Week 165: Septic, Piracy, Hardness, Television
The value of finding good sources, and then combining them.
Finding the Mona Lisa among the Sewage
This week found me in the basement and garage surveying the damage done by a clogged septic line. We’ve had this happen before, and we’ve gotten around it before, with a travel schedule going to my parents’ to use the shower and toilet, and while it’s painful, it’s manageable for a couple of days until the plumber brings the drain snake. We stopped it extra early this time, with only a smell in the garage bay. And this time we managed to find the clog in the last section of the pipe before the septic tank, and water spray it out, leading to it solving the problem, hopefully permanently.
While surveying the water level of the incursions, and applying a copious amount of Clorox to the concrete, I noticed that very close to this was one of the tubs of books from my old apartment. Before I got married, we put my entire library of books for quiz bowl in storage, and while I’ve raided the cardboard boxes in the basement, I haven’t gone into the Rubbermaid tubs in the basement. Of course I had to check to make sure the tub was undamaged, but I had an ulterior motive, I wanted to find the one tub which contained The Annotated Mona Lisa.
I found this art book in 1998, after my playing days, but it always struck me as one of the highest density sources for visual fine arts questions. And since I had been working the team through fine arts this semester, and their music appreciation elective was covering the other half of the fine arts distribution, I figured I’d look for it to give some study material that would cover more than I would feel comfortable going over.
(The tub didn’t have it, but it did have a mythology book I’ve been wanting to find for years. I’ve quoted this passage on Leib-Olmai for its bizarre translation of the role of the bear god’s antagonist, which has the same quality as the translation of “barbarian-quelling generalissimo” for shogun.)
(I’m sure you have questions, I have no answers except it reads more like a plagiarism trap than actual scholarship.)
I then resolved to look up The Annotated Mona Lisa on the internet, figuring I might be able to find a cheap secondhand copy. I then noticed that some copies had been scanned and made available on the internet. I don’t have a problem with the publication of things out of copyright in this way, but I recognize there’s a problem sometimes with the fair use of such things, and this book is clearly still in copyright. Just recently I saw that The Internet Archive was tagged for doing something similar.
So if anyone asks where my team is reading The Annotated Mona Lisa from, I’ll just tell them it’s not coming from some rival program to Fillmore High School from Head of the Class, it’s just coming from the copy I’ve had in my garage. And if you need to read that copy from…my garage… I think you know where you can get it…. my garaaage.
Besides it’s got that secondhand Clorox smell on it right now, you would agree this is better.
Mohs Hardness Scale and the Periodic Table
For this week’s handout during practice, I combined this brilliant chart of the Mohs hardness scale with several charts of the periodic table. I say brilliant because most versions of the Mohs scale simply use the numbers and the minerals, and this expands on it several ways, that I found when I had these in front of me I was able to do an extended 15 minute riff on the relations between the two that covered the beginning of the chemistry class the team will have next year, with material that won’t be covered at all in class, but will be useful in quiz bowl. To wit:
The periodic table and the Mohs Hardness Scale are two of the most orderly sets of information in the entire quiz bowl universe, and they both can show up in circuit canonical clues, and television canonical clues. We have to cover both at some point, might as well cover them the same week.
While this lacks the chemical formulas of some Mohs’ listings, it’s not hard to list the key components of things like salt, quartz, gypsum, calcite, diamond, etc. and then digress into their chemical formulas, which are their usual last clue.
The presence of lots of ore minerals of metals allows the introduction of a mid-level high school clue for an element. Ores aren’t typically last clues, because the focus of earth science and geology in high school isn’t usually to point people to work in mining, and industrial uses of chemistry are usually saved for college courses. But committing to memory associations like “Bauxite is an ore of aluminium, pyrite is fool’s gold, iron sulphide,” is never not useful in quiz bowl.
This chart, by showing the relative position of some metallic elements, manages to show clues that apply to groups of elements like the comparative softness of the alkali metals, and the comparative strength of carbide compounds.
Having both diamond and graphite listed allows you to introduce the notion of allotropes with an example of the effects on material properties.
Listing kyanite allows the subject of anisotropy to be introduced to students. While this doesn’t come up much as an answer, the concept of anisotropy is used to clue lots of scientific concepts, materials, and properties.
Showing boron nitride close to diamond allows the concept of atomic radius to be explored, and how the small difference in atomic radius is less stressful to a crystal structure than a much larger or smaller atom. That can lead to a lesson on crystals, defects, and strength of materials, or even how defects in crystals are exploited to create transistors.
This is a sort of edge work abutting geology and chemistry, but the connection between the two is not taught often enough, and pays off handsomely in quiz bowl.
Hopefully by now you’ve seen CBS Mornings’ report on televised quiz bowl, but if not I’ll attach a link here.
We were consulted on this for the statistics, but I kind of have to temper the bleak forecast conclusion drawn by the statistics. Nowhere in the segment do they mention COVID, which nailed a couple of the programs, and the number of shows which adapted to the emergency conditions is pretty high, higher than lots of other types of shows. And while they’re correct for six shows disappearing in recent years, that was not accounting for the net changes. I know we’re supplying three new programs formed during the past two years, including a continuation of a program that ended with the retirement of the producer and host when taping ended in February 2020. Overall, from where we were to where we are isn’t all that different from any other four year stretch in terms of program creation or extinction. I would not have predicted that when I started writing this.