BARGE 2012
Edited by Chris Ray
Packet by Minnesota B (Eliza Grames, Mike Cheyne, Gaurav Kandlikar, Robin Heinonen) and Yale A (Matt Jackson, Kevin Koai, Ashvin Srivatsa)
1. The speaker of this poem twice refers to the “doors where my heart was used to beat / So quickly” in reference to a friend's former home. One section of this poem addresses a “dear heavenly friend that canst not die, / Mine, mine, for ever, ever mine.” The speaker notes that “we live within the stranger’s land, / And strangely falls our Christmas-eve” in the last of the three descriptions of Christmas that mark the passage of time in this work. In one climactic section of this poem, the speaker reaches (*) “empyreal heights of thought” upon reading “those fall’n leaves which kept their green, / The noble letters of the dead.” Nature is described as “red in tooth and claw” by this poem, which inspired an iambic tetrameter quatrain with rhyme scheme ABBA to be called its namesake stanza. Its best-known lines come from section 27, in which the speaker concludes, “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.” For 10 points, name this 133-part poem on the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
ANSWER: In Memoriam A. H. H.
2. Applying a strong enough magnetic field to these substances can deform them through the Freedericksz transition. Linking units with triple bonds are often chosen for synthesizing a “low molar mass” variety of these substances, which must necessarily be rigid. A commonly studied one, 8CB, has four distinct regions set apart by three lines in a temperature versus pressure plot. They require a director to (*) orient themselves and are subdivided into calamitic and discotic, or thin-shaped and disc-shaped, species. Cholesteric, nematic, and smectic are the most common phases of these mesophase compounds, which can be thermotropic or lyotropic and were discovered when two distinct melting points were observed. For 10 points, name these substances in a state of matter between solid and liquid, which are polarized to form displays in flatscreen TVs.
ANSWER: liquid crystals
3. During this conflict, a cannon called “Old Kickapoo” repeatedly overshot a building it intended to destroy, forcing forcing the Kickapoo Rangers to abandon it and go room-by-room setting fire to a hotel founded by Eli Thayer’s company. The so-called “Bogus Laws” helped trigger this conflict, in which Jacob Branson’s arrest and the shooting of Charles Dow triggered a sub-war centered on a certain river valley. David Atchison was a Congressional agitator for this conflict, which saw Henry Pate’s followers lose the Battle of Black Jack. Wooden crates carried (*) breech-loading Sharps rifles to one side of this conflict, which included the Wakarusa side theater, at the behest of a Brooklyn minister. Those “Beecher's Bibles” were employed in this conflict, which saw the drafting of controversial documents named for Wyandotte and Lecompton. Featuring the “border ruffians,” for 10 points, name the violent term for this 1850s conflict that saw the issue of slavery divide a territory that included the city of Topeka.
ANSWER: Bleeding Kansas [or Bloody Kansas; accept the Border War before “border;” accept equivalents conveying civil strife in Kansas; do NOT accept “the Civil War”]
4. This text posits that heirs to their fathers’ wealth are no different from slaves as long as they are in their childhood, shortly before comparing Abraham’s servant Hagar to a mountain. Its author describes himself as having received the “right hand of fellowship” from those men who were “pillars of the church.” That author recalls meeting a man called “Cephas” in describing the incident at Antioch from Acts, in which Cephas is another name for Peter. According to this book, we must sow seeds which please the Spirit since “A man (*) reaps what he sows.” This text argues in its author’s large handwriting that Christ lifted the “schoolmaster” and “curse” that is Moses’s law; it therefore attacks circumcision as a misstep for faithful Christian converts. For 10 points, name this Pauline epistl addressed to a church in the mainland of modern-day Turkey that precedes Ephesians and follows Second Corinthians.
ANSWER: Epistle to the Galatians
5. The composer quipped that his inspiration for the second of these works was “twenty-five rubles,” and reportedly said he wrote the third of these pieces “for elephants.” Rhapsody in Blue influenced the fourth of these works, a poorly-received piece that was its composer’s first work following an exile. The first of these works opens with a brass fanfare followed by a cascade of Grieg-inspired triplet chords by the soloist; that work is in F-sharp minor and was the composer’s first major work. Their composer wrote two versions of the (*) cadenza in the Allegro ma non tanto first movement of the third of these works: One an ossia version dominated by massive chords, the other a lighter version used in the premiere. A soloist uses a series of bell-like block chords to open the C minor second of these pieces. One work often included among these is a set of variations on the 24th violin caprice of another composer. For 10 points, name these solo keyboard works by the composer of Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini.
ANSWER: piano concertos by Sergei Vasielievich Rachmaninoff
6. Lipatov appears in two multibly-eponymous equations regarding this force, DGLAP and BFKL. Entities acted on by this force can mix with its carriers to form a phase of matter which is detected by jet quenching, and which may be synthesized by the collision of ultra-relativistic heavy ions. A weaker form of this force is non-relativistically modeled by a screened Coulomb potential containing an exponential term with the product of the (*) pion mass and particle distance as an argument. That exclusively-attractive form is known as the Yukawa interaction or the “residual” form of this force, and is responsible for the stability of atomic nuclei. This force, modeled by an SU(3) gauge group, exhibits confinement, in which particles with color charge cannot be isolated due to the strength of this force. For 10 points, name this fundamental force described by QCD, in which gluons mediate interactions between quarks.
ANSWER: strong interaction [or strong nuclear force; accept color force before “color,” prompt after]
7. One of this novel’s characters recalls a book of train timetables memorized by his father; that man observes the balcony of an old man who spits at cats in the street. This novel features a bureaucrat who often exclaims “hats off!” and constantly rewrites the first sentence of a book in which a woman rides a horse through flowery avenues. An opera audience panics in this novel when the male soloist in Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice stumbles and falls. Seeing Othon’s son (*) die when Castel’s serum fails prompts the second sermon in this novel delivered by Father Paneloux, and it sees the journalist Rambert try to escape with aid from the smuggler Cottard, who tries to hang himself near its start. Joseph Grand and Tarrou join the “sanitary squads” in this novel months after thousands of rats begin to die in the streets of Oran. Doctor Bernard Rieux is the protagonist of, for 10 points, what novel by Albert Camus about the titular epidemic?
ANSWER: The Plague [or La peste]
8. G.F. Talbot's negotiation of a monopoly over this resource prompted a protest supported by the bazaari merchants and Jalal-al-Din al-Afghani which culminated in a pivotal fatwa issued by Mirza Shirazi; that protest against Nasir al-Din's Qajar regime and set the stage for the 1905 Constitutional Revolutions in Iran. A veto of the “Two Penny Act” concerning this resource led to the Parson's Cause case, won by a young (*) Patrick Henry. The subject of a “Counterblaste” by James I, its Y1 variety was denied by the Supreme Court as sufficient reason to subject this resource to FDA regulation. A key site for harvesting this resource, Varina, was set up by its most famous proponent, a man who married a daughter of Powhatan named Pocahontas. John Rolfe made Virginia a major center of, for 10 points, what cash crop that provides the nicotine content of cigarettes?
ANSWER: Tobacco
9. This book attacks the engram for being a pseudoscientific cloak for the idea that the past has become nothing unless cellular changes have stored the memory. This text terms the background information that limits the actions of mankind “facticity.” The world is an infinite series of finite appearances according to this book, which opens by claiming that the (*) noumenon simply doesn’t exist and that we can perceive the external world, contra Kant. In the framework put forth by this work, the biggest threatening influence is another’s gaze. Contrasting being-in-itself with being-for-itself, this book warns against making one’s existence entirely a social role, which its author termed “bad faith.” For 10 points, name this book that urges people to not despair at the void, written by Jean-Paul Sartre.
ANSWER: Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology [or L'Être et le néant : Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique]
10. A proof of the asymptotically-fastest algorithm for performing this process uses a theorem concerning the existence of integer sequences lacking three terms in arithmetic progression, as well as Schonhage’s theorem. The first known algorithm for this process that ran in sub-classical time was numerically unstable and employed an analogue of Gauss’s algorithm for complex multiplication to achieve a big-O exponent of log-base-2-of-7. Because this operation is associative, re-ordering sequences of this operation in a recursive process whose name includes the term (*) “chain” can result in improved runtimes. Strassen’s algorithm and the Coppersmith-Winograd algorithm are used to perform this operation, which is performed twice to execute a change of basis. This operation corresponds to composing linear transformations. For 10 points, name this non-commutative binary operation on matrices in which the number of columns of the first matrix must equal the number of rows of the second matrix.
ANSWER: matrix multiplication [accept word forms like “multiplying matrices”; accept just multiplication after “matrix” is read]
11. This figure pulled golden wool from brambles and ants helped her to sort seeds cast on the floor by her jealous mother-in-law. An eagle helped this figure obtain a pitcher of water from the origin of the river Styx, while a talking tower told this figure to give a barley cake to Cerberus on her trip to visit Persephone. This woman dripped burning lamp oil on her husband, the father of her child (*) Hedone. She jumped off a cliff and was carried to a beautiful palace by the West Wind where she was waited on by invisible servants, but persuaded by her jealous sisters to look at her husband as he slept. This woman was compared to the goddess of love, invoking the anger of Aphrodite, her mother-in-law. The myths about this woman mostly stem from an episode in The Golden Ass, as original Greek traditions describe her as the butterfly wing-sporting goddess of the soul. For 10 points, name this figure who everyone at least agrees was the lover of Eros, or Cupid.
ANSWER: Psyche
12. One play by this author has a cast of characters named after characters from Antigone, La Mandragola, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and Woyzeck. The title character of another of his plays strips naked and yells “Look at me! I am a man. I've got legs. I can run with a wheelbarrow full of cement!” He wrote about a political prisoner who has nothing to send back to his wife besides the title garment in a play collected with another work about Shark's extortion of Father Higgins and Tobias. A character reminisces about flying a (*) kite and discusses the English essay of his charge in the best known work by this playwright of The Coat and No-Good Friday, who used Styles’s photography studio as the setting for another play whose protagonist adopts the guise of a corpse he finds in an alley. The stage is mooned in his most famous play by this author of Sizwe Banzi is Dead, which centers on Sam and Willie, the servants of Hally. For 10 points, name this author of MASTER HAROLD... and the Boys, a South African playwright.
ANSWER: Athol Fugard
13. A Portuguese conversation in this series leads two characters to joke that a hentai enthusiast is “from Brazil” before realizing he actually is a clone of Adolf Hitler. A character in this show with The Destruction of Sennacherib tattooed on her back was once assaulted with her own dolphin puppet. A script greenlit as a sequel to Mandingo is written by two characters in this show, one of whom once lamented a failure to come up with the term “Stir Fridays” in a conversation with the protagonist, who goes on a weed-filled (*) killing spree after discovering that his chemotherapy drugs are being replaced with sugar pills and Zima. The most competent character in this show is often called “Truckasaurus” because of her massive hands and is enraged to find that Cheryl is sleeping with the sex-addicted comptroller Cyril Figgus. Lana Kane works this show's title figure, codenamed “Duchess,” under the command of his mother Malory at ISIS. For 10 points, identify this FX cartoon about Sterling, the titular secret agent and tremendous douchebag.
ANSWER: Archer
14. Hilarious stories by this man include an account of a singular giant whale named Porphyrion that disrupted his nation’s sea trade for over fifty years. This man surmised that his monarch was the “lord of the demons” in a work opening with stories about the adulterous Antonina. This author penned a five-book survey that heavily lauds aqueducts, his Buildings, which also described a team of workers under (*) Anthemius of Tralles.His best known work, called the Anecdota in Latin, famously tells of a lurid entertainer who prayed for more than three orifices to satisfy herself and performed in popular sex shows with geese before marrying way, way up. This man also used that work to criticize a confiscatory construction project in the wake of the Nika riots. For 10 points, name this author who scathingly attacked the Byzantine Empress Theodora and her husband Justinian in his Secret History.
ANSWER: Procopius of Caesarea
15. Elevated dGTP levels are toxic to these cells, resulting in their depletion in PNP-deficiency. These cells mediate delayed-type hypersensitivity reactions, while a variety of them predominantly found in the submucosal lymphoid tissues is known as the “gamma-delta” type due to the composition of their namesake receptors. They’re not NK cells, but the (*) CD8+ type of them secretes perforin to induce cytolysis. Autoreactive ones are eliminated in a process called negative selection, and Interleukin-2 is released when antigens associated to Class I MHC molecules bind to their namesake receptors. HIV infects the CD4+ variety of these cells, which are a subset of the “helper” variety.. Responsible for cell-mediated immunity, for 10 points, name these white blood cells which mature in and are named for the thymus.
ANSWER: T cells [or T lymphocytes; or thymocytes before “thymus” is read]
16. A lion lays on the ground next to a figure sitting on a rock with a spear in this artist’s A Faun and His Family. A man in a red cap on the left stands on a skeleton and a lion while the central figure gushes blood on three men standing before tents at right in this artist’s Christ on the Cross. A bow and quiver rest on a tree while a nude woman reclines on the grass below a rock in this artist’s Nymph of the Spring. This man abandoned a traditional signature in favor a winged (*) serpent emblem awarded to him by Frederick III of Saxony, through his sponsorship this man painted Maximilian and a young Charles V. This artist of the Glagow Madonna depicted his most famous subject and friend in an all-black outfit and hat, and also designed the woodcuts for that man's translation of the New Testament. For 10 points, name this German artist associated with Martin Luther and the Reformation.
ANSWER: Lucas Cranach the Elder
17. Two characters in this story are described as having bad moods that take shifts like guards, as one has indigestion in the mornings and the other is drunk in the afternoons. Near the end of this story, the narrator pays the “grub-man” to look after the title figure. The narrator’s reading of Jonathan Edwards and Joseph Priestley inspires a brief period of charitability towards that figure, whom the narrator unexpectedly finds in his chambers one Sunday morning. One character in this work takes his nickname from the (*) cakes that turn out to be the title character’s only sustenance, and it ends with the narrator reporting a rumor that the title character once worked at the Dead Letter Office in Washington. Ginger Nut, Nippers, and Turkey are the other employees at the law offices where this story’s title character briefly works. For 10 points, name this short story about a copyist who repeatedly responds, “I would prefer not to,” written by Herman Melville.