Prison Bowl Discussion

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Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by TheKingInYellow »

I'm assuming this is allowed to happen now?
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by at your pleasure »

I think there is a mirror next weekend, so not until then.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by ihavenoidea »

No...Triton Bowl on the 21st.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Sir Thopas »

Yeah, if you have stuff to say now, feel free to email Daichi and me. Until then, hold onto your thoughts—I'd certainly like to know what people thought about the set.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by TheKingInYellow »

Damn. My bad
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by aestheteboy »

I guess the discussion can start now since all mirrors have concluded. I think Guy will post the set or send it to Chris, since he has the final, edited version of the set. Again, thanks everyone for playing. I had fun writing.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Tower Monarch »

I might have some things to say later, but I thought the Tossups were generally accessible, so it became a great set for the younger teams. With respect to bonuses, I will have to look through my notes to find examples, but there did seem to be some variability that made me wonder what the goal was for middle part difficulty, sorry if that is really vague. The only problem I can remember off the top of my head was that what seemed like perfectly edited questions in subjects like literature and history seemed to be contrasted with hit or miss, a good example that I can remember being some missing prompts, such as on stereoisomer for enantiomer, as it is the more general answer and only one clue in that bonus part narrowed it, so I expect people who knew the answer to be safe as I was. I'm not sure what it was, but at times Quint and I felt that whoever wrote a given science question seemed to be researching clues that they did not understand rather than more challenging canonical clues, often leading to either transparent or useless lead-ins. Again, I will hunt down examples sometime.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by cdcarter »

http://quizbowlpackets.com/archive/2009prison.zip! Enjoy.

I will be posting thoughts of the set tomorrow.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by at your pleasure »

I was very happy with the set, and did not have serious issues with the questions. The only issues were the ICBM question(although I can see why partial answers should be unpromptable on a question on the ICBM) and the tossup on Ares. At least in the room where our B-team was playing, the moderator apparently read it in such a manner that the name Eris sounded like Ares. Was this an issue in other rooms, or was that just a combination of a slightly unclear moderator and an inexperience team?
Also, how did the Auden question get converted ? While I was greatly gladdened to hear him come up as a tossup, I don't recall having heard him come up as a tossup in a regular high school set before(although my memory can be,and frequently is,somewhat faulty).
Anyhow, great set.
EDIT: clarity and grammar.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

This was a well constructed set which probably skewed difficult for high school, which is both fine and a demonstration of the difficulty of writing sets with absolutely idealized difficulty across the board (probably impossible).
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Blackboard Monitor Vimes »

Doug, I've heard Auden at least once or twice before.

Overall, I thought this set was quite good, and I don't recall any specific complaints. Some third parts struck me as harder than the rest of the set, iirc, but there weren't too many of them (like the third part to the Hokusai bonus, which I don't think I'd heard before, but it was interesting to learn). If I recall something more specific, I'll try to be a bit more helpful. Awesome job, guys.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Tower Monarch »

All right, I will just flip through my notes and the first round just to clarify the minor issues I had with the set as a whole:
Plasma- This is kinda what I am saying about useless early clues- Kruskal-Shafranov and Vlasov-Poisson constitute a double lead-in at ACF Fall, but in high school, the third clue of Landaue dampening is probably enough to distinguish top teams. Carbon-12 and Avagadro's Number are both easy parts as written, accompanied by Loschmidt constant which is a higher level hard part, so it seemed like a great jump after an easy 20 for most passing students of Sophomore (not even honors) chemistry. Finally, going back to the contrast I pointed out earlier, the Ulysses bonus has a clear 3 part difficulty (maybe Mulligan is too hard, but I doubt that having heard of him without reading it) while the data structures bonus earlier in the round, in my opinion, throws 20 points at you if you have heard of these things before and even heap (presumably the "hard" part) seems fraudable with the clues about the sort and the tree clue, just generally blurring the easy-medium-hard distinction. Again, though, I really think I only notices some of the science faults as contrasting with some of the best questions in other subjects I have heard in high school sets.
EDIT: I hadn't heard the Hokusai question, but I correctly guessed the three parts before finding it. This seems to be one of the more conservative examples of canon expansion, as I expect all of the top Nationals team to know ukiyo-e by May, since it should come up at one of the two events.
Last edited by Tower Monarch on Sun Feb 22, 2009 12:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by cvdwightw »

So, having read the set at UCSD, I found this entirely acceptable, if a little bit on the hard side, for the high school level. It was clear that some teams on the NAQT diet were found deficient in philosophy and social science, but for the most part those topics were on things that are reasonably gettable at the high school level.

The only real issue that I did have with the set was length. Tossups were generally fine, but four-line bonuses really need to go away. I realize that these tournaments are all about learning, but don't take four lines to give two lines' worth of useful clues.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by The Laughing Man »

This was a really good set! My main quibble would be the easiness of the bonuses-- I realize that only with really easy bonuses will you be able to hit your conversion targets, but I think that in the playoffs, and especially in the finals the difficulty should be ramped up.
In terms of individual questions that could have been improved, I only saw a few. I thought mentioning blue and gold flags in the lead in of a Nightwatch question may not have been a good idea, although I imagine it is very difficult to write a nontransparent tossup on it. The question on Achebe bothered me because I think that starting a tossup with a title without providing a description is asking for a buzzer race especially when the work is (I think) fairly famous. Also, I think the Chromium tossup should have been reworded to say something along the lines of "An oxide of this metal appears in... the Jones reagent" because the lead-in technically applied to H, O, S and Cr (I negged with S off that clue.)

Overall though, this tournament was really awesome. I was really happy to see a well written Auden tossup and I enjoyed the various really interesting clues that came up in the Spain, Portuguese and Colonial America literature tossups. It was nice to see a good Naipaul question too. In spite of the fact that I negged on it, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria question was pretty neat. The film questions were cool too. Thanks Hunter + WJ!
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Tower Monarch »

The Laughing Man wrote:The question on Achebe bothered me because I think that starting a tossup with a title without providing a description is asking for a buzzer race especially when the work is (I think) fairly famous.
I hardly believe Achebe's poetic titles can ever be a buzzer race in more than 3 rooms even at Nationals, and the same goes for his short story. Though Man of the People is maybe a line early, I see no real issue with this tossup. But this goes back to the discussion you already started.
The Laughing Man wrote:Also, I think the Chromium tossup should have been reworded to say something along the lines of "An oxide of this metal appears in... the Jones reagent" because the lead-in technically applied to H, O, S and Cr (I negged with S off that clue.)

I'm not sure that buzz is defensible, but I totally agree that the complete lack of specificity in the first line and a half would have been easy to fix. Also, I just reread the question and find the second sentence not only more difficult but also a more effective lead-in in terms of clarity.
The Laughing Man wrote:I was really happy to see a well written Auden tossup and I enjoyed the various really interesting clues that came up in the Spain, Portuguese and Colonial America literature tossups. It was nice to see a good Naipaul question too. In spite of the fact that I negged on it, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria question was pretty neat. The film questions were cool too. Thanks Hunter + WJ!
These questions were among my favorites as well, though I would warn against any future high school tournaments placing more than the couple film questions featured here. Until the college level, there are few academic studies on films, therefore allowing teams to either fraud answers from trash, or just receive many zeros. I think in smaller quantities, this set demonstrated the latter issue can be kept to a minimum.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by cdcarter »

So overall this was a super great set. I absolutely delighted playing on it, and Hunter definitely out did themselves, even with the high expectations after last year. The science was amazingly well written, and it was nice to use legitimate science knowledge in high school quizbowl. So hats off to the science editorship.

In terms of difficulty, the set was probably exactly what it wanted to be. However this was too hard for the Minnesota field, PPBs were seriously depressed in terms of the majority of the teams. Can't really do anything about that, especially when it is also being run in NY and the Mid-Atlantic, but it was not optimal.

Now on to individual questions. The tossup on Turing blew, it got really transparent and really fraudable really quick. If you are talking about Church, Curry, Kleene, or Turing, do not put "lambda calculus" in the first line. This stuff is famous. Similarly the doppler effect tossup, it was very easy to figure out after hearing "distance of a galaxy" and caused at least one buzzer race.

The Ionesco bonus was amazing, and its great to see him coming into the canon more.

The worst tossup of the day was probably the colonial america tossup. I had no idea what was going on throughout the whole thing, and almost ended up negging on it. The pronouns were not very clear, and that is a hard answer line to get people to say.

How well known is it that Cadmus follows a cow? I thought that was a much easier clue than it's placement merits it. Similar with animus and anima for Jung. The taxes tossup was sort of like this, but also just another sort of confusing common link tossup, that it was hard to tell where it was going in the game.

Other great things were the TS Eliot bonus, the O'Connor tossup, and of course the Little Prince.

All in all it was a great set with a few issues that did not hinder my enjoyment of the set.

Oh and that massacring Jews tossup was bizzare and bad.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Terrible Shorts Depot »

This was a really sweet set. I suppose the bonuses trended easy, but that's not really a problem at all. I was especially smitten by the literature, though The Maltese Falcon seemed transparent.

Ares mentioned his companions way too early, and, as Chris said, the cows tossup was a tad antipyramidal. Bret Harte was way too hard, though awesome. "Prepared" was way too early in the piano tossup. The Huey Long tossup was sweet. Incest was a tad bit bizarre, though that would seem to be par for the course for a tossup on incest. The tossup on maps of the world was equally bizarre, though I liked it.

All in all, awesome set.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by sam.peterson »

I was kind of surprised that the Auden tossup didn't mention The Age of Anxiety; at least for me, that's an easier clue than Musee [...], though my knowledge could just be weird.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Whiter Hydra »

cdcarter wrote:Similarly the doppler effect tossup, it was very easy to figure out after hearing "distance of a galaxy" and caused at least one buzzer race.
That was not a kind tossup for me, as "distance to a galaxy" could either be Doppler Effect, Cepheid Variable, Nova, or just plain Variable Star, while most people only associate it with the first. Also, Kerr came a bit early in the Black Holes TU, I thought.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by The Atom Strikes! »

Generally a solid, quality tournament-- I would rate it with the excellent HSAPQ ACF 1 set this year. That said, I thought that by the playoffs, the fact that just about every bonus was an auto-30 for the top teams (when we played State College, I believe that the teams thirtied every bonus except one about progressive rock bands in which one teammate got overexcited and shouted "Yes!" instead of listening to the clues that revealed that the band in question was Jethro Tull), along with the fact that the tossup answer selection tended to be fairly narrow, meaning that some tossups would turn into games of buzzer chicken, made it more difficult to have meaningful matches between the top teams. Of course, this was a difficulty issue, not a quality issue (clues were generally well-ordered and pyramidal, avoided being overly vague and meaningless, and lacked hoses and other offenses), and the tournament was excellent for the vast majority of matches between the vast majority of teams.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

I see we are mentioning tossups we didn't care for. I can do that too.

The Nick Markakis tossup to me is a good example of a sub-optimal sports tossup (the Prince Fielder was one too, but I'll stick with the Markakis for now).
He refused to sign with the Cincinnati Reds twice, choosing to go to Young Harris College, where he was an outstanding pitcher. His current team drafted him in 2003 and decided to convert him to a power-hitting outfielder. He played for Greece in the 2004 Olympics and since his major league debut in 2006, he has maintained a .299 average while slugging 59 homeruns. For 10 points, name this player, often considered the franchise player of the Orioles, their left-hand hitting right fielder, who recently signed a six-year $66 million extension.
The opening clue is so-so at best. Very few people know or care about the college careers of baseball players. Very few people know the specific years that players were drafted by teams. Numerous baseball players were pitchers converted to different positions. So far, you would get people with encyclopedic, dare we say "trivial" knowledge of colleges and draft years, to perhaps buzz, rather than people who might be familiar with notable things that Markakis has done in his career. It then mentions that he is Greek. There are like one or two notable Greek baseball players (Markakis and Aaron Miles), so this is like mentioning the dreaded "Finnish composer" clue. It then gives a nothing clue: "since 2006, he has hit .299 and 59 home runs." Who the hell knows that? Nobody studies baseball players like that! Give specific years' stat lines if you're going to do stat lines. After FTP, it proffers an opinion, which wile probably true is not really something to say in a tossup ("franchise player"), before basically giving a giveaway that will be worthless in a year or so (the extension part). When you break it all down, this tossup asks you to identify the Greek Oriole right-fielder. None of the other clues basically help that much.

Why am I going on about this so much? I mean, for the 3 times sports questions pop in packets? Well, it's really more of the principle of the thing. Writers should apply the same standards to trash questions that they do to other questions. On the plus side, it's very good that I am getting the most agitated about the trash tossup than the rest of the questions in this excellent set.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Sir Thopas »

I did a shoddy editing job on the Markakis tossup, sorry. I meant to fix it up or just replace it but never got around to it.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by cvdwightw »

Mike, I think the bigger problem with the Nick Markakis tossup is that it just isn't that appropriate for high school-level trash outside of the Baltimore area. To the best of my knowledge, Baltimore doesn't have any sort of national following, doesn't have any "big name" superstars, and isn't such a good team that people check on how they're doing and pick up a couple of player names from "they're doing well." If you follow an AL team regularly, or live in the Baltimore area, 10 points. If you're an average or marginally interested follower, you may have trouble recalling his name. I may be in the minority here, but I believe that at the high school level, trash questions should be about things that people who don't regularly follow sports/movies/music/tv/etc. should have at least heard of.

The Prince Fielder tossup was a less-egregious version of this too, in that he's a major player on a team that has recently had some significance at the national level, but failed to mention the clue that most average sports fans would know, the whole issue about his conversion to vegetarianism.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Sir Thopas »

cvdwightw wrote:The Prince Fielder tossup was a less-egregious version of this too, in that he's a major player on a team that has recently had some significance at the national level, but failed to mention the clue that most average sports fans would know, the whole issue about his conversion to vegetarianism.
Wait, what?

Yeah, the trash didn't turn out nearly as awesome as I'd hoped. It always annoys me when the trash in academic tournaments is fairly bad or boring trash, so that disappointed me a bit.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by AKKOLADE »

Markakis is one of the two most famous O's and does have some name value amongst baseball fans.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by at your pleasure »

The worst tossup of the day was probably the colonial america tossup. I had no idea what was going on throughout the whole thing, and almost ended up negging on it. The pronouns were not very clear, and that is a hard answer line to get people to say.
That really should have just been "Massachusetts Bay Colony" or something like that; MBC was acceptable when I buzzed in and apparently the entire quesiton is talking about the MBC. In general, I'm not a big fan of "polities common links" in literature unless they are used to expand the canon.
Oh and that massacring Jews tossup was bizzare and bad.
Agreed. For the love of god, just write a tossup on the actual progroms and use the crusader massacres in a tossup on something to do with the crusades, where they can actually be made clear. Oh, and the Hebron massacres are (to me) not as famous as the actual progroms.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Down and out in Quintana Roo »

cvdwightw wrote:The only real issue that I did have with the set was length. Tossups were generally fine, but four-line bonuses really need to go away. I realize that these tournaments are all about learning, but don't take four lines to give two lines' worth of useful clues.
This.

Reading the full bonus clues (as i was a moderator at WJ) was almost tiring by the 5th or 6th round already because the bonus questions were insanely long. Some of them gave so many clues that it became laughable. They should have been shortened. When you have bonus clues as long as some NAQT tossups, you know you might have a problem.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Terrible Shorts Depot »

As much as I like having copious clues, there is a point where it becomes ridiculous. I'd say that the ACF suggestion of clues shorter than 2 lines is a worthy ideal.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

The only time I can recall which featured a flagrant presentation of "too many clues" was the linguistics bonus which basically give like a lecture on linguistics and then asked for some pretty simple stuff.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Terrible Shorts Depot »

Cheynem wrote:The only time I can recall which featured a flagrant presentation of "too many clues" was the linguistics bonus which basically give like a lecture on linguistics and then asked for some pretty simple stuff.
I WONDER WHO WROTE THIS BONUS
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Sir Thopas »

la2pgh wrote:
Cheynem wrote:The only time I can recall which featured a flagrant presentation of "too many clues" was the linguistics bonus which basically give like a lecture on linguistics and then asked for some pretty simple stuff.
I WONDER WHO WROTE THIS BONUS
yeah i guess my ideal of quizbowl-as-pedagogy doesn't work because people don't actually care about learning linguistics :(

For what it's worth:
Packet 8, Bonus 2 wrote:For 10 points each, name some features of languages which are TOTALLY WACKY.
[10] Romanian is the only Romance language with these as suffixes, thanks to influence from Slavic languages. In the other Romance languages, they generally developed from the Latin unus, meaning “one”, and the demonstrative pronoun ille. English examples include “a” and “the”.
ANSWER: articles
[10] Some languages like Basque have the ergative and absolutive type of these, where the subject of an intransitive sentence is treated like the object of a transitive sentence. Hungarian and Finnish have a ton of them, and better-known examples include the nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative types.
ANSWER: noun cases
[10] Hungarian and Albanian are two of the very few languages with this type of voiced plosive. English has this type of approximant represented by the letter y, and Russian has consonants colored by this point of articulation.
ANSWER: palatal (accept word forms) [GT]
Packet 5, Bonus 19 wrote:How much do you know about your own language? Let’s find out, for 10 points each.
[10] English is a member of this gigantic language family whose other members include such diverse languages as Lithuanian, Italian, and Hindi.
ANSWER: Indo-European
[10] English is becoming more and more like Chinese in that the former distinction between unvoiced and voiced plosives word-initially is turning into a distinction between the presence and absence of this characteristic, present in ancient Greek in the letters phi, chi, and theta.
ANSWER: aspiration (accept clear-knowledge equivalents like “a puff of air afterwards”)
[10] English has long since lost this phonemic distinction, which exists today phonetically in pairs like “bat” and “bad”. In Ancient Greek, it distinguished epsilon from epsilon-iota, and it is marked in Hungarian and Gaelic by an acute accent.
ANSWER: vowel length (accept clear-knowledge equivalents) [GT]
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

Yeah, I'm not going to lie, at this point I'm not sure I see any reason to have bonus parts be more than 2 lines long.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Terrible Shorts Depot »

Though the length is excessive, those are both very good bonuses. Very accessible to scrubs like me who glean all their linguistic knowledge from the blathering of linguistics obsessed former teammates. I like the first one especially, though, for some reason, we didn't hear it.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Sir Thopas »

Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote:Yeah, I'm not going to lie, at this point I'm not sure I see any reason to have bonus parts be more than 2 lines long.
Yeah, this was something Daichi advocated, and in retrospect I wish I would have heeded it more in editing.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Down and out in Quintana Roo »

Prison Bowl bonus wrote:This rule can be used to determine the number of positive or negative roots for a polynomial equation. It states that the number of positive roots equals the number of sign changes when the terms are arranged by decreasing exponent, and the number of negative roots equals the number of sign changes after negating the odd-powered terms.
Prison Bowl bonus wrote:In order to collect information on tanks before writing Achtung - Panzer!, Guderian consulted the writings of this Frenchman. He would later lead the forces that had captured Diego Suarez during Operation Ironclad and used the Cross of Lorraine as their symbol, and twenty years after that, become President of France.
Prison Bowl bonus wrote:This exception to the general rule of increasing atomic radius is because of the poor shielding ability of 4f electrons possessed by the elements in its namesake series. Because of this phenomenon, elements 58 through 71 are smaller than expected, giving the rare earth elements pretty similar properties.
Prison Bowl bonus wrote:Part of the Legalist policies enacted by Lǐ Sī included ordering the burning of books related to the teachings of this man, who emphasized filial piety as one of the five basic relationships, which also included husband and wife and ruler and subject. His works were developed further by Mencius, and he’s kind of important in China
These are all TOO LONG for bonus questions.
Prison Bowl bonus wrote:This quantity in a vacuum is the upper speed limit of all objects with respect to any reference frame. Cherenkov radiation occurs when electromagnetic radiation travels faster than this quantity for any given medium. In a vacuum, it is approximately 3 times 10 to the eighth meters per second.
Why do you need to make a bonus pyramidal? This is ridiculous. I know the original point of the bonus was to ask about "electromagnetic radiation," and i'm certainly no SCIENCE! guy, but this is just too much.
Prison Bowl bonus wrote:Looking at Central Park from outside the Museum of Natural History across the street is this 28th president sitting on a horse. He succeeded William McKinley after organizing the Rough Riders and before losing the presidential election on the Bull Moose ticket.
That is WAY too many clues for a simple Teddy Roosevelt bonus question that was originally on him being in an equestrian statue. Then it goes on to give three easy clues that my entire inclusion-level 10th grade history class could get. Not good.
Prison Bowl bonus wrote:17. In case you have not noticed, Russian leaders follow an alternating pattern of baldness and having hair. For 10 points each:
[10] Born in Georgia, this hairy General Secretary sports a trademark moustache even as he replaced the New Economic Policy with his Five Year Plans and led the Soviet Union through the Great Purge.
ANSWER: Joseph Stalin
[10] This balding General secretary enjoyed a short-lived tenure as the General Secretary, during which saw the downing of Korean Air Flight KAL-007 and received a letter and a visit from 5th grader Samantha Smith, the “youngest ambassador of the United States”. Predictably, his predecessor was the hairy Brezhnev.
ANSWER: Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov
[10] A senior political officer during the battle of Kursk, this hairless leader was known for his Moscow Metro work. He ceded Crimea from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR, and withdrew Soviet troops from Romania. He was known as Comrade Latrine Lover for deploring poor sanitation habits among Yuzovka’s miners.
ANSWER: Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev
What does the original clue have to do with this bonus? These are listed out of order and the "lead-in" clue is hereby confusing, stupid, and useless to players. If you're going to use "hair" as a clue and say that rulers alternate between "baldness and having hair," then why aren't you asking them in order?
Prison bowl bonus wrote:Much like Chip Beall, the people of this time period were anti-pyramidal, eschewing ostentatious tombs for ones cut out of rock, which were easier to conceal and protect. For 10 points each:
This, however, is the greatest introduction to a bonus series that i've seen in some time. Congrats.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

cvdwightw wrote:the clue that most average sports fans would know, the whole issue about his conversion to vegetarianism.
I'd think the clue that most average sports fans would know is that he's a big fat dude who plays for the Brewers.
The Laughing Man wrote:The question on Achebe bothered me because I think that starting a tossup with a title without providing a description is asking for a buzzer race especially when the work is (I think) fairly famous.
Achebe's poetry collection is not, in fact, famous in any way. You know a lot of things! That's not in any way bad, but don't commit the "I know it so it's easy" fallacy.
la2pgh wrote:as Chris said, the cows tossup was a tad antipyramidal.
Yeah, jumping straight from Basque/Gallic myth to the pretty famous clue about Cadmus was rather ill-advised.
la2pgh wrote:Bret Harte was way too hard
What? No way is Bret Harte too hard of a tossup answer. The clues used don't make it particularly hard either.

I'll have more to say when I finish looking through the set, but overall I've liked what I've seen.

Also, yeah, in the future, definitely cut down on the giant bonus parts.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

What does the original clue have to do with this bonus? These are listed out of order and the "lead-in" clue is hereby confusing, stupid, and useless to players. If you're going to use "hair" as a clue and say that rulers alternate between "baldness and having hair," then why aren't you asking them in order?
It's kind of impossible to ask those rulers in order since they don't all succeed one another. The leadin crops up again as clues like "he succeeded the hairy Brezhnev." I think you are wrong.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Down and out in Quintana Roo »

Jeremy Gibbs Free Energy wrote:
What does the original clue have to do with this bonus? These are listed out of order and the "lead-in" clue is hereby confusing, stupid, and useless to players. If you're going to use "hair" as a clue and say that rulers alternate between "baldness and having hair," then why aren't you asking them in order?
It's kind of impossible to ask those rulers in order since they don't all succeed one another. The leadin crops up again as clues like "he succeeded the hairy Brezhnev." I think you are wrong.
My point, Charlie, was that the answers (if you list Soviet leaders from #1-8 in order) are numbers 2, 6, and 4, respectively.

Also, the "alternating hair" stuff is wrong if you count the ruler after Stalin, Georgy Malenkov, as the third ruler of the USSR. He was, indeed, "full of hair" and was in charge for 6 months. Is he being skipped for convenience? (probably) Or because he was forgotten? (possibly)
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Sir Thopas »

Caesar Rodney HS wrote:Also, the "alternating hair" stuff is wrong if you count the ruler after Stalin, Georgy Malenkov, as the third ruler of the USSR. He was, indeed, "full of hair" and was in charge for 6 months. Is he being skipped for convenience? (probably) Or because he was forgotten? (possibly)
Don't ask me; my source was Hey! Spring of Trivia.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Terrible Shorts Depot »

I'm not sure about Harte, I guess. It seemed hard at the time, but that's a pretty easy tossup, considering the answer.

Speaking of round 7, the paper cut outs clue came way too early for Matisse. I was under the impression that his use of collage was very famous.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

Man, ya gotta learn your Bret "the Hitman" Harte stories.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Mechanical Beasts »

la2pgh wrote: Speaking of round 7, the paper cut outs clue came way too early for Matisse. I was under the impression that his use of collage was very famous.
The whole "I am physically ruined, so here, let me still make great art" motif tends to be famous for those who partake in it: I think it's pretty famous for Matisse.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Theory Of The Leisure Flask »

everyday847 wrote:
la2pgh wrote: Speaking of round 7, the paper cut outs clue came way too early for Matisse. I was under the impression that his use of collage was very famous.
The whole "I am physically ruined, so here, let me still make great art" motif tends to be famous for those who partake in it: I think it's pretty famous for Matisse.
When I was in high school, the collages were literally the only thing I knew about Matisse.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Kouign Amann »

Theory Of The Leisure Flask wrote:
everyday847 wrote:
la2pgh wrote: Speaking of round 7, the paper cut outs clue came way too early for Matisse. I was under the impression that his use of collage was very famous.
The whole "I am physically ruined, so here, let me still make great art" motif tends to be famous for those who partake in it: I think it's pretty famous for Matisse.
When I was in high school, the collages were literally the only thing I knew about Matisse.
Yeah, when I think "Matisse," I think collages. My mom is a big fan of them, and we have several reproductions around the house. They're generally what I first associate with him.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by AKKOLADE »

Cheynem wrote:Man, ya gotta learn your Bret "the Hitman" Harte stories.
I, for one, will never forget when his younger brother Owen kicked his leg out of his leg.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by wexs883198215 »

Ukonvasara wrote:
cvdwightw wrote:the clue that most average sports fans would know, the whole issue about his conversion to vegetarianism.
I'd think the clue that most average sports fans would know is that he's a big fat dude who plays for the Brewers.
As people might be able to tell from my profile pic, I'm a big Brewers fan and was indeed the one who wrote the Fielder toss-up. I originally had the vegetarianism thing in there, but due to length, cut it out because I didn't think it would be a very useful clue for most people since I thought it wasn't that well publicized. I believe I did mention that he is quite portly in the giveaway.

EDIT: forgot to mention something
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Auroni »

I think that the Kenzaburo Oe tossup in the finals wasn't scaled very well. If you're going to write a high school Oe tossup in the first place, it is important to mention a title or two after every one or two plot clues. The progression also went straight from The Pinch Runner Memorandum (which is still like ACF Nats hard) to Nip the Buds and then his most famous two novels.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Sir Thopas »

JelloBiafra wrote:I think that the Kenzaburo Oe tossup in the finals wasn't scaled very well. If you're going to write a high school Oe tossup in the first place, it is important to mention a title or two after every one or two plot clues. The progression also went straight from The Pinch Runner Memorandum (which is still like ACF Nats hard) to Nip the Buds and then his most famous two novels.
18. This author’s nonfiction works include a study of religious fanaticism, Somersault, while the title isolated teenager sexually assaults women on crowded subways in his novel J. He wrote about a man’s attempt to assassinate Patron in The Pinch Runner Memorandum, and in another work, a plague strikes a secluded valley where teenage boys have been evacuated. Bird tries to kill his deformed son in one work, while another ends with Takashi leaving a suicide note saying “I told the truth” to his brother Mitsusaburo when attempts to incite revolution through soccer fail. For 10 points, name this author of Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids; A Personal Matter; and The Silent Cry.
I mean, it's not like it just drops the name of Nip the Buds. I don't really see a problem with this one.
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by Auroni »

Sir Thopas wrote:
JelloBiafra wrote:I think that the Kenzaburo Oe tossup in the finals wasn't scaled very well. If you're going to write a high school Oe tossup in the first place, it is important to mention a title or two after every one or two plot clues. The progression also went straight from The Pinch Runner Memorandum (which is still like ACF Nats hard) to Nip the Buds and then his most famous two novels.
18. This author’s nonfiction works include a study of religious fanaticism, Somersault, while the title isolated teenager sexually assaults women on crowded subways in his novel J. He wrote about a man’s attempt to assassinate Patron in The Pinch Runner Memorandum, and in another work, a plague strikes a secluded valley where teenage boys have been evacuated. Bird tries to kill his deformed son in one work, while another ends with Takashi leaving a suicide note saying “I told the truth” to his brother Mitsusaburo when attempts to incite revolution through soccer fail. For 10 points, name this author of Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids; A Personal Matter; and The Silent Cry.
I mean, it's not like it just drops the name of Nip the Buds. I don't really see a problem with this one.
The first four clues are about works that are all nats or regular college level material. Instead, you could have put in The Catch and Aghwee (which high schoolers know more than that), had a clue of those aforementioned works still present, and then proceeded to more thoroughly discuss his best known works (and specified that he was japanese so that people that have heard the name oe but couldn't associate him with any works might still have a shot at conversion by the end)
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Re: Prison Bowl Discussion

Post by TheKingInYellow »

I have to agree with Guy on this one, this toss-up strikes me as solidly pyramidal, at least from my knowledge of the subject.
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