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Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Also, format-wise, we're currently at 28 teams. We'd have four prelim brackets of 7, followed by re-bracketing into four playoff brackets of 7 and ACF format finals. If there are 27 teams, there would be three prelim brackets of 9, followed by playoff brackets of 6 (top two from each bracket) where...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

This might be taking things in a slightly different direction, but why not reduce trash (or computational math) in favor of religion and mythology? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like the high school distribution has 0.9/0.8 religion and mythology out of 24/24 per packet, significantly less ...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

I would like to hear from people at long standing community college teams about how they make it work, because I have always been suspicious that given the extremely fast turnover, it seems like it is very improbable that you can build a totally student run organization that will last more than a y...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Who is this Horace Greeley school and are they really that good, or just on A sets? They're the king of :chip: Central (i.e. Westchester County), and they've been that good for at least a dozen years. I have no doubt they'd perform quite well at NSC or HSNCT if they could actually be convinced to a...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Baba Yaga is a staple of the mythology distribution at lower-difficulty tournaments like EFT. But American folklore like Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, etc. doesn't seem to come up at all. I'd feel uncomfortable including it in a tournament as RMP. What exactly is the reason for this disparity, and/or th...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Folklore: I can think of a lot of good crap for American folklore alone. Do people find it acceptable to include folklore (Paul Bunyan, Baba Yaga, that sort of stuff) as an occasional question in the myth category? To criticize my own quizbowl team, consider the 2009 HFT's bonus about the Copenhage...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

I further want to add to this that I hope when people are writing for "whatever" slots in academic tournaments, they'll also consider writing academic "whatever," too, especially interdisciplinary academic bonuses. I'm finding doing so highly edifying and rewarding to my own lea...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Did we ever get an answer as to whether sectionals run entirely by ACUI people (i.e. no help from the school's quizbowl-playing students) still receive autobids? or a team like Swarthmore caught behind Penn and Maryland. <broken record>If there was actually a Region 3 site, this particular hypotheti...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Bentley Like Beckham wrote:The original post mentioned the final details would be worked out by 12/1. Has this happened?

bt_green_warbler wrote:
jonpin wrote:Any announcements yet for SCT or ICT sites?
We expect to post the complete list of SCT sites on Monday. ICT sometime later.

Any progress on either front?

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

My three favorite tournaments since returning were ACF Fall 2008, Minnesota Open 2008, and the January 09 Terrapin, all of which seem to have been generally praised. I'm hesitant to try and list good tournaments from my undergraduate days (2001-2005), because a) my memory is foggy, b) I'm certain to...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Wait a minute- if you're hosting SCT, then you have an autobid anyway! You'll be able to send a team (Div II if you so choose) to ICT no matter what, rendering this (highly implausible, for the many good reasons explained above) situation moot.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

FWIW, I spent most of that question sitting on the buzzer thinking "hey, this is clearly a swing-era bandleader who played the clarinet, time to wait for a clue which will allow me to distinguish between Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman." Miller played trombone. I guess his music did promin...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

I agree with Andrew in this regard. I also was rather puzzled at some of the answer selection, particularly the Fine Arts. While I guess I appreciate a little bit of attempts to slip things through, tossups on Glenn Miller, Bob Fosse, and Nino Rota, all of which I answered using trash knowledge, we...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

What the hell is "Space Hulk?" Noted author of a video game tournament/person who gets every video game question Jeremy Eaton expressed a similar sentiment when that tossup went dead in our game. Can you not write tossups on completely random things with no regard to their importance or d...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Glad you liked the "landfills" question. In case it wasn't obvious, I wrote it as the geography/academic choice tossup.

ETA: Not to threadjack, but how do you clean up those tar sands? Inquiring minds want to know.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Brief results: Following playoffs, State College A was undefeated while St. Anselm's had one loss (to State College A). We did an advantaged final with State College A emerging as Champion, winning 545-165. I'll have stats up shortly, but here are brief results (including finals): 1. State College ...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Congratulations to State College, who defeated St. Anselm's in the first game of an advantaged final to win QuAC II; Matt Bollinger of St. Anselm's was the highest scorer from the prelims.

I'm sure Mehdi will have more complete results soon.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

We're leaning toward an 8-team top bracket at the moment.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

This is a really good idea and I would love to help make it happen.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

January 30th is the date of Penn Bowl, so hopefully they don't choose that date. February 13th is all clear as far as I know.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

What's on the 24th? Or May 1st? Good point- moving it later might work; presumably the pitfalls with those dates are that you're giving any possibly newly-qualifying teams less time to sign up for HSNCT, and if you go too late you run up against finals periods. Moving it later does seem like a poss...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Yeah, this issue came up in the collegiate section. Basically, the constraints are: 1) Princeton wants to host Buzzerfest (their collegiate tournament) on March 27. Due to their desire to host this before ICT and ACF Nationals, and because of various spring breaks, March 27th is really the only day ...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

So, hypothetically, if you had 15 regions, all of which qualified a separate host (taking their bid in Div I), champion, and UG champion, that's 45 teams right there- larger than the entire Div I field before you even begin to think about wildcards. You know, this could have happened already: we ha...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

How will this arrangement affect the awarding of autobids to teams hosting SCT? Will those teams still get those bids? Yes. So, hypothetically, if you had 15 regions, all of which qualified a separate host (taking their bid in Div I), champion, and UG champion, that's 45 teams right there- larger t...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

So, this is a high school issue, but this thread is the NAQT scheduling thread. According to NAQT's tournament calendar, http://www.naqt.com/schedule.jsp?hs=yes&day=yes&long=yes ,Bel Air High School in Bel Air, MD is hosting a A-set tournament on the 21st. This is notably the same day as Qu...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

grapesmoker wrote:back in around aught-one (that's like the quizbowl neolithic era, for some of you), there were no packet archives as such (certainly not online ones)

Um, what about the Stanford Archives? They were around back then.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

the paucity of novice tournaments these days I dispute this. We have: ACF Fall (gets easier every year) ACF Winter (never played it, but seems extraordinarily easy) Minnesota Novice Illinois Novice Isn't there also another novice tournament that is being run in late November? Also, this is if we bu...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

THUNDER was a pretty easy tournament; I'm not sure it was even as hard as some recent ACF Regionals. There was some crazy stuff that came up, sure, but it was the exception and not the rule. But I think that it would be a great tragedy if this thread devolved into a discussion of THUNDER's difficul...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

The music tossups at THUNDER were indeed very difficult; some of them would be among the harder questions at a 2009-vintage nationals. I felt that this was not true for the music bonuses, which if anything tended to be easier than other subjects on average, mostly due to the general lack of a "...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Really? So these writers and editors have an absolute stranglehold on this part of the distribution, and all we can do is thank God it's not worse? I submit that there is at least one thing that could be done about this: continuing to tell these people, over and over and over again, not to write on...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

So, by and large this tournament was really superlative. Yeah, there were a few bonus difficulty issues, a few poor tossup choices (hey thanks for giving us a 19-tossup Round Two just so you could continue to indulge your tired old BEES fetish), and other oddities like the packet with 1/1 South Amer...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Stats are up and here: http://results.scobo.net/SQBS.aspx?org=UMD&id=13&page=standings Thanks to everyone who came, Minnesota for producing a good set and we hope you enjoyed yourselves. Thanks to Maryland for hosting a very enjoyable (if small) tournament, and apologies for the later-than-...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

DumbJaques wrote:Field updated. Also, since we have a lot of people taking the train to this event already, there have been requests to go with a 9:45ish start time.

Oh that's awesome. Much appreciated.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

The only thing in this regard I remember causing a problem at the South Carolina site was a reader not taking Easter Rebellion for Easter Rising. I think the only part that was outlined there was Easter, but that should be obviously acceptable. We said "Easter Uprising" and were ruled inc...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Also, my earlier request must have gotten lost in the shuffle: could someone post the Shostakovich tossup from round 2? This man's first violin concerto is in A minor and ends with a "burlesque" movement, while his tenth symphony features the "Elmira" theme in honor of a student...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Apparently this set was very lazy in terms of providing alternate answers. Making the occasional mistake and leaving off answers is no big deal, but doing it consistently over an entire set is a big problem. Writing questions is about making them as playable as possible, and part of that is making ...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

As much I personally enjoyed the Renzo Piano tossup, it seemed like a dubious choice for this dificulty level. Also, could someone post the Shostakovich tossup?

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

History of Science is history and Philosophy of Science is philosophy. Science requires finding problems, experimenting, collecting data, analyzing data, and drawing conclusions. Welp, now that you have defined science for us I guess we can lay that pesky demarcation problem to rest. Thanks, Kay Li...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

"Culturally significant" is an untenable post-hoc justification--we get it, Chris, you like Bob Dylan. So do I. I also like the Violent Femmes a lot (allmusic calls them the "textbook American cult band of the 1980s" and they sold a million copies of their first album, so I gues...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Get off you high horse. People 50 years ago didn't know whether Dylan would last or not; he could've been a one-shot flash in the pan for all we know. Dylan is great, I love Dylan, he's still essentially pop culture. There's nothing wrong with that but he doesn't need to be in an academic tournamen...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

As much as we all seem to want to dogpile on Kay's every argument here, I see every reason to think that a Weinerian literature player has an advantage on arts and a Weinerian history player has an advantage on geography in much the same way as a Weinerian science player has an advantage on math. W...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

If I could make judgments about what would be important in the future, I'd be in the money. Too bad neither I nor anyone else has such forecasting ability. Dumping trash altogether would completely eliminate this ambiguity. Bob Dylan's first albums are almost 50 years old now, and I'm pretty sure t...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Sweet. Some number of Penn folks will surely show up to this.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

A bunch of high schoolers, including a coalition team, played last year. Coalition/non-school/open teams were allowed to play, but only as exhibition teams ineligible for the championship. (Also in attendance was a group of Williams alumni, and Jonathan Magin.) While we haven't explicitly discussed...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Actually finding time for this is going to be tricky (and the 27th is almost certainly too close to Christmas for me to make it). But I am interested.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Yes, if the extra space specifically goes to expanding social science. (Not that it's been seriously floated, but I'd also be strongly against eliminating geography entirely.)

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Penn will likely be coming to the Brown site for EFT; number of teams is still up in the air.

Is there any chance we could get a good idea of how long the tournament is expected to run? Some (perhaps all) of us will be taking Amtrak up.

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

"we should just lump geography in with other social sciences because that way, people who want to write on it can do so and people who don't want to write on it don't have to waste their time." ... In the third argument, we're essentially saying that we should relegate geography to an opt...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

we could put geography in with social science and increase social science to 2/2. Geography could then be limited to at most 1 question of that 2/2, as we currently do with all other social sciences. Carrying this option a bit further, there's been some noise about implementing some semi-requiremen...

Theory Of The Leisure Flask

Geography is fairly easy to write - if you're writing on a river, like the Parana - it's very apparent what your clues are going to be - tributaries, cities passed through, bridges, waterfalls, natural attractions These are exactly the awful almanac clues that people were claiming we could somehow ...

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