ACF Fall 2008: The Physical Impossibility of Joris-Karl Huysmans in the Mind of Someone Living
Packet by MIT A (Grace Li, Jason Trigg, Ylaine Gerardin, Zach Thomas, Chris Kennedy, Annelise Beck, Will Uspal, and Mark Seifter), and South Carolina (Joseph Montoya, Robert Harden, Katie Baehler, Preston Floyd, and Eric Douglass)
Edited by Andrew Hart, Rob Carson, Trevor Davis, Ted Gioia, and Gautam Kandlikar
Tossups
1. Herbert Spencer wrote about some Reasons for Dissenting from the Philosophy of this man, who divided history into the military aim and the industrial aim in Plan of Scientific Studies Necessary for the Reorganization of Society. His collaboration with Saint-Simon influenced his belief that the progress of societies started with animism, polytheism, and monotheism. Those divisions make up the Theological stage, which was followed by the Metaphysical stage in his three-stage model of societal development, which culminated in a purely scientific stage. For 10 points, name this author of Course of Positive Philosophy, the founder of positivism and father of sociology.
ANSWER: Auguste Comte
2. An equation named for this man gives the rate of change of the equilibrium constant with respect to temperature as delta H standard over R T squared. One paper by this man cited the isomerism of maleic acid and fumaric acid as evidence for a theory independently proposed by J. A. Bel concerning the tetrahedral nature of the carbon atom. One quantity named for him is a measure of the effective number of particles in solution. That quantity is related to the degree of dissociation, is important in colligative properties such as osmotic pressure, and is known as this man's namesake “factor.” For 10 points, name this Dutch scientist who won the first Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
ANSWER: Jacobus Henricusvan't Hoff
3. One accusation of treason against this man rested on him possibly owning his own railroad car, and he cast an abstaining vote when his Jewish wife Polina Zemchuzhina was accused of treason. This man joined Lazar Kaganovich and Georgy Malenkov in an attempt to bring Nikolai Bulganin to power, becoming one of the “Anti-Party Group” denounced by Khrushchev. He then served for a while as ambassador to Mongolia after being demoted from his post of Soviet Foreign Minister. For 10 points, name this man who signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi representative Joachim von Ribbentrop and was the namesake of some anti-tank “cocktails.”
ANSWER: Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov [or Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skryabin]
4. This composer’s tone poems include one in which the title demon murders a child, The Water Goblin, and his first symphony is titled after the “Bells of Zlonice.” He quotes the song series “The Cypresses” at the end of his Cello Concerto in B minor, which is probably the most frequently-played cello concerto today. This composer also wrote the American String Quartet, which was inspired by his time in Spillville, Iowa; that also provided inspiration of a symphony he wrote that was based on the Song of Hiawatha and African American spirituals. For 10 points, name this composer of the Carnival Overture, some Slavonic Dances, and his 9th symphony, From the New World.
ANSWER: Antonin Leopold Dvorak
5. This figure once launched Maricha across the ocean, after which he killed Subahu with his bow Kodanda in order to allow Vishwamitra to conduct a sacrifice. A son of Vali and Tara named Angada served as one of his messengers, and this figure befriended Guha, king of the Nishaadas. He forced his wife to climb a funeral pyre to test her purity, and after Kaikeyi got this figure banished, Bharata put his sandals at the foot of his throne. He helped recover the kingdom of Sugriva and was accompanied by his brother Lakshmana and the vanara Hanuman to fight the rakshasa king of Lanka, Ravana. For 10 points, identify this husband of Sita and seventh avatar of Vishnu, the subject of an epic by Valmiki.
ANSWER: Ramachandra [accept Phrea Ream, Phra Ram, Phra Lam, or Rajah Bantugan]
6. This man established the rurales to combat bandits, and Ramon Corral and Jose Limantour were among the cientificos who advised him. This man chose Manuel Gonzalez as his handpicked successor, and he reached his highest office by defeating Sebastian de Lerdo after issuing his Plan of Tuxtepec. His downfall was accompanied by a rebellion organized by Pascual Orozco and the declaration of the Plan of San Luis Potosí by Francisco Madero, who signed the Treaty of Ciudad Juarez with this man, forcing him into exile. For 10 points, name this mestizo Mexican ruler from Oaxaca (wah-HAH-cah), who waspresident from 1884 until 1911.
ANSWER: Porfirio Diaz
7. Veronese changed the title of his Last Supper to Feast in the House of Levi after he was told to replace one of these with Mary Magdalene. Two flowers, two pens, and some sheet music lay by another one of these at the bottom left of the portrait of Madame de Pompadour by Francois Boucher. The periodic motion of a woman’s feet and one of these can be found in a painting by Giacomo Balla titled the Dynamism of one of these, and another one of this animal is curled up at the foot of the bed as a woman rummages through a chest in the background in Titian's Venus of Urbino. For 10 points, a series of sixteen paintings by C. M. Coolidge depicts what animals playing poker?
ANSWER: dogs
8. This man lends his name to an integration method which finds optimal points described by roots of the orthogonal polynomial, his namesake quadrature. One unit named for him is equal to ten to the negative fourth Weber per meter squared. A statement named for him implies the non-existence of magnetic monopoles. Another statement developed by him yields the universal gravitational law when applied to the gravitational field and reduces to Coulomb's law for point charges. For 10 points, identify this scientist whose most famous law states that the net flux through a closed surface is proportional to the charge enclosed by the surface.
ANSWER: Carl Friedrich Gauss
9. The Leaf Hills located in this state’s Otter Tail County are home to its highest point, Inspiration Peak. The River named for this state rises from the Big Stone Lake and flows by towns such as St. Peter and New Ulm. International Falls is located near this state’s northern border, whose “Northwest Angle” is the only mainland region north of the 49th parallel. This state’s Lake Itasca is the source of the Mississippi River, and the St. Louis River flows into Lake Superior near its third largest city, Duluth. Bordered by Iowa to the south and Wisconsin to the east, for 10 points, identify this state with capital at St. Paul and whose largest city is Minneapolis.
ANSWER: Minnesota
10. One character in this work is mocked when Kat shouts “Change at Lohne” and attacks him with a bedcover when he is coming home from his favorite pub. One of the protagonist’s friends mourns that he will never become head forester, and gives away his boots. Some of the main character’s other friends include the locksmith Tjaden and the peat-digger Haie. The protagonist feels obligated to lie to Kemmerich’s mother, and stabs Gerard Duval when they both hide in the same shell hole. The protagonist dies on an otherwise uneventful day. For 10 points, name this work about Paul Baumer’s World War I experiences, written by Erich Maria Remarque.
ANSWER: All Quiet on the Western Front [or Im Westen nichts Neues]
11. Topological ones could use anyons to avoid the problem of decoherence. These objects use Hadamard gates, and the no cloning theorem makes error correction difficult for them. One of them is used in the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm, and one of them allows the use of Grover's algorithm to search through an unsorted database in sublinear time. They can use Shor's Algorithm to factor primes in “order log cubed of n” time, and their individual elements are represented by two-state systems. Loss and Vincenzo have proposed one constructed of a certain type of dot. For 10 points, name these devices that store information in the form of superpositions of ones and zeroes, in qubits.
ANSWER: quantum computers
12. The use of public funds by religious schools are banned by this man’s namesake amendments. He was Speaker of the House for three terms, though a scandal involving the Little Rock & Fort Smith Railway caused him to lose the presidential nomination to Rutherford B. Hayes. This man was Secretary of State for both James Garfield and Chester Arthur, and he was hurt in his attempt to become president by Reverend Burchard, who spoke of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” For 10 points, name this “Plumed Knight” and “Continental Liar from the State of Maine” who was defeated by Grover Cleveland in 1884.
ANSWER: James Gillespie Blaine
13. In one of this author’s works, Margery Meanwell grows up to become a schoolteacher. In another of his works, Edwin becomes a recluse beside the Tyne and Angelina must seek him dressed as a boy. In addition to “The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes” and the “The Hermit,” he also wrote about the village of Auburn, which had become depopulated because of a sudden influx of money, in “The Deserted Village.” His other works include one in which Kate Hardcastle meets Charles Marlow, and a work about Mr. Burnell, who is actually Squire Thornhill. For 10 points, name this man, who wrote She Stoops to Conquer and The Vicar of Wakefield.
ANSWER: Oliver Goldsmith
14. With Jacobi and Bellman, this man names an equation central to optimal control problems, and he names a theorem which implies that a square matrix A satisfies its own characteristic polynomial, along with Cayley. He names a cycle on a graph such that the path visits each vertex exactly once, and he is also the namesake of an operator which is the Legendre transform of the Lagrangian operator and gives the total energy of a system. Better known for the creation of a division ring where i squared, j squared, and k squared equal negative one, for 10 points, identify this Irish mathematician who developed the mathematics of quaternions.
ANSWER: William Rowan Hamilton
15. In one of this man’s works, Thomas Hudson comes to terms with the death of his kids and hunts for a damaged German boat. He wrote a work in which Harry Morgan runs contraband, and also wrote of Robert and Maria, who clash with Paolo, in the stories “Islands in the Stream” and “True at First Light.” Another short story by this author sees Al and Max discuss murdering the boxer Ole Andreson. That work is “The Killers,” which includes his recurring character Nick Adams. This man’s longer works include To Have and Have Not and one in which Manolin assists the fisherman Santiago. For 10 points, name this author of A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea.
ANSWER: Ernest Hemingway
16. Sandhoff disease is related to this disease, and the metabolism of 4-methyl-lumbelli-ferone is used in the biochemical test which detects this disease. It is caused by a mutation in the HEXA gene, which leads to a deficiency of hexosaminidase A. Compounds made of sialic acid and glycosphingolipids called gangliosides are not metabolized in this condition, which results in the “cherry-red” spot that can be seen on the retina of patients with this condition. For 10 points, name this fatal genetic disorder that mostly affects infants and is especially common among Ashkenazi Jews.
ANSWER: Tay-Sachs disease
17. Stone cannonballs line the paths of its outer courtyard, and its South Gallery is home to the Deesis (day-eh-sis) Mosaic. A ring of forty windows separated by ribs is found at the base of its most famous feature, which is supported by four pendentives to which Sinan added buttresses. The Fossatis gave it its red and yellow exterior, as well as its calligraphic roundels, and it was originally designed by Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus. A mihrab, a minbar, and some minarets were added after its conversion to a mosque in 1453. For 10 points, name this church with a giant dome, commissioned by Justinian and dedicated to the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople.
ANSWER: the Hagia Sophia [accept Ayasofya; accept Church of the Holy Wisdom before it is mentioned]
18. In one story, this man saved the town of Gubbio by making a pact with an attacking wolf. After spending time as a Perugian captive, he saw a vision of a hall full of cross-marked armor, which encouraged him to travel to Apulia. After 40 days' fasting on the mountain La Verna, he saw a six-winged seraph, after which he received the stigmata, according to his namesake Fioretti. He praised Sister Death, Brother Fire, and Brother Moon in his Canticle of the Sun, and was credited with inventing the Nativity creche scene. For 10 points, identify this Catholic patron saint of animals, the founder of a namesake group whose first two orders are the Poor Clares and the Friars Minor.
ANSWER: St. Francis of Assisi [prompt on Francis; accept San Francesco]
19. The beginning of this work discusses a town called The Motley Cow where one character gives a sermon “On the Despisers of the Body” claiming that the enlightened one knows that he is body and nothing more. Socrates is alluded to in the section “On the Flies of the Marketplace” and important themes include those of eternal recurrence and the will to power. Subtitled “A Book for All and None,” it begins when a prophet descends from the mountains to preach about the Ubermensch, and it reintroduced its author’s earlier statement from The Gay Science, “God is dead.” For 10 points, name this philosophical work, named for a dualistic prophet, by Nietzsche.
ANSWER: Thus Spake Zarathustra [or Also sprach Zarathustra; or Thus Spoke Zarathustra]