(Before I ramble: I take full blame for the questions in these categories, and it's not like people were submitting questions with these perceived "barbarisms". I'm not exaggerating when I say that re-wrote every submitted question in my categories, with the exception of a single bonus in the Gupta packet. The blame for the perceived difficulty lies squarely with me.)
Also, for what it's worth now, beta-hydride
was the intended middle part of that bonus, so we can agree to disagree about how important that is; certainly, I think "forming an alkene, hydrogen atom with a metal, two-carbons away" is enough cluing for that answerline for anybody who's ever heard the term "beta-hydride elimination" to be able to figure it out. It was also a middle part at CO 2013, so I thought that was uncontroversial. (I thought the mechanism of cross-couplings is a
good example of the sort of hard "figure-it-out" thing to ask about in QB, though maybe it should have just asked for one of them, sure.)
The rest of your points--I agree whole-heartedly with them. The EKG bonus was outrageous--I didn't know much about that topic going in, so I read a lot of sources online about it, and pretty much the only thing I could find that was relevant was diagnosing a couple of specific diseases with them. This was not gettable for anybody, including myself, and I apologize. The lever rule--I think the previous part explained the actual phase diagram of steel that you needed to use to solve the bonus part, but if you tuned it out, then that certainly makes it a lot trickier (though, I can't quite understand how one "forgets" the lever rule, since it's super-obvious based on the name!). To add to this list probably the biggest offender in this regard: if you've never done flow cytometry, or some other technique involving fluorescent proteins, there's no way in hell that you know what GFP's excitation wavelength is, no matter how good a generalist you are. No way a non-biologist gets that.
I guess the flip side of this is--if you're me, or Matt Jackson, or whatever, and you're trying to write a
real bonus on cardiology or anthropology and you've got literally no academic background in that subject, how do you approach something that's going to be hard, but not too hard? CO hard parts are, virtually by definition, either things that have never showed up in quizbowl before, or easier things with certain clues withheld. And if you don't have ideas for what the hard part of that bonus needs to be right off the bat, then you're casting in the dark. I just don't know what the approach for writing a hard part for CO should be in topics that you don't know well. If I'm writing a bonus about the human body, then I accept that there are med students or pre-meds in quizbowl that know way more about these topics than I do, that I normally would 10 or 20 this bonus, and I have to find something that may challenge them. Perhaps it's easier for literature or arts--you pick another author, another work, dig deeper into a book--the list of available options is finite. But here, if I don't want to write on a named thing, because quizbowl rightfully says that I shouldn't, then the easiest thing for me to do is go for something real and hard from a textbook or lecture notes, and if people don't get it, then maybe they'll accept it because they're not studying this topic academically.
When I was editing this set, I collected every bio/chem question from CO 2015 and 2013 (2014 has pdfs, so it's harder to do this), and chose the questions that I most wanted to imitate--and those that I didn't. Here are two bonuses from 2013 that are worth considering. (To be clear, I didn't model any questions in this set on these bonuses, but they are convenient for two points at question here. I have no idea who wrote them, and I hope I don't offend anybody reading this discussion.)
It is treated by inserting a catheter into the heart and firing radiofrequency waves at the defective tissue, for 10 points each:
[10] Name this conduction disorder in which an accessory pathway called the Bundle of Kent transmits electrical impulses faster than usual, leading to pre-excitation of the ventricles and reentrant tachycardia.
ANSWER: Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome [accept things like “pattern” or “disease”]
[10] This is the specific part of the conduction system that gets bypassed in Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. It transmits its impulses to the Bundle of His and is defective in a condition that exhibits Wenckebach periodicity.
ANSWER: AtrioVentricular node
[10] Though most patients have normal recordings, the classic pattern for Wolff-Parkinson-White seen on an electrocardiogram consists of a shortened PR interval as well as this unique finding, in which the ascending part of the QRS complex is slurred.
ANSWER: delta wave
Recently, organometallic compounds have become more popular as both reagents and catalysts in organic chemistry. FTPE:
[10] Name these organometallic compounds that are reagents in the Kumada cross-coupling reaction and form from the reaction of magnesium metal with aryl or alkyl halides.
ANSWER: Grignard reagents
[10] Although the addition of Grignard reagents to amides generally results in the formation of tertiary alcohols or amines, these special amides, named for their American creator, form ketones upon reaction with Grignards or organolithium reagents. They are formed from the reaction of acyl chlorides with an amine with methoxy and methyl substituents. The N-methoxy group on the resulting amide forms a persistent chelate with a Grignard reagent after a single addition is completed; this chelate is hydrolyzed at low temperatures free of nucleophiles to yield the ketone.
ANSWER: Weinreb-Nahm amides
[10] Name this palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling reaction, applied to the synthesis of antifungal Papulacadin D, which involves the reaction of an aryl or alkyl halide with an aryl alkyl silane in the presence of fluoride ions to form the coupled product.
ANSWER: Hiyama coupling
If I played on these questions last Saturday, I probably would have 10ed both bonuses, and if I was lucky, may have converted Wolff-Parkinson-White and Weinreb on a good day, but no prayer on either hard part (but I'll skip over middle parts for now, since they're not really the topic of this discussion). And I wrote specific bonuses on these topics for CO this year, after doing quite a bit of research in both topics! So, if you excuse these bonuses as more gettable, or at least more comprehensible to generalists, then how do I write to a wider audience? I have niche interests, I guess--does that mean that I'm just not cut up to edit science at this level? When I was trying to find stuff to imitate, these bonuses were not on the list, because I thought they were ridiculously obscure, but clearly "synthesizing antifungal drug" is more interesting than "solve math problem or chemical mechanism", so perhaps humanities players greatly prefer this sort of question?
I don't want this discussion to turn into "Adam's trying to make us pity him for how bad he is at quizbowl", because that's not my intent. But I'll leave it as an open question, I guess: if you're editing a hard tournament, do you make all the hard parts and hard clues things that you can convert? And if it's not feasible for you to say Yes, because you lack technical experience, then how do you pick clues? I tried really hard to make every bonus part in this tournament something that I'd have converted before writing the set: I know what the excitation wavelength is of GFP, I know the mechanism of the Suzuki coupling, I know what the lever rule is. But it wasn't going to happen everywhere.
I'm sorry for stuff that was too hard--I'm not denying this tournament's bio and chem were really difficult, at least in early clues and in bonus parts (if people think the easy parts of bonuses and TU answerlines were too hard, that's a totally different question). I just don't know what would have been
better hard parts in this case. Billy, Ike, Eric, other people, I'm serious, if you have ideas for what makes a hard CO science bonus part, I'd love to hear them. There were very few hard bonus parts in this set that I asked about because I wanted to introduce them to the QB canon--most of the time, they were of the form "this is something hard I know about this topic, let's see if anybody else does."