The Quizbowl Resource Center

Muriel Axon

I don't quite know how to articulate this, but: As a community, I think we could be a lot better at resisting the temptation to one-up each other with obscure references in casual conversation. My impression is that, at least if you're clever and funny enough about it (rather than just annoying), th...

Muriel Axon

Count me as a skeptic that statistics alone could ever show that a major, elite (sufficiently savvy) player has cheated -- or even a pattern of unusual buzzes. (I mean, Chris is known for his ability to steal questions in anyone's category.) With that said: Second, statistical analysis is dangerous ...

Muriel Axon

After I finish my PhD in (fingers crossed) July, I'll be moving to Montreal to take up a postdoc at UdeM, based at the Montreal Botanical Garden. I can staff tournaments in Montreal, if there are any, or perhaps as far as Ottawa. But I will never call packets "[the thing Canadians call them]." ( sta...

Muriel Axon

This is a fun website, Ryan! Thanks for putting it together.

Muriel Axon

My first impressed was that this set was better polished, better controlled for difficulty, and had fewer clumsy tossups that most sets of the same difficulty. Thanks to the set editors and producers for your hard work!

Muriel Axon

There were like 3 questions between tossups and bonus parts to which the answer was "water". I think two of them were in the same round, too. I don't remember what these questions were, but this is not necessarily a problem! (Here, I deleted the extremely banal sentence "Water is ubiquitous in huma...

Muriel Axon

It was wonderful to see your NMU teams, Dr. Joy, and great to see a lot of the local liberal arts colleges come, too! Your comment about the location is noted -- I also like having tournaments on East Bank!

Muriel Axon

The question on St. Thomas Aquinas should at least prompt on Thomas, for the same reason that questions on Leonardo da Vinci tend to accept Leonardo. Not a gameplay issue, but alleles don't have to become fixed through drift -- selection is often also important. Also not a gameplay issue, but I don'...

Muriel Axon

I have some sympathy for Jacob's post. I think it's true that TDs shouldn't provide book prizes that are falling apart or obsolete, and that they should ideally provide a varied selection of books. On the other hand (and I don't think this was a claim Jacob was making), individual players can't nece...

Muriel Axon

Minnesota Periwinkle (Tora Husar, Davis Everson-Rose, Lucas Pham, Alex Miles, and Hayden Binger) defeated Carleton A (Jakob Boeye, Ben Koppel, Peter Blanchfield, and Mitchell Anderson) in a one-game final (330-200). Congratulations to both teams, and thank you to everyone who came! I'm sending Brian...

Muriel Axon

I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation for the amount of CO2 released due to printing packets at a very large tournament (think HSNCT). Here, I assume that an HSNCT-sized tournament would use ~31000 sheets of 80 gsm paper. I used two separate life-cycle assessments of paper product emissions -- on...

Muriel Axon

What to do: The Shapley-Curtis debate bonus. This was a major turning point in the history of modern cosmology. The correct side in this debate was actually right and it wasn't a pair of crackpots talking about two equally stupid theories . Both sides presented (at the time) quality scientific evid...

Muriel Axon

frasier wrote: ↑
Thu May 02, 2019 2:17 pm
things which virtually no one uses or studies like earth science

wait, what?

Muriel Axon

Based on how one chooses to weigh criteria like 'importance in the real world / workplace,' 'number of majors,' 'interest to intellectually curious people,' etc., one could come up with a good argument for a lot of distributions that look nothing like each other, some of which are obviously undesira...

Muriel Axon

Geoffrey nearly out-powered me at ICT, tied Will Nediger and Mike Bentley for most powers at PIANO, and often beats grad students in the sciences (myself included) to questions in their own (broadly-defined) field. The difference between Minnesota coming 15th/8th at ICT/Nats last year and 4th/3rd th...

Muriel Axon

Comments on those three questions: Eyes -- this one is fine! The complaint I thought I had -- dropping scientific names absent context, in an obfuscatory way -- was avoided in the way I'd recommend -- which is to say, by providing contextualizing information about life history or (in this case) broa...

Muriel Axon

One thing that I appreciate about this set was that the questions were not just good on average, but also uniformly: There weren't very many duds. (One could compare this to PIANO, which -- as one of the writers -- I thought was of similarly high caliber overall, but had a handful of questions that ...

Muriel Axon

The question of identifiers aside, I think the music in this tournament was quite good and accessible. So-called "score clues" are a common target for critics of music questions, but I felt like at least a fair number of the clues based on score instructions or note spellings were well-chosen. Even ...

Muriel Axon

Since I was so rudely ratted out, I put the stats back up. Congratulations to hamburger university lab school (Will Nediger, Auroni Gupta, Dylan Minarik, Andrew Wang), who cleared the field! We ran Eyes X, Guerrilla History, ACRONYM, and SHAWARMA II -- big thanks to the editors/writers of those tour...

Muriel Axon

I regret to say that all scoresheets were lost, so no stats from the main event will be available. Whoops!

Muriel Axon

Our plan is to do what Mike says in his post. PIANO + Eyes will be a long day, but we'll have four efficient readers for the main event. We weren't able to negotiate a discount for Saturday rooms. (Brian checked our records, and it looks like last year, we just took a financial loss when booking bot...

Muriel Axon

Here's the situation as it stands now: Erik would really like an ACRONYM mirror to happen so that people who play here can staff the bigger, more important mirror at HSNCT. To that end, he's willing to subsidize the mirror somewhat to make sure that it happens. For that reason, I think we can keep r...

Muriel Axon

Mike, you're right that I should have been more prompt in figuring this out -- basically, as someone who doesn't check the forums too often, I wasn't aware that these events existed until Tejas sent me messages about them. I also took too long to publicly announce that Sunday events were a possibili...

Muriel Axon

Some of you have asked about side events. Thanks for your patience -- I'm sorry I didn't get back to you earlier! Here are my thoughts. There is some interest in the following events: ACRONYM, SHAWARMA, and Guerrilla History. We are considering hosting these on Sunday. (Eyes would be on Saturday at ...

Muriel Axon

[10] If you practice ahimsa and are a good enough Jain, your soul obtains true knowledge of the Universe. This Sanskrit word is used to indicate such omniscient souls, including those of the Tirthankaras. ANSWER: arihant [or jina] "Kevali" should be accepted here -- the state of omniscience is call...

Muriel Axon

It sounded like the bonus part on "phylogenies" said that they're most commonly created through maximum parsimony, which probably hasn't been true among published phylogenies since the 1990s. (An infamous editorial in the journal Cladistics -- published by the Willi Hennig Society, which is committe...

Muriel Axon

We are planning to run Eyes That Do Not See at lunch on Saturday, and we (or rather, someone) will figure out lunch delivery such that players can eat and play at the same time. I'm not aware of any other academic side events that will be ready by the mirror date. Erik Nelson contacted us about whet...

Muriel Axon

However, the main argument for this OP was trying to include more Bollywood movies in the trash distribution, as I don't know much about Indian art film in the first place. The other thing that was also on my mind yesterday was the India film tossup at NSC that included Lagaan along with Apu Trilog...

Muriel Axon

We are pleased to announce a mirror of PIANO / Minnesota Open on the Minneapolis campus of University of Minnesota on March 30, 2019. The exact building has yet to be determined, but it's likely to be Blegen Hall. PIANO is an open tournament, which means that anyone can register and teams can compri...

Muriel Axon

Re: Rob's comment -- yes, I just attempted to get in touch with Macalester and St. Thomas teams to see if booking rooms is free for them on Sundays; but it may well be that people are willing to pay $10-15 extra (total, across all side events) to be spared the inconvenience of going to a different v...

Muriel Axon

A lot of quiz bowl players talk about the relationship between the sort of atomized facts one might learn from flashcarding or packet study and the more synoptic perspective that constitutes 'real knowledge,' as valued in academia. I found this article to offer an interesting perspective.

Muriel Axon

That is a good question. The UMN team has to pay for Sunday rooms, which means it's often a poor financial decision for us to host Sunday side events. I'll talk it over with our board; perhaps we can find an alternate venue for side events. (To be honest, I'm also out-of-the-loop to the extent that ...

Muriel Axon

Sorry everyone! We've decided on March 30 and I just have to put up the announcement (Internet access currently spotty). Thanks for your patience.

Muriel Axon

Given that UMN can likely field around two house teams, I doubt we will cancel the mirror. The date is still to be decided.

Muriel Axon

Sorry, I managed to replace the old link with...itself. Here's the proper link!

Muriel Axon

The bottom line is that without a strong showing of support for a Minnesota mirror -- whether underlain by a formal rule directing teams there or not -- it just won't happen. I encourage people who would be likely to play a UMN mirror to list their names or their teams on this spreadsheet . The main...

Muriel Axon

I'm initiating a conversation about this with our club leadership and with Sam. At this point, I'm speaking for nobody but myself. I'm not too invested in having a Minnesota mirror -- although of course Sam and I would both like to see our questions in play. My take is that: 1. Various folks are rig...

Muriel Axon

I think people are complaining too much about packet 'feng shui.' There are two issues here: (1) Editors only have a certain amount of time, and given more time, the editors of this set should have prioritized proofreading over making sure "metaphysics" and "metaphysical poets" don't appear in the s...

Muriel Axon

I thought the clue about peat being a great carbon sink was sort of strange/unhelpful (also in general that tu seemed a bit hard for the difficulty) This clue was worded a bit funny, but the fact that peat decomposes slowly -- and thus, stores a lot of carbon -- is perhaps The One Thing You Should ...

Muriel Axon

Nathan is presumably using a single team name as shorthand for a packet that combines submissions from multiple teams, as well as questions written by editors. (This makes more sense if you can see the packet headers and file names.)

Muriel Axon

I appreciated that both difficulty and tossup length seemed well-controlled -- these both require considerable discipline. I think players at the UMN site appreciated that care and enjoyed the set. As others have mentioned, I think more attention to detail would have paid off, but I also think the s...

Muriel Axon

From the TU on spheres (Eds. 1): "the solid that gives the largest surface area for a given volume" is the exact opposite of the truth. A question mentions the "pyridinium atom," which I assume means "pyridinium ion." The centaurs bonus spells "lapiths" as "lapthis." A minor thing that I'm only ment...

Muriel Axon

Found the correct score to that round 9 game -- the stats above should now be (more) correct. Please PM or email me with further corrections!

Muriel Axon

I've uploaded stats . I'm guessing the score in game 9 between Greater East Naperville Co-Prosperity Sphere and I Fell During Bite the Box and Now I Have This Scab Team is incorrect, so if any of the participants in that game have the real score, let me know. Otherwise, it will take me a while to ch...

Muriel Axon

All three side events will be on Sunday. SNICK will be first. Please sign up soon!

Muriel Axon

The good thing about promoting non-Western art as a part of the art distribution is that it creates space for these works to be asked about as art, as Andrew suggests. Many times, I've stuffed questions about music (Western and non-Western) that isn't part of the classical or jazz traditions into "g...

Muriel Axon

Update: I'm putting up team formation spreadsheets for potential mirrors of SNICK, WORLDSTAR , and Words and Objects . Please sign up if you're interested. If we don't have at least four teams for each event, we may switch to a shoot-out format, if that's okay with the writers of each respective set...

Muriel Axon

I found the non-Western auditory art to be uniformly very good. I also appreciate the attention to balance over time and space of the non-Western art in general. I felt like the increase in non-Western art was worth the commensurate decrease in attention to painting and Western classical music, alth...

Muriel Axon

Contrary to my claim that we'll host side events not taking place at the Illinois event, we've had interest in mirrors of SNICK, WORLDSTAR, and Words and Objects, most likely on Sunday following the tournament.

Muriel Axon

UMN Quizbowl is pleased to announce an open mirror of NASAT on Saturday, August 18. Details about the set can be found here . The tournament will have an initial field cap of twelve teams, pending recruitment of qualified staffers. The entry fee with be $90 per team, with $10 discounts for: (1) each...

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