2019 PIANO/MO Specific Question Discussion

[vinteuil]

Here's your thread for discussion of individual questions. Please save small-scale fixes for the errata thread.

[Majin Buu Roi]

To start with briefly, the tossup on "Incan Emperors" has been changed to a tossup on just "Incas" to avoid some protest situations I've been made aware of. No actual clues have changed, but the pronouns have and hopefully this will reward the same knowledge better.

[vinteuil]

We've also adjusted the "classrooms" tossup to accept "schools" before the word "jigsaw."

The tossup on Athena now prompts on "Nike" as well as accepting "Athena Nike."

[a bird]

Could I see the stat mech bonus from packet 13 and the Helium atom question from packet 11?

[a bird]

Could I also see the TU on fisheries from packet 4 and the DNA damage bonus from packet 13? I was a bit confused on the "alkylation" bonus part—I thought at least one of the drugs mentioned functions by crosslinking.

[adamsil]

Could I also see the TU on fisheries from packet 4 and the DNA damage bonus from packet 13? I was a bit confused on the "alkylation" bonus part—I thought at least one of the drugs mentioned functions by crosslinking.

For sure!

David Cushing formulated his match-mismatch hypothesis to describe how these systems are influenced by phenological variation. The Baranov equation models the within-year decline in the output of these systems based on multiple sources of mortality. The Ricker and Beverton–Holt models, which were developed to model the dynamics of these systems, differ in assumptions about the stock-recruitment relationship. Trevor Branch and Ray Hilborn have disputed the relevance of Daniel Pauly’s finding that the mean (*) trophic level of these systems has declined over time. The concept of maximum sustainable yield is most often used to guide harvesting from these systems. One of these systems off the coast of Newfoundland collapsed in 1992 due to overharvesting. For 10 points, name these aquatic systems from which people catch animals like haddock and cod.
ANSWER: fisheries [prompt on populations; prompt on answers that mention fish] <SK>

This system is the simplest one solved using the Pluvinage method, a variant of a technique developed by Egil Hylleraas. Excitations of this system are the simplest examples of Fermi holes and heaps. A spherically symmetric integral symbolized K first used to describe the energy of this system is constructed from the Coulomb integral by exchanging labels on two wavefunction pairs. In reduced units, this system’s potential energy is “negative (*) 2 over r1, minus 2 over r2, plus one over r1 r2”. A coefficient of five-eighths appears in first-order perturbation theory on this system, an approach that gives its energy as negative 2.8 Hartrees. Even under the Born–Oppenheimer approximation, this system is still a three-body problem, unlike the similarly unsolvable system of H2+. For 10 points, name this system composed of two electrons orbiting an alpha particle.
ANSWER: helium atom [or He] <AS> (classified as physics)

Cyclophosphamide, a derivative of mustard gas, and cisplatin both work as cancer therapies by effecting this type of chemical transformation on DNA. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this general class of chemical reactions catalyzed by a broad class of chemotherapeutics that act at nitrogen-7 on guanine residues. M·G·M·T repairs damage caused by a spontaneous reaction of this type at O-6.
ANSWER: alkylation [or alkylating agents; or methylation; or methylating; or other word forms; or attachment of an alkyl or methyl group]
[10] Addition of a methyl group to this nucleobase just produces thymine. A fluorinated derivative of this base, which normally replaces thymine in RNA, is used in chemotherapy to block thymidine synthesis.
ANSWER: uracil [or 5-fluorouracil]
[10] 5-fluoro·uracil is a common example of this class of drugs, which stoichiometrically inhibit enzymes by irreversibly forming covalent adducts at the active site. Aspirin is another example.
ANSWER: suicide inhibitors <AS>

I'm pretty sure these are all alkylating agents.

Read slowly. Consider a nondegenerate two-state system, where, relative to some zero-energy reference, State 1 has energy “k T,” and State 2 has energy “2 times k T,” where “k T” is Boltzmann’s constant times temperature. For 10 points each:
[10] State 1 is described by what adjective, which refers to the lowest energy state of a system, and therefore, the most likely to be occupied?
ANSWER: ground state
[10] Solely in terms of fundamental mathematical constants, and relative to the same reference state, what is the value of the canonical partition function for this system? In decimal form, it’s roughly 0.503.
ANSWER: e to the negative-one, plus e to the negative-two [or one-over-e plus one-over-e-squared; or mathematical equivalents]
[10] This quantity for the system is about 0.687 k T, or negative k T times the log of the canonical partition function. This potential is directly linked to the canonical ensemble because its natural variables, temperature and volume, are held constant in the ensemble.
ANSWER: Helmholtz free energy [or F; or A; prompt on free energy] <AS> (classified as chemistry)

[Mnemosyne]

Could I see the tossup on sarcophagus? I answered "tomb" on the Barbatus clue, which I'm sure is technically wrong, but it's frustrating since it was in the "Tomb of the Scipios" and I might have been able to get it on a prompt.

I'm glad the Inca tossup was fixed, but I just want to reiterate that writing tossups using "one of these people" always seems to lead to ambiguous answers.

Could I see the tossup on covering maps? I remember hearing "namesake lifting property" so I answered with homotopies, but I'm guessing I was trying to buzz on word association instead of actually buzzing on the clue.

The tossup on Athena now prompts on "Nike" as well as accepting "Athena Nike."

Isn't this the opposite of our protest resolution? Wolfsberg buzzed in after the first sentence with "Nike", got prompted, said "Athena Nike" and was given 15. Jordan's team protested that he should've been negged. The protest was accepted and Jordan's team got to hear replacement questions to try and catch up to us. But now you're saying that it was fine to prompt on Nike?

[a bird]

ANSWER: helium atom [or He] <AS> (classified as physics)

Does this mean the question on _resolution_ in the same packet was classified as chemistry? I thought both questions were good, but the _resolution_ tossup didn't sound like chemistry.

Cyclophosphamide, a derivative of mustard gas, and cisplatin both work as cancer therapies by effecting this type of chemical transformation on DNA. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this general class of chemical reactions catalyzed by a broad class of chemotherapeutics that act at nitrogen-7 on guanine residues. M·G·M·T repairs damage caused by a spontaneous reaction of this type at O-6.
ANSWER: alkylation [or alkylating agents; or methylation; or methylating; or other word forms; or attachment of an alkyl or methyl group]

...

I'm pretty sure these are all alkylating agents.

I don't know that much about this, but I looked at the table of chemo drugs in this book, which says that cisplatin forms crosslinks. (I guess this some of the "alkylating agents" listed form crosslinks as well.) A quick google shows that chemocare.com calls it an alkylating agent, but the word "alkylating" doesn't appear on it's Wikipedia page.

[entropy]

About the Athena/Athena Nike tossup, in our room Stephen Liu buzzed at the ambiguous spot and said Nike, then Athena Nike. He was originally negged, then protested and received his power.

[adamsil]

ANSWER: helium atom [or He] <AS> (classified as physics)

Does this mean the question on _resolution_ in the same packet was classified as chemistry? I thought both questions were good, but the _resolution_ tossup didn't sound like chemistry.

Cyclophosphamide, a derivative of mustard gas, and cisplatin both work as cancer therapies by effecting this type of chemical transformation on DNA. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this general class of chemical reactions catalyzed by a broad class of chemotherapeutics that act at nitrogen-7 on guanine residues. M·G·M·T repairs damage caused by a spontaneous reaction of this type at O-6.
ANSWER: alkylation [or alkylating agents; or methylation; or methylating; or other word forms; or attachment of an alkyl or methyl group]

...

I'm pretty sure these are all alkylating agents.

I don't know that much about this, but I looked at the table of chemo drugs in this book, which says that cisplatin forms crosslinks. (I guess this some of the "alkylating agents" listed form crosslinks as well.) A quick google shows that chemocare.com calls it an alkylating agent, but the word "alkylating" doesn't appear on it's Wikipedia page.

The more I think about this, the more it doesn't make sense, cause cisplatin doesn't actually have any carbon in it to alkylate stuff with. According to more sources I find, it's very widely called an alkylating agent, yet it doesn't actually alkylate DNA, which makes extremely no sense to me. I'll fix the wording just to be clear, thanks for bringing it up!

Resolution was considered chemistry, yep. It was mostly on super-res, which won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, so I figured that was justification enough. (EM is trickier--I've seen that classified as chem, physics, and bio in the past, perhaps we should make up our minds!)

[Carlos Be]

Aseem was negged for saying "Kells" for Book of Kells and I was negged for saying "Anna Magdalena" for "Anna Magdalena Bach." While perhaps technically corrected these were pretty obnoxious negs to get.

Can I see the tossup on Dirichlet? Nikhil mentioned that it clued L-functions but I didn't recognize that during the game. Also, the clue about Dirichlet's approximation theorem is incredibly hard to buzz on at game speed, because Liouville has an incredibly similar theorem (this can be remedied easily by adding "which was generalized by Liouville" or something similar). I have no idea why that tossup clued some random textbook Dirichlet wrote instead of cluing Dirichlet series or Dirichlet convolution.

I was glad to see John Kani and Winston Ntshona to come up, but I object strongly to the statement in the question that Sizwe Bansi is Dead was primarily written by Athol Fugard. Zakes Mda called out this common misconception in the preface to one of John Kani's plays.

Finally, a lot of the math hard parts were on named theorems. In particular, "Hasse-Minkowski" struck me as needlessly specific, since the bonus part could have been just the "local-global principle" itself.

[zeebli123]

Could I see the "floating" tossup in round 10 and the "C sharp" tossup in round 11?

[34 + P.J. Dozier]

Can I see the tossup on Dirichlet? Nikhil mentioned that it clued L-functions but I didn't recognize that during the game. Also, the clue about Dirichlet's approximation theorem is incredibly hard to buzz on at game speed, because Liouville has an incredibly similar theorem (this can be remedied easily by adding "which was generalized by Liouville" or something similar). I have no idea why that tossup clued some random textbook Dirichlet wrote instead of cluing Dirichlet series or Dirichlet convolution.

A lower bound corresponding to a result proven by this man is given by the Thue–Siegel–Roth theorem. This man proved that, for a real number x, there are infinitely many integers p and q such that the a minus p-over-q is smaller than one-over q-squared. Richard Dedekind included many of his own results in an “edition” of this man’s lectures on number theory. This man names a class of (*) multiplicative functions that only equal zero for integers coprime to their modulus. This man proved that an arithmetic progression whose first term and difference are coprime contains infinitely many primes using his namesake L-functions. This formulator of the first boundary value problem gave the conditions for a function’s Fourier series to converge, and he was the first to use the fact that, if 5 items are put in 3 boxes, at least one box must have multiple items. For 10 points—who formulated the pigeonhole principle?
ANSWER: (Johann) Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet [accept Dirichlet approximation theorem or Dirichlet characters or Dirichlet’s theorem on primes in arithmetic progressions or Dirichlet L-functions or Dirichlet problems] <JR>

Could I see the "floating" tossup in round 10 and the "C sharp" tossup in round 11?

Description acceptable. In one painting, a man holding a piece of Mozart sheet music does this action in front of an audience divided into black, red, and blue sections. A man defecates by a fence in the bottom left of a painting whose main subjects perform this action. In a painting, a bride is shown between a huge rooster and a man doing this in front of the Eiffel Tower, and a similar-looking couple does this in The Three Candles. Punning on the Yiddish phrase for “itinerancy,” a beggar in black does this action in a work titled for the artist’s hometown of (*) Vitebsk. A pink church and green houses appear in a painting where the artist holds hands with his wife Bella, who performs this action. In another work, Bella wears black and holds flowers while the artist contorts his neck to kiss her while doing this action. For 10 points, name this action performed by Marc Chagall in his paintings The Birthday and Over The Town.
ANSWER: flying [or levitating, or floating, or any reasonable equivalent for being mid-air; prompt on jumping] <DS>

In the recapitulation of a symphony’s first movement, this note unusually resolves downward, prompting a modulation to the major supertonic of F. In that movement, this note is first played by the cellos, followed by a series of “throbbing” syncopated “Gs” in the first violins. After its quiet opening, the last movement of Beethoven’s Eighth is interrupted by all the strings and woodwinds holding out this pitch fortissimo. The main theme of the (*) “Eroica” symphony’s first movement is “interrupted” by this unusually-spelled chromatic note. This note’s minor key was used for the second of two sonatas titled “quasi una fantasia.” Beethoven’s fourteenth string quartet and piano sonata are both in this note’s minor key. For 10 points, name this pitch that can also be written as D-flat.
ANSWER: C-sharp [accept D-flat until mentioned; do not accept or prompt on “C”] <JR>

[zeebli123]

Description acceptable. In one painting, a man holding a piece of Mozart sheet music does this action in front of an audience divided into black, red, and blue sections. A man defecates by a fence in the bottom left of a painting whose main subjects perform this action. In a painting, a bride is shown between a huge rooster and a man doing this in front of the Eiffel Tower, and a similar-looking couple does this in The Three Candles. Punning on the Yiddish phrase for “itinerancy,” a beggar in black does this action in a work titled for the artist’s hometown of (*) Vitebsk. A pink church and green houses appear in a painting where the artist holds hands with his wife Bella, who performs this action. In another work, Bella wears black and holds flowers while the artist contorts his neck to kiss her while doing this action. For 10 points, name this action performed by Marc Chagall in his paintings The Birthday and Over The Town.
ANSWER: flying [or levitating, or floating, or any reasonable equivalent for being mid-air; prompt on jumping] <DS>

I negged this tossup with "kissing" right before it was dropped; perhaps it would be better to rephrase the sentence to mention the kissing first? The sentence also doesn't indicate that it wants what the artist is doing, not Bella, until about the second half of the sentence, anyway.

[vinteuil]

Aseem was negged for saying "Kells" for Book of Kells and I was negged for saying "Anna Magdalena" for "Anna Magdalena Bach." While perhaps technically corrected these were pretty obnoxious negs to get.

Does anybody actually refer to the Book of Kells as just "Kells" (which refers unambiguously to the abbey)? And why should we start accepting first names for a woman when we wouldn't for, e.g. her husband or sons?

[vinteuil]

Could I see the tossup on sarcophagus? I answered "tomb" on the Barbatus clue, which I'm sure is technically wrong, but it's frustrating since it was in the "Tomb of the Scipios" and I might have been able to get it on a prompt.

The Tomb of the Scipios isn't an "object," the unambiguous pronoun for almost the entire question.

The tossup on Athena now prompts on "Nike" as well as accepting "Athena Nike."

Isn't this the opposite of our protest resolution? Wolfsberg buzzed in after the first sentence with "Nike", got prompted, said "Athena Nike" and was given 15. Jordan's team protested that he should've been negged. The protest was accepted and Jordan's team got to hear replacement questions to try and catch up to us. But now you're saying that it was fine to prompt on Nike?

As far as I can tell, I was not made aware of this protest; when I was for the Stanford site, I ruled Nike to have been promptable.

[vinteuil]

Finally, a lot of the math hard parts were on named theorems. In particular, "Hasse-Minkowski" struck me as needlessly specific, since the bonus part could have been just the "local-global principle" itself.

I'll change this to just "Hasse"; it's very possibly a quirk of my education that we emphasized the specific theorem.

[vinteuil]

I was glad to see John Kani and Winston Ntshona to come up, but I object strongly to the statement in the question that Sizwe Bansi is Dead was primarily written by Athol Fugard. Zakes Mda called out this common misconception in the preface to one of John Kani's plays.

As the idiot who added the "primarily" part, I will be the one to fix it!

[Carlos Be]

Aseem was negged for saying "Kells" for Book of Kells and I was negged for saying "Anna Magdalena" for "Anna Magdalena Bach." While perhaps technically corrected these were pretty obnoxious negs to get.

Does anybody actually refer to the Book of Kells as just "Kells" (which refers unambiguously to the abbey)? And why should we start accepting first names for a woman when we wouldn't for, e.g. her husband or sons?

If the question had mentioned Kells already, Kells would have been acceptable by quiz bowl precedent. While it didn't say book, when you know what's going on in the question it's easy to function as if it had already said book, and give only the substantive part of the name.

Maybe I'm just a small music brain, but I've always heard the collection called Notebook for Anna Magdalena. If that is the case then it would be unnecessarily strict to not prompt on the name given in the title of the collection.

[Muriatic]

Could I see the tossup on "Anne Bradstreet's House"?

[34 + P.J. Dozier]

Could I see the tossup on "Anne Bradstreet's House"?

A metaphorical version of this place is described as the source of “rags” used to clothe a poem’s title object, which is then told, “In this array, ‘mongst vulgars may’st thou roam.” While passing through this place, a woman remarks how no “bridegroom’s voice” will ever be heard in it and describes it as “glory richly furnished.” Residents of this place include a son “whom greedy yet I miss out of his kicking place,” a husband who “will listen while you read a Song,” and a woman who is described as (*) “restless, waiting for him” in a poem by John Berryman. A resident of this title place, which once contained a “store I counted best,” is awoken by a “thund’ring noise / And piteous shrieks of dreadful voice” in a poem titled for it, which ends by remarking that “The world no longer let me love / My hope and treasure lies above.” For 10 points, name this title place of “Verses upon the Burning of our House.”
ANSWER: Anne Bradstreet’s house [accept any description of Anne or Simon Bradstreet’s home or similar; accept “Verses upon the Burning of our House” until mentioned; prompt on partial answer; prompt on Massachusetts Bay Colony or North Andover, Massachusetts] (The first poem is “The Author to Her Book.”) <WJ>

[jsingh]

Can I see the East Germany TU? I felt like the coffee crisis stuff was a bit early, as it came up in this past year's NASAT.

[Muriel Axon]

Can I see the East Germany TU? I felt like the coffee crisis stuff was a bit early, as it came up in this past year's NASAT.

Susanne Lohmann studied the role of informational cascades in a series of protests in this country. This country started to invest in Vietnamese and Laotian coffee production after a “black frost” that wrecked the Brazilian coffee harvest precipitated this country’s 1977 coffee crisis. In the late 1980s, a different country’s embassy in Prague became home to hundreds of refugees from this country. A term translating to (*) “flight from the republic” was used to describe widespread emigration from this country in its early history. A construction workers’ strike against higher work quotas developed into this country’s Uprising of 1953. The slogan “We are the people” was at the center of the Monday demonstrations at the St. Nicholas Church in this country, as well as the 1989 Alexanderplatz demonstrations. For 10 points, name this nation whose Peaceful Revolution included the fall of the Berlin Wall.
ANSWER: East Germany [or the German Democratic Republic; or Deutsche Demokratische Republik; or GDR; or DDR; do not accept or prompt on “Germany,” “Federal Republic of Germany,” “FRG,” “BRD,” or “Bundesrepublik Deutschland”]

Re: the complaint, that's fair -- when writing this question, I hadn't seen the NASAT mention given that it doesn't contain the phrase "coffee crisis." That said, I don't think this is a big problem. If anything, when ordering clues in this set, we may have overestimated how much the recent mention of a particular clue would increase the likelihood that someone would buzz. Given that the East Germany question in NASAT was a tiebreaker, I don't feel too bad about the placement; if you remembered it from there, I think you deserve the points!

[jsingh]

It was mentioned in NASAT, but also in NHBB last year in a recorded game, although I'm not sure how many people watch those.

[cwasims]

Could I see the tossup on Robert Lucas? I didn't recall a description of the Lucas critique in the tossup, but I might have been tired and not paying attention.

I was also somewhat annoyed that I couldn't have been prompted (or anti-prompted) when I buzzed with "estimating supply and demand" for the demand estimation tossup. I realize that all the substantive clues had to do with demand, but instrumental variables are obviously also used in the same way for supply estimation and estimating supply and demand is usually just treated as one topic in econometrics classes.

[Muriel Axon]

A book by Michel de Vroey contrasts this title economist’s “Walrasian” style to the “Marshallian” style of Keynes. This economist argued that the “operational job” of economists was writing FORTRAN programs that take economic policies as inputs and then output time series. This economist began research on economic development with Paul Romer in the late 1980s, after showing that people would only be willing to give up 0.05 percent of average consumption to (*) smooth out business cycles completely. In the article “After the Keynesian Revolution,” this man and Thomas Sargent called for a return to equilibrium business cycle theory. Earlier, this man attacked Keynesian models that treated as invariant statistical parameters that change with different policies. For 10 points, name this University of Chicago economist with a namesake “critique.”
ANSWER: Robert Emerson Lucas, Jr.

[cwasims]

A book by Michel de Vroey contrasts this title economist’s “Walrasian” style to the “Marshallian” style of Keynes. This economist argued that the “operational job” of economists was writing FORTRAN programs that take economic policies as inputs and then output time series. This economist began research on economic development with Paul Romer in the late 1980s, after showing that people would only be willing to give up 0.05 percent of average consumption to (*) smooth out business cycles completely. In the article “After the Keynesian Revolution,” this man and Thomas Sargent called for a return to equilibrium business cycle theory. Earlier, this man attacked Keynesian models that treated as invariant statistical parameters that change with different policies. For 10 points, name this University of Chicago economist with a namesake “critique.”
ANSWER: Robert Emerson Lucas, Jr.

Thanks, I obviously just wasn't paying much attention. I do think the Lucas critique clue could be expanded a bit though, since it's by far his most notable contribution to economics (at least to econ undergrads) and it goes by pretty quickly at game speed.

[vinteuil]

Aseem was negged for saying "Kells" for Book of Kells and I was negged for saying "Anna Magdalena" for "Anna Magdalena Bach." While perhaps technically corrected these were pretty obnoxious negs to get.

Does anybody actually refer to the Book of Kells as just "Kells" (which refers unambiguously to the abbey)? And why should we start accepting first names for a woman when we wouldn't for, e.g. her husband or sons?

If the question had mentioned Kells already, Kells would have been acceptable by quiz bowl precedent. While it didn't say book, when you know what's going on in the question it's easy to function as if it had already said book, and give only the substantive part of the name.

Maybe I'm just a small music brain, but I've always heard the collection called Notebook for Anna Magdalena. If that is the case then it would be unnecessarily strict to not prompt on the name given in the title of the collection.

These are reasonable enough, and I would certainly be upset upon making such a neg, so I will accept both for future mirrors.

[Muriel Axon]

I was also somewhat annoyed that I couldn't have been prompted (or anti-prompted) when I buzzed with "estimating supply and demand" for the demand estimation tossup. I realize that all the substantive clues had to do with demand, but instrumental variables are obviously also used in the same way for supply estimation and estimating supply and demand is usually just treated as one topic in econometrics classes.

Speaking on Sam's behalf -- as he's away from the computer:
1. You are right -- this answer on the demand estimation question at least deserved a prompt, and it was an oversight on his part. This will be corrected for future mirrors.
2. It's remarkable that you didn't get the Lucas question on the Thomas Sargent clue, given that you two won the Nobel Prize in the same year.

[cwasims]

I was also somewhat annoyed that I couldn't have been prompted (or anti-prompted) when I buzzed with "estimating supply and demand" for the demand estimation tossup. I realize that all the substantive clues had to do with demand, but instrumental variables are obviously also used in the same way for supply estimation and estimating supply and demand is usually just treated as one topic in econometrics classes.

Speaking on Sam's behalf -- as he's away from the computer:
1. You are right -- this answer on the demand estimation question at least deserved a prompt, and it was an oversight on his part. This will be corrected for future mirrors.
2. It's remarkable that you didn't get the Lucas question on the Thomas Sargent clue, given that you two won the Nobel Prize in the same year.

Unfortunately I did not remember that Lucas also won that year. In my defense, I did remember that Thomas Sargent won the prize the same year as my much more illustrious name twin (and even briefly considered buzzing with Christopher Sims, but restrained myself after remembering that he would be way too difficult to toss up).

[Banana Stand]

Common links I didn't like:

-Polish literature: There's zero reason for this not to be a tossup on Stanislaw Lem. It was literally all Lem works and he's a reasonable answerline at this difficulty. This adds nothing to the accessibility of the set.

-Ferrara: Maybe my least favorite tossup in the set. Maybe I'm just salty because I read HTTB five years ago and couldn't remember where it was set so I just buzzed and said Florence, but this tossup really didn't need to exist. "Ferrara" literally appears once in My Last Duchess and isn't integral to the poem at all, and using a contemporary novelist and a 19th century poem in the same tossup shouldn't be done outside of Scattergories. Was this an attempt at tossing up HTTB but trying to make it easy by adding some Browning lines? If so, there are so many better common link options for that, even if you just tossed up "Smith" using clues from HTTB or NW, for example, at least then you're using two relevant contemporary women authors.

-Egypt: I'd question this leadin at CO. I highly doubt anyone who plays the set buzzes on it. I literally searched "In the Train story Egypt" and it took me 7 links to get to one about the Taymurs, and even then it was nested deep into a Britannica page about Egyptian literature.

-Barcelona: Seemed like a fairly big cliff from "novel that nobody has heard of" to "lines from Homage to Catalonia" and seemed like another forced common link trying to wedge in something that was probably better off asked about in a different way.

Other things:

-Mayakovsky: This tossup is a bit of an abortion. Too hard, I'm pretty sure I was the earliest buzz in a very very strong lit field and got it a line before the giveaway. Jason Cheng wrote a TU on Mayakovsky poetry for It's Lit and got it at the end. Really not sure how this one slipped through.

-Hellman: Great tossup. Good, evocative clues, almost sure to conjure her name in your head if you've read any of these plays.

-Glaspell: Same as Hellman.

-Neal Cassady: I liked this tossup and enjoyed getting a good buzz on it, but I think it's a bit transparent. From the second line, you pretty much know it's a Beat guy whose own work isn't prominent enough to be asked about, and that severely narrows the answer space, but maybe I'm just complaining about knowing things.

-Leskov: Thought this could've used some sort of plot clue in the middle of the crit clues, but I was glad to hear them having read The Storyteller.

-monks in Japanese lit: Seems really hard, but I don't know a ton about Noh so I could just be ignorant. It seems out of all the lit writers, Jason wrote the most challenging material.

-Soul Mountain and It Can't Happen Here: I don't know what it was about these tossups, but I really liked them. Derek did a good job with these. I think it's the fact that they were both books that came up a ton in tossups when I started playing in high school, but haven't really had tossups devoted to them in 5+ years, and these were both good deep dives into them.

-Packet 9: Three playwright TU's in one round is meh, even if O'Neill isn't in the lit distro. Spread the love(this could've been addressed already in my packetization issues, though)

-Cognitive: Enjoyed playing this tossup, combines work from different fields that interact with each other in a great way.

-Swiss historians: Seems like negbait, especially for Germany, which I'm told multiple people did including someone who has read multiple of the historians mentioned but didn't know they were Swiss.

[vinteuil]

-Ferrara: Maybe my least favorite tossup in the set. Maybe I'm just salty because I read HTTB five years ago and couldn't remember where it was set so I just buzzed and said Florence, but this tossup really didn't need to exist. "Ferrara" literally appears once in My Last Duchess and isn't integral to the poem at all, and using a contemporary novelist and a 19th century poem in the same tossup shouldn't be done outside of Scattergories. Was this an attempt at tossing up HTTB but trying to make it easy by adding some Browning lines? If so, there are so many better common link options for that, even if you just tossed up "Smith" using clues from HTTB or NW, for example, at least then you're using two relevant contemporary women authors.

I wrote this because Ferrara is in fact integral to both works in terms of the history being evoked (Browning) and the school of painting (Smith). Regardless, I didn't think having genre-crossing "misc. lit" is particularly controversial and why should it be? Would a geographically diverse question within a single genre be OK from your perspective?

-Egypt: I'd question this leadin at CO. I highly doubt anyone who plays the set buzzes on it. I literally searched "In the Train story Egypt" and it took me 7 links to get to one about the Taymurs, and even then it was nested deep into a Britannica page about Egyptian literature.

We can definitely cut this and add another Mahfouz clue!

-Mayakovsky: This tossup is a bit of an abortion. Too hard, I'm pretty sure I was the earliest buzz in a very very strong lit field and got it a line before the giveaway. Jason Cheng wrote a TU on Mayakovsky poetry for It's Lit and got it at the end. Really not sure how this one slipped through.

Yeah, I didn't take nearly heavy enough of a hand on this tossup, and will likely just turn it into "Russian." (I've been informed that there was a buzzer race on the previous line, which makes sense, since it's a pretty famous line and the opening of his most famous poem.)

-Swiss historians: Seems like negbait, especially for Germany, which I'm told multiple people did including someone who has read multiple of the historians mentioned but didn't know they were Swiss.

The only historian mentioned is notably Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt, and only one work by him is clued. (The rest of the clues are about St. Gall.) Is this a complaint against asking about Swiss people in general?

[Banana Stand]

I wrote this because Ferrara is in fact integral to both works in terms of the history being evoked (Browning) and the school of painting (Smith). Regardless, I didn't think having genre-crossing "misc. lit" is particularly controversial and why should it be? Would a geographically diverse question within a single genre be OK from your perspective?

This is fair, I was probably more harsh on this question than I would've been because of the neg. In general, I do think common links should try to be as thematically self contained as possible (e.g. "books", "time" from this tournament), but that's more of a personal philosophy.

I'll also say I don't know much about Burckhardt and only brought this up since it was negged in my room, negged by another person I asked about it, and negged by WAlston who has read Burckhardt.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I'll also say I don't know much about Burckhardt and only brought this up since it was negged in my room, negged by another person I asked about it, and negged by WAlston who has read Burckhardt.

To clarify, since I've been mentioned - I buzzed on mention of Notker, whose biography I have read, and (I think?) before there were any Burckhardt clues. I was definitely aware that Burckhardt was Swiss, and I think that the Burckhardt clues used were good - my problem was that I had no idea where Notker was "from" because the collection of Charlemagne biographies I had didn't call him The Monk of St. Gall, and even if it did, I don't think that would help very much because I didn't know what St. Gall was or where it is until this forum discussion (thanks for enlightening me, because it's cool stuff worth learning about!). Also, Switzerland didn't exist back then.

Obviously it's my fault that I didn't know this fact, and indeed I've written similar (probably ill-conceived) tossups that rely on similar knowledge, but it was very frustrating to have read the sources being asked about and receive negative five points after (stupidly) buzzing, then realizing that I couldn't recall anything from reading the source that would let me answer the tossup.

I would also register a similar complaint about the Jordan tossup, which I'm told was made on that answer due to accessibility concerns. I immediately recognized that several of the clues were talking about things that were relevant during the reign of the Nabataean kingdom, but I had mostly encountered these in ancient sources, and because the Nabataean kingdom stretched into present-day Syria, Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia as well I had no idea what the question was going for. The other team negged early so this didn't affect gameplay (indeed, they negged with "Israel") but it was still extremely frustrating.

To draw on this and make a broader constructive criticism of this set, along the veins Jack has suggested - a lot of common link decisions made in this tournament that seemed like they were designed to make things more "player-friendly" ended up in fact making questions less accessible, or made them require extra leaps of knowledge on the parts of players, or alternatively (and less often) made questions very easy to fraud and/or guess. Examples of the former which come to mind are the tossup on miniatures, which said "specific word required" (making me and other players think you needed an Arabic term or some specific illustration pattern) and then had clues from several different things which I don't think uniquely pick out this answer, such muraqqas, which have a lot more than just miniatures in them. Examples of the latter include the tossup on heads/masks which began with a clue that, even to a layman, sounds like "this West African sounding people made stylized versions of these." I think this probably isn't the greatest way to go about this at this difficulty level, since stylized heads/masks are probably the West African art-objects that museum-goers are most immediately familiar with. This question played out as a buzzer race on the first clue.

I would be remiss, of course, to not conclude my post by contrasting the aforementioned tossups with the tossup on bronze clued from the Benin Bronzes, which was absolutely fantastic. Despite some frustrations regarding how the world art was asked, I have to recognize that quizbowl is still figuring out how to ask the huge amount of material in this previously under-asked area, and in general I thought this particular category was a step forward from this past year's CO.

EDITS: gramer iz hard

[Durkheimdall]

First off, thanks to everyone-- I really enjoyed playing the tournament!! This is not a well-thought-out critique, just wanted to comment and give some anecdotal data on questions I thought were interesting/cool. Take it with a grain of salt.

"Covering space", while enjoyable-- very nice to have a pure math TU not emphasizing history, 'who proved what result in number theory', etc.-- seems too hard, even for e.g. nats/open difficulty. It's been too long since my math education ended but I didn't take Topology and while I vaguely remember covering spaces coming up in Analysis and maybe Differential Geometry (no results for ctrl-F "covering" in my textbook) coursework they weren't a central concept. Just seems a shame to have the answer be a bit specific to topology when this kind of pure math question is already so rare.

The "anātman" question was very cool. Always nice to hear about philosophical convergence from different traditions.

"Malthusian trap" was also cool. I'm happy that I finally answered something in QB on the basis of reading A Farewell to Alms.

"Mizoguchi" wasn't converted in my room but this seems like a great answerline at this difficulty. Seems important, great to have a question on a Japanese director that's not Kurosawa (Not sure if Ozu should come up more), and I'm looking forward to checking out his films.

I also really liked the Marianne Moore TU and the Zaha Hadid bonus.

As a general comment, contrary to others' complaints, I really enjoyed the econ in this set. The main critique I'd give is difficulty fluctuation in bonuses, e.g. the bonus on Zaju theater versus the bonus on li and qi (don't remember the 3rd part).

[vinteuil]

Examples of the former which come to mind are the tossup on miniatures, which said "specific word required" (making me and other players think you needed an Arabic term or some specific illustration pattern) and then had clues from several different things which I don't think uniquely pick out this answer, such muraqqas, which have a lot more than just miniatures in them.

We have fixed this question to specify a specific English term, and added “as well as calligraphy” on the muraqqa clue. Thanks!

[vinteuil]

"Covering space", while enjoyable-- very nice to have a pure math TU not emphasizing history, 'who proved what result in number theory', etc.-- seems too hard, even for e.g. nats/open difficulty. It's been too long since my math education ended but I didn't take Topology and while I vaguely remember covering spaces coming up in Analysis and maybe Differential Geometry (no results for ctrl-F "covering" in my textbook) coursework they weren't a central concept. Just seems a shame to have the answer be a bit specific to topology when this kind of pure math question is already so rare.

So I agree that this was a pretty hard tossup, but I chose the topic because I kept running into it (along with the rest of the basic theory around homotopy groups) in classes—and I’ve never taken a pure topology class either.

[Smuttynose Island]

"Covering space", while enjoyable-- very nice to have a pure math TU not emphasizing history, 'who proved what result in number theory', etc.-- seems too hard, even for e.g. nats/open difficulty. It's been too long since my math education ended but I didn't take Topology and while I vaguely remember covering spaces coming up in Analysis and maybe Differential Geometry (no results for ctrl-F "covering" in my textbook) coursework they weren't a central concept. Just seems a shame to have the answer be a bit specific to topology when this kind of pure math question is already so rare.

So I agree that this was a pretty hard tossup, but I chose the topic because I kept running into it (along with the rest of the basic theory around homotopy groups) in classes—and I’ve never taken a pure topology class either.

Covering spaces was a tough tossup, but it seems a bit unfair to characterize it as a "bit specific to topology." They're incredibly useful for computing fundamental groups, which appear just about everywhere in modern mathematics. A tossup on "fundamental groups" or "homotopy" may have been easier, but covering spaces doesn't seem beyond the pale at this level.

And while I certainly hoped for more pure math in this tournament (since I enjoy Jacob's math questions), I do think it did a good job including easier answerlines. In the first nine rounds there were math tossups on Dirichlet, graph coloring, covering spaces, degrees of freedom, and r (sure this is CS as well). All of these tossups except the covering spaces tossup are either on standard QB math answers (Dirichlet and coloring) or on very well-known applied math topics such as degrees of freedom and r. Having one out of your five math TUs be on such a hard answerline is very much in the spirit of the old VCU Opens which strove(key word) to have 60% of their answerlines be acceptable at ACF Fall or ACF Regionals.

[Carlos Be]

Covering spaces was a tough tossup, but it seems a bit unfair to characterize it as a "bit specific to topology." They're incredibly useful for computing fundamental groups, which appear just about everywhere in modern mathematics. A tossup on "fundamental groups" or "homotopy" may have been easier, but covering spaces doesn't seem beyond the pale at this level.

I think when the tossup can be made easier by making the answer-line "fundamental groups" then the tossup is way too hard.

[Smuttynose Island]

Covering spaces was a tough tossup, but it seems a bit unfair to characterize it as a "bit specific to topology." They're incredibly useful for computing fundamental groups, which appear just about everywhere in modern mathematics. A tossup on "fundamental groups" or "homotopy" may have been easier, but covering spaces doesn't seem beyond the pale at this level.

I think when the tossup can be made easier by making the answer-line "fundamental groups" then the tossup is way too hard.

Not really? There's absolutely room at the Nats- level for the rare Nats or CO level answerline.

[jmarvin_]

The "anātman" question was very cool. Always nice to hear about philosophical convergence from different traditions.

Very pleased that this went over well with you and others; thanks for the praise! I wanted to show that there's room for that sort of thing in the answerspace.

Examples of the former which come to mind are the tossup on miniatures, which said "specific word required" (making me and other players think you needed an Arabic term or some specific illustration pattern) and then had clues from several different things which I don't think uniquely pick out this answer, such muraqqas, which have a lot more than just miniatures in them.

We have fixed this question to specify a specific English term, and added “as well as calligraphy” on the muraqqa clue. Thanks!

If I remember correctly, I originally wrote the question such that it said something like "these things are collected with poetry in muraqqas," but it was removed in editing presumably in an effort to pare down or smooth out the cluing.

[Bensonfan23]

I'll have more substantive comments on (mostly) the bio/chem in the set when I've had a chance to play the rest of the packets at practice this week, but for now could I please see the "blastula" tossup? I'll add for now that not accepting the formation name (morulation/blastulation/gastrulation) for the stage (morula/blastula/gastrula) was an extremely frustrating decision that isn't consistent with how these terms are used in the field and should be fixed sooner than later.

[Muriel Axon]

This stage occurs in steps 7-9 in the “normal table” developed by Nieuwkoop [NYOO-koop] and Faber. Transcription factors like Zelda accumulate during this stage in Drosophila to enable a transition in it governed by the ratio of nucleus to cytoplasm. Whitefish at this stage are frequently used in classroom demonstrations of mitosis. Deep cells and EVLs accumulate during this pre-epiboly [uh-PIH-boh-lee] stage in preparation for lengthening of the 15-minute cell cycle. The (*) inner cell mass is harvested at this stage, during which the Spemann [SPEE-mawn] organizer forms in Xenopus [ZEE-noh-pus], thus directing formation of the animal cap and the vegetal layer. The embryo at this stage has the first zygotic transcription and consists of at least 32 cells surrounding a fluid-filled cavity. For 10 points, name this stage of development in which a hollow spherical embryonic structure forms from the morula before gastrulation.
ANSWER: blastocyst [or blastula; prompt on trophoblast; prompt on blastocoel]

[Majin Buu Roi]

I'd question this leadin at CO. I highly doubt anyone who plays the set buzzes on it. I literally searched "In the Train story Egypt" and it took me 7 links to get to one about the Taymurs, and even then it was nested deep into a Britannica page about Egyptian literature.

My apologies for that. I elected to clue that story because my professor in an Arabic short story class I took at Pton spent like two weeks on it and repeatedly emphasized that that Taymur story in particular was the one that really introduced the short story form to Egypt, but I really should have done a spot check on how much English scholarship there was on it.

I'd probably second that I likely wrote the hardest lit (hence why I didn't write much of it). I'm generally bad at judging difficulty in that area as I really only have "things I've actually read/seen" knowledge and "pure quiz bowl binary association" knowledge in lit and no spectrum between those two extremes.

[adamsil]

I'll have more substantive comments on (mostly) the bio/chem in the set when I've had a chance to play the rest of the packets at practice this week, but for now could I please see the "blastula" tossup? I'll add for now that not accepting the formation name (morulation/blastulation/gastrulation) for the stage (morula/blastula/gastrula) was an extremely frustrating decision that isn't consistent with how these terms are used in the field.

Sorry, I did read some papers on this subject but I hadn’t ever seen that form of the word (blastulation) used before. It should definitely have been acceptable, my apologies.

[Durkheimdall]

So I agree that this was a pretty hard tossup, but I chose the topic because I kept running into it (along with the rest of the basic theory around homotopy groups) in classes—and I’ve never taken a pure topology class either.

Covering spaces was a tough tossup, but it seems a bit unfair to characterize it as a "bit specific to topology." They're incredibly useful for computing fundamental groups, which appear just about everywhere in modern mathematics. A tossup on "fundamental groups" or "homotopy" may have been easier, but covering spaces doesn't seem beyond the pale at this level.

Thanks for sharing your perspectives on the question! What you both said makes sense. I'm sure a big part of my uncertainty about the difficulty of the answerline is due to defects in my math education. What Jacob described-- running into the topic in multiple disparate places-- is generally a really good heuristic for asking about it in QB.

[Muriatic]

Can I also see the tossups on Toll-like Receptors and the one on the Golden Stool?

In the first nine rounds there were math tossups on Dirichlet, graph coloring, covering spaces, degrees of freedom, and r (sure this is CS as well).

I thought the graph coloring tossup felt more like CS than math, although I suppose completeness could be both.

[CPiGuy]

Can I also see the tossups on Toll-like Receptors and the one on the Golden Stool?

In the first nine rounds there were math tossups on Dirichlet, graph coloring, covering spaces, degrees of freedom, and r (sure this is CS as well).

I thought the graph coloring tossup felt more like CS than math, although I suppose completeness could be both.

I don't know what the other clues were about, but the clue about the Heawood conjecture was very much math.

[Vinjance]

Thanks to everyone who helped write this set, it was a blast to play! I enjoyed hearing novel answerlines and learning about new things, especially in science. After re-reading through the first 8 packets, here are my comments regarding specific questions:

In the NAND gate tossup, the clue "Just three of these devices can construct the MUX operation" doesnt appear to be accurate: you need at least 4 NANDs to make a multiplexer, assuming you only have non-inverted sel, A, and B (alternatively, 3 NANDs and 1 NOT). Additionally, it would help to specify the number of inputs to the multiplexer (2x1 in this case). Also, I believe NOR is acceptable for the "minimum required parts for functionally complete logic" clue (the metric by which you're calculating "required parts" isn't quite clear to me). Regardless, this is a great idea for a EE-related question!

I thought galactic filaments was the hardest science answer in the set--in terms of accessibility, it seems more suitable at ACF nats / Chicago Open. That being said, I appreciated hearing and learning about a new type of astronomical object that hasn't been tossed up yet (as far as I can tell).

In the interferometer tossup, the matched filter sentence seemed largely unhelpful and potentially misleading. I'm guessing the main clue in this sentence is "H1 and L1", which shows up in most of the ligo papers. But for people like me who haven't read those papers, that sentence is confusing for me because matched filters have many applications in digital communications and therefore apply to any sort of signal detector. I don't know if you're intending for people to earn points for knowing what the abbreviation for the Livingston and Hanford sites is (I would assume not), so additional context in that sentence would be appreciated if you're looking to clue from how LIGO signals are processed.

The soil fertility bonus (along with the hydrology bonus later) was an excellent idea and well executed. I enjoy hearing earth science questions that focus on the importance of things rather than just vocabulary.

So I'm not gonna lie here, but I actually thought the term "fishery" referred to a fish market rather than a zone in the ocean from which fish are harvested. I don't know if I'm just being dumb, but I think it would be better for the fisheries tossup to accept fish populations rather than prompting, mainly because this is such a novel answerline and because I think players will have trouble coming up with fishery in an ecological sense rather than an industrial sense where the term is probably better known.

I'm not a fan of the clue in the thermohaline circulation tossup that refers to Sverdrup balance: as far as I can see, the original Stommel and Arons paper does not seem to mention Sverdrup's name. This is particularly misleading because the Sverdrup balance is mainly used to explain wind-driven circulation (i.e. the OPPOSITE of thermohaline circulation)

The bonus part on human geography does not seem to adequately distinguish from sociology, environmental sociology, or similar disciplines, at least from the perspective of an apparent easy part. Also, it just so happens that the intro sentence to this bonus mentions the human geography professor Gillian Rose, while there is an apparently better known Gillian Rose who was a sociologist (Hegel Contra Sociology is cited as her magnum opus). Furthermore, a few universities seem to have departments of "sociology and human geography" (example: https://www.sv.uio.no/iss/english/resea ... sociology/), suggesting the two are too similar to require quiz bowl players to distinguish between one another

Upon looking at the classrooms tossup again, I'm starting to better understand why classroom is a much more appropriate answer here than school. But I also think it would be helpful to indicate that the type of location you're looking for here is a part of a building rather than an actual building, at least towards some of the later clues. For example, I buzzed here on Bloom's taxonomy, said school, and was prompted, but instead of thinking of a specific component of the school, I thought of specific types of schools. To me, I feel like I demonstrated enough knowledge to show that I knew the answer. Maybe just say "these rooms" at a late enough point in the question?

For the particle number question, I realize Stirling's approximation is specifically used to rewrite N!, but at game speed, it is very tough to tell whether you mean "In the formula for entropy, Stirling's is applied to the factorial of this specific property to get the S-T equation" or "Stirling's is applied in the formula for this property to get the S-T equation" (the latter applies to entropy or number of microstates).

Apologies in advance for getting any facts wrong. The critical comments I'm making here should not undermine the quality of the tournament as a whole, which was very high. Thanks again for an outstanding set of questions.

Neil

[Bloodwych]

cisplatin forms crosslinks

It is alkylating-like in that it can interstrand crosslink (N7-N7 for instance) despite not having carbons; it's a mechanistic description more than a literal one and cyclophosphamide works similarly

stuff:
- why did the alkyne question not accept or prompt on "ethynyl" at the estradiol clue?
- the bisphosphonate bonus seemed a bit easy compared to some of the other ones
- Indiana vesiculovirus is neat, thanks for teaching me something