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Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

I, too, am not sure where my Mozart tossup was "delighted with itself." I tried to incorporate clues from various important Mozart arias and operas, and I'm reasonably sure I mentioned nothing obscure or unimportant, though perhaps I overestimated people's knowledge of Il Re Pastore and Mi...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

My problem with Atdorfer is that's he's got one well-know work ( The Battle of Issus ) and is otherwise obscure. I haven't seen the Altdorfer tossup, but this isn't true at all. Any history of landscapes in European art likely mentions Altdorfer's Landscape with Footbridge and possibly Landscape wi...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

Sleeping the night before is super key. I totally disagree with caffeine though, in my experience it hurts play a lot. I do recommend lots of water, and jogging from match to match, if possible. Keep blood flowing, listen to good music, and enjoy yourself. I am sure all members of Whitman's 2007-20...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

I've registered, though under Wigner's Friend because my current username is more than 20 characters.

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

What does DVLO stand for? Four guys who came up with a theory on colloid behavior. I wrote a tossup on it for a finals round of CO this year (hardest round ever made?), so given that, I'd say it has zero business appearing in a high school set except as a leadin to a tossup on colloids or something...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

Retrospectively looking through a lot of the science I wrote, it clearly was too hard, even from a theoretical level. Some of it was certainly ridiculous; I have no idea what I was thinking (I suppose this would warrant jokes about my screenname, though I can assure everyone all questions were writt...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

I think most notably is the Church of Apris tossup where I was circling around the answer, not being able to pin it down. You also got up from your chair and physically circled around the room after buzzing in, in among the most endearingly amusing "Oh my God I can't remember what this is"...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

Stat Boy wrote:
I've never experienced temporary blindness or vomiting after quiz bowl
You should ask Shantanu about his WoQ experience...

Yeah, seriously, don't avoid sleeping or eating for three days before a quizbowl tournament. Really. Also, eat food at regular intervals. It's good for you.

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

Popper's main criticism of modern Marxists was that they did not make concrete predictions that were falsifiable. And if we were to follow Wittgenstein's rules about speech and silence (in the way that the logical positivists tried to), a lot of what we would say on the forums would likely go unsai...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

People should either make concrete, if highly nuanced, statements or stay away from the topic entirely until there is more evidence to speculate about; I think the latter more responsible. ITT, Shantanu Jha is Karl Popper in his criticism of 20th-century marxists. Really? I thought myself more on t...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

Also, I find the assertion that Whitman was the dominant DC area team a little misleading, considering another noted DC metro area team, TJ, got within literally 5 points of winning both national titles. Considering my performance and mental state in the PACE finals resembled that of a megalomaniac...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

Sir Frederick Frollick wrote: 19. Walt Whitman, 72

I really see no possible justification for that ranking.

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

I'm up for this.

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

I am definitely playing this.

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

Bentley Like Beckham wrote:
Hypothetically someone could sync up the audio with the podcast audio if they really wanted to.

Yeah, I had that thought, though I don't have the time to do so. But if anyone wants to volunteer, I can upload the video.

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

ILoveReeses wrote:
Someone did videotape it from TJ I think.

It was my mother, actually. The only problem being that pretty much everything is inaudible.

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

Stat Boy wrote:
David from Whitman
There's no David on our team...is this Daniel?

Or it's your father. Whose name, is, in fact, David, as I recall.

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

As long as we're insisting on correctness, my name is pronounced "Shan-tha-noo". But honestly, Shmoo, Shmooey, Shnu, or any variations on the preceding, work just fine. Whore of Babylon (WoB) also works.

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

I'd like to sign up, now that I'm reasonably sure I'm coming.

Also, I support the call for a 2/0 Kierkegaard and Heidegger per packet distribution.

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

Everyone in the Gov program is going to get better, and honestly, I dont really think too many teams in the country will be able to beat us on a consistent basis. I won't even talk about 2010, they might as well just give us our trophies now. I'm a massive fan of the group at Gov; Greg Tito will pu...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

One of the tightest games I have EVER played in my life. Congrats to our good friends from Whitman, who take home a well-deserved championship by winning PACE, and thanks guys for that awesome 360-360 game that kept me dangerously close to dying of ventricular fibrillation :grin: I can't wait until...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

So I know I'm probably saying the obvious here, but from my limited time on this forum it seems to me that there is no one consistent format that everyone approves of, or even that everyone agrees with. Every tournament has something imperfect--too much trash, too many computation questions, too mu...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

As much I love Shantanu (as we all do), I doubt that he'll even be in top 10 indiv. It's hard to do exceptionally in the indiv ranking when you have a teammate the caliber of Adam Marshall, and Shantanu isn't great at trash or geography, if I recall right. I'm thinking Guy will do better than predi...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

I don't know nearly as much about the state of things as our TD, but it doesn't look good due to low sign-up/failure of certain necessary elements (questions) to coalesce in time. I'll post when I know more, but in the meantime, Shantanu can tell you more. His email is at the bottom of the original...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

No, he didn't attend the Robot Factory. He's probably just some sort of quiz bowl ascetic. Evan's pretty much got it. I'm still entertaining fantasies of not going to college, moving to Tibet, and living as a Buddhist monk. I think Doug's assessment of me is pretty accurate, though I can't remember...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

Unfortunately, due to a lack of questions, Whitman will not be having a tournament on the 5th, so that date is now open. Or, you have no idea what you're talking about, and we are having the tournament. I'll be making the announcement after I shore up a couple more things about getting packets writ...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

I wrote the literature, arts, and the small amount of philosophy. I'm sorry if people found it too difficult, but I stand by the questions in that they were well written and I think really nothing was too difficult for high school. I am inclined to agree; I thought the fine arts and literature was ...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

This is getting ridiculous, so I pose an open questions to any who seek to answer: is there anything going on April 5th? Clearly, I'm incapable of finding out for myself, and I want a date that we can actually hold the tournament. We have indeed reserved our school on April fifth for our very soon ...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

and at the same time doesn't know some basic stuff I wouldn't say this so much as "occasionally thinks the answer is something more obscure than it actually is." Well, there is a considerable amount of basic stuff that I do not know well, and have few plans to learn, simply because with y...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

I just noticed that Shantanu alone had more powers than all but 4 teams in attendance today. You know, he could probably beat about all but 4 teams singlehandedly. Same with the honorable Phil Graves. I'm pretty inconsistent on NAQT packets, but with a few qualifications, I think the above statemen...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

There was 15/0 math, (<4)/4 comp sci, 15/15 physics total in the tournament. The math theory was written to have answers that everyone in the room would know of, which did make the questions a bit weird, but it's nearly impossible to give six lines of clues on any high school math topic. It's confu...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

I'm glad you enjoyed the phonon and numerical integration questions; I wrote those and was wondering whether they would be too difficult for this tournament. They absolutely were too difficult for this tournament. Those might have qualified as third parts for bonuses, but that's pretty much it. Not...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

I'm sort of out of it, but...Whitman is coming to Harvard? That's awesome, but you guys should probably register or something... I'm pretty sure we have, actually. The questions in the early rounds were pretty bad in terms of questions being transparent, lacking a smooth gradient of clue difficulty...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

Once someone refused to accept the extra 5 points for moral reasons. Easy lead-ins, crazy long powers. If only I could tell everyone what it was I was objecting to, because, as Guy says, your mind would be blown. I think I powered six questions in that final round, at least two of which I was somew...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

And Whitman is bringing back their entire A Team lineup, which also features the addition of some Indian kid who is really good at NAQTs. I don't think calling me really good at NAQT is fair. I don't think I've converted more than three or four current events, trash, or geography tossups across my ...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

I wrote most of the Whitman packet and I'm extremely sorry that people thought the answer choices were so out of line. I actually didn't get to hear its edited incarnation, so I'm not sure what got changed, if anything, but I'm responsible for all of the tossups from our packet that Chris mentioned....

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

As to the fact that Whitman beat handicapped Gov A, even our A team (Freeman) was able to beat a Mark-less Gov A (@ Ocean Lakes). Not to say Whitman is bad. To be fair, we beat Gonzaga by a pretty large margin at the same tournament (and yes, Ted was most certainly there). And the UMD tournament ha...

Megalomaniacal Panda on Absinthe

I guess I'll be the first from Whitman to post. First of all, thanks to everyone for the kind comments. I was pretty happy with the tournament. The question set was probably the best I've heard this year. NAQT's emphasis on trash and current events have never been something I enjoy, and their latest...

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Re: DC/Metro Area 2007-08

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Re: 2008 HSNCT Post Tourney Discussion - TJ Wins!

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Re: Walt Whitman Invitational Tournament (5/10/08)

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