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Captain Sinico

ANNOUNCEMENT I’m very pleased to announce that the NAQT Illinois State Championship will take place on Saturday, February 22, 2014 on the campus of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. This event is jointly hosted by the University of Illinois Academic Buzzer Team and Champaign Centennial...

Captain Sinico

Hello friends, I just wanted to say that I had a very good time editing for this tournament. To see such a great cast of (mostly young!) players duking it out on my questions, for the highest stakes in the game is enough to melt the hart even of a spite-fueled dinosaur such as I am. Unfortunately, I...

Captain Sinico

You might use differential equations in quantum mechanics and relativity, but those are for computational purposes and aren't essential for basic conceptual understanding of the topics... If the equation you're dealing with is a good model of the system under study, every part of the basic conceptu...

Captain Sinico

A better explanation might be: the question writers did a good job of selecting middle clues that reward real knowledge over studying old packets. What, then, is the general opinion concerning studying old packets? It shoudn't be done?... No, go ahead and do it. Just don't expect that knowing every...

Captain Sinico

Let me respond to all the points I'm seeing here: 1. Like Jerry et al. are saying, a team throwing a game (tanking) is unethical and a team having been caught doing so should suffer a penalty assuming your tournament has published rules against tanking. If your tournament doesn't have such a rule, h...

Captain Sinico

I always appoint someone to do this at the start of a tournament, albeit usually not in advance. You have good ideas there, coach.

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Captain Sinico

Habitat_Against_Humanity wrote:You may as well call out UIUC for not fixing UChicago's faulty Judge.

I did once try to do this!

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Captain Sinico

Kwang the Ninja wrote:Heh, Sorice's post in that thread is hilariously prescient.

I'm pretty much always right. Trust me.

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Captain Sinico

I'll add that it's not necessary for the purpose of keeping the stats that are currently kept to transmit entire scoresheets. On the contrary, only the following data are needed: Each player's name Each player's +10's Each player's -5's (Each player's +15's or other powers if applicable) Each player...

Captain Sinico

I think the number of man-hours put into staffing the average tournament will be on the order of or exceed the number put into editing it. Let's examine that. As I find Gautam's estimates reasonable, I'll follow them to the conclusion that on the order of 300 hours will be spent producing questions ...

Captain Sinico

So, do we have a location and time for this yet?

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Captain Sinico

It seems to me like the takeaway from this thread is "consider what people might know when writing clues." Giving the scoring and playing in a specific section is, in fact, probably less vague and less useless than giving a random group of notes, especially given that the latter is less ac...

Captain Sinico

I'm bringing 3 buzzer systems, one of which has only 7 reliable lights.

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Captain Sinico

Yeah, if you read Ike's earlier posts, by "shootout format" he seems to mean something like the Hilleman singles format with a team of two standing in for each player. I think that's sensible.

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Captain Sinico

YOU WILL LIVE TO REGRET THIS!

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Captain Sinico

Erdös' work is, to my knowledge, serious math; he was certainly a serious mathematician. It also happens that he led an interesting, curious life that makes him the subject of popular interest, at least among some, c.f. Erdös numbers, which were/are in no way the work of Erdös per se. Consequently, ...

Captain Sinico

I think Coach Reinstein has the right idea here. There's plenty of stuff to fill out a year's tournaments without resorting to un-mathematical answers like Erdős numbers (I guess people, perhaps just Auroni, don't know that they're really not mathematical at all) or other biographical junk. Rather, ...

Captain Sinico

Incidentally, I have a couple intriguing offers and will be accepting more until tomorrow.

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Captain Sinico

Having spoken with Charlie, he probably won't be able to make it to Chicago due to some stuff beyond his control (thus my saying upthread that I now need a teammate.)

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Captain Sinico

I'm down a teammate so if you want to play with me, let me know.

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Captain Sinico

Our team is rounded out by Adam Perkins.

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Captain Sinico

Apparently, we're out Alex. If you want to join our high-flying team of winners, please let me know.

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Captain Sinico

Hey Jerry, I sent you a reply a few days ago, but I gather you didn't get it. Sorry about that. Our packet is so late because I've been waiting on questions from a team member (NOT ME THIS TIME, DAVID GARB AND ASSOCIATED ASSHOLES!) which I am now, i.e. at this very moment, writing on the assumption ...

Captain Sinico

I might be interested in this if I can get a ride and lodging with people, so you can put me down tenuously.

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Captain Sinico

My shock at the derailing of this thread can safely be said to be bounded.

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Captain Sinico

Please add to your field a team consisting of Mike "Needs To Expand His Knowledge Base" Sorice, Andrew "Icy Efficiency" Ullsperger, Chris "Really Knew the Occasional Lit Question" Vicich, and Alex (last name and DGLP-inspired nickname pending.)

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Captain Sinico

Right, Jonah, but if the packets were available for free and freely redistributable, they'd appear on the archives more or less immediately, rendering the NAQT site issues moot.

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Captain Sinico

Echoing every player's consensus that there's too much trash. Please reduce to at most 1/1 for general use and eliminate completely for Nationals (ICT/HSNCT.) Of course, this is hardly the first time I've asked for this, but it is the first time in this thread. I don't have any new arguments and wil...

Captain Sinico

"Pending" means I'm waiting to approve your request. As I'm approving all manually, it might take a while, so please try to be patient.

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Captain Sinico

Charbroil wrote:Just out of curiousity, what are your criteria for membership of this group?

I'm planning on letting anyone who asks in unless I have a good reason to keep them out. If people make asinine posts or whatever, I'll consider removing them.

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Captain Sinico

Hi guys, At what I consider a fair request for privacy, I've split all posts about the NSC cheating issue to special forum. This was not in the least done to squelch discussion, nor in a foolish attempt to hide any facts (which are already widely known.) In order to access the form, you have to join...

Captain Sinico

I'm not sure. Let me check what happened with that.

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Captain Sinico

Yeah, MSJ was one of our most difficult seeding decisions, since we didn't know the composition of their team. I saw their HSNCT A team and was suitably impressed - I have to believe they would have had a higher seed if we had faith they'd show with that same team. In the end, their seed was a compr...

Captain Sinico

I also want to apologize for the continued delay in disseminating the set. Having completed my work on it, I discovered that Chris had some other things he wanted to do with it before release. Chris assures me it will be sent for archiving today.

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Captain Sinico

Hi, You're right to call me on that and I'm sorry for taking longer than I said. A different project has been taking most of my PACE time. Here are the results of our seeding meeting: - 1's 1. Maggie Walker A 2. State College A 3. Southside A 4. St. Anselm's 5. LASA 6. Dorman A. 7. Georgetown Day 8....

Captain Sinico

Inkana7 wrote:...a tossup on "groups" or "group" that mentioned the word "group" in the tossup.

Huh, I noticed and tried to fix that... I guess it didn't work somehow. Sorry!

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Captain Sinico

The usual ACF procedure is that the two-way tie is broken (preferably by play, possibly on paper if play is impossible for some reason,) then advantaged finals happen. I'm not sure what HSAPQ's format is.

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Captain Sinico

Sure, I can agree with that. I'll publish our full seeding tomorrow since there's clearly a high degree of interest in that. Since we take the top two from each bracket and initial bracket records don't count after the initial bracket, I don't think it's necessary to get a top 10 seed to have a good...

Captain Sinico

The set will be sent for archiving later today and should appear shortly. I will make a post and send an e-mail to all coaches once it's available. I apologize for the delay: some pagination and repeats replaced during the tournament had to be/are being fixed and NASAT editing was higher priority fo...

Captain Sinico

Ukonvasara wrote:
MichaelKearney wrote:since Charlie has edited more trash tournaments than any other person in quizbowl, I don't get why that's a bad thing
You heard it here first: quantity equals quality!

That's the first time I've heard that argument, so it MUST be wrong!

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Captain Sinico

I agree with you that we shouldn't try to assume anything that isn't necessary and that that's where we get into trouble. That said, we can't avoid the fact that we're assuming that the player does know something by assuming that we should accept an answer that could be, for example, Millet or Milla...

Captain Sinico

I mean, people complaining isn't ipso facto wrong or against the rules or anything, though it can be annoying. Let's be big enough to bear some potential complaints.

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Captain Sinico

Yeah, that to my mind is the rule that we ought most to change. I have what I think is a sensible proposal that we'll hopefully be discussing soon.

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Captain Sinico

You know, it's not like Charlie can "close down" your thread. If you want to conduct a poll, good luck - I'm not going to stop you unless your thread starts sucking.

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Captain Sinico

I'd say that's mostly fair, Jerry. Certainly if someone gives an answer with an audible "s" at the end, that's going to be accepted without further issue for Millais as a plausible pronunciation of the written word (and not accepted for Millet for the converse reason.) I'd say in general t...

Captain Sinico

Yes. Sorry for the confusion. We can easily enter those games this year and shall do so. I apologize that they are not in there now.

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Captain Sinico

I'd say we're pretty happy with how they turned out. We worked very, very hard on seeding, with Fred and others working week after week to get us tournament results and many of our core members spending over 7 hours deliberating to rank every team in our field. Our brackets held serve or had one tra...

Captain Sinico

I thought cross-over games mattered in the final rankings. For example, SJHS and Loyola both finished 4th in their 2nd flight brackets after winning tie-breakers against two other teams within their respecitive flights---SJHS against Dunbar B & Walter Johnson and Loyola against Hoover & Qui...

Captain Sinico

Yeah, DCD is perennially an excellent team. Michigan's often good for another elite team or two. Of course, there are occasionally elite teams from Ohio and Missouri. I haven't seen much from Iowa, Wisconsin, or Indiana yet, but those states have programs, so hopefully they can bear fruit at some po...

Captain Sinico

We did our absolute utmost to retain all scoresheets, spending over an hour after the tournament filing them systematically. Therefore, we anticipate being able to enter everything in short order. We hope people will forgive the delay for completeness' sake: stats have been finished excepting 8 game...

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