VA
2005 Terrapin Invitational Tournament
October 22, 2005 – University of Maryland
Tossups by Virginia (Leo Wolpert)
1. A Jodeci song plays in the background of this album’s interlude, in which a woman calls the artist a “biscuit-suckin’ motherfucker.” Its depressing songs includes one in which he finds his woman shot in the heart, “Me & My Bitch;” another in which he claims to “hear death knockin’ at my front door,” “Everyday Struggles;” the title track where he claims his life is played out like the jheri curl;” and the final track in which the artist depicts shooting himself, “Suicidal Thoughts.” For 10 points, name this album containing the more upbeat “Unbelieveable,” “Juicy” and “Big Poppa,” a Notorious B.I.G. work whose title implies Biggie’s acceptance of his own demise.
ANSWER: Ready to Die
2. Dalziel Hammick showed that this process in alpha-trioxymethylene results in polyoxymethylene, which was later used as a commercial polymer. Phenarsazine chloride undergoes it readily, making it useful as a chemical warfare agent, and uranium hexafluoride undergoes it to separate uranium isotopes. The Hortvet device can determine the temperature at which this occurs, and so-called “flowers of sulfur” are created by it. An apophorometer uses it to identify minerals, and hoar crystals always grow by this process. Occurring at temperatures and pressures below the triple point, for 10 points, name this phase exemplified by dry ice, in which a solid changes directly into a gas.
ANSWER: sublimation
3. Future IOC president Avery Brundage’s Nazi sympathies caused him to be booted from this organization, which was based on four principles, including building an “impregnable defense,” and four objectives, one of which was to “provide sane leadership.” Founded by Quaker Oats heir Robert Douglas Stuart Jr. and first chaired by General Robert E. Wood, its most famous member vilified “the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration” in a Des Moines speech. For 10 points, name this organization whose members included Gerald Ford and Charles Lindbergh, which opposed United States intervention in Europe and the Pacific until Pearl Harbor was attacked.
ANSWER: America First Committee
4. He is the author of the radio play Cascando and the short stories “All Strange Away” and “Imagination Dead Imagine,” which depict survivors of a nuclear holocaust. The title character’s journey from naturalism to the bizarre world of Mr. Knott’s house is told in his novel Watt. Other strange characters include the one-eyed Worm and Mahood in The Unnamable, which is often grouped with Molloy and Malone Dies. However, he is better known for his plays, such as one in which Winnie is stuck in a mound of dirt, Happy Days, and another in which Hamm and Clov live another day in the soon-to-end world. For 10 points, name this Irish absurdist playwright of Krapp's Last Tape, Endgame and Waiting for Godot.
ANSWER: Samuel Beckett
5. On his deathbed, he competed sketches for unrealized works like Opening of the Doors of the Spanish Inquisition and African Slave Trade, while his early works include the grim pen-and-ink Executioner Strangling a Prisoner and the neoclassicist Centaur Carrying Off a Woman. His later work includes portraits of the patients of his friend Dr. Etienne-Jean Georget such as Kleptomania, Gambling Mania, Delusion of Military Command, and Manic Envy. His best-known work has a man waving a flag toward a barely-visible ship in the distance while several others struggle to remain afloat on a makeshift vessel. For 10 points, name this French realist painter of The Raft of the Medusa.
ANSWER: Theodore Gericault
6. Its title in English was co-opted by Mary Daly to discuss the titular concept’s relationship to Christianity. In its first chapter, “Biology,” the author echoes Merleau-Ponty’s idea that “man is a historical idea” rather than a species. Later in its first book, “Facts and Myths,” the author comes close to accepting Stendhal’s admiration of women while excoriating D.H. Lawrence for trumpeting man’s superiority in his works. Rejecting the idea that biological determinism controls how women act, or the “eternal feminine,” it famously posits, “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” For 10 points, name this seminal work of feminism written by Simone de Beauvoir.
ANSWER: The Second Sex or Le Deuxième Sexe
7. Allgrove's syndrome causes achalasia [a-kuh-LAY-zhuh] and dilation of it, and Zenker's diverticulum and Schatzki's ring are often signs of trauma to it. Boerhaave [BOHR-hahv] syndrome is a transmural perforation of it that, like the similar Mallory-Weiss syndrome, can be fatal and usually occurs after forceful emesis. Paterson-Kelly syndrome causes webs to form in it, and ulceration of it named after Barrett causes difficulty swallowing. For 10 points, name this part of the digestive tube affected by acid reflux disorder, which uses peristalsis to convey boluses of food from the mouth to the stomach.
ANSWER: esophagus
8. One of his generals became the first exarch of Italy, and his wife had previously been the consort of Hecebolus, the governor of Libya. His reign saw the Lazic War, in which he conquered Armenia and Colchis, and he sponsored the fifth ecumenical council, coercing Pope Vigilius into supporting his policy of condemning heretics. Succeeding his namesake uncle in 527, his most lasting contribution consisted of the Digestae seu Pondecta, Institutiones, Codex, and Authenticum seu Novellae. For 10 points, name this Byzantine emperor whose general Belisarius suppressed the Nika revolt, best known for commissioning the Hagia Sophia and codifying the law.
ANSWER: Justinian I [or Flavius Petrus Sabbatius or Flavius Anicius Justinianus Magnus]
9. In Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Great-Granny Liu believes that one of these creatures is “feasting on her brain,” and Ferdinand Bardamu finds himself sorting them for the Port of New York in Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. A steel one is the titular entity of a Yevgeny Zamyatin play, and the discomfort caused by Italian ones forces the eponymous canine of Virginia Woolf’s Flush to return to his owners. Their most famous literary appearance is in the title of a poem in which the speaker uses the analogy of the mingled blood within it to try to seduce a woman. For 10 points, name this insect that “suck’d me first, and now sucks thee” in a John Donne poem.
ANSWER: fleas
10. His later works include The Myth of the Framework and In Search of a Better World and he earned the nickname “the Official Opposition” for his objections to logical positivism. He collaborated with J.C. Eccles on The Self and its Brain, and dismissed psychoanalysis as unscientific. He respectfully disagreed with Plato in the first volume of one work, “The Spell of Plato,” but tore Hegel up in the second volume “The High Tide of Prophecy” for Hegel's use of historicist ideas to defend Prussia's actions. For 10 points, name this man who promoted a theory of falsifiability and wrote the works The Poverty of Historicism, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and The Open Society and Its Enemies.
ANSWER: Karl Raimund Popper
11. Material from a glacier forms the Bhagirathi, which joins with the Alakanda near Devprayag to form it. One of its tributaries, the Mahakali, is set to be dammed at Pancheswar, and it is sometimes called Jahnavi, from a myth in which it was ejected from a wise man's ears. Dammed at Haridwar and at Farakka, its largest tributary, the Yamuna, converges with it at the city of Allahbad, and after running its over 1500 mile course, it empties into the Bay of Bengal. For 10 points name this river of Bangladesh and India, the river on which Calcutta lies, that is considered holy by Hindus.
ANSWER: Ganges River or Ganga
12. To questions in lecture that he could not answer, he wished to reply “I think I'll leave that to the next generation” and drop dead. A constant named after him and Borwein is the sum of the reciprocals of the Mersenne primes, and a conjecture named for him and Strauss states that any number of the form 4 divided by n can be expressed as the sum of three unit fractions. He elegantly proved Chebyshev's theorem as a 17 year old, and with Rado and Ko his name graces a theorem involving subsets and their relation to binomial coefficients. For 10 points, name this Hungarian mathematician renowned for his many collaborations and a namesake number reminiscent of one for Kevin Bacon.
ANSWER: Paul Erdös [air-dish]
13. Reinforcements relieved Edmund Allenby's troops on the second day and the 1st Cavalry Division held the Wulverghem line at this battle. General Fitz-Clarence usurped the 2nd Worcesters from another division to halt an attack west of Gheluvelt, preventing the opposing side from advancing past St. Eloi [el-WAH]. Ploegsteert Wood, Le Gheer, and Passchendaele Ridge became targets of violent attacks, prompting Sir John French to incorrectly remark “the war surely cannot last much longer.” For 10 points, name this battle fought October 31 to November 17, 1914 that halted the German “race to the sea,” the earliest of three battles fought near the same Belgian city.
ANSWER: First Battle of Ypres or Battle of Flanders
14. The protagonist, who occasionally finds freedom in Pigeon house, identifies with Mademoiselle Reisz's [REES] independence, if not her look or demeanor; feels an acute sense of dread while helping Dr. Mandelet deliver a child; and is inspired to wade into the ocean after seeing a wounded bird drown. A friend of Mme. Ratignolle, the main character meets secretly with Alcée Arobin, while her husband, Léonce, treats her as an object. Ultimately, however, Robert Lebrun's belief in societal morals prevents him from satisfying her newly unrepressed sexuality. For 10 points, name this work that focuses on Edna Pontellier, the most famous work of Kate Chopin.
ANSWER: The Awakening
15. His belief that politics is based on emotion rather than rationality was expressed in his works The Transformation of Democracy and Facts and Theories. He simultaneously debunked Marxism and the bourgeois elite in a famous 1916 work that divided human beings into “lions” and “foxes,” and he later formulated the theory of “circulation of elites.” His “law of income distribution” appeared in his first major work, though his most lasting work is A Manual of Political Economy, in which he put forth revolutionary ideas such as indifference curves. For 10 points, name this Italian economist who wrote The Mind and Society and whose namesake optimality is reached when no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.
ANSWER: Vilfredo Frederico DamasoPareto
16. Donald Knuth [k-nooth] makes one variety of them “dance” in an algorithm for solving pentomino puzzles and the n-queens problem. Their “unrolled” variety contains arrays of elements and their “skip” type allows large numbers of elements to be ignored, improving their linear indexing time. Often containing data-less “sentinels” at their beginning and end, they were created by Simon, Newell, and Shaw for the Information Processing Language, and their representation as blocks and arrows won the latter two a Turing Award. For 10 points, name this data structure in which each data node contains a pointer to the subsequent data node.
ANSWER: linked list [accept chained list]
17. During his final season, he was traded to the Red Sox for “Psycho” Steve Lyons, though a knee injury prevented him from pitching against his old team in that year's World Series. He pitched his only no-hitter in 1978, a year after “Black Wednesday,” the day on which he was sent to the Cincinnati Reds after allegations that he was jealous of former teammate Nolan Ryan’s salary. For 10 points, name this Hall of Fame pitcher who racked up 311 wins and won the 1975, 1973 and 1969 National League Cy Young Awards, best known for his days as a New York Met and his alliterative moniker, “Tom Terrific.”
ANSWER: (George) T(h)om(as) Seaver
18. Langdon Cheves, the ninth Speaker of the House, joined with others such as William Lowndes and Richard Mentor Johnson to form this group, which was strongly opposed by Samuel Taggart. The desire to add “the Floridas to the South” and “the Canadas to the North” was expressed by one member, Felix Grundy, though this group was given its derisive name by Virginia's more pacifist John Randolph. For 10 points, name this group of Democratic-Republican congressmen whose ranks included John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay that, in 1812, advocated engaging the British in armed conflict.
ANSWER: War Hawks
19. In the second part of this novel, “The Prayers of the Saints,” Elizabeth recalls how the protagonist's biological father, Richard, killed himself after being falsely arrested and beaten by police. In the first part, “The Seventh Day,” the reader learns of the family patriarch’s idealization of his biological son, Royal, who dies at a bar in Chicago. The protagonist is further conflicted by his feelings towards the pastor's nephew, Brother Elisha, but he eventually reconciles with Gabriel and undergoes conversion on the “threshing floor” at the altar of his Harlem church. For 10 points, name this bildungsroman about John Grimes, the first novel of James Baldwin.
ANSWER: Go Tell It on the Mountain
20. His early works are peppered with scherzos such as the last of his Three Fantastic Dances. The polka from his ballet The Golden Age proved popular, as did the “Bureaucrat’s Polka” from his ballet The Bolt. While he composed scores for films like “Five Days – Five Nights” and “A Year is Like a Lifetime,” he was often coerced into writing patriotic works like Poem of the Motherland and The Sun Shines on Our Motherland. For 10 points, name this composer of the Babi Yar symphony and the ballet Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, whose “Oath to the People’s Commissar” shows the heroism of his countrymen in the face of Nazi invasion within his Leningrad symphony.
ANSWER: Dmitri Shostakovich
21. The “imiut” fetish, consisting of a stuffed skin tied to a pole in a pot, is associated with him, and his daughter Kebechet was either a snake or an ostrich that provided him with cool refreshment. At his cult centers, such as Zawty and Hardai, a vast number of dog mummies can be found, and he was referred to by the name “Foremost of the Westerners,” as his domain was thought to lie well west of the Nile. With his companion Wepwawet, he is known as “He Who Counts the Hearts,” weighing the hearts of the dead against a feather of Maat. For 10 points, name this deity, the jackal-headed conductor of souls and god of mummification in the Egyptian underworld.
ANSWER: Anubis or Inpew or Yinepu or Anpu
22. The speaker of this poet's “The Goblet” is surrounded by nature's beauty, but eventually finds life is fundamentally empty. The suicide of Stefan Zweig influenced the collection Lagar, and this poet combined allusions to the suffering of children dislocated in the wake of the Spanish Civil war in Tala. The suicide of her lover Romelio Ureta inspired her most famous works, which include “Pain” and “The Prayer,” in which she asks Jesus to forgive Romelio for his suicide in a 14-line poem. For 10 points, name this Chilean author of the collections Tenderness and Desolation, the latter of which includes her famous “Sonnets of Death.”
ANSWER: Gabriela Mistral or Lucila Godoy Alcayaga
23. Its final chapter notes that Herbert Spencer objects to being labeled an opponent of the titular concept, and that its title was gleaned from an expression in Galt's Annals of the Parish. The fifth chapter meshes justice with the titular concept, stating that justice can be “moralised by the social feeling.” Its second chapter famously claims it is “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied,” and it bases its titular doctrine on the idea “that pleasure and freedom from pain are the only things desirable as ends.” For 10 points, name this work that espouses “the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people,” a philosophical tract by John Stuart Mill.
ANSWER: Utilitarianism
2005 Terrapin Invitational Tournament
October 22, 2005 – University of Maryland
Bonuses by Virginia (Leo Wolpert)
1. Name some things related to the Helmholtz equation, you know, the one from physics, for 10 points each.
[10] The Helmholtz equation contains this differential operator, the divergence of a scalar function’s gradient, represented by del-squared.
ANSWER: Laplacian operator
[10] The Helmholtz equation can be related to solutions of the inhomogeneous wave equation through this transformation that decomposes functions into sinusoids.
ANSWER: Fourier transform
[10] When k equals 0 in the Helmholtz equation, it is equivalent to this Frenchman’s namesake equation, which states that the Laplacian of an unknown function is equal to a given function.