Science Monstrosity II: Science of the Lambs - announcement

grapesmoker <*no_reply_at_yahoogroups.com*> · Tue, 25 May 2004 23:22:40 -0000

I'm happy to announce this year's installment of Berkeley's annual 
summer science tournament, Science Monstrosity II: Science of the 
Lambs. Tentatively, SM will take place on July 10th and will be part 
of Berkeley's annual BASQuE tournament. Depending on the desires of 
the participating teams, SM may happen on Friday to leave more 
playing time for the next day's mirror of Chicago Open. In any case, 
it will be held during the weekend of July 10th. My hope is that this 
tournament will also be held at Chicago, as well as any other mirrors 
of CO.

Rules:
SM is open to teams of one or two players regardless of student 
standing. SM packets will consist of 20 questions, and will be played 
with standard mACF rules.

Editing:
This year's SM will be centrally edited by me. If you don't plan on 
playing and would like to lend your expertise in some area of science 
to editing, please contact me.

Entry fee and mirror costs:
It's free. That's right, there's no charge to either play at or 
mirror SM. There is, however, a packet submission requirement to both 
play and mirror. A team of two will have to submit a 20/20 packet 
conforming to the distribution outlined below. A one-person team will 
need to submit 10/10, halving the number of questions in each 
category. In order to mirror SM, I will provisionally require at 
least two packets to be submitted from that mirror site. I wish I 
could relax these requirements, but unfortunately I cannot rely on 
getting the number of packets I would like from just the West Coast. 
Therefore, I feel that it's best to spread the burden around the 
country; my goal is to get 10 usable packets all together.

Distribution:
4/4 each of Physics, Biology, and Chemistry
3/3 each of Math/CS/Engineering and Astronomy/Earth Science
2/2 your choice

Notes:
1) Your choice may be biography. There may be no more than 1/1 
biography in your packet.
2) DIVERSITY IS VERY IMPORTANT! Try to distribute things evenly 
across disciplines. That is, don't write 4/4 worth of solid state 
physics questions or 3/3 "name the constellation" questions.
3) Astrophysics belongs in physics, not astronomy. Biochemistry is 
chemistry, not biology.

This distribution seemed to work well the last time SM was held. For 
one-person teams, the distribution is halved, with the either the 
Math/CS/Eng. and Astro/Earth distribution split 2/2 and 1/1 either 
way.

Difficulty:
Anything covered in a standard undergraduate course on the topic is 
fair game. Again, I must emphasize the importance of being diverse in 
your choice of answers. I do not want to get 5 packets each 
containing a tossup on the Meissner effect. The sciences are no less 
diverse internally than any other subject, and you should avail 
yourselves of that. At the same time, try to avoid answers that are 
too esoteric. I trust the question writers to be good judges of what 
constitutes esoteric and what doesn't.

Deadline:
The "deadline" to submit your packet is June 27th. Since I'm probably 
going to be desperate for packets, I will accept your packets after 
this deadline too (in fact, I'll accept them anytime until three days 
before the tournament), but I beg of you not to abuse this fact.

That wraps it up for the announcement. If you are interested in 
playing, mirroring, or editing, please contact me at jerry_v at 
berkeley dot edu. I may make exceptions to the packet submission 
criteria for teams that really want to play but don't feel 
comfortable in their ability to produce a good 20/20 packet, but in 
general, I think the requirement will hold.

Jerry