

The governess question seemed to narrow the answer space down considerably early on. It mentioned that this was a profession a woman could have in the 18th/19th century, and that she had a master. With an earlier question on Pamela, this mostly ruled out "servant" as an answer. I can't think of any other professions given these constraints.

The Adding Machine tossup was actually a common-link on machines, the other play being Sophie Treadwell's Machinal. I was also worried about the governess tossup being too transparent, I probably should be more coy about the gender of the characters. Based on the data, I'm not sure how badly it played though, it got first-lined in one room, powered in three rooms (all clustered around the last Jane Eyre clue in power), and then the remaining live buzzes are all pre-FTP or post-FTP.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I would also agree with JinAh that the monopsony and IV tossups were very poor and didn't seem to distinguish levels of knowledge much. Both of them led in with extremely canonical examples of how each of the concepts was applied - the monopsony tossup came out of the gates and basically said its a market situation which is bad for wages (this is the main context in which they're studied, labor economics) and the IV tossup led in with a very basic example of what the technique is, which I don't think is going to differentiate people.

Will have more comments later - a lot of specific issues I'd like to point out, but those stood out as particularly egregious to me.

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

I would also agree with JinAh that the monopsony and IV tossups were very poor and didn't seem to distinguish levels of knowledge much. Both of them led in with extremely canonical examples of how each of the concepts was applied - the monopsony tossup came out of the gates and basically said its a market situation which is bad for wages (this is the main context in which they're studied, labor economics) and the IV tossup led in with a very basic example of what the technique is, which I don't think is going to differentiate people.

Will have more comments later - a lot of specific issues I'd like to point out, but those stood out as particularly egregious to me.

Yeah the monopsony question was not good, and I should have replaced it, I tried to just play with the wording, but I should have completely replaced that tossup.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

The tossup on pillars seemed kind of problematic - every clue is very clearly a thin vertical object! The leadin literally says that the djed represents a spine!

I negged this tossup on the first clue with "stele" knowing that the relief in question at Dendera was indeed depicting a thin, vertical object, but only managed to vaguely remember what it looks like. Steles and pillars serve different functions, so I don't feel too bad about this one, but it was a bit frustrating and seems to demand some leaps of knowledge on the player's part to get at what the question's going for.

I've discussed a bunch of individual questions with Caleb in private and will post my notes publicly in the next few days.

[Asterias Wrathbunny]

Can I see the question on Blue Velvet? Personal bias aside (it's one of my favorite movies) I recall the clues being obvious very early (the In Dreams scene) and I don't believe the guy who lipsyncs it is ever established as gay.

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

What was up with the bonus that asked for "sigma g plus" ?

I couldn't actually figure out what the hell the part wanted and gave A1g because that's what the totally symmetric representation would be on the character table and have never encountered and and having difficulty finding whatever nomenclature system uses this and I was similarly confused to just be told I was wrong when I provided the Mulliken symbol for the totally symmetric irreducible representation of the D infinity h point group that literally anyone who was asked that question would provide.

[VSCOelasticity]

Going through the 2/29 questions:

• U(1) is still not a hard part at this level, IMO. Harder than SU(3), though.
• I obviously cannot see conversion stats, but the shikimic acid/Tamiflu/Diels-Alder bonus seems to lack a medium part. People can name one flu drug pretty easily, especially now with virology getting more press.
• The Gibbs tossup has some typos: "HEavidside" and an erroneous comma after "Clifford". I'm also not sure if the entropy clue is unique (Shannon comes to mind as a possible answer)
• Not a substance critique, but all the power clues for soil formation are pretty short and choppy.
• The chiral resolution answerline is quite the doozy. I think if a tossup requires a 6-line answerline, it might be worth reconsidering how to ask that content.
• The main answerline of plastic deformation is plasticity, which is not the most likely answer IMO.
• I distinctly remember enjoying the phrase "pitiful mouse strain" :)
• I could be wrong, but Green-Tao seems like a hard pre-FTP for arithmetic progressions
• Mutans in power for caries seems a bit more generous than other questions
• Fullvalene should be no higher than pre-FTP for ferrocene, and as it stands the pre-FTP is much harder (less stock)
• The power seems too generous for prime, should probably end at cyclic. I might be biased, but that is a well-known fact from algebra.
• WIMPs doesn't seem like a medium part when you give "hypothetical dark matter candidate". As (to my knowledge) that clue narrows the answer down to a 50/50 between WIMPs and axons, and most people will say WIMPs because axons are harder to know about.
• Because Weinberg and Witten are pretty close together alphabetically, that clue seems less than ideal. Also "american" is left uncapitalized in that question.
• I mentioned the Raman spec and plasmon bonus thing in the other thread
• Not sure if law of large numbers works for a hard part when you say give stats context and "tends to infinity"
• Tomonaga being the first word of the first clue in the 1D tossup seems anti-pyramidal
• Both word sense and WordNet seem on the hard side here. Spelling out computer vision could help with difficulty. Or maybe doing something on word2vec? Could just be a gap in my knowledge. Good to see NLP though!
• The boundary layer/Blasius/Reynolds number is on the soft side, because boundary layer is the obvious fluid dynamics structure to say even if you don't know what the no-slip condition is.

[Bhagwan Shammbhagwan]

For the Russian tossup on sci-fi lit, it seems that the Roadside Picnic clue would be better placed at the end, because I would imagine more people converted the tossup at that point in the question, on knowing that it was the basis for Tarkovsky's Stalker, than necessarily knowing about the other novels mentioned.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

For the Russian tossup on sci-fi lit, it seems that the Roadside Picnic clue would be better placed at the end, because I would imagine more people converted the tossup at that point in the question, on knowing that it was the basis for Tarkovsky's Stalker, than necessarily knowing about the other novels mentioned.

That seems like non-insignificant knowledge? Not a film buff but I also buzzed on a clue from a film adaptation (Hard to Be a God) and I think that's not going to be uncommon for this question.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

There were a number of great questions in this set, but I wanted to praise several specific tossups from this tournament:

• The tossup on illusion touched on a very important concept in Buddhist theology that hasn't been asked in depth before.
• The tossup on Taiwan dealt with very important foreign policy issues that are still of great relevance today.
• The tossup on ending the Peloponnesian War was a great way of testing in-depth knowledge and understanding of the historical context behind a number of undoubtedly "core" works of literature.
• The tossup on jade was a great way of asking non-Western art from a lot of different cultures and built very well on the work that Jacob Reed and others have established in pushing this category.

[Amizda Calyx]

Going through the 2/29 questions:

• Mutans in power for caries seems a bit more generous than other questions

There were only two powers on this tossup across 16 rooms; looking through the database now I see it has been clued a few times recently, but I think I'm okay with it being towards the end of power. I might revisit it after the next mirror, though.

[touchpack]

Going through the 2/29 questions:

• The Gibbs tossup has some typos: "HEavidside" and an erroneous comma after "Clifford". I'm also not sure if the entropy clue is unique (Shannon comes to mind as a possible answer)
• WIMPs doesn't seem like a medium part when you give "hypothetical dark matter candidate". As (to my knowledge) that clue narrows the answer down to a 50/50 between WIMPs and axons, and most people will say WIMPs because axons are harder to know about.

Definitely gonna endorse both of these. Boltzmann is another answer that comes to mind, and according to Wikipedia, Boltzmann actually came up with the x*ln(x) formula first. Re: WIMPs, I guessed sterile neutrinos in a failed metagaming attempt since I assumed the answer would be something harder. WIMPs given "dark matter candidate" is way too soft for a medium part, and even if it got low conversion I wouldn't necessarily trust the conversion since it's very possible other players also tried to metagame the question like I did.

[Judson Laipply]

While this isn't a specific area of expertise for me, I'm pretty sure that Packet 5 bonus 14 part 2 should at least prompt on AGN.

I was thinking SMBH because of the M-Sigma clue until a later clue mentioned feedback regulating star formation and I thought that was specific to AGNs rather than anything containing an SMBH.

[Zealots of Stockholm]

Did this set really need two different bonus parts which had four answers required? I don't really know much about the categories or content of those bonuses, this just seems obnoxious to me.

[Noble Rot]

I don't think anyone has mentioned this as a problem, but I wanted to apologize to any teams/players that negged the Trajan tossup with Nerva. The sources I used for that question waffled on the issue of whether or not the alimenta was created by Trajan, or created by Nerva and then expanded by Trajan. I've found enough sources since then that at consider Nerva creating the alimenta a serious possibility, so I'll reword that clue to make it a bit clearer for future mirrors. Again, sorry to anyone who was (quite reasonably) thrown off by that clue.

[Ewan MacAulay]

What was up with the bonus that asked for "sigma g plus" ?

I couldn't actually figure out what the hell the part wanted and gave A1g because that's what the totally symmetric representation would be on the character table and have never encountered and and having difficulty finding whatever nomenclature system uses this and I was similarly confused to just be told I was wrong when I provided the Mulliken symbol for the totally symmetric irreducible representation of the D infinity h point group that literally anyone who was asked that question would provide.

Yeah sorry that should be an acceptable answer - it's only down as sigma-g-plus in my notes but Atkins MQM also uses A1g.

Question meant to reference the fact that the ground state vibrational wavefunction of the molecule spans the totally symmetric irrep of the molecular point group, but reading it back my phrasing is ass. Thanks for the heads up!

[Smuttynose Island]

Some miscellaneous thoughts on various VisArts bonuses (based on the 2/29 packets that were posted):

• Steyerl/Goldin/Washington: I liked the concept behind this bonus, but both Steyerl and Goldin seem like hard parts. Plus while "Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a taxi, NYC" has come up more in quizbowl, but The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is probably Nan Goldin's most notable work.
• Jafa/Beyonce/Venice: I thought that both Beyonce and Venice were easy parts. Golden Lion+Film Festival strikes me as too generous at this level.
• Cuba/Frankenthaler/Pollock: This hard part on "Cuba" struck me as very hard. We got a description of some Carmen Herrera works (who has unfortunately never come up before?) and then not the most famous work by Ana Mendieta. Mentioning her Silueta series or even one of the more famous photos from that series would have been nice.
• Iraq/Vietnam/Artaud: Artaud and his connection to surrealism is a great hard part.

Overall, I thought that the visual arts questions were well executed. I also don't mind an arts distribution that skews modern. Although this tournament seemed to go just a bit too far in that direction.

[Red Panda Cub]

• Steyerl/Goldin/Washington: I liked the concept behind this bonus, but both Steyerl and Goldin seem like hard parts. Plus while "Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a taxi, NYC" has come up more in quizbowl, but The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is probably Nan Goldin's most notable work.
• Cuba/Frankenthaler/Pollock: This hard part on "Cuba" struck me as very hard. We got a description of some Carmen Herrera works (who has unfortunately never come up before?) and then not the most famous work by Ana Mendieta. Mentioning her Silueta series or even one of the more famous photos from that series would have been nice.

For what it's worth, I think Goldin is at this stage more famous for PAIN than for any of her photographs, and that's what was clued in the bonus, iirc (it's certainly work w/ PAIN that got her to the top of most powerful people in art), so I think that's fine, though maybe still rough for a medium part.

And I thought the Cuba part was fine, the Mendieta description sounded very Mendieta even without a title drop (i.e. it was well/evocatively described, props Vishwa!), so we were able to convert it.

Additional comments: the lead-in to the Gethsemane TU seems soft, since "the spirit is willing" is a pretty famous quotation.

Newcomb's Problem, while a cool idea for a TU, seems likely, to me, to have played pretty flat and then cliff late, though I am prepared to have this view debuffed by the actual stats.

Edit: fixed typos.