The weirdest part of this shutting down of quiz bowl is the possibility of demand being outpaced by supply. Consider this: I've been involved with quiz bowl for nearly 30 years, and there has never been a time that you could not reasonably get enough teams together for another event if you had the packets. Demand has always been effectively infinite for questions. But that constant demand has prevented a more efficient question production method from forming.
Let me now state my Iron Law of Question Supply, forged from years of observation of myself and others: It is always easier to produce the surplus question for the future, than it is to create the question on demand.
For this example I'm taking a book that is closest to my hand right now: How the World Works: The Periodic Table by Anne Rooney. It's a history of chemistry focusing on the development of the periodic table. It's a basic book for non-scientists written as part of one of Barnes & Noble's collection of books that end up in the bargain section. It does its job perfectly, and it's going to be a very nice prize for someone at the end of a high school tournament someday. And I can write more questions out of that than I know can go into a single packet.
All writing in quiz bowl is constrained by a distribution. And there's not enough room in the distribution for two questions on subjects relating to the periodic table. And if I were to write my own tournament, I could maybe slip two in, three at the absolute most. And that's the truth of most sources of sufficient informational density. You can write more out of them, than you can use in one place.
For everybody but NAQT**, this is a basic problem. We conflate fulfilling the distribution with our deadline. We could take the approach that we're going to need a question about the periodic table in this next tournament, and maybe the one whose deadline is next month, and maybe the one whose deadline is next semester, and maybe next year. The distribution, the demand, will always be there. And if you compare the mental effort to produce questions, it will always be easier to write multiple questions in one sitting from a rich source compared to remembering there was still some meat to work from for a question in that book you read last month, finding the book, checking that you aren't retracing your clues, getting down to writing, and doing it again.
But here's the new thing: because tournaments have been pushed off the calendar, the demand for questions to fill tournaments has been pushed off the calendar. We don't know when we're coming back, so we don't have a demand, and that means we might realize that we can build the supply up now. It's kind of a unique moment we're in, some of the rules that have dominated quiz bowl no longer apply, it's kind of like when negative interest rates are proposed. But while we wait, you could build up knowledge of a category, while you write questions in that category for later tournaments. Which in turn gives you more time later to pick up another category, and fill that demand for later tournaments. It's a unique opportunity, which we hope to never get again.
**For NAQT writers it's a slightly different problem: it means you can do it, but topic repeat checking and feng shui checking against your own effort means it may get sent many tournaments into the future, and you may not get paid promptly for the same work.
This week’s mental preparations
I got outside this week. Not to resupply, but to clean up the back yard where a tree had fallen, and to clean up the garden plots. If you are cooped up and can’t travel, having a plant outside that you have invested your time and effort to plant is a way to mark your time, and feel you are accomplishing something. I found this out last year when I wasn’t really strong enough to make the garden happen until it was too late to plant. So instead of having something to keep tabs on in the early spring, I could only stare out at empty pots, and get frustrated at my lack of progress. This weekend, I put in strawberries, radishes from seed, onion sets, and potatoes. I have seeds to go in the other garden beds, and once the rain of the past two days clears, I’ll have all my planting for spring done, and I’ll have something to see out there that is a return to normal.
Stuff to Hear
I collected these two lists of the most famous opera arias about the same time I had the electric toothbrush version of La Donna é Mobile run through my facebook feed. The details of performance in these two articles is a bit further in depth than most opera questions end up being, but if you’re looking to put up some points in audio rounds when the writers decide to throw a curveball of opera, this is an excellent hedge. 1 2
One of the podcasts that got me into listening to podcasts is the long discontinued Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir, which covered 53 films in or near the film noir genre. It also netted me many questions written and answered during its time. With easily available streaming, this is a short course in film theory you can take while we're all home.
The Revolutions Podcast began a six month hiatus before completing the second half of its final season this week. It’s gone through ten seasons of revolutionary politics starting in England, then to the US, France, Haiti, South America, France again, all across Europe, back to France, Mexico, and finally to Russia. In that time it’s fed hundreds of questions through the system, only some of which came through me.
Stuff to Look At
One of the neat things about last week's lesson on polar curves was that I recognized that a cardioid and a parabola are inversions of each other about a circle. The idea of circle inversion is a powerful trick of geometry, and math competitions. This video has an excellent explanation of circle inversion beginning at 6:12, and the whole thing gives you an explanation of Ptolemy's theorem.
Stuff to Read
I saw a new season of Killing Eve was starting and that got me to thinking about villanelle form in poetry. There are links there to “Do not go gentle into that good night” and links to other forms of poetry, so that covers an entire swath of poetry studies for quiz purposes.
This showed up in my twitter feed a couple weeks ago. It's one of those stories I could pull if I needed to, but I've never needed to. I would note this is something that could extend the classic trash question about Washington Senators teams moving out of Washington. Of course when I looked to verify this, the only page I could find for it was the wikipedia page for the Padres. This is also an example of the Wikiization of knowledge. Histories like this were common on web pages of every major league team, or you’d find all transactions in a page of a sports almanac. But over time these web pages have lost ground to the Wiki page in search, and the original sources have disappeared from view.
Stuff to Do
The James Dyson Foundation published this group of science and engineering labs to do while you’re at home. Since they’ve done the hard work in setting the challenges, it’s something to do if your children are bored, and if you are bored and looking to learn about some physics and mechanics principles they’ve also done the work collecting that for you.
The Articles I Learned from This Week
This article on Triscuits serves to both solve and debunk the twitter mini sensation that surrounded them last week. Personally, if I’m going to snack on shredded wheat, I’m doing it with Frosted Mini-Wheats dry, yes, dry. I even like Wheat Thins better than Triscuits.
The Articles You Could Learn from This Week
The October Crisis - An incident of Canadian history that is one of the most commonly mentioned quiz bowl Canadian events.
Fine Wind, Clear Morning - One of the 36 views of Mt. Fuji
Didn’t You Learn Anything From the Last Time?
1
Key to its strength is the fact that the hydrogen atoms run along the length of the polymer, enabling it to form hydrogen bonds between fibres.
A. Give the trade name of this polymer developed by Stephanie Kwolek and used to manufacture devices such as bulletproof vests.
answer: Kevlar
B. Kevlar, like nylon and Teflon was one of the polymers developed at this chemical conglomerate.
answer: Dupont
C. The monomer of Kevlar is a member of this class of organic chemicals, broken into three groups depending on how many hydrogens have been substituted from the CON group. Kevlar is a secondary type of these compounds.
answer: amides
2
A 1932 uprising in this country saw indigenous 'mozos' rise up against the work of the Fourteen Families.
A. Name this central American nation.
answer: El Salvador
B. The Fourteen Families of El Salvador controlled the production of this consumer good on the slopes of its Santa Ana volcano.
answer: coffee
C. This uprising was crushed by the Salvadoran government and army in an action known by this Spanish term.
answer: La Matanza or The Massacre
3
Answer the following about curves in polar coordinates.
A. For these curves of the form r equals a cos the quantity k times theta if k is odd the curve has k petals but if k is even the curve has two k petals.
answer: rose curves
B. The seeming linear equation r equals a times theta defines this class of curves.
answer: (Archimendian) spirals
C. In the conic equation r equals l over 1 plus e cosine theta, when e has a value between 0 and 1 the equation defines this particular conic section.
answer: ellipse
4
One of his associates was a legendary accountant named Johnny Inkslinger.
A. Name this legendary lumberjack figure.
answer: Paul Bunyan
B. Paul Bunyan is often depicted alongside this gigantic blue ox companion.
answer: Babe
C. Like the legend of Tony Beaver further east, one tall tale about Paul Bunyan describes his doing this activity while having pork products strapped to his feet.
answer: skating (on a griddle or stove)
5
On the night of March 18, 1990, thieves stole 13 works from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
A. The Gardner Museum is in this New England city.
answer: Boston
B. Among the paintings taken was Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the only seascape painted by this Dutch master. Another stolen work was long attributed to him before being properly attributed to his student Govaert Flinck.
answer: Rembrandt van Rijn
C. Five works of this Impressionist were taken in the heist, including two works portraying horses and jockeys.
answer: Edgar Degas