Stuff that is not related to Ghetto Warz or Moon Pie

[waspman23]

I think the important point here is that Jerry learned some interesting physics from a UCI packet. Huzzah for quizbowl.

Well, it's more like I learned from your explanation plus my own research into my textbooks. I think that bonus part would have made plenty more sense if it said "the usual form of this thermodynamic law does not hold for expansion with a cosmological constant." Otherwise, it makes it look like all the laws are invalid, which is not the case. This is actually a good example of a topic of interest which makes for a fine answer and provides new information, but is phrased poorly.

Said question did specify a "constant dark energy density" and the "main laws" of the subdiscipline. (Note that the second law also needs to be reformulated - various papers on the arXiv discuss this, e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0612092.) "Violated" may not have been the best choice of words, but the basic content of the question is valid.

[Your Genial Quizmaster]

I ought to just let this thread lie, but there's something that's been gnawing at me since it started. Jerry said:

Oh shit, the problem with every tournament ever and then some! I don't know what the problem with your region is, but I suspect it's because everyone knows UTC hardly does any editing anyway and since apparently a total of 2 teams care about good quizbowl at all, this is what you get.

And Eric said:

Also, I think we've established repeatedly on this board that you can't trust Charlie to edit anything.

Believe it or not, this led me to spend several days wondering if you were right and I was wrong. Not so many years ago, people talked about UTC's tournaments as though they were the gold standard of independent tournaments; now they're talked about as though they're American Standard, as in toilet fixtures. I wondered, am I that out of touch?

So finally, being a reference librarian by training, I went back to see if Eric is right and it has been established repeatedly on this board that I can't be trusted to edit anything.

Guess what? It hasn't.

Here's what I found when I checked recent discussion threads and the World of High School Quizbowl archives regarding tournaments I edited. When it says "silence' below, it means that there were no comments either way on the quality of the questions. You may disagree, but I feel a lot like an umpire: if I get the calls right, usually silence is the best I can hope for.

Sword 07: faint praise. There was one critical post, but it was from me.
COTKU 06: silence
Moon Pie 06: silence
Sword 06: We know the story -- Penn Bowl, playd on the beta versions, got ripped. However, there were no complaints posted from the three sites that played on the final set.
COTKU 05: "pretty good", minor complaints (too many duplicates)
Moon Pie 05: silence
Sword 05: silence
COTKU 04 and Harvard mirror: silence

While I was at it, I checked the Yahoo! qb group and here's what I found there:

COTKU 04 and Harvard mirror: silence
Moon Pie 04: silence
Sword 04: silence
COTKU 2003: strong praise
Moon Pie 03: Buzzerfest thanked us for "cooperating on a mirror which made this tournament significantly better than it would have been"
Sword 03: silence
COTKU 2002: mixed reviews -- "generally fine" but complaints that the bonuses were too long, unevenness of packets (from swap), etc.
[I remember that one well. We had 27 teams, of which exactly four submitted full packets.]
Moon Pie 2002: no complaints from our field, but there were complaints from another site where they were used -- inconsistent degree of difficulty, too many repeats, etc.
Sword 2002: silence, except generic thanks from Samer for Sword Bowl questions used to fill Penn Bowl gaps
COTKU 2001: major complaints, but they were all about the quality of packets received from another tournament
Moon Pie 2001: some praise, some complaints about a few packets in particular by newer teams
Sword 2000: active praise

I pointedly didn't check on COTKU 2000 because whether or not I actually got ripped, I should have been. I was in the throes of a divorce and wasn't worth a damn; luckily some good friends stepped in and picked up the slack, and the tournament survived.

I also found two comments on Yahoo! that run counter to the prevailing theory that UTC's tournaments are too easy. Clemson commented that COTKU 1999 & 2000 as practice questions were "over our heads" for a new team. Similarly, other players at Missouri complained to Jason Mueller in fall 2004 that he started them off with Moon Pie questions, and they wanted something easier like Trivial Pursuit.

So on purely empirical evidence, there was not a consensus that I'm a bad editor, at least up to this point. In fact, it would appear that my tournaments have improved since the early oughts. I'm sure some of you will step in to fill the void and offer retrospective criticism of past UTC tournaments, if for no other reason than to justify what's been said in the past week. Still, I can take a little comfort in the meantime.

[Mr. Kwalter]

stuff about what I said

All right, I'll buy it. Saying that you have been continually pilloried in this forum is, well, apparently untrue. I just don't think that you can take that as evidence that your questions were fine and dandy. I know that wasn't your point. You clearly know that your questions are at least on some level subpar, any experienced editor does. You know, I thought your questions for sword bowl 07 weren't very good. But they were better than any version of sword bowl 06 I saw and I wasn't throwing things. So maybe I shouldn't have offered you a cookie for that? They were better, but they weren't that much better. They were at the high end of what you consider to be standard, which is a tournament consisting mostly of questions that, for one reason or another, I personally would never allow into any tournament of which I was in charge. They're either tossups on typhon with the first line asking "do you know which of typhon and echidna is a boy???" or they're tossups on the bulwer-lytton contest. To be clear, the former is bad because the first clue narrows it down to at worst a 50/50 guess if you're gonna know it at all, the second is on something inane and unimportant. Criticism.

I'm not sure what you were trying to prove by posting that. If you want an apology, I'm sorry, I said something that was clearly false. I sincerely mean it when I say I won't make such unfounded accusations against you again. But it seemed like the whole point of your post was to strut about like a wounded flamingo, and I don't know why we should indulge that any more than we should indulge venom-filled invectives.

[DumbJaques]

I shot a flamingo with the quizbowl cannon. In the words of our resident gigantic ass/professional brawler, "Yeah, I said it!"

In all seriousness, I think it's worth noting that, while things have clearly been invective-friendly for a good while, things didn't really get ridiculous until someone started hurling ethnic slurs while apparently trying to identify Matt Weiner's raging, pathological desire to keep the black man down. I guess there isn't really a way to consolidate this thread, the criticism thread, and one or two others, but together I'd like to think they represent an acknowledgment from pretty much everyone here that things went a little overboard. I don't really feel like writing one out, so just pretend I wrote this giant long tract about brotherly love and togetherness and what we learned today and how great a place the world would be if we could all be like Seth Teitler*. It was moving, I promise.

I believe there are still many good points to be made (after looking at the tournament, I certainly don't think we'd be doing qb a service by not attempting to address some of the issues), so maybe something can still be salvaged from this twisted heap of wonderful, wonderful hate. But since I thrive on spite, I'll be betting against all of you. Bastards.




*Actually, my post about preserving vitriol for when it is well and truly called for still stands. There are, in fact, people who are ruining quizbowl, but this tournament was, in my opinion, not an example. Examples include state organizations, worksheet rounds, Quakers, and me (and, probably, this post in particular).

[SnookerUSF]

Matt Weiner's raging, pathological desire to keep the black man down.

Classic!

[Matt Weiner]

This little roundup of criticism levels has also disproven the notion that the shadowy Vinokurov-Weiner-Kwartler cabal spends all its time insulting Charlie Steinhice, so thanks for that. To be fair, I definitely think most or all of the tournaments you listed sucked, but it's not always worth it to be called a racist and dragged into conducting a lesson on logical fallacies in order to register my opinions about quizbowl tournaments.

I also found two comments on Yahoo! that run counter to the prevailing theory that UTC's tournaments are too easy.

Stop. Just stop. You keep bringing this up every time, and it's a complete straw man. No one is saying the problem is that your answer selection is too easy, nor is your obvious implication (that there exists some group of non-idiots that believes good questions are necessarily hard questions) true. Nor, despite your constant aversions to the contrary, can you just keep saying or implying that "ACF is impossible" in every post without being called out for doing just that.

Now, here's some constructive criticism. Some of the major problems with your tournaments (by which I mean, at a minimum, all tournaments, whether academic or trash, produced in the last three years by you or other people in-house at UTC for use in collegiate or open events) are as follows, with examples from Moon Pie 2007. I know this is just going to encourage Charlie to do more of the below in order to spite people who have opinions, like the pathetic Southern stereotype he is, but hopefully the other UTC editors as well as quizbowl in general can take this in good faith:

-Transparent leadins that make tossups first-clue buzzer races; sometimes, these exist on overly hard tossup answers so that a question will be answered in six words, or not at all. Why in the world is "this guy is from Iran and did stuff in Iran such as winning elections in Iran" the series of clues for Ahmedinajad? (1) What purpose does it serve to write that question instead of something that doesn't cause people to buzz in on the first clue with the one and only contemporary Iranian likely to come up in a tournament of low difficulty? There's like a million examples of this in the set; another good one is a tossup on the Battle of San Jacinto that begins "Prior to this engagement, Santa Anna put over 350 Texans..." and then goes on for six more lines. (2) For an example of the all-or-nothing problem, how about "This French postmodern cultural theorist, who died in March 2007" as a first clue in a tossup? (3) A few teams get it on the first clue, most teams don't get it at all. Why even bother writing the rest of the question (other than to include clues about The Matrix, since every single question must have a trash clue!)

-Wildly inconsistent bonus difficulty turning game results into the luck of the draw based on which tossups you get. In Moon Pie 2007, two consective bonuses in a packet were on "Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, and Mobutu Sese Seko" (4) and "monism, functionalism, and anomalous monism." (5) The first bonus is an automatic 30 for any experienced team and a likely 20 for even the worst team in the field. The second answer set is a 0 for pretty much everybody (no, it's not the famous kind of functionalism) or maybe a 10 for the best teams, who might know what monism is. There are, again, lots more such bonus pairs to pull out of pretty much any packet in the set, or any set you have produced. UTC seems to subscribe to the philosophy of just tossing three (or six) related answers together to make a bonus without considering difficulty structure.

-Nonclues and vague clues used in tossups or anywhere. Opening a tossup with "At a time when England was focused on applied mathematics, this man was among the first to emphasize rigor and pure math" encourages guessing or, more likely, anger. (6)

-Well-known chestnuts re-used as tossup leadins as if people have never heard old packets. Bird in Space being charged a customs duty is a guaranteed buzzer race even at the high school level. Why would a leadin that was questionable ten years ago be the leadin again now? What does this accomplish except first-clue buzzer races in every game between teams from the top 3/4 of the field? (7)

(1) A member of the Islamic Society of Engineers, he is a former mayor of a world Tehran. He studied civil engineering at Iran University of Science and Technology, and later served on the faculty there before earning his Ph.D in transportation engineering there. He became the sixth president of Iran after running under the campaign "It's possible and we can do it" and defeating Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in a run-off, receiving 62% of the vote. FTP, Name this leader of Iran, whose comments denying the Holocaust have earned him infamy in many Western circles.
ANS: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

(2) Prior to this engagement, Santa Anna put over 350 Texans, whom he had captured in previous battles, to death. His forces marched northeast and caught up to Sam Houston's forces near Lynch’s Ferry and planned to rest for two days before attacking. However, Houston devised a plan to attack the Mexican forces a day earlier in the afternoon, during the Mexican army’s traditional siesta. When Houston’s forces launched the attack, the Mexican soldiers were ill-prepared and unarmed as Texan soldiers charged at them while crying “Remember the Alamoâ€

[NoahMinkCHS]

Hey Matt, I wonder if you might consider noting who wrote the packets that gave us these examples. I know you may not want to single out teams, especially those writing their first packets (like our C team, for example) and also that many packets may be attributed to several teams; even so, the creation of poor/needs-improvement questions go beyond the editing (which has gotten the brunt of the blame so far) to the writers themselves, and I wonder if it would be beneficial to see whether these came from writers who should know better or relative newcomers. I unfortunately do not have the packet set or I would just look myself. Thanks.

[BigFlax]

Now, all this shit Dren is saying (and its the sort of stuff you tend to get from the Sorenson/Flaxman [read: trash partisan/cbi apologist] crowd,) is the really awful stuff

Uh, what? Not that I really should feel a need to respond to this, but I have long been on the record, whatever record that might be, as despising CBI. In fact, my senior year at Northwestern, we didn't play CBI, which unfortunately ended up having financial ramifications for the club that year because, unbeknowst to us, much of the money we were to receive from the university was tied into playing CBI. But then, I shouldn't be that surprised that you should be way, way off base on a forced interpretation of my opinions, should I?

Also, don't you dare equate "having an oddly high number of questions with clues involving rape might make female players uncomfortable" with "Matt Weiner is a racist who hates HBCUs" as far as accusing people of horrible shit goes. Are you seriously willing to claim that the general lack of pornography/"controversial" question topics/clues at this year's TRASHionals was in any way noticeable or a detriment to anyone's time? Get over yourself.

[Susan]

Hey, you know what's far more likely to make female players uncomfortable*? Stuff like this.

*Uncomfortable, disgusted, whatever; next time people are waving their hands around about why there aren't more girls in the game, that is why.

[Matt Weiner]

Uh, what? Not that I really should feel a need to respond to this, but I have long been on the record, whatever record that might be, as despising CBI. In fact, my senior year at Northwestern, we didn't play CBI, which unfortunately ended up having financial ramifications for the club that year because, unbeknowst to us, much of the money we were to receive from the university was tied into playing CBI. But then, I shouldn't be that surprised that you should be way, way off base on a forced interpretation of my opinions, should I?

Also, don't you dare equate "having an oddly high number of questions with clues involving rape might make female players uncomfortable" with "Matt Weiner is a racist who hates HBCUs" as far as accusing people of horrible shit goes. Are you seriously willing to claim that the general lack of pornography/"controversial" question topics/clues at this year's TRASHionals was in any way noticeable or a detriment to anyone's time? Get over yourself.

I don't think anyone was trying to reopen the specifics of that ridiculous argument (certainly I'm not) but rather pointing out the general tendency of people on one particular side of these arguments to bring in the most insane and out of proportion ad-hominem attacks (e.g., "you hate black people because you disagree with me about quizbowl") in order to defend notions (e.g., "quizbowl teams in the Southeast don't want to play good questions") that are both untrue and far too unimportant to get libelous about. Your and Greg's confusion of "these particular questions upset one particular female" with "DAN PASSNER HATES WOMEN AND ACF HATES EVERYONE" when the latter is untrue and irrelevant, and the former at best unproven and equally irrelevant, is pretty much of a quality with what Dren did, though certainly of a lesser degree.

P.S., has Dren killed himself yet? Please let me know as soon as he does.

[Rothlover]

Now, all this shit Dren is saying (and its the sort of stuff you tend to get from the Sorenson/Flaxman [read: trash partisan/cbi apologist] crowd,) is the really awful stuff

Uh, what? Not that I really should feel a need to respond to this, but I have long been on the record, whatever record that might be, as despising CBI. In fact, my senior year at Northwestern, we didn't play CBI, which unfortunately ended up having financial ramifications for the club that year because, unbeknowst to us, much of the money we were to receive from the university was tied into playing CBI. But then, I shouldn't be that surprised that you should be way, way off base on a forced interpretation of my opinions, should I?

Also, don't you dare equate "having an oddly high number of questions with clues involving rape might make female players uncomfortable" with "Matt Weiner is a racist who hates HBCUs" as far as accusing people of horrible shit goes. Are you seriously willing to claim that the general lack of pornography/"controversial" question topics/clues at this year's TRASHionals was in any way noticeable or a detriment to anyone's time? Get over yourself.

A. If you care to continue with this line of posts done two weeks after the fact it should probably be broken off further by a mod, as "things that have nothing to do with anything anyone was saying."

B. You cannot deny the point that you are a trash partisan at this point. It is also not an inherently bad thing to be one. Bad trash/TRASH events can often simply become the respite of once-good academic players who don't give a fuck anymore about quality and have friends or whatever they play with (like Tim Young or Adam Fine). Those people are probably not doing it for the questions and thats fine. The problem becomes when people like that try and wield influence in a general quizbowl sphere, since trash and CBI are quizbowl only in the sense that they use buzzers and have 4-on-4 competition. You chose to read me saying the simple words "trash partisan" as an insult, when they are not. CBI apologist probably is pejorative, and I consider a CBI apologist to be anyone who played CBI for multiple years with anything other than vocal bad faith as a motivator (for instance, Jason Mueller is a CBI apologist simply by playing even when he talks about how "bad" the questions are, because it is obvious he has some need to feel big by scoring points on excrement.) Maybe I misintepreted the four write-ups of CBI events that are on your site, but nowhere did I see the phrase "these questions are against all that quizbowl is."

C. Where the fuck did the rape stuff come from here? My post was simply saying Steinhice isn't a bad guy, but that Dren Rollins was being a vaguely anti-Semitic and narrowminded idiot. What the fuck does that have to do with people enjoying or not enjoying TRASHionals? What the fuck does that have to do with anything other than for you to try and get another chance to say "get over yourself," much like your pointless "nice shoulder to cry on fest you've got going here" post after my write up of the 2006 Canada NAQT Sectional, which was in no way about that. Did you take so many courses on "the male gaze in the work of Anatole Litvak" at Northwestern that you never got around to taking one on "Contributing?"

Was TRASHionals extra magical for you since you didn't have to ride in to protect noble Alma by covering her eyes and ears except for that lead-in that referenced porn, and that bonus on "tar baby" and that other one on "Lucky Charms"? The only thing TRASHionals cut out by getting rid of its Evil/Weird/Bizzare section was the chance to have a few sex tus and 10 pointlessly bad tus on everything from Tawana Brawley to "that gunk that forms in ones eye in the morning." People only know what they would and wouldn't enjoy by having potential exposure to it, and considering that half the field at TRASHionals had not been there the year prior, they didn't get "The full TRASH experience," because you and a few others scremed real loud. This all also has less than nothing to do with having women in quizbowl as well.

I'd also note that The full TRASHionals experience featured a lot of bad hygiene from opposing teams, godawful tossups on things like "rubber ducks," among the other 40% of general knowledge q's, losing two games because of absurd underlining or protest handling, bad bracketing etc. Someone with CBI experience can tell me if that approximates the college bowl experience.

So yeah, as long as you continue to make random posts when you know nothing and have had nothing to do with academic for years, and continue to be cloyingly loud (especially when you can't temper that with an iota of self-deprecation or levity,) tyou should probably get the fuck out of academic threads, and get back to that "being able to run a block" project you bl*g about (I also hear that more colas need annual round-ups...)

And I apologize to Seth Teitler for not using proper criticism form.

[Matt Weiner]

The main differences between College Bowl and trash are:

-At College Bowl, every single question is the worst question ever. At trash (or at least at TRASHionals), there are frequently a lot of good questions that give you some hope that the bad questions will eventually be fixed, but also make the bad questions somewhat more frustrating in that you know the writers are capable of doing better.

-Most of the people involved with trash mean well, whereas the people who run College Bowl are horrible human beings without exception.

-College Bowl: Jason Mueller and inappropriate hugging. Trash: Andrew Juhl and insufficient showering. I'd say it's a coinflip there.

[Rothlover]

The main differences between College Bowl and trash are:

-At College Bowl, every single question is the worst question ever. At trash (or at least at TRASHionals), there are frequently a lot of good questions that give you some hope that the bad questions will eventually be fixed, but also make the bad questions somewhat more frustrating in that you know the writers are capable of doing better.

-Most of the people involved with trash mean well, whereas the people who run College Bowl are horrible human beings without exception.

-College Bowl: Jason Mueller and inappropriate hugging. Trash: Andrew Juhl and insufficient showering. I'd say it's a coinflip there.

yeah, I know most of the TRASH people are good and mean well, just got caught up in some incredulous anger. [/i]

[Your Genial Quizmaster]

Back to Moon Pie for a moment: When I was looking through the archives, I found a discussion thread that deserves to be brought into this one. The first post does an excellent job of laying out the biggest issues that editors face, and the unfortunate consequences, but it does so in a respectful and constructive tone:

http://www.hsquizbowl.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3351

Virtually every word of that applies to Moon Pie, except that we were also breaking in a new editor-in-chief. David & I, and others associated with the UTC program, are already taking the painful lessons of Moon Pie to heart and applying them to next year's tournaments, and some of those steps parallel the advice from that post. As noted earlier, we've divvied up the duties so no one will be editor-in-chief for more than one collegiate set next year, and David's already started writing questions for COTKU while I'm doing the same for our fall high school tournament.

Of the three main points of the post, the one we're struggling with the most is the third. How do we enforce packet submission requirements and deadlines, without driving a high percentage of people out of the game? There are too few strong, active programs with continuity as it is. In 2006-07 we tried varying combinations of carrot and stick...

http://www.hsquizbowl.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3148
http://www.hsquizbowl.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3412
http://www.hsquizbowl.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3581

Yet we still didn't get even as many submissions as we did last year. And many of them were from earnest new teams with no question-writing experience whatsoever. I have copied one classic example below; since it was never used, the author can't be identified and ridiculed by name. This is word-for-word as submitted, except that I reordered the bonus parts for your amusement.

These paintings were created in the 19th century. For 10 points each when I name the painting, you give me the artist.
1. The persistence of Memory
Answer: Salvador (Felipe Jacinto) Dali (y Domenech)
2. Guernica
Answer: Pablo Picasso
3. The Thinker
Answer: Auguste Rodin

Obviously the question is unusable, but you can't completely throw out all the subpar questions. The biggest reason is that there just aren't enough good ones to start with (again, a situation eloquently discussed in the aforementioned post.) There's also the issue of rewarding a good faith effort. At Moon Pie, per my request, David set aside a submitted packet that was much closer to high school level difficulty. That team's coach later told me that his team had worked hard on those questions and was very discouraged. When time permits, I try to take the usable answers and giveaway clues, and write a whole new question around it, so at least people can see the difference. I did a lot of that for RC Cola, including four or five freelance questions written by a seventh grader. (Oh, if only the average college player was as willing to write as that young lady!) David did a good deal of similar rewrites for Moon Pie but underestimated how much time it would take to overhaul them all, just as the post cited above described.

We're working on a new approach to packet submission for the fall; if you have any thoughts, feel free to share them here and/or e-mail us at utcquizbowl [at] gmail [dot] com.