The Quizbowl Resource Center

Victor Prieto

I'd like to posit what seems to me an obvious possibility and which Sean himself can confirm or deny. When he said "Penn-ance is in order," maybe he was talking about, you know a pun that would suggest there is something to apologize for, instead of him meaning "you need to write ano...

Victor Prieto

...but it was unusual to hear so many questions beginning "this technique." I'm glad to hear you enjoyed the science. I definitely think I had a little too much "this technique" going on but figured it was somewhat justifiable considering how core the individual techniques are, ...

Victor Prieto

It's just... weird to outright ask for another "Penn-ance," considering that the circumstances that produced the original were not observed here. This set was so-so, but it was playable. Yes, the set was definitely a step down from the last couple years, but it strikes me as outlandish to ...

Victor Prieto

Penn State will be sending 1-2 teams.

Victor Prieto

The set is currently at 87% written and 60% fully edited.

If you'd like to mirror this set, please go ahead and email us. It will be available right up until nationals next year, and is the perfect set to use for a JV division of a big tournament or a standalone tournament in a young region.

Victor Prieto

Resurrecting this thread to strongly recommend Malcolm Gladwell's podcast called Revisionist History. I've only listened to episodes 4, 5 and 6 so far, which were all extremely illuminating and thought-provoking, and only 30 minutes each.

Victor Prieto

Insofar as the entire community is the addressee of this apology and insofar as I am a member of that community, I reject this apology I look forward to hearing his genuine apology shortl-- I'm another member of that community, and honestly, I'm not looking for an apology. In my opinion, David Madd...

Victor Prieto

I applied to HSAPQ as a freelance writer during the summer of 2013, and worked until a month ago. During that time, I wrote a decent number of questions (somewhere in the order of 200 or so questions) and edited chemistry for a couple of NASAT sets. I decided to leave because I needed to cut back on...

Victor Prieto

Yes, I believe chemistry needs to be cut 20% at higher levels to make way for stronger other science. It's simply not as broad of a topic as the other big two and so I think we can cut it at higher levels to make room for more interesting stuff from the other science distro... Other science is fill...

Victor Prieto

This post reserved for mirrors: Carver Fall Novice - October 8th @ Carver HSES (Philadelphia, PA) Wheaton North - October 8th @ Wheaton North (Wheaton, IL) Wofford Free - October 15th @ Wofford College (Spartanburg, SC) RIFT - October 15th @ Rice University (Houston, TX) Nittany Lion Novice II - Nov...

Victor Prieto

Hello, I am pleased to announce Pennsylvania Novice 2016, available for mirrors between September 24th and May 31, 2017. The set is being written primarily by players from Carnegie Mellon and Penn State, and edited by Victor Prieto, Bill Tressler, Chris Chiego, Ben Herman, and Ryan Bilger. This set ...

Victor Prieto

This was the tossup on amyloid beta, which was certainly one of my harder answerlines: Are you kidding? There's no way this answerline comes close to ACF Regionals difficulty, and this choice of answerline robbed 90% of people with decent knowledge of Alzheimer's disease. Do you have any more examp...

Victor Prieto

Empirical evidence point: this went dead after various buzzes with "echolocation" and "sonar" in Pennsylvania vs. California went dead. The first buzz was after the word "bathymetric." Editorial experience point: an answerline of sound in this context is what I'd classi...

Victor Prieto

Cody wrote: (the pronoun has been changed to "this phenomenon" for future mirrors, to help avoid this situation)

Can you post the updated text? I thought this was an inspired idea, but it didn't translate well in gameplay.

Victor Prieto

Short-beaked echidna wrote:
Auks Ran Ova wrote:What I've learned from this thread is that my new favorite non-American quizbowl term is "specialism".
wait what do you guys call it?

Speciality.

I, too, am fascinated by this thread.

Victor Prieto

Giants

Victor Prieto

Frankly, I don't buy into this logic that new players are scaaaaared of big mean older players, even if they're Mr. Scary Internet Jerry himself! I think new teams are turned off by hard, long questions that go unbuzzed until the giveaway or dead much more than they are by overly challenging oppone...

Victor Prieto

This tournament’s target difficulty is meant to be “regular-minus” by modern conceptions of “regular” difficulty - our goal is something around the difficulty of MUT, but skewed a bit toward MAGNI - older incarnations of EFT and 2013's Michigan Fall Tournament are decent baselines for comparison. T...

Victor Prieto

#1 Miracle on Ice (won 7-0) vs. #1 The Band is Out on the Field (won 4-3)
#1 The Giants Win the Pennant (won 6-1) vs. #1 We'll See You Here Tomorrow Night (won 4-3)

Victor Prieto

Also, I strongly believe that this tournament would be better off on the easier side of what has now become "regular" difficulty, like MAGNI and ACF Regs 2010 were. However, if there's space for a regs+ tournament on the calendar, that can be considered too. The easier side of regular (bu...

Victor Prieto

[quote="Periplus of the Erythraean Sea""] Points of discussion: 1) The "low-key" regular difficulty open model (as opposed to the "big open where lots of strong teams come to one site" model) for 2014's DEES and 2015's Missouri Open seemed to go over decently. This...

Victor Prieto

Ah. Taken out of context, the second and third lines are definitely true of both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, but I suppose if someone missed the words "national leader" right at the start, they'd be toast. Not really sure if there's anything to be done about that, though.

Victor Prieto

I'd like to see the tossup on Fidel Castro please, I think there were a lot of clues that applied to Che Guevara as well. Someone negged with that in the room I moderated, and I thought it was a hose, too.

Victor Prieto

We've known about the existence of this tournament for a while. This tournament was originally announced much earlier, and even if the team packets were hard to control, that's not a good explanation of what happened with the editor's packets. So let me back up for a second - a lot of my issues wit...

Victor Prieto

So, Penn State had a pretty rough lunch experience on Saturday. Penn State B finished prelims around 11:50, but for some reason Penn State A wasn't let out until 12:20 and we couldn't leave until 12:30. Penn State B was texted at 12:55 (right as we were getting food) that they had a tiebreaker that ...

Victor Prieto

I was expecting high levels of whimsicality and difficulty, but I was surprised, the whimiscality and difficulty were several orders of magnitude more than I anticipated. I was not expecting a tossup on UNIFAC at "nationals-minus" difficulty. Apparently, when a tournament is announced to b...

Victor Prieto

What's the per-20 distribution of each packet, i.e. for which categories will there be fewer questions than in the submission distro? Let's use all 24 every round! 18 tossups on earth science without repeats seems... improbable. I count more than 18 named time divisions on the Geologic time scale W...

Victor Prieto

not quite wrote:
Galadedrid Damodred wrote:What's the per-20 distribution of each packet, i.e. for which categories will there be fewer questions than in the submission distro?
Let's use all 24 every round!

18 tossups on earth science without repeats seems... improbable.

Victor Prieto

Brian this is getting ridiculous, I hope you charge an exorbitant fee for assholes cannon fodder who are trying to freeload off of your tournament... As long as you allow science-less riffraff for competition and keep out the people who actually know science, it's fine by me! Makes it easier to cla...

Victor Prieto

A popular chestnut that most quizbowl people know is that director Werner Herzog lost a bet with Errol Morris that he could make a successful film about pet cemeteries. He was forced to eat his shoe for losing the bet, and made a short film about how he cooked and ate it entitled Werner Herzog Eats ...

Victor Prieto

It didn't matter to the outcome of a game yesterday, but I was negged for saying "Nobunaga," but "Oda" or "Oda Nobunaga" would have been acceptable. I knew that Oda was the clan, and so I've always figured that Nobunaga was his name and his unique identifier. Can someo...

Victor Prieto

The tossup on cobalt has a clear hose for iron near the end. It reads: "The standard source for Mössbauer spectroscopy is an isotope of this metal that decays to iron-57." The way it should have been written is something like this: "An isotope of this metal beta decays into the stand...

Victor Prieto

I'm answering your comments à la Tarantino (not in chronological order), because I think my argument makes more sense when presented this way. Stephen (and Eric): Hmm, I'd figured if [the lead-in] was the problem, the issue is pretty uncontroversial. Isn't the problem there simply that the clue is a...

Victor Prieto

18. A method to remove sidebands in this technique applies a series of 180 degree pulses prior to data collection and is called TOSS. Heteronuclear couplings can be measured using an application of this technique called SEDOR, though REDOR is much more commonly used today. One constant important to...

Victor Prieto

I think this set, for the most part, is a solid example for future tournaments attempting to hit "Nationals-minus" difficulty. That's not to say there weren't mistakes or some clunkers here and there, but definitely a solid set. At least twice, there were bonuses that were identical to bon...

Victor Prieto

I'd like to see the solid-state NMR question (round 3) before saying some words about it. In addition, I'd like to see the tossups on size exclusion chromatography (round 11) and Woodward (round 2).

Victor Prieto

I've written a packet about various video games I have played, all released between 1993 and 2011. I'll read it tonight at 10p EST.

Victor Prieto

I liked the methylation... and cysteine tossups especially. Sure you liked those, you one-lined both of them! ANSWER: kelp forests [or kelp beds] <AG> This was the ecology tossup. This was a very good tossup. Can you elaborate, because it's not apparent to me why this is a "very good" tos...

Victor Prieto

Sorry I keep mentioning things piece-wise like this, but virtually identical clues about the work function are contained in the tossups on photons and electrons in rounds 9 and 10, respectively.

Victor Prieto

It didn't matter to the outcome of a game yesterday, but I was negged for saying "Nobunaga," but "Oda" or "Oda Nobunaga" would have been acceptable. I knew that Oda was the clan, and so I've always figured that Nobunaga was his name and his unique identifier. Can someon...

Victor Prieto

Thoughts: I was happy with the way the set turned out, but there were a couple of clear problems. One was bonus difficulty variability -- while we hit the mark with providing true easy parts to not alienate newer and less experienced teams, we were pretty liberal with our middle parts and sometimes...

Victor Prieto

[10] A common way of determining protein concentration involves measuring absorbance at this nanometer wavelength, where proteins absorb the most light. Nucleic acids in contrast have maximum absorbance at 260 nm. ANSWER: 280 nanometers [or 280 nm] This isn't true 100% of the time. Proteins always ...

Victor Prieto

Astroglia should be acceptable for astrocytes.

Victor Prieto

boo, democracy won

doesn't matter, currents is better

To Pimp a Butterfly vs. Hamilton
Currents vs. Carrie and Lowell

p.s. it sucks that TPAB and Hamilton are in the same semifinal, since they're probably the two strongest contenders.

Victor Prieto

MALIK SECTIONAL #1 To Pimp a Butterfly vs. #3 Summertime '06 HORAN SECTIONAL #2 Hamilton vs. #4 In Colour This one is annoying, because I'd vote for In Colour over most of the other albums here. But Hamilton is just so masterfully put together, and there's so much raw talent there. STYLES SECTIONAL ...

Victor Prieto

I'm writing a packet containing an undisclosed number of tossups on Quentin Tarantino films for this.

Victor Prieto

This post is reserved for field updates.

Field (teams/buzzers/staffers): (4/3/4)

Penn State (3/2/3)
Carnegie Mellon (1/1/1)

Updated 1/14

Victor Prieto

Penn State Quiz Bowl is happy to announce that we are hosting a mirror of NAQT Collegiate Novice series on January 16, 2016. I, Victor Prieto, will serve as tournament director. We will be using the IS-150C set. This tournament is intended for quizbowl teams with little or no experience. Correspondi...

Victor Prieto

After a flurry of registrations, 19 teams are currently registered for this tournament. Our current field cap is 20. Any additional teams beyond 20 will be placed on a waitlist. Get your registrations in soon!

Victor Prieto

I'm trying to get a better idea of exactly what made it transparent. Was it the fact this was a named event in the desert? Was it higher rates of cancer? Was it "above-ground" or "in Nevada"? So I did power this with real knowledge because I know John Wayne possibly died from ca...

Search found 421 matches