Chicago Open 2012: The Reins of History Back in the Hands of Man
(Packet by Seth Teitler, Selene Koo, Evan Adams, Matt Weiner)
Tossups
1. One of this composer’s pieces uses the same text from “The Orchestra” in its second and fourth movements, and uses a D dorian minor center in its fifth movement, based on “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” In addition to the William Carlos Williams-inspired The Desert Music, he set the Hebrew text of some psalms to music in his Tehillim. Another work is based on a cycle of eleven chords introduced in the “Pulses” section. He incorporated tape loops with a string quartet in a work that includes interviews about World War II and offers parallels between the composer’s journeys between New York and Los Angeles and those of Jews during the Holocaust. He also created theMusic for 18 Musicians and utilized the phasing process in works like Drumming. FTP, name this minimalist composer of Different Trains.
ANSWER: Steve Reich
2. At a 1945 conference held inside this structure, all American nations except Argentina agreed to a mutual defense pact. In the 1860s, a wide avenue called the Promenade of the Empress was built to connect it to the rest of its city. This structure is the centerpiece of one of the largest urban parks in the world, and takes its name from a native word for “grasshopper. " A 1992 peace treaty named for this structure ended fighting between the FMLN and the El Salvador government. It's been the site of the NationalHistoryMuseum since 1939, after the official residence of its country’s leader was moved to Los Pinos. When this building housed a military academy, it was defended by a group of six brave cadets deemed Los Ninos Heroes. Those deaths occurred during an 1847 assault on this structure by Winfield Scott. FTP, name this castle which the Paseo de Reforma connects to Mexico City.
ANSWER: ChapultepecCastle [or Castillo de Chapultepec]
3. One character in this work is compared to a “Homeric heifer," and later, the central character compares himself to Priam after speaking at his drowned friend’s funeral. That central character first kisses his neighbor after braiding her hair. Later, the title character’s suspicions are aroused after a failed astronomy lesson results in his wife revealing the money she saved, and again after he sees her gazing at a dead man with her eyes like the tide. The narrator plans to write a History of the Suburbs after completing this work, in which he becomes convinced that his son Ezekiel was fathered by his friend Escobar. The main plot sees Capitú accused of adultery by her jealous husband Bento Santiago. FTP, name this novel by Machado de Assis.
ANSWER: Dom Casmurro
4. Eschenmoser proposed a “scenario” named for this molecule in which it reacts with DHF to produce sugars in the primordial soup. This molecule’s synthesis is achieved by an enzyme with the conserved motif K-K-C-G-H-M, which contains an active site cysteine found within a TIM barrel. The processes of synthesizing and consuming this molecule take place within specialized peroxisomes named for it. With succinate, this molecule is synthesized by isocitrate lyase. This molecule and acetyl coA are consumed by malate synthase to produce malate, which re-enters the Krebs cycle. FTPE, name this two-carbon molecule that is produced when isocitrate is converted to succinate in its namesake cycle.
ANSWER: glyoxylate or glyoxylic acid (accept oxoacetate or oxoacetic acid)
5. This man cursed his city from Mount Gargettus after returning from a long absence to find that his throne had been usurped by the first demagogue, a son of Peteos named Menestheus. After his ghost came to the aid of the Greeks at the Battle of Marathon, Cimon was led by a female eagle clawing the ground to this man’s grave on Scyros, where he had been pushed off a cliff by his host Lycomedes. His descendants had tiny butts because this man lost much of his rear end when Heracles freed him from a chair in Hades, where he'd gone on a mission to kidnap Persephone with his friend Pirithous. A rejection by this man’s son led to suicide of his second wife, Phaedra, whose younger sister saved this man’s life on Crete by giving him a ball of thread. FTP, name this Athenian hero who entered the Labyrinth and killed the Minotaur.
ANSWER: Theseus
6. The Stevens dissent in this case chided the majority for ignoring the still valid Palko test in favor of the “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” test from Duncan. Stevens also noted that “no amount of process can legitimize some deprivations” in support of his proposal to entirely replace incorporation with substantive due process analysis. The Thomas concurrence in this case suggested overturning the Slaughter-HouseCases and reviving the Privileges or Immunities Clause. The majority opinion in this case, authored by Samuel Alito, maintained the validity of the incorporation of fundamental rights and found evidence in American history that the right to self-defense is fundamental. FTP, name this case which incorporated the earlier DC. v. Heller against the states, requiring state gun regulations to be Constitutional under the Second Amendment.
ANSWER: McDonald v. City of Chicago
7. This author created a character who threatens to turn a fugitive into the police unless she consents to being sold to an Egyptian whorehouse, the Marquis of Casti-Piani. His attempts to create the new genre of “monster tragedy” were blocked by censors, so he instead wrote about a woman who shoots Dr. Schon and is then broken out of prison by her lesbian admirer, Countess Geschwitz. In another of his plays, the recurring image of a “headless queen” is first introduced in a conversation with Melchior, who impregnates Wendla in a hayloft before the suicide of a character who can't handle the “obscene” world and his failure in school, Moritz. A character introduced in this man’s play Earth Spirit entertains Prince Kungu Poti and Dr. Hilti before being killed by Jack the Ripper in the sequel Pandora’s Box. FTP, name this author of the play Spring Awakening and creator of Lulu.
ANSWER: Benjamin Franklin “Frank” Wedekind
8. The completion of this project led the country in which it's located to jump from a nonplayer in butter export to second place behind Denmark in that industry. This project also spawned the Kopi Kuz coal company and the Lenzoto gold mining business. It's paralleled by a more northerly counterpart which defines the “BAM zone." Ground for this project was broken with the symbolic dumping of a spade of dirt into a silver wheelbarrow in 1891. In 1918, in an attempt to prevent released POWs from forming a “German front,” this entity was seized by the Czech Legion. Work on it was originally supervised by Sergei Witte, and it was completed in 1916 with the construction of the Amur RiverBridge. FTP, name this engineering feat which extends 5700 miles east from Yaroslavsky Station in Moscow, the only transcontinental transportation route in Russia.
ANSWER: the Trans-Siberian Railway [or Trans-Siberian Railroad; or Transsibirska Magistrala]
9. Adding the viscous term to the eigenmode equation for this phenomenon gives the Orr-Sommerfeld equation. Rayleigh showed that in simple cases, a necessary condition for this phenomenon is that there be an inflection point in the velocity profile. Another common necessary condition for this phenomenon is a value of less than one-fourth for the Richardson number. This phenomenon is responsible for the formation of high-altitude undulatus or “billow clouds” near jet streams, and it is suppressed by a parallel magnetic field if the Alfvén velocity exceeds the velocity change driving this instability. FTP, a vortex sheet at a velocity discontinuity is a simple case of what shearing instability named for British and German physicists?
ANSWER: Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (accept shear instability or shearing instability before mention in the question)
10. This man ended one book by listing the "unperceived defects" of men such as Richelieu, Michelangelo, and Darwin after earlier analyzing "meteorological influences on” extraordinary men. In an attempt to expand his theories to a racial level, he claimed that Gypsies atone for committing murder by not changing their shirt for a year. Along with Moreau de Tours and Prichard, this author of The Man of Genius founded the positivist tradition within one field, which believed that childhood epilepsy was a sign of “moral insanity.” He used the term “stigmata” to refer to features such as facial asymmetry and over- or -undersized skulls. FTP, name this University of Turin professor who theorized about “atavistic” throwbacks to primitive humans and advanced his “degeneration theory” in several criminology books likeThe Criminal Man.
ANSWER: Cesare Lombroso
11. This company hired former LBJ attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach to lead its thirteen-year defense of antitrust charges. This company’s production efficiency doubled in 1924 with the invention of the Carroll Rotary Press. In a 2001 book, Edwin Black asserted that this company provided special help to the Nazis.It dates its legal formation to Charles Flint’s 1911 merger that created CTR, and it was long led by Thomas Watson and his son. In 1944, its six-year partnership with Harvard researchers resulted in the building of the ASCC or Mark I. The first forerunner of this company was Herman Hollerith’s firm that helped calculate the 1890 US Census. In 1981, this co-developer of the OS/2 operating system introduced a model using the 8088 processor, the Personal Computer. FTP, name this “Big Blue” manufacturer which long dominated the mainframe market.
ANSWER: IBM [or International Business Machines]
12. This artist painted a man holding a knife at bay with a woodwind instrument in The Musician’s Quarrel, and showed a pregnant woman sitting on a stool in The Flea Catcher. A foppish young man on the right sits next to a courtesan and has wine poured for him as his opponent cheats him in both of this artist’s paintings The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs and The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds. He painted a boy having his fortune read while two women surreptitiously steal his coin purse and his watch in The Fortune Teller. This resident of Lunéville painted a seated woman clasping her hands above a skull and looking into the reflection of a candle in the mirror in his version of The Penitent Magdalene. He painted a similar scene in Magdalen with the Smoking Flame. FTP, name this French imitator of Caravaggio known for his interior scenes lit only by candles.
ANSWER: Georges de La Tour
13. A space has this property if and only if every continuous map from a closed subset to the reals with the Euclidean topology can be extended to a continuous map from the space. That characterization of this type of space by the Tietze extension theorem is related to the fact that this type of space is one in which disjoint closed subsets can be separated by functions, as prescribed in Urysohn’s lemma. A space with this property and the Hausdorff property is said to satisfy the T-four axiom, and this type of space is usually defined as one in which disjoint closed subsets have disjoint neighborhoods, as opposed to a regular space. This term also denotes a type of subgroup that can be used to construct a quotient group. FTP, give this term that also denotes the Gaussian distribution, as well as the contact force exerted perpendicular to a surface, which appears in simple expressions for the friction force.
ANSWER: normal (accept normality or other word forms before “this type of space”)
14. The speaker of one of this author’s poems is opposed by an old woman who seeks to separate him from his beloved. Another work by this writer is a 516-line ode describing the battle between Ignorance and the Muses. In addition to The Anti-erotic and Musagneomachie, he noted, “Happy the man who, like Ulysses, has travelled well” in one of 192 alexandrine sonnets written while in “exile” in Rome, his Regrets. He also wrote the sonnet sequence Antiquities of Rome and imitated Petrarch in his sequence of love sonnets, L’Olive. Another of his works was inspired by Sebillet and declared that great poetry could only be achieved by imitating the Greeks and Romans. This author of Defense and Illustration of the French Language also wrote a manifesto for the group that he was in, along with writers like Remy Belleau and Pierre de Ronsard. FTP, name this French poet and member of Le Pleiade.
ANSWER: Joachim du Bellay
15. This film’s final scene was said to be the most difficult shot its director ever created, and consists of a composite image of 32 separate exposures and an Albert Whitlock matte painting of sunlight through clouds. Ub Iwerks’ efforts as a special photographic advisor on this film earned him a 1963 Oscar nomination. This film’s three-step axial cut of the corpse of Dan Fawcett may be an homage to Russian montage techniques, and another shot features a pair of glasses breaking as a schoolgirl runs into town. For a scene in the attic of the Brenner family’s home, the lead actress endured several days of having live animals thrown at her. FTP, name this film starring Tippi Hedren and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, in which the residents of BodegaBay are inexplicably attacked by the title animals.
ANSWER: The Birds
16. One philosophical work titled for this man claims that the preface to his most famous work, in which he decries the state of his discipline as a “monster” with disparate body parts, is “one of the classic descriptions of a crisis state.” In another philosophical account, this man’s ideas, along with those of an Italian follower, are shown to be factually incorrect under the reasoning of a prior thinker’s “tower argument.” Kant’s line in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that we should be “proceeding precisely on the lines” of this man’s “primary hypothesis” coined a metaphor about this man that signifies a change of perspective leading to a progressive shift. FTP, name this man whose namesake “revolution” titles a Thomas Kuhn book, and was ushered in after the publication of his On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.
ANSWER: Nicolaus Copernicus
17. The fourteenth of these works begins by urging the retention of the sagum, while the first one begins by recalling a meeting in the Temple of Tellus. The first one decries the impious act of awarding a public thanksgiving to a dead man, and sarcastically asks if Hannibal was at the gates while discussing the author’s absence from a meeting. The siege at Mutina is referenced many times in these works, including the thirteenth, which contains commentary on a letter sent to Aulus Hirtius and another man, and argues against a peace urged by Lepidus. The failure of these works was signaled by the formation of the Second Triumvirate, and their author was soon executed, with his head and hands displayed in the Forum. FTP, name these speeches attacking Mark Antony which were delivered by Cicero, and modeled on Demosthenes’ attacks on the father of Alexander the Great.
ANSWER: Cicero’s Philippics [or the Cicero’s Philippicae; prompt on partial answer; accept just Philippics or Philippicae after “Cicero”; accept Cicero’s orations against Marcus Antonius or equivalents before “Mark Antony”]
18. Deborah Brown analyzed this philosophical construct in the form of an annotated mystery story alluding to Don Quixote. Bill Lycan claims that this idea is so problematic that it should be permanently stricken from the literature. The description of this entity focuses on the context in which the word “house” is learned, and notes that it recognizes the author’s friends and returns their greetings in English. It was introduced in the article “Knowing One’s Own Mind” which concludes that, because it has no causal history to connect itself to its thoughts and the world, it cannot be said to have thoughts or to give meaning to utterances. This creatures “writes articles about radical interpretation” and is composed of dead plant matter, which is animated by a lightning strike to become an exact duplicate of Donald Davidson. FTP, name this central figure of a Davidson thought experiment.
ANSWER: Swampman [do not accept “Swamp Thing” prompt on Donald Davidson before it is read]
19. This character peruses a seven-volume pictographic atlas called The Wonder of England. He remembers his father telling him a story about a man finding a tiger under the dining table and shooting it in time for dinner. In a comedic moment, he's given the awkward task of explaining “the facts of life” to the 23 year old Reginald Cardinal. This character’s father dies during a conference concerning the harshness of the Peace of Versailles. The novel in which he appears ends with this character sitting on a pier in Weymouth. Dr. Carlisle is the only resident of Moscombe who sees through his assertion that he personally knows Churchill and Lord Halifax. This man struggles with his missed opportunity for a relationship with the housekeeper Miss Kenton and with the growing realization that his employer Mr. Darlington was a Nazi sympathizer. FTP, name this protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.