A small note I wanted to include this week before I forgot it: One of the things I noticed when cataloging things for the first book was that I expected to rise to a level that I had to include it was Nelson Mandela’s history in South Africa.
When setting up the first book, I didn’t pick the exact top 99 most frequently mentioned subjects in quiz bowl. There were some that represented a category that I needed to cover, and there were some that represented something that got mentioned frequently but weren’t in the top 99 when you accumulated all the information. But my editors and I were both surprised when Nelson Mandela wasn’t in the initial list. I had cleared a path for African history in the list, but despite being mentioned frequently in questions, Mandela was easily outdistanced by other subjects, and I ended up giving that slot to the pilgrimage of Mansa Musa[77].
The difference between the pilgrimage and Mandela’s rise wasn’t all that close, and at the time I simply explained it away with the idea that because repeat checking is automatic for he creation of packets in some of the archives I used to compile my numbers, Winnie Mandela’s career was taking up mentions that could have gone to Nelson Mandela.
Off the cuff that makes sense, but I’m less inclined to believe that is the simple reason, or that there would be a simple reason. If I had only used NAQT questions for my research, that might hold, the repeat checking there begins as mostly lexical**, so “Mandela” as text represses the results collected in a single tournament set to a single question. But since I was also looking through mentions on public archives, that control wouldn’t have been present, it would have been lots of questions that were submitted and under an editor’s control to decide if there was enough reason to include both Mandelas in questions in a set.
(** I state it as “mostly lexical” because the internal coding of the Ginseng processor allows keywords or tags to be created for subjects, and be attached to a question without being part of the text of the question. This is useful in this sort of situation, but it depends on the diligence of writer and editor to include those directives, and the automation of such tagging, which is done today, but not done during the beginning of the corpus under consideration, and has never been perfect.)
Also a confounding variable in this was the time periods of activity for both Mandelas, as Nelson Mandela temporarily retired from politics in the 2000s, while Winnie’s legal issues became prominent in that same time. Since my measure of important for the book was mentions in questions, a lot of the Mandela questions of the time period were really current events, not history. Despite the questions being generated for two completely different subjects, they’d conflict under lexical repeat checking as much as they would if they were in the same category. A lot of questions could have gone through, but didn’t.
The third confounding factor would be situations where Nelson Mandela was mentioned in a question about Winnie, only as a reference. (e.g. “Name this wife of the former South African President.”) Here a writer could refer to Nelson Mandela in a question (the stat I wanted to model) without it appearing in a fashion I would be able to count.
It was about at this point, I realized there was little I could do about this now. There’s probably some amount of error in my estimate of importance here, but it’s something I would need to run more experiments against to figure out which factors matter. It also would require coming up with parallel possible problems which could be experimental runs. Thus far I’ve only got two:
Do questions about Pierre Curie and Curie temperature restrict the throughput of questions about Marie Curie?
Do questions about John Adams the president restrict against John Quincy Adams, or all the other John Adamses of note (the composer, the astronomer, etc.)
Current events in two forms:
I went into practice this week with a goal of extending the lesson of last week, that current events could always be a fountain of new inspiration for writers, and so it never hurts to be aware of what's happening in the news. The trick for quiz bowl is to filter the ordinary news that will be useful from the news that will be important today, but change before it is used in a packet. There were two pieces of news this week which I immediately identified as useful, and so during the lesson portion of practice on Tuesday I brought both up.
Mersenne Primes - Perfect Numbers
There was an announcement of a new Mersenne prime number this week[28], and it was immediately followed by the knowledge that a new perfect number had been found. Since one is proven to prove the existence of the other, we had something that always comes up in quiz bowl:
A Mersenne Prime is a prime number of the form: Mp = 2p − 1 where p is a prime number. when p is prime and Mp is prime a perfect number, 2p − 1(2p − 1) exists, according to the Euclid-Euler theorem. A perfect number is a number whose factors not including itself sum to itself. So 6 = 1+2+3 ; 28=1+2+4+7+14 (hopefully all those super and subscripts make it through) There is a project, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) which is attempting to find the next Mersenne prime.
As a news story this is never front page news, but it’s perpetually a story on the “newest” Mersenne prime and becomes a story that writers can latch onto. As a result, there’s usually a bump in the questions on Mersenne primes starting about a month after a discovery. What’s neat about that is that the exact details of the discovery are never the news, they’re only the leadin, if they’re actually mentioned at all. Tying back into last week’s explanation: Firsts are always uniquely identifying for being the first of a class of information. Newest is uniquely identifying for the moment, but it always brings the class of information back to the writers' attention.
100 years of Rhapsody in Blue
This showed up in my news feed because it was a segment on CBS Sunday Morning. I probably should have seen this at the beginning of the year and scheduled for its exact date. Anything of sufficient note to have a 100th anniversary year has the potential to be asked about in three times during its centenary year.
At the beginning of the year when people are reviewing anniversaries for the year (As I had done when I wrote a 1924 category for the simulated television games during the run up to Seton’s playoff match.)
A month after the exact date (assuming there’s an exact date and there’s a set of writers regularly checking “on this date” sources.)
Whenever a major television news magazine honors the anniversary (as in this case)
Very rarely someone makes the effort to land it so it will appear for the exact anniversary. That requires a lot more work than people typically are willing to effort.
I included these two pieces, the commentary and the performance on the team’s reading list. I have started transferring the OTW entries into weekly documents in the team’s Google Drive, and I added Rhapsody in Blue as a music OTW. That’s one of the things I wanted to revisit with them as I sent them to the team, adding additional content so that there’s something for every category of knowledge.