The Quizbowl Resource Center

Excelsior (smack)

How to park a car or other small vehicle at Harvard for $6.00: 1. Go to ( https://www2.uos.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/permit/purchase.pl ) 2. Register an account (assuming you haven't already done so) 3. If it asks you for department information, select "Visitor to Campus" and use code "7700...

Excelsior (smack)

Seeing as there is going to be another mirror, I suppose I should point out the following repeats or repeat-like-substances (all packet numbers refer to the order in which they were read at Harvard): Yeats twice in packet 2; Buffalo Bill in packets 1 and 2; I have "Brubeck repeat" written ...

Excelsior (smack)

So I think most people would be more open to discussion if proponents of repealing the anime rule could give some assurance that they won't disrupt the primary function of this forum - to promote good quiz bowl. For the record, I think the anime rule is dumb and ought to be done away with, and at t...

Excelsior (smack)

I wasn't at the tournament, but it looks like these things are stats: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournament ... /combined/

Excelsior (smack)

@Gautam - that isn't quite the same thing, though. A tournament with enormous bonus-to-bonus variability can (and in fact, probably will, statistically speaking) still produce some sort of bell-curve-looking distribution of mean bonus conversion, as will a tournament with zero bonus-to-bonus variabi...

Excelsior (smack)

Only board staff members are permitted to have “joke” accounts or secondary accounts of any kind. Changing this is something that might help eliminate the cliquishness. I agree with this. Every "joke" account from at least the past three years has been awful, and has served no real purpos...

Excelsior (smack)

we want to avoid this board becoming an insider-only internet environment And you think that prohibiting discussion of anime , a topic shunned by most board-goers, is in any sense effective towards this end? Let's be honest - anime is a banned topic of discussion because Matt Weiner doesn't like it...

Excelsior (smack)

Every time we have a discussion thread about a tournament, someone will inevitably come in and say "well bonus X was so easy a trained monkey could answer it, while bonus Y wasn't even accessible to Nobel-winning experts in the field and therefore this tournament had awful bonus difficulty cont...

Excelsior (smack)

Ah, I see what was going on there. I didn't get the scope of the operators correct (the integral is in the exponential and the V-E term is in the square root). I don't think there's any good solution to this (you'd have to throw in lots of QUANTITY / END QUANTITY), so I guess there's nothing amiss t...

Excelsior (smack)

Can you post the tunneling tossup? I honestly didn't have any idea what was going in that question and only buzzed based on the "Could this be anything other than ___" principle. In particular, whatever equation was going on when I buzzed was completely opaque to me (possibly because I was...

Excelsior (smack)

I dunno, some things just feel kind of off about the slopes tossup. The continental slope is a qualitatively different kind of thing than the other things described in the tossup, for one (though I see why you probably need that in there for conversion reasons). Even if it _is_ uniquely-identifying ...

Excelsior (smack)

In the tossup on "slopes", I see what you were trying to do (mass wasting and all of that is important, yes) and it was a good idea in principle, but it didn't play well. Anything specific here? Fixed the others; thanks. Can you post the "slopes" tossup? (and, unrelatedly, could...

Excelsior (smack)

The trash in this tournament was ridiculously fun. Particular kudos to the questions on Balto, humans, Ash Ketchum's dad, Kudryavka, and the water type. Regarding the science - the only clue I remember off-hand as being particularly out-of-place was the VEI (which is the Volcanic Explosivity Index a...

Excelsior (smack)

Overall, I liked this set quite a bit. The science was, for the most part, more palatable than at VCU Open this year (and I think Regionals 2013 too, though I don't remember that tournament all that wel), so good on Cody for that. The practice of relegating all trash to a non-regulation warm-up toss...

Excelsior (smack)

A second is a defined length of time http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/2/6/1/261474772db3c1ed51e1f89ebcf1d483.png I eagerly await the announcement of ACF Nationals 2030: International Linear Collider edition. There's no reason it can't be 6 or 4 seconds, and we can have lengthy (and probably largely...

Excelsior (smack)

It's probably more important for 5 seconds to be consistent between games at the same tournament than for 5 seconds to be identical across all games everywhere. Perhaps TDs could make this more likely by giving instructions to their moderators about how timing should be done. How do you propose to ...

Excelsior (smack)

...a lot of the most common pronunciations that anglophones use are technically wrong. For instance, most people pronounce "Qin Shihuang" as "Qin Xihuang", but both pronunciations should be acceptable answers anyway. No dialect of English I'm aware of distinguishes between pinyi...

Excelsior (smack)

Very minor bug: ampersands in packet-download links (and possibly other places?) aren't being percent-encoded. Example: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/541/Chicago%20A%20&%20Illinois%20B.pdf Should be: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/541/Chicago%20A%20%26%20Illinois%20B.pdf i.e. with...

Excelsior (smack)

Looking at Columbia, I think we would lose Laferbrook, OSU, and the Michiganders; we'd possibly pick up Yale, maybe Harvard and/or Brown, but both of those seem dicy right now (also Columbia house team?). You can almost certainly count us out since most if not all of us will be in New Haven for the...

Excelsior (smack)

Unrelatedly, the link for Tournament #26 (11-12 NHBB B) is broken.

Excelsior (smack)

No. Saying "answer please" at the end of a tossup is not the rule in any format, and it shouldn't be, because it encourages conferring and confuses players who are used to moderators who actually adhere to the correct rules. Moderators should certainly count down the time on their hands t...

Excelsior (smack)

Regarding item 2, I have always thought that the practice of prompting for a buzz at the end of a tossup was, even if not explicitly prescribed, at least not verboten. If this is not the case, it absolutely should be, in light of your third point. If we can't expect moderators (in practice) to corre...

Excelsior (smack)

Not that it actually matters, but is it just my computer or does the set actually have bizarre fonts in random tossups?

acfregs.png: (160.68 KiB) Downloaded 104 times

Excelsior (smack)

This spreadsheet might be of interest to some people: (http://www.mediafire.com/view/nv24m5qjbm8vvgc/out.csv). Basically, it tallies the number of opponents with each record that each team played in the prelims and has a few summary stats. Presumably, interested parties can slice and dice this infor...

Excelsior (smack)

I'd like to float a random idea. I think it'd be fun to have bouncebacks at CO. Seeing as I have never actually played a tournament with bouncebacks (OAC doesn't count), I think this would be interesting. On the other hand, bouncebacks require you to be thinking during every bonus, and that's kind ...

Excelsior (smack)

I will be serving as head editor for the tournament and as subject editor for Lit and Fine Arts; Marshall will edit History, Social Science, and Current Events; Seth Teitler will edit Physics and Mythology. We are currently negotiating to find a biology/chem editor and a religion editor. Philosophy...

Excelsior (smack)

To get to the more general point, though, I feel that computer science for a long time has been held to a higher standard than other sciences about what is computer science and what is not. Chemistry questions in particular frequently ask about things scientists actually do which aren't particularl...

Excelsior (smack)

PACKET Yale -This indole tossup is really good. I couldn't remember the name of the reagent in the indole test, unfortunately -I enjoyed this voting systems tossup, but I wonder whether Duverger's Law is a little early. -This VEGF tossup is extraordinarily hard. The fact that POEMS and Avastatin ar...

Excelsior (smack)

I already anticipate that this will be my favorite side event ever. I hope this is mirrored somewhere where I can battle James Lasker and Eric to become the champion of SPACE.

Excelsior (smack)

I generally found this tournament pleasant. The questions were generally enjoyable (except that tossup on the Gamow theory of alpha decay, what the fuck), and there was nothing that was systematically annoying about them. Thanks to the editors for that. In logistical terms, on the other hand, you (g...

Excelsior (smack)

So, what you're saying is that this bonus part isn't even rooted in reality? There may be 16 binary boolean operators in the abstract, but that doesn't mean there are actually 16 defined ones (in fact I'd be there aren't), so this bonus is even more confusing if not flat out wrong. I'll find anothe...

Excelsior (smack)

For instance, the prevalence of orgo in this set--there's a reason HSAPQ functionally banned orgo for most of its HS sets. Maybe I've forgotten what I wrote for this set, but I distinctly recall putting barely any orgo in. I just skimmed over the chem tossups, and found orgo content in the 1st sent...

Excelsior (smack)

When describing a physical scientific thing that either doesn't have an obvious pronoun, or for which the obvious pronoun would make the answer transparent, I very strongly prefer the use of the word "thing", which carries with it no implications as to what kind of thing the "thing&qu...

Excelsior (smack)

My main reason for gravitating towards the Skype option is to give people such as Charles Tian and David Seal, whom it's been intimated will not be able to participate in any further CHB tournament held far in the future, a chance to compete for the title. If those people think it would be better t...

Excelsior (smack)

If nobody steps up to edit this tournament, I will do it* and you will have to play geology tossups on "Gondwana separating from Laurasia".

*I will not actually do it. Somebody please do this.

Excelsior (smack)

Re: GCD - yeah, you're right; I wasn't really thinking clearly about it. Re: strong force - I will defer to somebody with more quizbowl experience on this one, because I'm not really sure what the best clue ordering here is, upon further consideration. One possible option might be to find a way of d...

Excelsior (smack)

For 10 points, give this term whose additive kind is given by negative one and whose multiplicative kind is the reciprocal. "negative one" is not in any sense the "additive identity inverse" of anything besides the number one. Packet 1, bonus 9: What in the almighty fuck is &quo...

Excelsior (smack)

I have emailed the necessary files to Jacob Wasserman to upload stats to the DB; in the meanwhile, final stats may be found at http://srivatsa.org/staaaats/mut2013. The final order of finish was as follows: 1. Penn 2. Columbia t3. Yale House t3. Stony Brook 5. UMass Amherst t6. Harvard t6. Vassar t6...

Excelsior (smack)

Live stats may appear at http://srivatsa.org/staaaats/mut2013, but I will not be in charge of stats, so no guarantees. Stats will be migrated to the DB after the tournament, as usual. EDIT (11:30 am): Semi-live stats are happening. Round 3 is just finishing up. We have 14 teams, which are split into...

Excelsior (smack)

I think it was at Chicago where the lady at the check-in desk even offered to help us find packing tape with with to cover some of the more fragile edges of the trophy, so it didn't snap off. I think we actually used some wrap from one of those luggage-wrapping machines (like this ) that they use t...

Excelsior (smack)

Speaking of Josh Alman... Josh Alman is really really good Man do I feel like a dunce now. Honestly, I'm not really angry about the whole Josh Alman dealio (which is the only one that personally affected me), particularly given that it seems to have spurred NAQT to look into the Watkins/etc cases. I...

Excelsior (smack)

Do you think I could see the tossups on "cross-dressing" and "Kreb's Cycle"? I believe the latter said something about phosphofructokinase catalyzing a step in the Kreb's cycle in the first clue, while I believe it actually catalyzes the third step of glycolysis (the answer I bu...

Excelsior (smack)

I'm not quite sure how to simulate the scenario where we have bad seeding (other than complete randomization of brackets). Just to be clear, the bracketing procedure you're currently using is: I assigned 36 teams random strengths on a (0,1) scale, and then bracketed teams in such a way that teams 1...

Excelsior (smack)

To make your life easier, consider this bookmarklet: javascript:(function(){x=document.getElementsByTagName('font');o=%22%22;tu=g=0;for(i=0;i%20%3C%20x.length;i++){if(x[i].color==%22red%22){o+=x[i].innerHTML;}if(x[i].size==%22-1%22){g+=1;q0=x[i].innerHTML;q1=q0.split('\n');q2=q1[3];q3=q2.replace('Bo...

Excelsior (smack)

You can probably expect to see (semi-)live stats at http://srivatsa.org/staaaats/bhsat2013 once the tournament is under way (but I will not be in charge of stats, so I can make no assurances). Stats will eventually be migrated to the DB for archival. EDIT (9:45 am): Tournament is underway, and round...

Excelsior (smack)

The Hermitian inner product maps vectors over this field onto this field. I literally did not know what you were trying to say here. "The Hermitian inner product maps vectors over the complex numbers onto the complex numbers" seems to me to be a perfectly cromulent statement. Or, equivale...

Excelsior (smack)

How badly do you need staff? A spur of the moment one-day trip to Boston to staff a quizbowl tournament sounds bizarrely appealing to me. Yale, what are your travel plans? Maybe I could hitch a ride. Or I could take the 4:40 AM train and leave on the 6:30 or 9:30 train. We already have too many peo...

Excelsior (smack)

Great, thanks.

Excelsior (smack)

Hey, can somebody confirm that they got Yale A's packet?

Excelsior (smack)

Wait, what? Maybe I'm crazy, but this seems even less legit than "fake" quizbowl science...all you're doing is answering some multiple choice (figuring out which 3 of the 4 answers make 0 sense requires near 0 knowledge If we were to hypothetically put the first question (radium) on an A-...

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