Welcome to the 2014 Penn Bowl Discussion forum

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Welcome to the 2014 Penn Bowl Discussion forum

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

I am sure Eric Mukherjee will have more to say here, seeing as he was actually in charge, but thanks for playing the set! I hope you enjoyed it.
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Post by Sima Guang Hater »

Hey everybody,

Thank you for coming out to play Penn Bowl. I'd like to thank my co-editors Rob Carson, Will Alston, and Patrick Liao, and I'd also like to thank contributors Matt Jackson, Aaron Rosenberg, Ike Jose, Cody Voight, Billy Busse, Tanay Kothari, and a few other people I've probably forgotten. Without their help this tournament wouldn't have gotten off the ground.

Feel free to discuss away.
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Re: Welcome to the 2014 Penn Bowl Discussion forum

Post by vinteuil »

I generally liked this tournament: the vast majority of the questions seemed to be written on things people care about by people who care about them to some degree, which was nice. I also liked that questions seemed pretty well distributed-across subject areas (esp. history), although there did seem to be a lot of fluids-related stuff in the science.

I don't have the set yet, so these impression could be misguided, but:
  • A good number of the bonuses seemed very unforgiving (e.g. Pergamum as a middle part) in either their hard or middle parts (and maybe both, but if we're 10ing a bonus on something, I'm probably not the best judge of the difficulty of that topic). This seemed especially true in science, but I definitely wouldn't go so far as to say that all of those bonuses were inaccessible or that the science was uniformly too hard. Also, this could just be progressive tiredness, but they seemed to get much harder as the day went on.
  • There was definitely an issue with repeats. Off the top of my head, the two most egregious were: a convection bonus in one round followed by a tossup in the next; two bonuses with "the holocaust" as the easy part in the same round. Will already seems to be aware of the groanworthiness of the amount of "Germany"/"German."
  • Again, this might be misguided, but there did seem to be an issue with transparency, partly from picking tossup answerlines that result in transparent questions unless a great deal of care is taken (not implying that this tournament wasn't made/edited with care). When I have the set, I'll hopefully be able to substantiate this.
Maybe music belongs in its own thread so as not to crowd this one, but I actually think that shouldn't be too much of an issue: this tournament had uniformly pretty good music. I don't think I heard any outright lies in the questions, which is a good start. That said:
  • The "conceptual" questions (species counterpoint, tonal harmony, "how many strings are on a violin"—although that part got kind of insulting) were cool, but there were so many of them that I have to wonder about the repertoire that they were pushing out of the distribution. I'd be interested to see how other people felt about this.
  • I didn't think I would ever complain about a tournament having too much Bach, but I guess I am now! Again, he's super-important, but I didn't hear a similar proportion of Beethoven/Mozart/Brahms/Stravinsky etc., so I have to wonder if this was more by accident than design.
  • I'll repeat that people should be careful choosing quotations to use as first lines. Unless you can be sure that they are well-known, the best you're going to get is "narrowing it down" and maybe "that's cool."
  • The "music clues" (I didn't hear that many of them, and I didn't miss their absence) could probably have been preceded by a warning to slow down. Off the top of my head, this was an issue in the clue on the Rachmaninoff Paganini Rhapsody and "Dream Sequences" tossups.
And finally—that dream sequences tossup...I can't imagine it was converted well. Grace seemed pretty upset about it, but I'll let her post here if she's so inclined.
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Re: Welcome to the 2014 Penn Bowl Discussion forum

Post by Lo, Marathon Ham! »

I was wondering if I could see the tossup on sodium hydroxide (I think that's the one?). My teammate buzzed in early and said lye and is pretty sure it should have been accepted and was pretty upset at the time.
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Post by Ndg »

vinteuil wrote: The "conceptual" questions (species counterpoint, tonal harmony, "how many strings are on a violin"—although that part got kind of insulting) were cool, but there were so many of them that I have to wonder about the repertoire that they were pushing out of the distribution. I'd be interested to see how other people felt about this.
I think these were great. Specifically, I've always felt that music theory is underrepresented in most tournaments, so I appreciated questions like the counterpoint bonus, which reward people for actually writing and playing music, more than most music history questions do (not to sound simplistic or anything). I think it's perfectly fine to have some of these questions at the expense of whatever standard "repertoire" is supposed to come up at every tournament.
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Post by Fado Alexandrino »

Ndg wrote:
vinteuil wrote: The "conceptual" questions (species counterpoint, tonal harmony, "how many strings are on a violin"—although that part got kind of insulting) were cool, but there were so many of them that I have to wonder about the repertoire that they were pushing out of the distribution. I'd be interested to see how other people felt about this.
I think these were great. Specifically, I've always felt that music theory is underrepresented in most tournaments, so I appreciated questions like the counterpoint bonus, which reward people for actually writing and playing music, more than most music history questions do (not to sound simplistic or anything). I think it's perfectly fine to have some of these questions at the expense of whatever standard "repertoire" is supposed to come up at every tournament.
I agree with this.

The cello tossup mentioned a lot of opus numbers in it. Are these works generally only known by their opus number? I really liked the music in this set!
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Post by Everything in the Whole Wide World »

I'd just like to add to the praise for the set. I feel the history distribution was to-to-bottom stronger than last year and there were some really fun ideas I liked, particularly the Aaron Burr treason TU. Delaware had a great time and looks forward to next year's incarnation.
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Post by Cody »

vinteuil wrote:I didn't think I would ever complain about a tournament having too much Bach, but I guess I am now! Again, he's super-important, but I didn't hear a similar proportion of Beethoven/Mozart/Brahms/Stravinsky etc., so I have to wonder if this was more by accident than design.
This was intentional, but it wasn't out of proportion -- two bonus parts and an entire bonus for Bach compared to a tossup and a bonus part (Mozart) a tossup and a bonus part (Beethoven), two-thirds of a tossup & a third of a tossup & a bonus part (Brahms). (I think)
The United States of America wrote:The cello tossup mentioned a lot of opus numbers in it. Are these works generally only known by their opus number? I really liked the music in this set!
I know them by their opus numbers since I've listened to them on an album, but they were meant as unique placeholders rather than clues in-and-of-themselves.
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Post by Lagotto Romagnolo »

Ndg wrote:I think these were great. Specifically, I've always felt that music theory is underrepresented in most tournaments, so I appreciated questions like the counterpoint bonus, which reward people for actually writing and playing music, more than most music history questions do (not to sound simplistic or anything). I think it's perfectly fine to have some of these questions at the expense of whatever standard "repertoire" is supposed to come up at every tournament.
Not to derail the thread, but I think the discussion so far indicates that we've reached the point in quizbowl where the audience is large and diverse enough that there's no one legitimate way of approaching the music distro (probably more so with the other arts) that will satisfy everyone - and I don't think that's a bad thing at all. We've reached the point where we can separate style from quality, so we can enjoy different stylistic approaches over the course of a year.
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Post by vinteuil »

Aaron makes a good point, and I suppose Cody's post just means that I didn't hear enough of the packets for proportionality to kick in.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone refer to either of the Brahms sonatas by opus numbers, but I do think that a number of cellists would know that (of course any cellist has probably played or heard of popper anyways, but...) But I am wondering why "e minor first sonata for this instrument" wasn't used instead? Partly because Brahms wrote all of his sonatas for the various instruments in different keys (with the exception of the f minor clarinet and piano sonatas).
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Post by Victor Prieto »

I had fun at this tournament. However, if the difficulty was truly intended to be "slightly easier than Penn Bowl 2013," I don't think it hit that difficulty. I'd say that it was similar to last year in difficulty for tossups, and the bonuses were slightly more difficult than last year. I'll echo Jacob in stating that bonuses demanded some heavy knowledge for the middle and hard parts. Meanwhile, the biology and chemistry tossups were really stingy for giving out powers.
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Post by Ndg »

MoeMoney wrote:I was wondering if I could see the tossup on sodium hydroxide (I think that's the one?). My teammate buzzed in early and said lye and is pretty sure it should have been accepted and was pretty upset at the time.
I don't remember what the first one or two clues were, but it sounds pretty wrong to say that lysis buffer contains 0.1 N lye. My understanding is that "lye" names solutions of sodium hydroxide, but not the compound itself.
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Post by Gonzagapuma1 »

Why was the tossup on the Airbending thing not a "tossup 0" instead of a real tossup? If my team had lost a game based on that funn tossup I would have been very upset.
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Post by Cheynem »

Maybe it was just a trash tossup? I personally dislike the tossup zero trend myself.
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Post by Matt Weiner »

Gonzagapuma1 wrote:Why was the tossup on the Airbending thing not a "tossup 0" instead of a real tossup? If my team had lost a game based on that funn tossup I would have been very upset.
Yeah, it was never claimed that this tournament would not have trash. Having trash in only one round in service of the dead-horse "haha children's cartoons am i rite" meme is aesthetically unpleasant but it doesn't seem any more upsetting than losing any other game by the margin of a trash tossup, fairness-wise.
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Post by Gonzagapuma1 »

Matt Weiner wrote:
Gonzagapuma1 wrote:Why was the tossup on the Airbending thing not a "tossup 0" instead of a real tossup? If my team had lost a game based on that funn tossup I would have been very upset.
Yeah, it was never claimed that this tournament would not have trash. Having trash in only one round in service of the dead-horse "haha children's cartoons am i rite" meme is aesthetically unpleasant but it doesn't seem any more upsetting than losing any other game by the margin of a trash tossup, fairness-wise.
I agree with you somewhat, but the announcement seemed to indicate that there would be no trash as it could only be put in the "other" category that didn't explicitly include trash. Also, I don't believe Penn Bowl 2013 had trash.
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Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

I'm curious as to why a tossup on a central concept from a very-well known cartoon is to be labeled a "less" legitimate form of trash simply because people who are half your age can enjoy it as well. Would people be labeling this question as "funn" if it happened to be on some indie band they liked instead, or some TV show of relatively equal prominence but geared toward a different audience? I find questions on indie bands and most TV shows horrendously unenjoyable, but that doesn't mean that they're illegitimate as trash questions.

It's correct that Penn Bowl 2013 did not have trash. Nowhere in the announcement was it specified that Penn Bowl wouldn't have trash, but given the connotations of "Other" today it was perhaps a bit misleading to have that question (though there was no other trash in the set).
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Post by Tejas »

I don't think the question was less legitimate because of its source, but I do think the answerline was too obscure for a tournament with only one trash question. Obviously these types of questions are going to be polarizing but having it as the first tossup was pretty confusing to me and should probably be avoided.
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Post by Cody »

If you're going to have trash, have trash. If you're not going to have trash, don't have trash. What shouldn't happen is that the first tossup in the first packet is a trash question (and a rather injoke-y one at that) and then -- ha. ha. ha. -- there's no other trash questions. It's just kind of dumb no matter what the answerline is.
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Post by Gonzagapuma1 »

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:I'm curious as to why a tossup on a central concept from a very-well known cartoon is to be labeled a "less" legitimate form of trash simply because people who are half your age can enjoy it as well. Would people be labeling this question as "funn" if it happened to be on some indie band they liked instead, or some TV show of relatively equal prominence but geared toward a different audience? I find questions on indie bands and most TV shows horrendously unenjoyable, but that doesn't mean that they're illegitimate as trash questions.

It's correct that Penn Bowl 2013 did not have trash. Nowhere in the announcement was it specified that Penn Bowl wouldn't have trash, but given the connotations of "Other" today it was perhaps a bit misleading to have that question (though there was no other trash in the set).
It really has nothing to do with the subject matter. Questions meant to prove a point or joke around are bad ideas, which is why it, at best, should have been a tossup zero.
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Post by Brian McPeak »

Gonzagapuma1 wrote:Why was the tossup on the Airbending thing not a "tossup 0" instead of a real tossup? If my team had lost a game based on that funn tossup I would have been very upset.
You're just bitter because I won the trash off
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Post by UlyssesInvictus »

Was the FMJ tossup fine arts then? I also feel like there was some music/geeky PC bonus somewhere in the set, but I've long forgotten it by now.

I genuinely thought the first tossup was a tossup 0, and even asked the mod to double-check after we got it. I'm honestly okay with it, it just seems a rather weird decision if it was indeed the only tossup in the set.
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Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

UlyssesInvictus wrote:Was the FMJ tossup fine arts then?
Yes, the tossup on Full Metal Jacket was written for Other Arts. The Geo/CE/Choice tossup for that round was the geography tossup on New Hampshire.
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Post by Arch Stanton »

Since nobody's mentioned it, it was pretty cool to hear a bonus on David Cronenberg.
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Post by Victor Prieto »

Arch Stanton wrote:Since nobody's mentioned it, it was pretty cool to hear a bonus on David Cronenberg.
I totally forgot about this bonus. While Cronenberg might be all the rage, this bonus was still in sore need of an easy part. Perhaps you could change the third part to Oliver Stone by making a James Woods connection through Videodrome?
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Post by UlyssesInvictus »

Oh, that's right, I thought Cronenberg was another trash question, especially since it was absurdly hard and the question seemed to focus more on his films' zany plots than the themes and art style located therein. Also, I'd bet money that way more people know who he is in qb from Rick and Morty than by studying film theory...
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Post by Auks Ran Ova »

UlyssesInvictus wrote:Also, I'd bet money that way more people know who he is in qb from Rick and Morty than by studying film theory...
This strikes me as incorrect.
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UlyssesInvictus wrote:Also, I'd bet money that way more people know who he is in qb from Rick and Morty than by studying film theory...
How much?
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Ukonvasara wrote:This strikes me as incorrect.
To turn this into a learning experience, I was under the impression that Cronenberg was known for his "body horror" style and Naked Lunch, but was declining in relevancy and "artistic merit" (however you want to define it) recently; I'd genuinely appreciate a comment about what he ought to be known for and to what degree of significance.
Cody wrote:How much?
I still think I'm right if you include everyone who plays qb at every non-open level, but I'll bet 37 cents and a 500 word essay praising VCU as the greatest institution since the Justice League, or of your choice.
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UlyssesInvictus wrote:
Ukonvasara wrote:This strikes me as incorrect.
To turn this into a learning experience, I was under the impression that Cronenberg was known for his "body horror" style and Naked Lunch, but was declining in relevancy and "artistic merit" (however you want to define it) recently; I'd genuinely appreciate a comment about what he ought to be known for and to what degree of significance.
From what I know about David Cronenberg, he definitely used to be known for his horrors and psychological thrillers (Crash is the only one I know from that time), but his newer collaborations with Viggo Mortensen are still noteworthy (I remember A History of Violence appearing on some top movies of the 2000s list somewhere, and A Dangerous Method was also quite famous a few years ago), so I wouldn't write him off the quizbowl-approved list of non-trash directors. That being said, he's still probably too hard to be an easy part.
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Post by Gonzagapuma1 »

UlyssesInvictus wrote:
Ukonvasara wrote:This strikes me as incorrect.
To turn this into a learning experience, I was under the impression that Cronenberg was known for his "body horror" style and Naked Lunch, but was declining in relevancy and "artistic merit" (however you want to define it) recently; I'd genuinely appreciate a comment about what he ought to be known for and to what degree of significance.
WRONG.
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Post by Corry »

UlyssesInvictus wrote:Also, I'd bet money that way more people know who he is in qb from Rick and Morty than by studying film theory...
I am this person.
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Post by Cody »

UlyssesInvictus wrote:
Cody wrote:How much?
I still think I'm right if you include everyone who plays qb at every non-open level, but I'll bet 37 cents and a 500 word essay praising VCU as the greatest institution since the Justice League, or of your choice.
39 cents and you have a deal ;)

I don't think we should care about high schoolers (at least, high schoolers that didn't play the set); if all of high school quizbowl was included, you might be right, though. I think you'll find that, in college, plenty of people do know him for his films or, at least, first knew him for his films and then saw Rick & Morty.
UlyssesInvictus wrote:To turn this into a learning experience, I was under the impression that Cronenberg was known for his "body horror" style and Naked Lunch, but was declining in relevancy and "artistic merit" (however you want to define it) recently; I'd genuinely appreciate a comment about what he ought to be known for and to what degree of significance.
His best known films are certainly The Fly and Videodrome -- not Naked Lunch. (I don't know if I'd put Cosmopolis in art film yet, due to the recency effect/Pattinson, but that's certainly well-known as well; I'd actually assumed that Cosmopolis was the easy part of that bonus). A number of his "recent" films have just as much "artistic merit" as his earlier films. I would consider him a middle part at regular difficulty.
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Post by Matt Weiner »

I think this is a good teaching moment about why these cartoon questions are so polarizing and perhaps unwise to include in academic quizbowl most of the time. As we have discussed in the past regarding anime, it's an "all-in" phenomenon -- either you have little to no idea what it is, or you spend huge chunks of your life obsessing over it, especially doing things like surrounding yourself, in real life or online, with other obsessives, so that you build up a completely unrealistic idea of how important and popular it is. I'm using the word "it" because I believe this statement applies equally to anime and to the new hipster cartoons like Rick and Morty and Adventure Time that are often approached in the same way (while not making any similar moral judgments about liking the Cartoon Network stuff).

The reality is, of course, that almost twice as many people in the U.S. paid $10 a ticket to see a single David Cronenberg movie in the theater, before factoring in DVDs, Netflix, TV airings, online piracy, or the 15 other feature films Cronenberg has directed, than are willing to watch Rick and Morty for no marginal cost to themselves on Youtube and TV combined. Now, it's true that this doesn't account for the fact that nearly all of the Rick and Morty audience is in the "18 to 34" age group from which effectively 100% of college quizbowl is drawn, but at the same time, that's pretty much the people who are watching art films in theaters too. It also doesn't account for the fact that Cronenberg's The Fly grossed even more and in 1988 dollars at that, though I'm assuming people who were attending movies in 1988 have no impact on what current college quizbowlers know.

The same goes for the "metalbending" question -- there's a small group of people, and a small group of quizbowlers, that has an unseemly obsession with cartoons made for 9-year-olds, and the point at which it was funny to foist it upon everyone else has long been passed. I know that these questions aren't actually competing for distributional space, in that Cronenberg is misc arts and a putative question on Rick and Morty would, like the metalbending question, be trash, but it's important to have a realistic conception of what people know and why when writing any question, and this attitude that "everyone I know voted for McGovern/loves cartoons" is oftentimes indicative of deeper problems that extend into multiple categories.
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Re: Welcome to the 2014 Penn Bowl Discussion forum

Post by Matt Weiner »

Also:
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:I'm curious as to why a tossup on a central concept from a very-well known cartoon is to be labeled a "less" legitimate form of trash simply because people who are half your age can enjoy it as well.
We feel that “traditional” quizbowl trash puts an inordinate amount of emphasis on sports, video games, TV shows, and bands/artists that individual quizbowlers happen to enjoy, (i.e. do you know what this Community character did in episode X) rather than looking at broad cultural impacts of particular works, groups, genres, or institutions.
There is literally no better example of "an unimportant thing with no cultural impact" coming up simply because "individual quizbowlers happen to enjoy" it, and in spite of the fact that broad swaths of other quizbowlers do not enjoy it and have no hope of answering it, than questions on "concepts" from serialized cartoons airing on Nickelodeon.
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Re: Welcome to the 2014 Penn Bowl Discussion forum

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

UlyssesInvictus wrote: Also, I'd bet money that way more people know who he is in qb from Rick and Morty than by studying film theory...
A lot of people learn various academic things through pop culture sources that make fun of/reference them, and this is not a problem.
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Re: Welcome to the 2014 Penn Bowl Discussion forum

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

I didn't write the metalbending question and this isn't the MW tournament (which, I'll admit, failed pretty badly in its attempt to steer away from minutia - as quizbowl tends to do in general).
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Re: Welcome to the 2014 Penn Bowl Discussion forum

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The metalbending question was mine. I included it because it's something that is loved by a lot of quizbowlers (as evidenced by both going down the top 10 list of quizbowlers in last year's poll and the freshmen/sophomores on my team) and has enough of a cultural impact that it gets coverage in the WSJ. Furthermore, it's not anime, nor is it made for nine-year-olds (unlike something of similar repute among quizbowlers, "Phineas and Ferb"), so it's not clear to me that either of these criticisms apply. I also felt like it has enough of a following that most rooms would have at least one person that could answer it, but I'm happy to be told otherwise.

I do agree with the larger point that including things like anime, in which obsessives just live in an echo chamber, is unfair in academic quizbowl questions in tournaments that matter.
Last edited by Sima Guang Hater on Tue Oct 21, 2014 1:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Welcome to the 2014 Penn Bowl Discussion forum

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It's pretty clear that the only trash tossup in a tournament, inserted as tossup 1 of packet 1, is there to make a point and/or be funny, in a way that the exact same question buried among 15/15 trash in a tournament with a dedicated 1/1 trash per packet distro would not necessarily be.
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Re: Welcome to the 2014 Penn Bowl Discussion forum

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

Matt Weiner wrote:It's pretty clear that the only trash tossup in a tournament, inserted as tossup 1 of packet 1, is there to make a point and/or be funny, in a way that the exact same question buried among 15/15 trash in a tournament with a dedicated 1/1 trash per packet distro would not necessarily be.
Yes. I included it to start off the day in a lighthearted and fun way, for a question that will invariably not matter for placement (since it's the first round). I''ll cop to that.
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Re: Welcome to the 2014 Penn Bowl Discussion forum

Post by Good Goblin Housekeeping »

Could someone send me a version of the set that I can read without having to input passwords/I can actually access packet 6 to wangandr95 at google's mail service?
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Re: Welcome to the 2014 Penn Bowl Discussion forum

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

I have one, but I'll wait for the editing team to do it themselves or give permission.
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Re: Welcome to the 2014 Penn Bowl Discussion forum

Post by Cody »

This is a password list:
  1. fancyrestaurantssuck
  2. mudkips
  3. icewinebestwine
  4. harperdidnothingwrong
  5. youforgotboyibo
  6. thecakeisalie
  7. heritageminute
  8. theshinypony
  9. nobodylikesphysics
  10. kingcarolofromania
  11. canijustgobacktocanada
  12. CANADACANADACANADA
  13. newjerseyisbetterthancanada
  14. andrewjackson5ever
  15. everyonelovesphysics
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Re: Welcome to the 2014 Penn Bowl Discussion forum

Post by Good Goblin Housekeeping »

The reason I asked is because the passwords don't appear to work for 6, 13, 14, and 15.
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