Week 184: Super Saturday and everything after
plus online textbooks and the Roman Empire question
[Forcibly shortening this week’s bit because I may need the main section for a bottle episode next week. I hope it won’t be necessary, but I don’t want to overstuff this one when I will desperately need the text later.]
Super Saturday
I’m in the process of writing a letter to all the New England teams that participate in the local television programs, to encourage them to keep competing after November 1. I have done this email for a couple of years now, and the odd specificity I can imbue this email with comes from the formatting choice made by these shows. To compete on one of these programs, your team must qualify by doing well on a written (or now, powerpointed) exam, and the top N teams then get to play in the on-stage competition. The competition is called Super Saturday (or if they schedule it to fit, Super Sunday), and it was an opportunity, pre-COVID, to invite all the local schools down to the television station and get photo ops showing how much interest there is in quiz bowl competition. Since COVID, Super Saturday has been an online thing, and while it still attracts a virtual crowd (Boston’s qualifier regularly had 80-100 schools competing for 15 show slots), it’s not quite the promotion magnet that it used to be.
The relationship between NAQT and WGBH, who organizes the shows and provide their own questions to the other stations, is not quite friends or enemies, but a sort of mutual interest. It is in the mutual interest of both parties that in each state of New England, in each station’s viewing radius, for each show’s N slots available on air, there is at least N+1 and preferably more like 2N teams which could credibly compete on air and produce a program that will keep the audience engaged. The bigger the multiplier on N, the more opportunities there are to host circuit quiz bowl events, qualify for nationals, and generally offer quiz bowl opportunities in New England. As long as that number stays well above N, there’s a great opportunity not just for us, but for anyone in New England who wants quiz bowl to thrive. All you have to do is have your tournament public to those potentially competing teams before Super Saturday. Maybe that means finding the contacts at the schools, or email blasts to principals, but the more opportunities all the schools have before Super Saturday closes the television field the more teams are going to figure out that the season is just beginning.
A note on online textbooks
I was helping Catie out with a Chemistry assignment, and I noticed something about the structure of her textbook. Her online copy of the textbook was too exact a copy of the physical text. When faced with an unfamiliar term in the text, bolded, she didn’t have the instinct I had, to go to the glossary.
Because lots of textbooks were digitized as just a straight conversion, especially due to COVID creating lots of online course, lots of implied features of the printed copy of the book were not implemented properly in the virtual copy. Chief among these is the idea of accessing the glossary when you encounter an unfamiliar term. You may remember how textbooks used boldface or a right-facing triangle to indicate something is in the glossary or referred to somewhere else in the text. These were supposed to exist to serve the function that hyperlinks do in webpages, and signal to the reader that the explanation was elsewhere, usually the glossary.
The essential problems of this:
The process of turning to the glossary is no longer standardized, and it's more difficult to do. Some digitized texts make the glossary definition a tool tip or mouse over option, others make it a hyperlink, and allow the position within the document to be navigated using browser forward and back. And some of them are simply scanned without regards to navigation. Other books are split between chapters or sections and don’t include the glossary links as a link to another document. Each of these would be something that would have to be taught as part of the class itself. And since we don’t think about the necessity of learning all these methods, the idea of turn to the glossary for more information is not taught any more.
The glossary is also at a disadvantage in electronic texts, simply by being at the end of the book. Most browsers load a long document in sequence, so the last pages are loaded last. If you’re opening a sufficiently long document, and you jump to the chapter you’re supposed to read, you won’t notice the glossary is there. If you start at the beginning and wait for the table of contents and jump to it, the reference to the glossary will be overlooked.
The online textbook is not always conducive to shuttling between two points in it. The natural action in opening an online document is to have it in one tab of your browser. The less likely action is to use a second tab and switch between them (which is somewhat natural if you’re reading quiz bowl questions.) But in order to really use a glossary and the text requires being able to compare them in a second, and the way to use a browser for that is to resize, create a second window with the glossary on a tab there, and then look at both. If your natural viewing without needing a glossary is one pane of a single window, this demands you change your methods to use an occasional feature. So where this sort of thing was a natural motion for past students, one thumb acting as a bookmark and flipping the bulk of the book back and forth, The action of comparing two parts of the same document is not part of the usual student repertoire.
So how do I tie this to quiz bowl? Glossaries and the information and examples included there are becoming hidden information. Hidden information is the sort of thing that is attractive to the writer who realizes it is hidden. As the virtual copy of the textbook becomes more ubiquitous, different parts of the text book contain the information hidden in plain sight, and become the basis of questions.
The other thing that made this edition shorter was that I was all set to answer this same question in this edition, and somebody this morning beat me to it.
I don’t necessarily think about the Roman Empire as much as most men, but that’s due to two things:
The one course I took on ancient history in college specifically ended at the founding of the Roman Empire, so when I think about Rome it’s about the Republic.
I played quiz bowl so there’s a lot of history competing for that piece of head space.
So here’s my list, without a neat diagram in two dimensions.
Boston Molasses Disaster
You can’t go through quiz bowl without finding out about this and having it invade your thoughts ar the oddest moments.
The Isabella Stewart Gardner museum heist and art theft and fraud in general
I don’t watch or listen to true crime, unless there’s a painting involved.
Whether Warren Zevon knew he was dying during the making of the 2001 album My Ride's Here.
While thinking if this one last weekend, I ended up realizing I had missed the 20th anniversary of Zevon’s death. I knocked out a list of my 20 favorite songs, and then immediately realized nobody needs that.
The concept of infinitely fracturing multiple timelines.
I spend an inordinate amount of time working out where this change to the timestream would have led, where a different decision would have led me in life. From this pondering I’ve come up with one rule: we do not live in the darkest timeline because we are able to consider the possibility of a darker timeline.
The fact that there are multiple disastrous Johnstown Floods.
Between this and the platform collapse during Andrew Johnson’s Swing Around the Circle, you could totally believe Johnstown has always been cursed.
Don't Tell the Newfoundlanders
The best, most believable conspiracy theories stem from how small and petty they are. And it’s hard to get any pettier than a conspiracy between Pre-and-Post WWII Britain and the US to weld Newfoundland onto Canada.
The Villa raid and the Punitive Expedition
This is the first piece of Mexican history I taught Catie.
How the fonts used for signs in public buildings gives you a fix on the date of construction.
I blame reading “Outside Lies Magic” and the first Macintoshes having font editors that were cheaper to buy than programming languages.
Whether 1990's NIMBY efforts to push Walmart out of small towns ultimately doomed local businesses they were trying to protect, by forcing the creation of Super Walmarts which drew from many adjacent small towns, and then allowing the dominance of dollar stores after the local stores were convinced their days were numbered.
One day I noticed every IGA in my area was gone and replaced by a Dollar General. This theory stems from that and the bloody fight Ithaca waged against Walmart while I was in college.
The things that, despite my working life as an engineer, I still think of as ideas from space: Rolamite Bearings, Hydraulic actuators, Aerogels, Hoberman structures, Pykrete aka HMS Habakkuk.
All of these are deadly time sinks and are examples of “what you think the people practicing witchcraft think is witchcraft.”
Finding the third tub of books I packed from my apartment in my garage.
I know it’s down there, and it’s got to have at least ten books I’d love to have on my bookshelf. But there’s about four other tubs on top of that one, maybe…
The sad history of Paraguayan dictatorships, specifically the War of the Triple Alliance.
One of those ten in the tub is “At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig,” a history and travelogue of Paraguay. In the taxonomy of WarDads, I’m clearly Disasters of WarDad.
Why there should be a feature on mapping software allowing you to list to what that building used to be.
This wouldn’t make any money, but if I could pull up the map where I am and say, “Didn’t that used to be a Burger Chef?” and it tells me that was a block over, I’d settle so many arguments with myself.