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As disappointed as I am by the location of the ICT, I think I should point out that there are ultracheap fares to Minnesota from a handful of Midwestern cities on the Megabus.

One possible solution might be to have a potluck breakfast before each tournament. Every team can bring some kind of food item, such as a roast, or a bowl of mac and cheese, or some sandwiches, and then they can get together in a room and share the food with each other, and presumably socialize whi...

I might be wrong, but I think the Ann B. Davis set is not yet okay to talk about (isn't BU mirroring it in February)? The above post should probably be edited.

But packet randomizing should really be rather nonrandom; you want the history, science, and lit tossups spaced out within the packet with everything else randomly scattered around.

There is no usually to this. Come up with one specific instance where someone who knows everything is beaten by someone who knows less that isn't a: rigged, b: a buzzer race (that shouldn't happen because the smarter player would get it before the buzzer race clue appears), or c: a non-pyramidal qu...

Here are three more on Bonhoeffer.

Presumably this should be in the college section rather than the high school one. Mods?

Some Hyde Park food options: Giordano's : Deep-dish and normal pizza, sandwiches, pasta, salads, etc. Noodles Etc. : Inexpensive pan-Asian. The Snail : Slightly more expensive, higher-quality Thai. Ribs 'n' Bibs : Self-explanatory, though not all meals come with bibs. Seth Teitler recommends "T...

Chicago loses Pericles Abbasi to the real world, and we all weep bitter tears of dismay.

Gabe, are you claiming that NAQT had much more nonwestern content than ACF did? Leaving aside current events, I just don't think that's true.

DII qualification doesn't affect the autobid. Think what you may of how fair that is (as previously noted in this thread, the intent is to dissuade host teams from fielding their better staffers--presumably DI players--on house teams), but I find it hard to see how anyone hosting an SCT can reasonab...

The official policy of the Chicago College Bowl Team (I'm speaking as an officer of the team, not as an individual) is to maximize the amount of national championships we win. We recognize ACF Nationals, ICT, and CBI Nationals as legitimate national championship conferring tournaments. As such, we ...

I've known about the rule since before I ran an SCT in 2003 (at which we took our autobid in DI and fielded a DII team that also received a bid). Additionally, I'm pretty sure it's in the information that all SCT hosts are sent, and I certainly don't recall it being buried in fine print. I'm sorry a...

This was addressed on the other board, but the Rochester that qualified for the ICT is presumably Fred Bush playing solo in the Southwest SCT.

So, D1 and D2 bids are up.

He probably can take exception to your walking in during the middle of the game, and the "break in the action" was in the middle of our bonus. I'm just saying.

Since Dan brought up CBI, I thought I'd go off on a tangent: When did NAQT packets get so short? This was the first SCT I have played since 2001 (and here I date myself), when I recall packets having 28 tossups. If my notes and memory are to be trusted, the D1 packets I played this weekend had 26 to...

Matt wrote:Certainly don't construct whole tossups out of several quotations about the answer; there were 2 of these that I recall.

I remember the tossup on Dream of Gerontius that was like, "Pius XIII thought it was super. Delius thought it blew." What was the other one?

I remember the Michigan team telling us they negged on this question and protested it, but I don't think it affected the outcome of their match.

I've seen it once or twice with "Fall of Icarus" as the acceptable title. I was curious as to whether this was generally accepted.

I was just curious about this, since it came up in one of our matches at Regionals: what is the minimally acceptable title for Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus?

Peter Onyisi used to have some web-based stats program going on. I wonder whatever became of that.

Regardless of how one feels about playoffs that don't include all teams, I think it's silly to act like they never happen. Jerry, you attended a tournament this very weekend where only the top eight teams participated in playoffs*. Penn Bowl, in its larger incarnations, had playoffs for only the top...

NAQT wrote:Hosts may charge teams that withdraw within 72 hours of the beginning of the tournament a cancellation fee of up to $40. Hosts may charge teams that withdraw within 24 hours of the beginning of the event, or which do not show up at all, a cancellation fee of up to $80.

Original text here.

Not to get too far off topic, but were the changes to the SCT host requirement announced somewhere? I found some of the changes silly (like the announcement of late-dropout penalties--has anyone ever successfully collected such a fee?) and some of them really annoying (like the change from a "s...

Beloit has shown up at CBI regionals a few times in the past couple of years. They do have a website that lists a student contact. Good luck to your student.

It's not about the language of choice; it's about the topic. Salman Rushdie writes, in at least the one book of his that I've read, about uniquely Indian experiences. He writes about Indian people, living in and near India, experiencing aspects of Indian history. On the other hand, Kazuo Ishiguro (...

A few comments: -I don't see Gleevec as an unacceptable answer for the hard part of a bonus. Granted, I'm in a cancer biology program at Chicago, where Janet Rowley, whose work on the Philadelphia chromosome led to the development of Gleevec, works, so I may be biased here. I encountered Gleevec in ...

10. Adenine might be a bit hard; I wrote an adenine question for ACF regs last year, and there's very little you can manufacture other than structural clues before the thymine. Clues relating to cyclic AMP or to ATP would be, I think, easier than structural information but still okay before thymine...

A sample of biology tossup answers included in the set: PCR, archaea, cnidaria, adenine, mimicry, prions, Calvin cycle, scapula, vitamin D... Gosh, I wonder why the tossup on sonic hedgehog wasn't used. Also, hurrah for this year's ACF Fall not being as much of an anatomy-fest as previous years have...

Thanks to Ed Cohn, Andrew Yaphe, Alice Chou, Seth Teitler, Christian "Everyone's Hero" Kammerer. Ramey Ko, Ben Recchie, Leah Williams, and Sudheer Potru for moderating, scorekeeping, stat-wrangling, or otherwise helping out with the tournament.

The only myth book that I have yet managed to get to open to every mention of "hammer" (well, several mentions at least) is the Encyclopedia of Ancient Deities (Patricia Turner and Charles Russell Coulter). It's not a perfect source, but it is very broad, and its index does allow you to lo...

Hey, I got bored and generated the linear regressions (as described in Paul's initial post) for everyone at IO who scored over 10ppg. Somewhere Among Us A Stone Is Taking Notes: Andrew: y = 13.694x + 63.338 Paul: y = -12.739x + 19.732 Jerry: y = -34.395x + 45.478 Kentucky: Seth: y = -69.066x + 99.34...

I just wanted to be the first to thank Seth Teitler for running his completely awesome myth tournament. The questions were excellent and, I believe, will be made available pretty soon, so all y'all who didn't go should check them out.

Also, congratulations to Seth Kendall for winning it.

I understand that the stats were posted on Berkeley's website, but no public announcement of the results were made.

Wasn't it once standard practice to post an announcement of tournament results shortly after the tournament was held? Whatever happened to that?

One tiny little correction to Jerry's post: the "Master Builder" clue was in a question about Kazantzakis, not Tanizaki, and prior to the mention of the title, the question mentioned a character that appeared only in the Kazantzakis work (and had a name that didn't sound Norwegian). Appare...

I'd be willing to help write religion or mythology, but much more willing to play.

Susan

According to Selene Koo, at least, the "Greatest Team Ever Assembled" was Chicago A at Beaver Bonspiel 2004 (Andrew, Subash, Ed, and Seth).

Susan

I'm pretty sure that the last CBI winner to receive money was the University of Chicago when we won in 2003. From what I understand, Ford is no longer a sponsor of CBI, hence the $10,000 first-place prize, as well as the reimbursements for travel and lodgings at the NCT (up to $1500 per team if I re...

Quoted from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/quizbowl/message/15339 :

"Finally, just a quick note on div 2 eligibility. Any undergrad who has
not been to acf nationals before is eligible in division 2."

Chicago C was also Division II.

Susan

I know you were asking Bruce, but since I've been here forever, I can answer this: the University of Chicago used to have quite a lot of suicides until they started putting people in inpatient psych at the slightest hint of suicidal ideation. Undergraduates do still get a winter holiday called "...

The text of the relevant part of the Parkinson's disease question: A. Parkinson's specifically degrades this collection of cell bodies outside the CNS that comprises the substantia nigra, caudate nucleus, and putamen. Answer: basal ganglia Confusion due to the fact that anything ending in ganglia is...

Commentary on a few of the bio/biochem/chem questions (neither as extensive nor as well-informed as Seth's): Generally, I thought the science in the set was very good in terms of both answer selection and writing (a step up from, say, last year's Nationals on both counts). I felt the answers stayed ...

The full text of that question is: In the English translation of ~*Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus*~, Rule 3.323 [3 point 3-2-3] gives definitions of this word, describing it as "the (*) copula, the sign of equality, and the expression of existence." Its tense resulted in the ambiguity cite...

Maybe I'm missing something, but shouldn't the strength-of-schedule compenent of the S-value account for the supposed disadvantage of having to play DI teams on DII questions? It doesn't seem to me that it should be all that different from having to play against a very strong DII team. That said, I'...

The University of Chicago will be hosting the ACF Midwest Regional Tournament on Saturday, February 26, 2005. Fee structure: $100 - base fee -$10 per functional buzzer system -$10 per functional moderator Packet-related discounts: January 14th: -$30 January 28th: -$20 February 4th: +$0 February 11th...

The obvious example (to me, at least) is "named" organic reactions (including but not limited to Friedel-Crafts, Diels-Alder, WIttig, Wolff-Kishner, and Claisen condensation), though as a non-chemist, I'm not exactly clamoring for more obscure answers in non-biological chemistry. It does s...

mreece wrote:What is it with Chicago and cyborgs, anyway?

Well, we lost our first one, didn't we?

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