Week 210: The Repetitions, not the Knowledge

And five years of not being interesting to my cardiologist.

Mar 21, 2024

Yesterday was my fifth year checkup after myocarditis, and it largely went the same as the previous yearly checkups. I get stuck in traffic, get into the hospital late, get an echo and ten minutes of visitation with the cardiologist, and then it's basically done, with a "see you next year," that basically tells me I'm no longer interesting to them. Aside from the bruise on my left side where the tech dug the ultrasound probe in, there's no trace of whatever that was that nearly killed me.

I'm going to have to concede there's one question in my life that I'm never getting the answer to, because I'm not volunteering for exploratory surgery, and the evidence appears to be gone. Our best guess remains some rare virus, but if it was it was one that left no trace on the cardiac wall, and a trace is what they expected to see. Wasn't there the first time, or any time after.

After the appointment, I drove around with a free lunch hour, and settled in compiling the things that needed to be written for practice. I had a list of guides that needed to be added to the team's shared drive before the television taping, and I spent some time doing that:

An infographic for blood typing. I knew there was one on the same website I go to for periodic tables for the team, and I put a link to that in the folder. There's only two questions that can really be asked about this for television, but they haven't been asked in the aired episodes, and I can't imagine it not appearing in this year's set.

An infographic for cloud types. I knew these were plentiful online, so I selected an appropriate one. There's only three questions to ask here, but all three are perfect picture-based questions, and if the writer is playing to the production team and a host who is also a weatherman, this seems likely to appear sometime.

A set of articles on old names of cities. I've done old names of countries for the team before this, and I know that old names of things and pseudonyms are effective last clues which will carry over into television shows.

An article on countries that moved their capitals, which is the sort of equivalent associative knowledge of a name change.

I gave the team the information for these little bits, and then I spent some time pointing out things that we went over earlier in the year to review as likely pictures to be used for questions.

- Presidential portraits and photographs

- People in the news

- Landmarks (covering the landmarks I put into a slideshow after seeing the first game of the new format)

- Paintings (covering a slideshow I put together. I told them I'd be adding a few things to it reflecting the artists that I've seen the show repeat so far.)

- Artists' self-portraits (we've discussed this before because it reduces the possible ways an answer for a picture question can go.)

- Flags and country symbols and maps

Share Holed up with a buzzer

Why should I come back to these items, because we’re approaching the point where I’m not able to find obvious big holes to patch. If you look at what I said up above, I’m having to go through things I’m guessing are likely to appear, but only have a payoff of two or three questions from now until the end of the series. I was taking my lack of diagnosis into the quizbowl practice. I would be very happy to know what it was that nearly took me out, but it wouldn’t actually change much of my life past the moment of knowing. It would be very satisfying for me in the moment to be proven right by having a question on blood types or clouds show up, but the value to the team is not that much. It would be much better for the team to hit the things that are much more likely to come up, and in high frequency, and make sure they’re ready to face those subjects. Essentially, we’re at the point where repetition and working under pressure and at speed is better for practice than adding a little more knowledge.

In line with that observation, I put together four sixty-second rounds/double category rounds, so that we could start to work those again in practice. These are less for knowledge dispersion and more for knowing

- What does the team like if given the choice? There's a two in three chance they'll get to choose a category, and it's important for them to choose what they know versus what they like. I'll test the reverse case next week to give them the other lesson (given a category, use every second between knowing what you're getting and being asked the question to figure out what the answers will be.)

- The muscle memory of work as a team, relay answer to the captain, and then the captain says the answer. The part of this that matters is speed in processing, and the captain knowing when to pass in a lost cause.

The one trick I did finally convey properly came from my attempt to imitate their 60-second round that they played on air. I limited the ten questions to fill in the blank of Shakespeare's plays. After they got slammed by the ones that aren't covered in high school, I revealed a little hard-won knowledge of this, while promising to give them the whole list in the drive. Whenever a fill-in-the-blank category appears, you can limit your search criteria to titles that aren't a single word title. Whenever a fill-in-the-blank category appears, you can eliminate a lot of answers which are similar except for a single word. So that sort of rules remove from this test most of the histories named for kings, and most of the tragedies named for their protagonists.

Between now and three weeks from now, I want to give them everything in a similar form to what they will face on TV. So study sheets are out for the moment, and practice questions that stay close to the televised format are in. In practice we went through eight 60-second rounds, four that I wrote during lunch, and four that were from practices in October. After I write this tonight, I’m going to stitch together another three 60-second rounds, and convert some study guides into quizlet flash cards and Kahoot quizzes. Between now and three weeks from now, we’re going to miss a practice, due to Easter break; since we can’t schedule a zoom call, I want to give them something they can practice on their own every day. Even if we’re playing with the house’s money, we don’t want to make it easy for anyone.

OTW

Having run to the end of the PBS series for Roman Emperors, we’ve had to double up on In Our Time this week. Between that and the History podcast OTW early use of podcasts on Diocletian and Constantine, I’m running short on that one, so it may morph into something else soon.

# Poem OTW: Sonnet 43 “How do I love thee?”

https://poets.org/poem/how-do-i-love-thee-sonnet-43

# Poet OTW: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

https://poets.org/poet/elizabeth-barrett-browning

# YouTube Terminology Video OTW