Chicago Open 2007

Packet by Ed Cohn, Susan Ferrari, Adam Kemezis, and Kelly Tourdot

1. It begins with an “Author’s Preface” that takes place at Shawmut College and was inspired by the work of Laurence Gronlund. As the novel progresses the protagonist falls in love with the doctor’s daughter who is a descendant of Edith Bartlett and gets thrown out of a society dinner in Boston for informing the diners about poverty in the city. Other characters in this work, that spawned the sequel Equality, include Drs. Pillsbury and Leete, as well as the manservant Sawyer, who perishes in a fire. The protagonist, who was hypnotized in an underground sleeping chamber wakes up in the twentieth century. For 10 points, name this novel about Julian West’s adventures in the future, a work of Edward Bellamy.
ANSWER: Looking Backward 2000-1887

2. This period’s early years saw the Sonoman and Marathon orogenies, while in later years the Sphenycodontia evolved to form early therapsids. Fusulinids and ammonoids are index fossils for this period, during which the development of the Tethys Ocean began. Euteryptids and trilobites became extinct during this period, and, during its Kungurian age, the super-continent Pangaea was formed. Fossil deposit sites from this period include a basin near Lubbock, Texas and a namesake region in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. For 10 points, name this final period of the Paleozoic that ended with the largest-known extinction event.
ANSWER: Permian period

3. Holmstrom and Gibbard and Satherthwaite proposed similar theories, while Duncan Black proposed that this theory be modified with the so-called “single-peaked preference” principle. Its criterion IIA, also known as the Chernoff condition or Sen’s property alpha, concerns the independence of irrelevant alternatives. Proposed in the 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values, its other criteria include restricted domain, monotonicity, non-imposition, and non-dictatorship. FTP name this theorem holding that no voting system based on ranked preferences can meet these criteria given at least three options to select.

ANSWER: Arrow’s impossibility theorem

4. This soldier first made his name at Booneville, Mississippi, where his unit beat an enemy force five times larger. His later posts included governing Texas, and he once claimed that if he owned Hell and Texas, he’d rent out Texas and live in Hell. Highlights in between included counterattacking successfully at Perryville, winning at Yellow Tavern, where his nemesis J.E.B. Stuart was killed, and joining his men in a spontaneous and successful charge up Missionary Ridge. For 10 points, name this namesake of a square in the West Village who, after replacing David Hunter, routed Jubal Early in an 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign, and who was Grant’s best cavalry general in spite of his extreme youth and shortness.

ANSWER: Philip Henry Sheridan

5. Lopes et al used them to study the effects of D. desulfuricans upon stainless steel, and Pei developed a light-emitting variety containing ITO. The capacity of a series of these items is described by Peukert’s law, and their components can be arranged in bobbin, spirally-wound, and prismatic arrangements. The crowfoot variety, which was developed by Callaud, lacked a porous barrier, unlike the earlier Daniell variety, whose reactants were copper sulfate and zinc sulfate. Their potentials may be determined from their component concentrations by the Nernst equation. For 10 points, name these structures containing paired redox reactions which, when linked in series, can form a battery.
ANSWER: electrochemical cells or galvanic cells or voltaic cells

6. Notable translators of this work include Sir Israel Gollancz in 1891 and Sister Mary Hillman in 1967. The narrator experiences a vision of the New Jerusalem in the poem’s third part. In the second section, the narrator discusses whether the title figure has replaced Mary as the queen of heaven, before she recites the parable of the Vineyard . Composed of 101 stanzas, it opens after the narrator falls asleep in an “erber grene” while mourning the loss of the title figure. For 10 points, name this work, probably written by the author of “Cleanness,” “Patience,” and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” an allegorical poem in Old English.

ANSWER: Pearl

7. Its artist had treated the subject just two years earlier in an apparent self-portrait that depicted the title figure as ill. A white sheet attempts to cover a soiled mattress on the left. The foreground is dominated by a stone table covered with a basket of overripe fruit and a glass carafe filled with red liquid. The titular figure seems to beckon the audience to taste the contents of his fine goblet. Painted during the artist’s stay with Francesco del Monte, its namesake figure is pudgy and fingers a black velvet bowl as he holds together his white robe. For ten points, identify this 1597 Caravaggio painting showing the Roman god of wine.

ANSWER: Bacchus

8. His first significant post was as Home Secretary under Gladstone and Rosebery, and sources for his personal life include his amorous correspondence with Venetia Stanley. The only Prime Minister to take office on foreign soil, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer until he succeeded Henry Campbell-Bannerman. In the seventh year of his term, he was forced to form a coalition with the Tories and Bonar Law. A year later he was outmaneuvered and forced to make way for a man whose “People’s Budget” he had championed in 1909. For 10 points, name this Liberal Prime Minister from 1908-16 who led Britain into World War I and was succeeded by Lloyd George.

ANSWER: Herbert Henry Asquith or the Earl of Oxford and Asquith

9. An analog of this phenomenon has been used to develop part of the Cheshire Cat Principle, that baryon mass is nearly independent of bag radius in the chiral bag model. In the case of unbroken supersymmetry, repulsive contributions from fermionic photinos would nullify the normal attractive effect. It namesake calculated its strength by considering only virtual photons with standing wavefunctions in the cavity. For 10 points, name this short-range attractive force between two parallel uncharged conducting plates in a vacuum.
ANSWER: Casimir effect

10. This school’s “new” phase was begun either by Arcesilaus [ahr-kess-uh-LAY-us], who posited the idea that nothing can be mentally grasped, called akatalepsia, or by Carneades [kahr-NAY-uh-deez], who while on a visit to Rome argued on successive days for and against justice, until Cato got him expelled as a threat to morals. The paradoxically later “old” phase was centered on Antiochus of Ascalon and set forth in Latin by Cicero, and abandoned skepticism to move closer to positions of the Stoics and Peripatetics, claiming that they were the true representatives of the schools’ founder. Speusippus in 347 BC became the second head of, for 10 points, what school based around a gymnasium outside of Athens and founded by Plato?

ANSWER: the Academy or Academic School (prompt on “Platonism”)

11. It is the main component of Thomas Keller’s Peach Melba. Heliogabalus fed it to his dogs, while Pliny the Elder described an early version of gavage using dried figs in relation to this dish. Preparations of cromesquis and poutine featuring this ingredient have been produced by Martin Picard, chef of Montreal’s Au Pied du Cochon. In 2007, Ed Smith claimed his “manhood” was at stake after some of his fellow aldermen announced plans to repeal a ban on the sale of this comestible in Chicago. For 10 points, name this delicious and cruel food item, which is prepared from the livers of force-fed geese and ducks.
ANSWER: foie gras

12. When the protagonist of this work’s first section dies, his body is so feverishly hot that it boils water. The first part also recounts the sending of the circular letter after the death of the servant girl Aoi. Another section, entitled “The Sea Bass” in Helen Craig McCullogh’s translation, contains an anecdote explaining the good luck of the warrior Kiyomori , yet upon Kiyomori’s death, his son Munemori takes over leadership of the Taira, leading to the clan’s demise at the hands of the Minamoto clan. For 10 points, name this chronicle of the Gempei War, a classic work of 14th-century Japanese literature.
ANSWER: the Tale of the Heike or Heike monogatari
13. After the ovaries, this structure is the second most common site of malignant germinomas, and the Fra-2 protein controls NGFB-1 expression in this structure. Arylalkylamine-N-acetyltransferase controls the rate-limiting step of hormone production in this organ. An organelle called the synaptic ribbon exists in its namesake cells, and like the retina, this organ also expresses phosducin and opsin. Along with the habenula, it forms the epithalamus. It contains the corporea arenacae, which are calcified deposits that show up on skull X-rays, and it is light-sensing in reptiles and birds. For 10 points, name this melatonin-producing gland in the brain, which is named for its conical shape.
ANSWER: pineal gland or epiphysis cerebri
14. A University of Oklahoma law school dropout, he won the acquittal of the socialist state senator S. J. Harper, who was accused of violating the Espionage Act, and used publicity from the case as well as an anti-Standard Oil platform to win election to the state Public Service Commission in 1918 and the governorship in 1928. Weathering an impeachment attempt in 1929, he led a filibuster against the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933. His fanciful book My First Days in the White House describes his efforts to enact the “Share the Wealth” program he proposed in his campaign autobiography, Every Man a King. For 10 points, name this populist Louisiana senator assassinated in 1935.

ANSWER: Huey Pierce Long

15. Fionnuala (finn-ooh-la) and her brothers were transformed into these creatures by their wicked stepmother. Hyria and her son by Apollo both turned into these animals after jumping into a lake, and Apollo used one to travel to the Hyperboreans. In the Völundarkvitha, Volund and his brothers wed three women associated with these creatures, but after 7 years they fly away. The relentless questioning of the Princess of Brabant caused one to bear her away her husband, Lohengrin. FTP name this animal associated with Apollo’s son Cycnus whose guise Zeus took while impregnating Leda.
ANSWER: swans

16. One of the central scenes in this opera is in the Oldenwald forest, in which the titular character lulls Regina to sleep with a concert of angels and is then beset by tempters representing lust, luxury, and money. Set during the Peasant’s Rebellion of 1524-1525, its premiere was postponed due to Nazi opposition, and its composer extracted three scenes—”Angelic Concert,” “Entombment,” and the “Temptation of St. Anthony”— to form the movements of a symphony of the same name. FTP, identify this opera or symphony about a painter, based on the Isenheim altarpiece by Grünewald, a work by Paul Hindemith.

ANSWER: Mathis der Maler

17. Key common institutions of this people included the religious festival of the Carneia, and the division into three tribes called Hylleis [hill-AY-is], Dymanes [die-MAN-eez], and Pamphili, which were famously renamed in Sicyon by the tyrant Cleisthenes. This people claimed that their mother-city was a namesake polis in central Greece whose mythical king had allied himself with the sons of Heracles in their efforts to conquer the Peloponnese. Their dialect is used in the poetry of Theocritus and the choruses of tragedy, and was spoken throughout Greek Sicily and Italy. For 10 points, name this Greek ethnic group that included Sicyonians, Argives, Syracusans, Corinthians and Spartans, and saw itself as the ancestral enemy of the Ionians.

ANSWER: Dorians (prompt on “Spartans” or equivalents before the penultimate line; do not accept or prompt on “Greeks” or “Hellenes”)

18. These objects can exhibit a quadratic transverse Doppler shift known as the Shklovskii effect. The distance to one of these objects can be estimated from the line-of-sight electron column density, known as the dispersion measure. A braking index of less than 3 can occur in models where the magnetic and rotational axes are misaligned, producing a “lighthouse effect.” Initially termed “LGM” upon their discovery by Jocelyn Bell and Anthony Hewish, FTP name these rapidly-spinning, magnetized neutron stars whose emission sweeps past Earth at regular intervals.

ANSWER: pulsars

19. This man’s writings include The Spiritual Resurrection and Meditation on the 25th Psalm, both written after the fall of Münster in 1535, in which he may have lost a brother named Peter. This man was taken into the nonviolent Anabaptist sect founded by Obbe Phillips, and became its best-known spokesman and eponym. His followers were concentrated in his native Holland as well as Poland and Ukraine, and suffered a major schism in the 1690s due to Jakob Amman. Large communities now live in the U.S. and Western Canada, and have founded universities in Harrisonburg, Virginia and in Winnipeg. FTP name this leader of a namesake sect whose offshoots include the Hutterites and Amish.

ANSWER: Menno Simons

(accept either name without prompt, prompt on “Mennonites” from people who were visibly asleep for the first half of the tossup)

20. The central couple first meets at a Christmas play and the book opens during a carriage ride through burning bonfires. A key scene takes place in Book 3: “The Fascination,” where a servant, Christian, gambles his mistress’ money away to the owner of the Quiet Woman Tavern. By the end of the novel, its protagonist, a former diamond seller, has lost part of his sight and wanders the land as an itinerant preacher. This occurs after his wife drowns attempting to run away with her true love, Damon Wildeve. Ultimately, the death of Eustacia Vye allows Diggory Venn and Thomasin to come together in, for ten points, what novel set in motion by Clym Yeobright’s decision to come back to Egdon Heath, a work by Thomas Hardy.

ANSWER: Return of the Native

1. Name some things associated with trinucleotide repeats, for 10 points each:
[10] Several trinucleotide repeat disorders are associated with genes on this chromosome, including spinobulbar muscular atrophy. Another disorder is caused by repeat expansion within the FMR1 gene on this chromosome and is the most common type of inherited mental retardation
ANSWER: X chromosome
[10] Associated with a CAG repeat on chromosome 4, this fatal polyglutamine disease usually presents with spasmodic, uncontrollable movements and clumsiness.
ANSWER: Huntington’s disease or Huntington disease or Huntington’s chorea or chorea major
[10] Trinucleotide repeat disorders such as Huntington’s disease display this phenomenon, in which successive generations experience earlier onset and greater severity of the disease.
ANSWER: genetic anticipation

2. Answer the following about vampire literature for 10 points each:

[10] This auburn haired character from Dracula is bitten by Dracula in the form of a wolf and staked by her fiancé Arthur Holmwood.

ANSWER: Lucy Westenra (accept either name)

[10] This Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu novella, influenced by Coleridge’s “Christabel”, tells of the titular character’s attraction to Laura.

ANSWER: Carmilla

[10] This novel, written by Elizabeth Kostova, portrays Dracula as the shadowy titular figure through the journeys of the unnamed narrator and her father through Cold War Eastern Europe and Turkey.

ANSWER: The Historian

3. Name these German films for 10 points each:

[10] Franka Potente portrays the title character who races to save her boyfriend from a bad business deal in this 1998 Tom Tykwer film.

ANSWER: Run Lola Run or Lola Rennt

[10] Based on the real life case of Peter Kurten, this 1931 Fritz Lang film’s central character is Hans Beckert, a serial killer who preys on children, portrayed by Peter Lorre.

ANSWER: M

[10] Set in Berlin in 1945, this 1980 Rainer Fassbinder film tells of the titular woman’s struggle to survive the American and Russian occupation and ends with Germany’s 1954 victory in the World Cup.

ANSWER: The Marriage of Maria Braun , Die ehe der Maria Braun

4. Name some people or things relating to the Genoese Republic, for 10 points each:

[10] In 1339, Simone Boccanegra became the first man to hold this highest magistracy in the republic. The position shares its name with a similar one in another maritime republic.

ANSWER: Doge [dozh]

[10] This ruler of Genoa from 1528 to 1560 is known for re-writing the republic’s constitution, for being Charles V’s greatest admiral and as the namesake of an ocean liner that sank in 1956.

ANSWER: Andrea Doria

[10] This Corsican nationalist fought so successfully against the Genoese that they finally called in the French to crush him, which they did, but then in 1768 forced Genoa to give Corsica to them.