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Nathan

quick sidenote to Jerry:

actually, The Geographical Pivot of History is pretty well-known and would certainly be a suitable part of a historiography bonus. In fact, I daresay that that title is more gettable than McKinder himself.

Nathan

Ray: I have written questions on Lu Xun and Rickshaw Boy...I believe others have as well (he is right as to their importance). Chris: You probably will find some Kleist in your local bookstore...anyone who does much reading in German literature will read some Kleist...he's more read in Germany than ...

Nathan

Does Roy really come up more often than McEwan? There was a spate of Amsterdam tossups awhile back. I haven't seen any Atonement tossups but they will come with time...I'd be willing to wager hard cash that Atonement will still be read a generation from now and God of Small Things may not. yeah, the...

Nathan

I actually don't really have a problem with the current literary canon. There's a reason why there aren't that many tossups on Milton...just like there aren't that many tossups on Shakespeare (considering their importance)....they're just too hard to write pyramidally...(especially Milton with his s...

Nathan

"Thus, tossups on "Adonais" or "Oe" or "Saint Joan" or "Raskolnikov" or "Snows of Kilimanjaro" These, as a set, are too hard for ACF Fall. With that said, I think Snows of Kilimanjaro or even Raskolnikov would be fine so long as the other three ...

Nathan

Matt: yup, people do use that strategy. actually, there are two different circumstances: one is the obvious one -- where you don't know the subject and your opponent does; the other is where you do know the subject but have been playing qb long enough to know that there's only a couple possible answ...

Nathan

I think we're talking at cross-purposes here: I mispoke when I said "blood flow"...I should have just said "equation" and "blood"....it is actually extensively used in medicine. the point is, I have buzzed off that clue and been right at least 50% of the time...which, c...

Nathan

a quick google search demonstrates that the Henderson Hasselbach equation has something to do with calculating blood ph and is indeed often used in a medical environment.

Nathan

I meant Henderson-Hasselbach -- which is indeed used in some relationship to human blood flow (ask a med student)...and that clue comes up frequently.

thus, throw in the Freeburg corollary: most qb questions are bad questions and one should only assume pyramidity with certain editors.

Nathan

If you don't know much about a subject but have "qb memory" then there are plenty of occasions where p has an intermediate value. i.e. the question is clearly going for an equation and something about blood flow comes up....I'm going to buzz with "Henderson-Hasselbach" and in qb ...

Nathan

"Exactly wrong. This assumes that there is no chance that one of your teammates will answer the question correctly or that the other team will make a mistake because they buzz in too early." I have played on numerous occasions where that exact assumption is warranted (besides, it doesn't h...

Nathan

"For instance, if you think your team can get 10 points on the bonus, then if you're more than 20% positive your guess is right, you should go ahead and buzz in, because in the long run this strategy will gain you points. This is perhaps a surprisingly low number, but it follows from the assump...

Nathan

btw....kudos to Mike on the editing...(and to the packet writers)...this was a well-run tournament and extremely well-edited....the vast majority of the tossups were pyramidal and the bonuses were edited to a consistent degree of difficulty.

Nathan

one thought on negs....there are certain situations where it makes sense to buzz extremely aggressively and I'm not sure how'll account for them. for example, I have played virtually the entirety of my career without a teammate with legitimate science knowledge (that includes when I had teammates :)...

Nathan

the same answer (or a related answer) without any of the same clues is not a repeat. period. now it's generally considered bad form to have the same answer twice in the same tournament...but there's nothing wrong with having a tossup on an author and then a tossup on a specific work by that author (...

Nathan

fwiw, the order of priority should be:

1 well-researched questions
2. well-written questions
3. interesting questions.

Nathan

kudos to Subash. questions were generally extremely well-written...don't recall any that left me cursing (this might be a first)... tossups were extremely gettable while bonus difficulty was probably a little higher than years past. the playoff rounds ramped up the tossup difficulty nicely...I think...

Nathan

"Quizbowl at any level will never be a spectator sport again. Nobody (in the world outside the circuit) cares, it's just that simple. So let's stop this talk about entertainment for spectators and all the attendant bullshit." you're conflating two points -- one of which is mine (your first...

Nathan

to partially second Matt's remarks: I don't comprehend the basic premise of this discussion: if there is one. CBI, is an activity, a chance-dependent game -- like many others. It's just not quizbowl. They're not the same thing and shouldn't be compared. If someone wants to play both, who cares? I pl...

Nathan

count me in.
fwiw, I'd vote for Friday evening.

Nathan

Seth is, of course, right.

demonstrates the ineptness of my sleep-deprived, alcohol-addled faculties.

Hoc verum est.

Nathan

as a dinosaur who has not taken anywhere near as many advanced humanities classes as Andrew, but who has taken more than most -- "My point, yet again, is as follows. To argue that "all science questions should primarily feature information that comes up in science classes" is to indul...

Nathan

I don't really have the time to be getting into this...but a quick note before Andrew is awaken by the Marilyn McCord Adams tossup someone is sure to write (actually, she'd be a very legit lead-in): I think one problem is that within other fields "history of" is to some extent a recognized...

Nathan

how well did the first clue distinguish the Moho from the Gutenburg?

Nathan

"I guess Great Chain of Being is the philosophy tossup. Sort of confusing, I thought. Basically, it's a tossup on a book almost nobody has read (Arthur Lovejoy?). Still, it's better than the tossup at NAQT on the same subject." actually, I assumed this was part of the lit distribution (at ...

Nathan

>4) I also have no idea what Nathan is talking about. How is a tossup on >John Austin a "mistake"? He's only the most influential British >philosopher of the post-WWII era. Also, it seems odd to quibble about >one leadin, especially since the set was so full of unfamiliar clues (and I, >at...

Nathan

If the leadin was "According to Islamic tradition," then certainly "Abraham" should be acceptable since that phrase implies that the question is giving one (or more) of several varying accounts around a common character (that phrase would not be used if the character sought was e...

Nathan

IMHO, superb editing and writing (on the whole) in this packet. numerous excellent tossups ("vampyre" sticks out in my recollection)....the tossups were virtually all extremely gettable while bonuses were generally challenging without being inaccessible. a few quibbles: the Austin tossup w...

Nathan

CUNY will hopefully attend....I will be at a trial in Detroit for two months during that period (assuming it doesn't settle)....and should be able to make the trip (it's at Northwestern right?)....don't know when I'd have time to write a packet....

Nathan

placeholder...removing my own post

Nathan

I suppose one problem with question obscurity is the tendency to find anything foremost in its category to be askable....since categories are almost infinitely multipliable....we end up with the most notable Latvian epic, Sri Lankan lesbian poet and what-not...(and I've certainly been guilty of this...

Nathan

"And as far as Zurburan goes, inane leadins notwithstanding, if he shows up in my watered down 12th grade Spanish culture course (which he does), I'd wager he's important." Zurburan, Murillo and de Ribera (though secondary to Velazquez within their period) are certainly a notable triumvira...

Nathan

Matt: I don't mean to disparage Akhmatova's significance but rather point out that Tsvetaeva is of similar stature.

as for mythology: I never understood why it wasn't a subset of literature.

Nathan

it could be a feeble attempt at satire but I don't know who this poster is...some of it reads like it could be but others appear to be bona fide points.

I haven't exactly been to many tournaments recently so I don't know if Repin has been showing up....for all I know, maybe he's the new Rublev.

Nathan

I threw Repin into a bonus with Ge and Rublev a while back....I'd never seen him come up before....does he show up a lot now?

Nathan

underrepresented figure: (in fact, he's not represented at all)....C.P. Cavafy...not only is he the most beloved of modern Greek poets (more so than Elytis) but he had a great deal of influence on an entire generation of post-war British writers....Durrell and the early Fowles were suffused with him...

Nathan

on underrepresented: agree with Jerry on the Russkies....I didn't know anyone had ever written an Ilf and Petrov question -- 12 Chairs should be gettable...if nothing else because Mel Brooks made an excellent movie adaptation....I haven't read the Gold Calf but that's considered to be notable. I hav...

Nathan

I recall a discussion awhile back where a fair amount of qb'ers indicated that they use wikipedia as a reference source....I thought that was an awful idea at the time and today just ran across an article evincing why....

http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html

Nathan

I really wish people wouldn't try and parse this article too much....it's certainly more accurate than the old NY Times article....btw, this trope that there must be a tension in QB between those participating in game shows and not is exactly the type of rot they teach them in journalism school....a...

Nathan

though it was one of the worst performances of my life -- that was a tournament for the ages...probably the strongest field in history and the best question set I have ever played on -- the packet writing was superb in every round -- to be self-aggrandizing for a second, I think the packet I submitt...

Nathan

but with one caveat:

sometimes the more pyramidal (and therefore correct) way to order clues will be less than optimal from a grammatical perspective.

Nathan

Imprecations, Blastations, Invocations, Damnations and Excited Utterances against the late posting of this event. Anyone who knows me knows that this tourney would be the mother of all wet dreams (to paraphrase ADJ). Unfortunately, I will be leaving Chicago Saturday evening after the Open...(if anyo...

Nathan

I'd suggest that last year's Open may have been slightly stronger.... In terms of predictions, I guarantee that the team of Dan, Ted, myself and the player to be named later will pull off at least one "upset". As well, in the interests of talking smack -- we'll finish in the top 5 and we'l...

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another thought

thoughts

well...

one more thing

oh, and another

thoughts

Wikipedia

Wash Post Article

I generally agree with you on this

my 3 cents