2012 SCT: Critique my questions

[Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon]

Here are the questions I wrote or edited in both DI & DII. I'll use an asterisk if the final question seems significantly different to what I wrote. Italics indicate I only edited it.

I always appreciate feedback on what I work on, and I appreciate your playing today.

In DI I wrote:
Tossups on:
The Third Man
Crazy Heart
Oakland Raiders
All in the Family
Stephen Douglas
Buddy Holly
Robert Johnson
Chris Bosh
Stone Cold Steve Austin
Henri Matisse
William Hogarth
Flagpole Sitta*
The Thing
Avenue Q
Up in the Air
Flannery O'Connor
yellow (pop music)
Sufjan Stevens
Magical Mystery Tour

Bonuses on:
Primus/Orhan Pamuk/The Princess Bride
Big Mac Index/confidence/misery index
Conqueror Worm/Hellboy/Rob Zombie
Kinsey scale/Fujita scale/Glasgow coma scale
The Red and the Black/Stendhal/Lucien Leuwen
Nora Helmer/Ibsen/The Lady from the Sea
Johnny Cash/American/Rick Rubin
Selena Gomez/Sara Bareilles/Wings
ABBA/Celine Dion/Katrina & the Waves
Otherside/Red Hot Chili Peppers/Jane's Addiction
Guru/8 Mile/Spike Lee

DII:
Tossups:
Mumford & Sons
John Coltrane
Van Halen
Watchmen
Buddy Holly (converted from DI)
Nancy Grace
Cowboys & Aliens*
Zombieland
Japan (lit TU)
Gettysburg*
Bonus Army*
Silver Surfer
Saul Bellow
Prime Ministers of Canada*
Big Sean
LMFAO

Bonuses:
Talking Heads/Once in a Lifetime/David Byrne
The Rape of the Lock/Alexander Pope/Belinda
Cleveland Indians/Grady Sizemore/Florida Marlins
The Courtship of Miles Standish/Longfellow/speak for yourself
The Third of May 1808/Goya/Black Paintings
Richard Lovelace/Deep Throat/analytical engine
Pokemon/Goldeneye/Pac-Man
chordates/notochord/pharyngeal slits
Ghiberti/Gates of Paradise/Brunelleschi
Gulf Stream/Winslow Homer/Civil War
Blood Wedding/Lorca/Spain
Anatomy Lesson/Rembrandt/Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer
Edward Hopper/Nighthawks/Early Sunday Morning
continental drift/Wegener/North America, Europe, & Asia*
Born in the USA/Anarchy in the UK/Back in the USSR
Metallica/Genesis/The Stooges
The Beatles/Norwegian Wood/Drive My Car

Merged all of the "Critique [writer]'s questions" threads into a single thread --JTH

[jonah]

I am interested in comments on the following questions that I wrote and edited for this year's SCT:

Division I wrote:
Packet 1: Octavio Paz (heavily changed from my original)
Packet 2: Letter from Birmingham Jail
Packet 3: oil drop experiment/molecular orbital theory/Hartree-Fock method; Blaise Pascal
Packet 4: prime (math common-link incorporating prime ideals and prime numbers)
Packet 6: Frederic Remington
Packet 9: harmonic functions
Packet 11: Book of Esther; Hermitian matrices
Packet 13: optimization
Packet 14: diagonals of polygons; Rayleigh
Packet 15: Dijkstra bonus; open sets
Packet 16: bonus on compass-and-straightedge constructions; bonus on Shabbat

Division I edited:
Due to a last-minute emergency situation, I had to briefly take over computer science subject editing, in which role I edited the bonus on programming problems (infinite loop/exceptions/race conditions), the tossup on SQL, and the (also written by me) Dijkstra bonus

Division II wrote:
Packet 1: Ampere's law
Packet 3: common link on the word "grace" (grace notes, Jeff Buckley's album, Mark Grace, Grace Hopper, prayer before/after meals); converted version of the oil drop/... bonus from Division I; converted version of the Pascal tossup; bonus on object-oriented programming
Packet 5: bonus on polynomials
Packet 6: science-common link on the term "translation" (network address translation, RNA translation, geometric translations, giveaway about translating languages)
Packet 8: mixed tossup on Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz (clues from Wicked, Family Guy, and The Wiz); bonus on systems of equations
Packet 12: vocal music terms (oratorios, tenor, melisma)
Packet 14: converted version of the Rayleigh tossup; converted version of the diagonals-of-polygons tossup
Packet 15: tossup on matzah

Division II edited:
Basically all the math, almost all the visual arts, and a couple of computer science questions because of the aforementioned issue. An asterisk indicates that I did the Division I-to-Division II conversion but did not edit the original Division I question.
Packet 1: bonus on continuity; *tossup on the Sistine Chapel ceiling; *Henry Moore/Frank Lloyd Wright/Louis Sullivan bonus; Euclid tossup
Packet 2: common link tossup on George Washington in art; compass-and-straightedge constructions bonus distinct from the Division I one I wrote; Bernini bonus
Packet 3: Van Gogh bonus; Christo tossup; dot product tossup; object-oriented programming bonus (also written by me); Pascal tossup (I wrote the Division I tossup and did the conversion to Division II)
Packet 4: Death of Marat tossup (clues from both Munch and David); bonus on the small-angle approximation
Packet 5: bonus on polynomials (also written by me); Goya bonus; Rodin tossup
Packet 6: Fermat/probability/Andrew Wiles bonus; math tossup on the number 11; British architects bonus (Christopher Wren/Inigo Jones/Prince Albert); bonus on artwork with numbers (Albrecht Durer/Jasper Johns/five [from Charles Demuth]); John Constable tossup; bonus on Flash/Adobe/HTML 5
Packet 7: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror/Parmigianino/Escher bonus (I did the conversion from the Division I bonus that started with SPiaCM)
Packet 8: paintings with dogs (Arnolfini Wedding/Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte/Bacchus and Ariadne); systems of equations bonuses (also written by me); Elgin marbles tossup; bonus on I and the Village
Packet 9: tossup on compilers; tossup on Leonardo da Vinci; bonus on Lorenzo Ghiberti/Gates of Paradise/Filippo Brunelleschi
Packet 10: Winslow Homer bonus; tossup on (finding) maximum; tossup on the Sydney Opera House
Packet 11: Cauchy tossup
Packet 12: art techniques (chiaroscuro/sfumato/impasto) bonus; bonus on pop artists (Andy Warhol/Roy Lichtenstein/Claes Oldenburg); tossup on Edgar Degas; bonus on shapes graphed in polar coordinates (limacon/cardioid/Archimedean spiral); tossup on recursion; *tossup on Michelangelo
Packet 13: tossup on I. M. Pei; Rembrandt bonus; quotient topology bonus (Mobius strip/torus/Klein bottle)
Packet 14: tossup on Rene Magritte; bonus on Edward Hopper; tossup on diagonals of polygons (I wrote the Division I tossup and did the conversion to Division II)
Packet 15: tossup on inverses (inverse functions, inverse elements, inverses matrices); tossup on Thomas Eakins; Constantin Brancusi bonus (Princess X/Brancusi/Bird in Space)
Packet 16: tossup on Watson and the Shark; bonus on William Rowan Hamilton (Hamilton/quaternions/complex numbers); bonus on Diego Velazquez (Surrender of Breda/Velazquez/Las Meninas)

[RyuAqua]

In Packet 2, the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" tossup needed to say "It references an earlier work's 'I-It' relationship..." or "It references Martin Buber's 'I-It' relationship..." so as to prevent hoses in which people buzz and say "I and Thou" with nothing to delineate the two.

[Marble-faced Bristle Tyrant]

Division I

pineal gland/melatonin/serotonin
John Philip Sousa
Jacques-Louis David
Siegfried
Cephalopoda
Rosetta Stone/demotic/Ptolemaic dynasty
peptidoglycan/Archaea/isoprene
coelacanth/lobed fins/Devonian
Vulcan/general relativity/Nemesis (this was originally just about three hypothetical astronomical objects)
The Planets
Jupiter/Roche Limit/Lagrange points 4 and 5
Dream of the Red Chamber/Cao Xueqin/Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Division II
Cephalopoda (derived from the DI one; I'm not a fan of the edited leadin)
John Adams/Nixon in China/Doctor Atomic
Jupiter/Roche limit/Pele (also derived)

[Smuttynose Island]

Stephen Douglas

I'd like to applaud you on this TU. I didn't get to see a lot of it, but I love it when people use important/interesting/suitably well-known quotes by or describing people in their TUs, which I thought this TU did well.

[Black-throated Antshrike]

Can I see the LMFAO tossup again. I remember hearing something that I didn't think was right, but I could just be misremembering it.

[Auroni]

William Hogarth

This question seemed to be particularly hard or at least devoid of middle clues before the basic description of The Rake's Progress, unless I'm underestimating the accessibility and ease of The Humours of an Election or something.

[Bartleby]

Stephen Douglas

I'd like to applaud you on this TU. I didn't get to see a lot of it, but I love it when people use important/interesting/suitably well-known quotes by or describing people in their TUs, which I thought this TU did well.

I also really liked this TU.

[Yellow-throated Honeyeater]

I didn't contribute much, but I'm a newbie to writing college questions, so I'm happy for feedback. Thanks to the editors who converted my pulp into questions.

Division I
Saleh/Yemen/Houthi
Politico
Erechtheion/caryatid/snake
Navona/Bernini/Triton
Pearce/Arpaio/McCain
Jamaica
Ragtime/Goldman/Seussical

Division II
Biden
greenhouse/Durban/IPCC
pharmaceutical industry
Prague
Achebe/Things Fall Apart/Nwoye
Tibet
GE
Pascal/Bernoulli/Navier-Stokes
BP
Hamas/Jordan/Abdullah II
potential/Schrodinger/node
energy
fly
Pei
Coriolis/mass/cross product
Hungary/euro/central bank
Assad/Syria/Arab League

[bird bird bird bird bird]

One song by this group tells listeners what to do if "you wanna have fun and do something." It sings the ~Jersey Shore~ theme, "Get Crazy," and declares, "Girl, look at that (*) body, I work out." While wearing Dr. Dre headphones it declares, "everyday I'm shuffling." SkyBlu and his uncle Redfoo comprise--for 10 points--what duo responsible for "Sexy and I Know It" and "Party Rock Anthem" named for a vulgar Internet abbreviation?

This artist depicted a large piece of beef being carried to a tavern in France in his painting ~The Gate of Calais~. An unfinished work by this artist shows a basket of mussels balanced on the head of the title ~Shrimp Girl~. His series ~The Humours of an Election~ depicts a parliamentary campaign, while another series of his works includes a depiction of (*) Sarah Young being rejected by Tom Rakewell. For 10 points--name this English painter and engraver, best known for ~The Rake's Progress~.

[Ondes Martenot]

You know the drill by the now. Everything I wrote was in DII. I can post my questions if requested

arepoagitica/milton/euripedes
taney
chamberlain
election of 1936
washington (in art)
dot product
benedict arnold/montgomery/montreal
rebecca/du maurier/the birds
livingstone
chrysanthemum and the sword/benedict/personalities
novum organum/bacon/idols
phosphoric acid/ortho/buffer
somalia
white dwarf
paganini
graphite
daedelus
reconstruction/hayes/revels
eight legs/loki/asgard
pcr
catalyst
IWW
elgin marbles
peron
clear and present danger/internet/ny times v. sullivan
one hundred years of solitude
justinian
scopes monkey trial
acetone
metternich
seminole
nicaragua/iran/reagan
ir spec
marlowe/johnson/spanish tragedy
chapman/keats/planet
meiji/tokugawa/samurai
alloy/ductility/eutectic
agincourt
phlogiston/oxygen/scheele
magic mountain
chromatography
canada
green bay packers
tammany hall
verdi/caesar/godunov
murdoch
polymerization reaction
carnot/efficiency/0
fdr's court packing plan
avogadro's number
xyz affair/talleyran/quasi war
ether/williamson/grignard
lohengrin
lysistrata
santa anna/san jacinto/goliad

[mujason]

(Some of these were significantly altered in editing)

DI:
Pebble Beach tu
Sofia tu
Bhutan tu
Oklahoma City bombing tu
moons of Saturn bonus
yellow (in music) tu
Niger bonus
Congressmen (Frank, Hoyer, Issa) bonus
Jose Saramago bonus
Katherine Porter bonus
Department of Education bonus
Enigma tu
Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse bonus
Magical Mystery Tour tu
Battle of Tannenberg tu
Oder-Neisse bonus
Bradley Cooper tu
Renoir bonus
states with ousted congressmen bonus
The Middle tu
UCLA quarterbacks bonus
Judith tu
Ten Days that Shook the World bonus
Eurovision winners bonus
Fringe bonus
cities in India bonus
state governors bonus
Frasier bonus (Maris wasn't my error)
Chicago Federal Building bonus
Joey Votto tu
2011 WSOP bonus

DII:
slain military commanders bonus
Steve Martin bonus
southern England bonus
Lake Michigan bonus
Seattle landmarks bonus
Saturn bonus
Spanish-American War bonus
Washington, D.C. suburbs bonus
good and bad sports records bonus
Walt Whitman poems bonus
Netherlands bonus
Sir Walter Scott bonus
economic namesakes bonus
Baltic Sea bonus
Terminator bonus
Nikolay Gogol bonus
fictional lands bonus
John Tyler tu
Massachusetts coast bonus
cat breeds bonus
1984 Summer Olympics tu
Pineapple Express bonus
Nabokov bonus
T-Pain bonus
Eugene O'Neill bonus
Prokofiev bonus
La Perouse Strait bonus
Tolstoy bonus
Tokyo/Honshu/Yokohama bonus
Book of Exodus bonus
Man Booker Prize winners
Percy Shelley bonus
Presidents in Cabinet bonus
Ariel tu
Tigris River bonus
BYU alums bonus
Jane Austen characters bonus
1948 election bonus
Indian Ocean bonus
Stuart monarchs bonus
Phantom Zone bonus
Chicago Bears bonus
Taurus bonus
Saumel Johnson bonus
Nobel Prize in Physics bonus
early NBA stars bonus
Roman foes bonus
Dickens novels bonus
Atalanta bonus
Sean Penn bonus
Community bonus
Isis bonus
Confederate generals bonus
Wilhelm II tu
mayors bonus
2011 Emmy winners bonus
English kings bonus
Volta River bonus
Parthenon bonus
E. M. Forster bonus
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame bonus
MLK bonus
Adult Swim bonus
Rubber Soul bonus
European rivers bonus
Beethoven bonus
Hermann Hesse bonus
Boston Bruins tu
Lord of the Flies bonus
subatomic particles bonus
Breaking Bad bonus

[dtaylor4]

The items above the dash in each column are D2 only.

Tossups

Sirens
D'Artagnan
Emily Dickinson
Luncheon of the Boating Party
-
New Zealand
Kenny McCormick
Recent strikes
Governor of Minnesota
The Prophet

Bonuses

D2 only:
I and the Village
-
Clayton Antitrust

[Madagascar Serpent Eagle]

My thoughts:

Gettysburg*

This dropped Edward Everett kind of early...I know when they mentioned him, there was a collective pause of curiosity followed by mashing as soon as there was a Gettysburg-sounding quote a second later.

Packet 12: vocal music terms (oratorios, tenor, melisma)

I'm not sure if it was wrong in the question or just misread to us, but everyone on my team heard "this highest vocal range" for the second part, and we said soprano in the midst of great confusion about the clef clue.

quotient topology bonus (Mobius strip/torus/Klein bottle)

I actually enjoyed this one a lot, for some reason.

potential/Schrodinger/node

Could I see the node part? I remember I like the first two parts, but I was kind of confused by the quantum clues in that, although I got it from the classical waves part.

graphite

I talked to someone on our B team who said he didn't get prompted for saying "carbon." Should he have been? It didn't change the game or anything, but I'm curious.

EDIT: Clarification about carbon.

[jonah]

Packet 12: vocal music terms (oratorios, tenor, melisma)

I'm not sure if it was wrong in the question or just misread to us, but everyone on my team heard "this highest vocal range" for the second part, and we said soprano in the midst of great confusion about the clef clue.

The wording in the packet is as follows:

What highest of the three main male {vocal ranges} is often denoted on a staff using the {treble clef} with the number 8 written beneath it?

So it sounds like the question was misread to you.

[bird bird bird bird bird]

The "particle in a box" problem is a staple of introductory quantum mechanics. For 10 points each--

A. That problem is to find the wavefunction that results when this quantity is zero between ~-a~ and ~a~ and infinite everywhere else.

answer: _potential_ (accept _potential function_ or _potential energy_)

B. The particle in a box problem is solved using the "time-independent" form of this equation that plays a central role in quantum mechanics.

answer: _Schr\"odinger_('s) equation

C. Solutions to the Schr\"odinger equation contain these points, analogous to a stationary point on a standing wave, where the particle cannot be found.

answer: _node_s

This is the only elementally pure substance commonly used as a moderator in nuclear reactors. A single-layer derivative of this material, used in observing the quantum Hall effect, has been prepared using Scotch tape. It contains stacks of ~sp~2 hybridized atoms, which causes electron (*) delocalization and makes it a good conductor. For 10 points--name this soft allotrope of carbon used in lubricants and pencil leads.

answer: _graphite_ (prompt on "graphene" before "stacks"; prompt on "carbon" before "carbon")

[Black-throated Antshrike]

Dot product

Wasn't saying the dot product symbol was in the divergence too easy as a lead in?

[jonah]

Dot product

Wasn't saying the dot product symbol was in the divergence too easy as a lead in?

It was on the easy side, but I think of of Division II as primarily for younger college students who are not especially likely to have taken Calculus IV or calculus-based physics, and therefore don't think it was unconscionably easy. If I had thought of a suitable lead-in that was harder without being obscenely hard, I would've gone with it.

[setht]

I guess I'll join in. I wrote the following DI questions:

the Moon
Uruk
the state
dunes
free particle (or state or energy)
Chiron
white dwarfs
magnetic field
Orion
Perseus
work
mass
flint (or chert)
Hathor
Vodun
guys named Cyrus
weather forecasting
lenses
sound waves
Brynnhild
Hubble parameter
Georg Ohm
Myrmidons
Wolfgang Pauli
grass
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ahura Mazda
Louis deBroglie
Emile Durkheim
Antoni Gaudi
main sequence
Hamiltonian
Nestor
turbulence
Aztec pantheon
sutras
George Stokes
stability
Thorstein Veblen
Virginia Woolf

nominal GDP/velocity/Irving Fisher
Apep/Osiris/Ammit
Marshall McLuhan/Herbert Blumer/Norman Rockwell
diffraction/earthquakes/Brillouin
metamorphism/dikes/sills
Iseult/Njord/Gareth
Indonesia/Clifford Geertz/Benedict Anderson
Sholem Aleichem/Fiddler on the Roof/shtetls
p waves/shadow zones/105 degrees
fumaroles/phreatic explosions/geysers
central force/one over r/Johannes Kepler
Joseph Stiglitz/asymmetric information/invisible hand
momentum/impulse/translations
Levi-Strauss/The Savage Mind/Iriquois
water table/artesian well/aquiclude
lift/Martin Kutta/Lord Kelvin
Schwarzschild metric/electric charge/speed of light

Some of these were revised by editors; some of them were written rather quickly to kill needs and may not reflect my best work. Regardless, if anyone has comments I'm interested in hearing them, especially if there are any suggestions for things I should/should not do while working on ICT.

Thanks,
-Seth

[Black-throated Antshrike]

Dot product

Wasn't saying the dot product symbol was in the divergence too easy as a lead in?

It was on the easy side, but I think of of Division II as primarily for younger college students who are not especially likely to have taken Calculus IV or calculus-based physics, and therefore don't think it was unconscionably easy. If I had thought of a suitable lead-in that was harder without being obscenely hard, I would've gone with it.

Laplace Operator, or is that too hard? It was mentioned in my Calc III class, but this could be very biased.

[jonah]

Dot product

Wasn't saying the dot product symbol was in the divergence too easy as a lead in?

It was on the easy side, but I think of of Division II as primarily for younger college students who are not especially likely to have taken Calculus IV or calculus-based physics, and therefore don't think it was unconscionably easy. If I had thought of a suitable lead-in that was harder without being obscenely hard, I would've gone with it.

Laplace Operator, or is that too hard? It was mentioned in my Calc III class, but this could be very biased.

That would've been fine, it just didn't occur to me.

[Black-throated Antshrike]

Dot product

Wasn't saying the dot product symbol was in the divergence too easy as a lead in?

It was on the easy side, but I think of of Division II as primarily for younger college students who are not especially likely to have taken Calculus IV or calculus-based physics, and therefore don't think it was unconscionably easy. If I had thought of a suitable lead-in that was harder without being obscenely hard, I would've gone with it.

Laplace Operator, or is that too hard? It was mentioned in my Calc III class, but this could be very biased.

That would've been fine, it just didn't occur to me.

Didn't occur to me either until I just reread this 2 minutes ago

[bradleykirksey]

Stupid question, Fred, but was the lead-in for Gettysburg inspired by Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

[Fond du lac operon]

Dot product

Wasn't saying the dot product symbol was in the divergence too easy as a lead in?

FWIW, I didn't get it there (actually I think I was 上海'ed into scorekeeping that round) despite being a math major, although it's true I took vector calculus an embarrassingly long time ago. I'm not sure people would have gotten that unless they took vector calc literally last semester, or otherwise had to use it a lot (maybe physics majors?). Probably still early, but I don't think it's that bad as a lead-in. Nobody got it in my room until the giveaway, at least.

[jonah]

Dot product

Wasn't saying the dot product symbol was in the divergence too easy as a lead in?

FWIW, I didn't get it there (actually I think I was 上海'ed into scorekeeping that round) despite being a math major, although it's true I took vector calculus an embarrassingly long time ago. I'm not sure people would have gotten that unless they took vector calc literally last semester, or otherwise had to use it a lot (maybe physics majors?). Probably still early, but I don't think it's that bad as a lead-in. Nobody got it in my room until the giveaway, at least.

That's pretty surprising to me. I too am a math major, haven't taken vector calc (or used it in physics or elsewhere) in over four years, and would know it cold on that clue. I don't think it's quite too easy, but I do think it's among the easier lead-ins for math questions in that set, and maybe even the set as a whole (I haven't really looked at the Div II set overall).

[Fond du lac operon]

That's pretty surprising to me. I too am a math major, haven't taken vector calc (or used it in physics or elsewhere) in over four years, and would know it cold on that clue. I don't think it's quite too easy, but I do think it's among the easier lead-ins for math questions in that set, and maybe even the set as a whole (I haven't really looked at the Div II set overall).

It's possible that you're just good at remembering mathematical notation, or I'm just bad at it, or somewhere in between. But I don't think it was really that bad of a lead-in -- I suspect most people's reaction to vector calc is to forget all of it as soon as possible (I know mine was, haha), so even if they've taken the class, they might not know it.

[jonah]

That's pretty surprising to me. I too am a math major, haven't taken vector calc (or used it in physics or elsewhere) in over four years, and would know it cold on that clue. I don't think it's quite too easy, but I do think it's among the easier lead-ins for math questions in that set, and maybe even the set as a whole (I haven't really looked at the Div II set overall).

It's possible that you're just good at remembering mathematical notation, or I'm just bad at it, or somewhere in between. But I don't think it was really that bad of a lead-in -- I suspect most people's reaction to vector calc is to forget all of it as soon as possible (I know mine was, haha), so even if they've taken the class, they might not know it.

Well, I liked that course, which is probably at least part of why I remember it pretty well.

We've taken this conversation to private messages, since it doesn't really advance the discussion of SCT.

[Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon]

Stupid question, Fred, but was the lead-in for Gettysburg inspired by Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

I don't even think that lead-in was mine, to be honest.

[cornfused]

Stupid question, Fred, but was the lead-in for Gettysburg inspired by Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

I don't even think that lead-in was mine, to be honest.

I know what you're referencing, Bradley, but the Edward Everett thing is a common trivia chestnut. Besides that $1,000,000 question, it's shown up in (I think) Ken Jennings's Brainiac and various other places - after all, it's commonish knowledge that Lincoln wasn't even the keynote speaker at Gettysburg, so it's only one extra step to say, who was?