This entry is down to four stories.

First, we went to a quizbowl tournament last Saturday, which we won. We drove almost everyone else into the ground, which for the most part wasn’t surprising, since Rossview and Knoxville West weren’t there.

My throat’s been kind of sore lately (nothing major, just a cold sort of thing), and I didn’t want to strain it, lest I lose my voice in the middle of a match or something equally scarring, so I let Dallas be captain for the first four games. However, I decided after the fourth game that my power hunger and ego were affecting my ability to play, so I took the captainship back. Interestingly, I did actually play better (my performance for those first four rounds was rather mediocre).

The one highlight of the day was getting to play Ezell-Harding in the semi-finals. So far, we’ve only played them three times: once at this tournament last year, once at State, and on Saturday. We lost to them at State, and we beat them last year, but the questions were really screwy, so I didn’t count it as being worth anything.

This year, though, the questions were much better, and we beat them by a solid margin - 300 to 200, give or take. We all played very well—there was even a question involving Wikipedia. Disambiguation was the answer, so you can guess how the question ran.

All in all, it was a good tournament, and I had a lot of really awesome buzzes (thanks to remembering stuff from science bowl and quizbowl practice earlier in the week) and got the winning tossup in the finals round, which made me happy. Actually, it wasn’t really the “winning tossup”—it was the one that ensured the opposing team couldn’t tie the game, but let’s not mince words.

Next topic: Mid-state JCL Convention

I had a good time. Since I only sort of know Latin at this point, I don’t take many tests, so I snuck out early and helped get the grading machine working, and spent most of the day helping the machine grade tests, with the exception of when I was moderating certamen.

So, before I go back to ranting about how graphic arts are hurting America, I’ll talk about certamen. Evan Latt and I moderated Latin I (or Novice) certamen (which is, by the way, Latin quizbowl, for the uninitiated). It was largely uneventful, as most Latin I’s don’t know enough to make any borderline answers or protest anything. Also we had Upper Level (Latin III+) observers for most of the questions, who handled the answers that weren’t on our sheet, since neither of us really still remember Latin.

The one interesting episode was when the buzzer set broke in the middle of the finals round. After someone buzzed in on a tossup, it just died. Luckily, they got the question, or we really would have been in trouble. We moved into the room where Upper Level finals had just finished, so any momentum was destroyed, but it all worked out in the end.

Now, back to grading. This year, for the first time in 3 or 4 years, MLK didn’t win the overall sweepstakes; Hume-Fogg did, beating us by about 1,000 to about 700. But there’s more to this story than meets the eye.

Since I spent all day in the grading room, I started keeping my eye on the sweepstakes totals after all the academic tests were scanned. I saw how mixing the Latin V’s in with the Latin IV’s (which was supposed to have happened beforehand) brought MLK’s total down and Hume-Fogg’s up. I saw how fixing a majorly screwed up reading comprehension key did the reverse.

And then I saw how entering the graphics arts results gave Hume-Fogg 400 of their 1,000 points.

So Hume-Fogg beat us in the overall sweepstakes. But I’m OK with that. After all, MLK and Hume-Fogg are academic magnets. And we beat Hume-Fogg in academics. I say let Hume-Fogg have their moment of glory and their trophy that’s an inch taller than ours. Because we beat them where it really counts.

Besides, they had twice as many people as we did.

And now for a demonstration of my total inability to transition…

Tiresias, the server this site is hosted on, experienced a hard drive failure on Tuesday. This in and of itself is not a big deal; site5 just needed a few hours to transfer all the data onto a new hard drive. After that, they rebooted the server and everything was sunshine and daisies. For about 30 minutes.

Then, all of a sudden, I couldn’t contact Tiresias at all. It didn’t respond to HTTP, pings, anything. But only if it came from my IP address.

Long story short, it was all very annoying, and I was in tears that I couldn’t check my e-mail or my website, and actually, I think it was all karma again, since I had just subscribed to the wp-hackers mailing list, which got something like 120 messages while I was gone. After several exchanges with site5 tech support that were getting nowhere, the server suddenly appeared again, and there was much rejoicing.

So, I was originally going to call this post Website Withdrawals, but I didn’t, because this next story makes for a much better title.

Our math class just gets more and more amusing. I think it’s because we’re doing lots of manifold related stuff, which is one of Professor Hughes’s areas of focus, so he has a bunch of jokes, like the parallelepiped.

So today, we were discussing line integrals over vector fields, and he was making sure we understood what vector fields were. I shall come as close to a quote as possible (I’m working from memory here).

You all know the Beatles, right? Well, you know they had a song called Strawberry Fields. If you think about a strawberry field, it’s a field, and at every point, there’s a strawberry.

He goes on to also invoke the analogy of a corn field, but, he noted, not a corn field like the one in Kansas where it’s flat and all the stalks point straight up; we wanted one that was kind of hilly so the corn stalks were pointing in different directions—that’s a vector field.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2006 at 9:35 pm and is filed under High School, JCL, The Site, Quizbowl. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.