FACTS Question-Specific Discussion

[rehg98]

Please use this thread to discuss specific questions from FACTS; we welcome any constructive criticism you might have concerning the writing and editing of this set's questions. If you wish to see a specific question, one of the other editors/writers or I can copy and paste that question into the thread. Thank you!

[csa2125]

I'd like to request feedback on the RMP and Social Science since I've heard that there have been a few complaints with it.

Here's a list of every answerline in those categories to jog your memory:

Religion TUs: Buddha, C S Lewis, Krishna, (Muslim) women, Iblis, (Book of) Ruth, Methodism, Faith, atheism, monks, bar mitzvah, Jehovah's Witnesses, fire (in Zoroastrianism), cows
Religion Bonuses: Sun Myung Moon / weddings / Book of Common Prayer, Rahab / Tamar / Babylon, Lord's Prayer / Serenity Prayer / Mary, miko / kami / torii, Selassie / ganja / hat (changed from Rasta / ganja / I-tal), grace / Calvin / Romans, Bathsheba / shepherd / census, Heaven's Gate suicide / Kool-Aid / Texas, bardo / Tibet / Panchen Lama, adhan / five / Moses, Sunnah / Surah / Hijra, Rig Veda / soma / aum, koans / Zen / Bodhidharma, Jain / nudity / fasting

Myth TUs: spider, Artemis, Egypt, Daedalus, Cupid, Thoth, Hanuman, Baldr, Yggdrasil, Medea, Excalibur, lions, Cu Chulainn, Carthage, Ishtar
Bonuses: The Golden Bough / Sibyl / Holy Grail, myth / Levi-Strauss / Endymion, Thebes / Tiresias / Laius, yoni / Shiva / Indra, Perseus / St George / Slavs, Inari / foxes / Tsukuyomi, rabbit / Uncle Remus / scarecrow, Lilith / Tobit / snake, Philoctetes / Bow / Aesculapius, Seven-League Boots / Fenrir / Bifrost, Osiris / passion plays / Abydos, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight / Arthur / shield, Snorri / Eddas / Ymir, bats / Popol Vuh / twins

Social Science TUs: words, (economic) efficiency, (political) power, gift-giving, Adler, California (Stanford Prison + Third Wave Experiments), division of labor
Bonuses: criminology / Panopticon / Beccaria , (amended to) Saussure / Proto-Indo-European / postmodernism, McLuhan / TV / David Foster Wallace, beauty contest / Keynes / IS-LM model, Festinger / Merton / asyla, Kroeber / Columbia / Sapir, intelligence / fluid intelligence / Binet, inequality / property / Amartya Sen

Philosophy TUs: machines/computers, Marx, Zeno's Paradoxes, Kant, beauty, Spinoza, UK (philosophers of language), Nazism
Bonuses: Zhaungzhi / butterfly / name, World as Will... / Schopenhauer / Nietzsche, numbers / Pythagoras / Plotinus, utilitarianism / Mill / hedonism, Judith Butler / texts/ Averroes, Cicero / Plato / stoicism, conservatism / mind / Ayn Rand, Rorty / pragmatism / rationalism AND empiricism

Thanks for the feedback and thanks for playing!

[The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island]

In general, I thought the RMP was really really well done; it felt regs+, it wasn't stale, and a lot of it was gettable (I'm not going to speak to SS because I very much do not play SS.) I only really had a couple of nitpicks;

-The Artemis tossup felt kind of jarring to me; the switch to a Bible clue and then the switch back felt really abrupt, and I thought including "pagan deity" or something in that clue would alleviate that feeling
-Similarly, I thought the Egypt tossup, at least at gamespeed, felt really hard to figure out which clues were about native Egyptian myths and which ones weren't; the inclusion of the Proteus clue between the Set clue and the Isis clue kind of broke the flow there I feel (and I would argue that the Set description is somewhat better known than Proteus myth anyways, although I'm not willing to strongly assert that)

(With these two, I don't mean to argue that the tossups are bad/need to be changed necessarily; those were just my viewpoints on playing them)

-The Averroes bonus part made it sound like Al-Ghazali specifically attacked Averroes in The Incoherence of the Philosophers, which isn't true (Averroes was born after Al-Ghazali's death date)
-The Osiris/Passion Plays/Abydos bonus seemed quite hard c.f. the rest of the Myth bonuses (especially considering on QuizDB Passion Plays has 1 bonus hit on "stanford housewrite" and Abydos has 1 hit total at ACF Nats)
-The Cuchulain tossup named dropped a bunch of Irish sounding names in power, which made it fairly transparent

Despite all of that, the RMP felt very very polished and a lot of those tus were some of my favorites to play, so thanks for editing!

[Ozymandias314]

I played the March 10th edition of FACTS at MIT, and here are some specific things I noticed:

1. In the bonus for Asclepius I'm 99% sure that it said that he was a "son of Hermes", but I'm also pretty confident that Asclepius is actually a son of Apollo.

2. I don't know bio, but apparently the first clue for the down syndrome tossup actually clues to Leukemia? Or Cancer? That's what the moderator in my room said after reading the TU.

3. For the Zhuangzi/Butterfly/Name bonus was pretty difficult, even for high school reg+. For starters, (Zhuangzi (book)/Butterfly/Consummate Person(至人）) was a bonus at Chicago Open this year, and furthermore, and despite four years in Chinese public school when I was younger, I had basically never heard of this work. I feel like a really quick fix for the first part would just to tossup the person instead of the work. As for the last part with the answerline "name", I wasn't listening 100% closely because it was the other team's bonus, but I felt that it was worded pretty vaguely and wasn't really clear what it was asking for.

[The Hands Resist Him]

Did the Glacier National Park bonus say that Montana was to the west of Idaho? I'm not sure if that was a mistake in the set, or if the moderator just misspoke/I misheard.

[34 + P.J. Dozier]

Did the Glacier National Park bonus say that Montana was to the west of Idaho? I'm not sure if that was a mistake in the set, or if the moderator just misspoke/I misheard.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't just you. A bunch of people were talking about that.

The leukemia thing that Vincent brought up also was very contentious amongst the players (several people, including our bio player, negged it with leukemia in the first line).

If it isn't too much work, could I see the answerlines for the fine arts questions in the set (à la the RMPS answerlines above)?

[kwang]

As requested, the complete list of Fine Arts answer lines:

Auditory TUs: the sea, Beethoven PCs, Hungary, flute, violin, requiem mass, Carnival of the Animals, Elgar, Italy, Mahler symphonies, Dvorak, clarinet, Bach.
Auditory Bonuses: Grieg / Tchaikovsky / Rachmaninov, Leningrad Symphony / Shosty 10 / Carmen, Miroirs / Ravel / Pictures at an Exhibition, Chopin / Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 / piano, Webern / Tchaikovsky / Satie, Purcell / Debussy / piano four hands, Ives / Concord Sonata / Adams, mass / polyphony / La Folia, Haydn / London / Drumroll, Mendelssohn / Orff / Songs Without Words, Spain / Rimsky-Korsakov / Boccherini, Tallis / Vaughan Williams / Greensleeves, Schubert / Die schone Mullerin / five.

Visual Arts TUs: Mannerism, Copley, boxing, Russia, Vermeer, green, Rodin, Delacroix, Seurat, self-portraits, Bernini, Whistler, Greece.
Visual Arts Bonuses: Beata Beatrix / Rossetti / Raphael, Dada / Fountain / Ernst, Bruegel / wedding / Potato Eaters, Not to be Reproduced / Magritte / Ensor, Futurism / Boccioni / automobile, Parthenon / Elgin Marbles / Phidias, gold / Klimt / Bloch-Bauer, Hirshhorn / Japan / stickers, black / Goya / Saturn, Cole / Hudson River School / Course of Empire, Olympia / Manet / Morisot, Three Graces / Botticelli / Canova, dog / Hogarth / playing cards.

Other Arts TUs: Stieglitz, Wagner, Barber of Seville, Mies, Gehry, Davis, India, Coltrane, Glass, London, Turandot, clown, Scorsese.
Other Arts Bonuses: vogue / runway / modern dance, Empire State / Flatiron / 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Cloud Gate / Calder / Crown Fountain, Ingres / Pieta / YBA, The Godfather / Brando / baptism, Gateway Arch / airport / ice rink, Pirates of Penzance / modern major-general / Gilbert & Sullivan, Prokofiev / Lieutenant Kije / Romeo and Juliet, Rome / Fellini / Westerns, The Shard / soccer stadiums / Hancock Tower, Sweeney Todd / A Little Night Music / POTUS, Fiddler on the Roof / Tevye / Aleichem, Crystal Palace / revolver / Brunel.

I was involved in writing/heavily editing most of the auditory questions in this set, so feel free to direct any comments/criticisms about those to me. The Tchaikovsky duplicate bonus part has been noted and will be fixed.

[34 + P.J. Dozier]

Could I see the full Hungary, violin, Carnival of the Animals, Italy, and Seurat tossups? I didn't get to hear those tossups outside of the first line, but from the little that I heard, I liked them (particularly Italy – loved that Neapolitan chord clue!).

Other things:

- Bonus difficulty for fine arts was kinda all over the place occasionally. For example, "Beata Beatrix / Rosetti / Raphael" (the first two parts are fairly hard) is certainly not on the same level of accessibility as "black / Goya / Saturn" (definitely an easy 30 for most art players).

- I don't think explicitly cluing Bernini's David in the first line of a Bernini tossup is the best idea for a set of this difficulty.

- I may just be dumb, but I feel as if the early kimono clue in the Whistler tossup could be neg bait for Monet – maybe clarifying it a little further might help?

- The Paul Revere's vest hint for the green tossup definitely needs to be tweaked. At MIT, there were MANY people (myself included) who negged it with "black" because, frankly, you can't really tell that his vest is green unless you scrutinize the painting actively looking for the minute difference between his dark green vest and the black background. Perhaps adding in a "it's not black, but..." or something could ameliorate the issue.

Other than that, though, I loved the fine arts in this set overall (particularly music). It was definitely fair, well-written, and consistent, and I really enjoyed playing it.

[kwang]

One composer from this country included a toccata nicknamed “The Devil’s Staircase” in a collection of notoriously difficult etudes. That composer’s piece Atmospheres, which exemplifies his pioneering “micropolyphonic” style, appears in the score for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Another composer from this country wrote an orchestral work whose second movement is a “Game of Pairs”. Besides writing (*) Concerto for Orchestra, that composer from this country portrayed Judith demanding that her husband open seven locked doors in his one-act opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. For 10 points, name this home country of Béla Bartók, who studied at its Royal Academy of Music in Budapest.
ANSWER: Hungary

The four movements of one piece for this instrument are structured as a nocturne, scherzo, passacaglia, and burlesque. This instrument, for which Shostakovich wrote an A minor concerto, plays the opening notes “G / A D” over soft strings in a 1905 concerto whose third movement was described as a “polonaise for polar bears”. Due to an overly prominent oboe solo, Pablo de Sarasate refused to perform Brahms’s (*) D major concerto for this instrument. Another concerto for this instrument unusually includes no orchestral introduction before the soloist’s entry. Twelve concerti for this instrument comprise The Contest Between Harmony and Invention. An E minor concerto by Mendelssohn features, for 10 points, what string instrument that plays Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons?
ANSWER: violin

One section of this work ends with an abrupt G major chord and borrows a repeated note motif from a Rameau harpsichord suite. In another section of this work, an offstage clarinet plays a “C-Ab” [“C A-flat”] ostinato. The fourth movement of this composition depicts the title entities with a painfully slow adaptation of Offenbach’s (*) “Galop infernal”. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” is quoted in the “Fossils” movement of this work, which opens with an “Introduction and Royal March”. Other movements of this piece include a mockery of critics titled “People with Long Ears”, a piano duet titled “Wild Asses: Swift Animals”, and a cello solo depicting a swan. For 10 points, name this humorous zoological suite by Camille Saint-Saens.
ANSWER: Carnival of the Animals [or Le carnaval des animaux]

A city in this country names a major chord built on the lowered second scale degree, such as a D-flat major chord in C major. Richard Strauss was sued by a composer from this country after accidentally committing plagiarism in a tone poem inspired by this country. A violinist from this country encouraged (*) Berlioz to write a symphony loosely based on Byron’s poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. One composer from here wrote etudes nicknamed “The Trill” and “The Devil’s Laughter”. Another composer from this country depicted the fountains and pines of its capital city in such movements as “The Pines of the Appian Way”. For 10 points, name this birthplace of Ottorino Respighi and Niccolò Paganini.
ANSWER: Italy

This artist’s unfinished last painting depicts a lean female in a yellow dress leaping off of a galloping white horse; that painting is The Circus. Three nude women appear before this artist’s most famous work in his painting The Models. One painting by this artist shows a girl in a white dress staring directly at the viewer as she holds hands with a lady in a pink dress carrying a (*) red parasol; that painting also depicts a woman who is holding both a dog and a monkey on leashes. For 10 points, name this painter who used his signature pointillist technique in such works as Bathers at Asnieres and A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
ANSWER: Georges Seurat

[csa2125]

1. In the bonus for Asclepius I'm 99% sure that it said that he was a "son of Hermes", but I'm also pretty confident that Asclepius is actually a son of Apollo.

This has been fixed.

3. For the Zhuangzi/Butterfly/Name bonus was pretty difficult, even for high school reg+. For starters, (Zhuangzi (book)/Butterfly/Consummate Person(至人）) was a bonus at Chicago Open this year, and furthermore, and despite four years in Chinese public school when I was younger, I had basically never heard of this work. I feel like a really quick fix for the first part would just to tossup the person instead of the work. As for the last part with the answerline "name", I wasn't listening 100% closely because it was the other team's bonus, but I felt that it was worded pretty vaguely and wasn't really clear what it was asking for.

Here's the Zhuangzhi bonus:

14. In this book, a man uses a skull as a pillow which asks him “How do you know it’s bad to be dead?” For 10 points each:
[10] Name this book, parts of which are framed as dialogues with Huizi. It expands on the Dao de jing throughout its “Inner Chapters,” “Outer Chapters,” and “Miscellaneous Chapters.”
ANSWER: (the) Zhuangzhi [“JWONG-dzuh” but accept phonetic answers; accept Zhuangzhou; or Chuang tzu]
[10] Zhuangzhi could not tell whether he was a man dreaming of one of these animals, or one of these animals dreaming of a man, which exemplifies the “Transformation of Things.”
ANSWER: butterfly [accept Butterfly Dream]
[10] Zhuangzhi analogized a doctrine advising to “rectify” these things to a net for catching fish. One of these words given to the central figure of the Analects is “Confucius,” while one belonging to the author of the Zhuangzhi is “Zhuangzhi.”
ANSWER: name(s) [accept rectification of names or zhengming or chengming; prompt on words]

Note that the CO bonus clued from the first chapter in which Kun transforms into Peng and "Walking Two Roads," which is not at all comparable to asking "name the second most famous Daoist philosophical text behind the Dao de jing." You didn't mention which years you where in Chinese public school, but Zhuangzhi is not easy to read; I wouldn't except really anyone to hear about Hegel through American high school.
The "names" part has been slightly amended, but it should be pretty clear what it wants now.

[raginbulls]

Could I take a look at the science answerlines?

[kiwikoalabear]

Sorry for the delay! Here are the requested science answer lines:

Biology TU’s: spleen, translation, proteins, RuBisCo, CF, peroxisomes, Miller-Urey, bacteriophages, calcium, Down syndrome, Parkinson’s, ER, ATP, aorta, cellulose
Bonuses: DNA / Southern blot / PCR, peregrine falcon / W and Z / uric acid, renin / blood pressure / nephrons, transformation / electroporation / calcium, malaria / artemisinin / liver, penicillins / cell wall / B-lactamase, central dogma / reverse transcription / inteins, blue / dinoflagellates / chlorophyll, Muller / meiosis / metaphase I, glycolysis / magnesium / Warburg, Hardy-Weinberg / population size / easiness, cas / mitochondria / zinc, neurons / Cajal / ethanol, Arthropoda / Chelicerata / hermaphroditic

Chemistry TU’s: microscopy, phosphorus, NMR, water, Arrhenius, colloids, combustion, Lavoisier, chromatography, ideal gases, mercury, ethers
Bonuses: nitrogen / alkynes / sodium, distillation / cracking / heptane, entropy / boiling / fluctuation, transition states / Gibbs free energy / saddle point, titration /equivalence point/complexometric, semiconductors / doping / group 13, Wolff-Kishner / zinc / single covalent bond, lead / redox / concentration cells, electron capture / Auger effect / beta-decay, Heck reaction / sp2 / Japan, halogens / potassium / astatine, Dies-Alder / benzene / cholesterol, activation energy / Langmuir / heterogeneous, charge / magnetic monopoles / color

Physics TU’s: half, ferromagnetism, Ohm’s law, heat capacity, momentum, electric field, superconductivity, uncertainty principle, neutrinos, precession, plasma, double-slit experiment, strong, three
Bonuses: Feynman / space time / positrons, pendulum / modes / wave, special relativity / Lorentz / beta, Q factor / damping / friction, turbulent flow / Navier-Stokes / continuity, dispersion, group velocity, diffraction, action / potential energy / Euler, resistor / Wheatstone / inductors, chaotic / quantum mechanics / unstable equilibrium, black bodies / Planck / emissivity, Stern-Gerlach / spin / magnetic field, crystals / defects / Miller, atomic number / Bohr / wavenumber, Michelson-Morley / interferometer / Mössbauer

Misc. TU’s: four, cosine, orthogonal, dark matter, trees, parallel, Mars, prime, extinction of the dinosaurs, Bayes, aquifers, glacier, Java,
Bonuses: expected value / integral / skewness, James Webb space telescope / lagrangian / infrared, exponential / power / order, galaxies / barred / lenticular, comparison / bubble sort / counting sort, black hole / gravitational waves / no-hair, dynamic programming / memory / knapsack, complex / differentiable / conformal mapping, soil / horizons / illuviation, Titus-Bode law / Kepler / two, factorial / natural log / Stirling approximation, Dijkstra’s algorithm / graph theory / Bellman

[skewit]

Could I see the Shostakovich bonus?

[kwang]

This has been slightly edited since the MIT mirror, but the parts are the same.

This symphony’s first movement parodies a theme from Hitler’s favorite operetta, Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this symphony which features a 22-bar snare drum “invasion theme” and is nicknamed for a city under siege.
ANSWER: Symphony No. 7 in C major by Dmitri Shostakovich [prompt on “Symphony No. 7” by asking for a composer; accept “Leningrad” Symphony]
[10] In addition to the DSCH motif, the third movement of this Shostakovich symphony uses a repeated horn solo to represent Elmira Nazirova. It is unknown whether this symphony’s scherzo second movement depicts Stalin.
ANSWER: Symphony No. 10 in E minor
[10] A flute solo in the first movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 quotes the “Habanera” from this Bizet opera, in which Don Jose and Escamillo vie for the title character.
ANSWER: Carmen

[1992 in spaceflight]

Round 8, tossup 15 is a repeat tossup (on combustion) that was in an earlier packet.

[1992 in spaceflight]

The leadin to the Down Syndrome tossup also applies to leukemia, as well, if a protest from Midwest Championship is to judge. (The buzz was right at Philadelphia Chromosome)

[34 + P.J. Dozier]

The leadin to the Down Syndrome tossup also applies to leukemia, as well, if a protest from Midwest Championship is to judge. (The buzz was right at Philadelphia Chromosome)

This same issue occurred at the MIT mirror as well, where many people made the exact same neg. I'm surprised that it hasn't been addressed yet.

[kiwikoalabear]

The leadin to the Down Syndrome tossup also applies to leukemia, as well, if a protest from Midwest Championship is to judge. (The buzz was right at Philadelphia Chromosome)

This same issue occurred at the MIT mirror as well, where many people made the exact same neg. I'm surprised that it hasn't been addressed yet.

That's curious. I definitely changed the lead-in after MIT, and the version played at TJIAT reads:

"19. One form of this disease is caused by a Robertsonian translocation. The main model organism used to study this disease is the Ts65Dn mouse, which is tested for defects in its Mrpl39 gene. Those who suffer from this condition often have characteristic (*) Brushfield spots along the iris. More than 50% of those afflicted with this condition suffer from Alzheimer’s disease after age 60. Symptoms of this disease include sleep apnea, a lower than average IQ, and a shortened neck. For 10 points, name this syndrome, caused by the trisomy of chromosome 21.
ANSWER : Down syndrome [accept DS or DNS; accept trisomy 21 before mention]"

[db0wman]

The leadin to the Down Syndrome tossup also applies to leukemia, as well, if a protest from Midwest Championship is to judge. (The buzz was right at Philadelphia Chromosome)

This same issue occurred at the MIT mirror as well, where many people made the exact same neg. I'm surprised that it hasn't been addressed yet.

That's curious. I definitely changed the lead-in after MIT.

As someone who played the tournament that Mr. O'Rourke moderated at, the tournament organizers stated beforehand that we were playing an "old" version of the FACTS set. I assume that we used a version from before TJIAT, as the violin tossup was also certainly different.

[A Dim-Witted Saboteur]

The leadin to the Down Syndrome tossup also applies to leukemia, as well, if a protest from Midwest Championship is to judge. (The buzz was right at Philadelphia Chromosome)

This same issue occurred at the MIT mirror as well, where many people made the exact same neg. I'm surprised that it hasn't been addressed yet.

That's curious. I definitely changed the lead-in after MIT.

As someone who played the tournament that Mr. O'Rourke moderated at, the tournament organizers stated beforehand that we were playing an "old" version of the FACTS set. I assume that we used a version from before TJIAT, as the violin tossup was also certainly different.

Yes; sorry, this was a fairly bad situation. There was a permissions issue with the folder in which the packets were that I couldn't resolve due to being at ACF Nationals, so a version from before two weeks' worth of corrections were made was used. My apologies for any issues this caused.

[1992 in spaceflight]

For the record, I am glad to hear that the issues were fixed. I was under the mistaken impression that we were able to access the new packets at UIUC after a while, which was where my criticisms were coming from.