ACF Fall 2005
Packet by Illinois A, Williams A, Alfred, Southeastern, Carleton B, UTC B
1. This battle was made more difficult for the winner when the Culloden ran into a reef and diverted the Leander in a rescue mission. The losing admiral had studied his enemy’s prior tactics at the Battle of the Saintes, and had his ships chained together while at anchor to prevent the British from dividing his fleet. However, the French fleet was too far from the shore, allowing the British to attack the line under Brueys from both sides, culminating in the explosion of the flagship, L’Orient. Only two French ships-of-the line escaped, while Lord Nelson’s fleet did not lose a single ship to French fire. FTP, name this 1798 naval battle that stranded Napoleon in Egypt.
ANSWER: Battle of TheNile [or Battle of Aboukir Bay]
2. A book on this man “and metaphor” was written by Sarah Kofman, while this man’s “life as literature” is the subject of a book by Alexander Nehamas. Gilles Deleuze wrote a book about this man “and philosophy,” while important English-language books about him were written by Arthur Danto and R. J. Hollingdale. One of this man’s books begins “We remain unknown to ourselves, we seekers after knowledge” and includes an essay asking “What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?” and another about guilt, bad conscience, and related manners. This man’s early works include essays “On the Use and Disadvantage of History” and on “Schopenhauer as Educator” collected in his Untimely Meditations, while later works include On the Genealogy of Morals. FTP, name this German philosopher of The Birth of Tragedy and Beyond Good and Evil.
ANSWER: Friedrich Nietzsche
3. Its value can be derived by applying the Bragg-Williams approximation to a 2-dimensional Ising model, resulting in a mean-field theory. It is given by the coupling constant times the number of nearest neighbors divided by Boltzmann’s constant, and Onsager’s solutions imply that near it the spontaneous magnetization scales as the one-eighth power of the temperature. TRM occurs when a substance is cooled in the presence of a magnetic field below this point, which has an antiferromagnetic counterpart in the Neel temperature. Associated with a second-order critical transition, for ten points, identify this temperature above which a ferromagnetic substance becomes paramagnetic, discovered by the father-in-law of Frédéric Joliot.
ANSWER: Curie Point or Curie Temperature
4. As a young man, the people of this man’s county called him Ole One Shot because of his marksmanship. This man earns the ire of Miss Caroline, his daughter’s teacher, when she discovers that this man taught his daughter to read with the assistance of his cook Calpurnia. In one episode, this man proves that a young woman named Maybella was beaten by someone who mostly used his left hand, which indicates that she was not attacked by Tom Robinson. This man is the father of a boy named Jem and a girl named Jean Louise, who goes by the nickname “Scout.” FTP, name this attorney who stands up for a falsely-accused black man in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
ANSWER: Atticus Finch (prompt on “Finch”)
5. The oldest surviving one is known as Sialk and is located in the suburbs of Kashan. Robert Koldewey found one in Borsippa which dates back to the 5th century BC, and the largest of them, known as Chogha Zanbil, was created in Dur Untashi, near Susa, around 1200 BC under the direction of Untash-Gal. Koldewey also found one that he took to be a temple to Marduk, the name of which, Etemenanki, translates as “The Foundation of Heaven and Earth.” Having no interior chambers, it typically possessed a mud-brick core and an exterior covered with baked brick. With about 25 remaining today, FTP, name these step-pyramids of ancient Mesopotamia.
ANSWER: Ziggurats
6. Antonio Buero Vallejo wrote a play about this painting that shares its title. The most important commentaries on are those of Sir Kenneth Clark and Michel Foucault, whose take on it can be found in his book The Order of Things.The ceiling of the room in which it is set has two mounts for chandeliers that do not appear in the painting. In the rear are two large but unintelligible paintings above a mirror in which two people can be seen. In the right front corner stand two dwarves and a dog, while on the left stands the artist himself with a red cross on his chest, in the act of painting. In the foreground is the Infanta, surrounded by the titular servants. FTP, name this painting of the Spanish court by Diego Velázquez.
ANSWER: Las Meninas or The Ladies in Waiting or La Familia de Felipe IV or The Family of Philip IV
7. Artificial selection is required for the rare Vanilovian variety of this behavior, which can be seen in the gold-of-pleasure plant with respect to flax. Egg behavior in cuckoo wasps and signaling by predatory photus fireflies are examples of the aggressive variety of this phenomenon. Also exhibited by viceroy butterflies and the two-headed snake, for ten points, identify this biological phenomenon, best known in its Müllerian and Batesian varieties, in which one species benefits from a superficial resemblance to another.
ANSWER: mimicry
8. He wrote about the fates of Sinfin Carrasco, Justino Perez, Roberto Lopez, and the rest of the “crew” who engaged in the titular fight in his “Furious Struggle Between Seamen and an Octopus of Colossal Size,” which along with “Fear” and “We Are Many” appeared in the volume Estravagario. He wrote poems to a “fallen chestnut,” a “yellow bird,” and “laziness” in his Elemental Odes, while his earlier works include poems about the battle of the Jarama River and one entitled “The Magellan Heart.” Later in his career politics played a larger role in his work, as seen in book-length historical poems like Canto general and a work based on his visit to an Incan city in the nation north of his own, “The Heights of Macchu Picchu.” FTP, name this author of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, a Nobel laureate from Chile.
ANSWER: Pablo Neruda (or Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basualto)
9. His wife was never permitted in the royal carriage, as a condition of his marriage to the lower-class woman after he became heir apparent following the death of his cousin Rudolf and father Charles Louis. Alleged to have died because surgeons could not find any buttons on his clothing, which he had sewed onto himself each day for a perfect fit, this man held the office of inspector general of all land and sea forces, which spurred Oscar Potiorek to invite him to a review of maneuvers in Bosnia. FTP, name this Hapsburg prince, assassinated by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.
ANSWER: Archduke Franz Ferdinand [or Francis Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria-este; or Franz Ferdinand, Erzherzog Von Österreich-este]
10. Its protagonist visits his mother’s grave and sees a line from “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” on her tombstone. In a dream, that character derives the area of an ellipse using integration in front of the class. One of the plays written by the same character, Heaven and Hell, features several references to Apocalypse Now, but the play was not produced at the titular school because a student got his finger blown off during rehearsal. The film focuses on a poor student with many extracurriculars who falls in love with an elementary school teacher. FTP, name this film Bill Murray as Herman Blume and Jason Schwartzman as Max Fischer.
ANSWER: Rushmore
[note: filmed at the alma mater of the Dudley Moore of quizbowl, Chris Frankel]
11. The sect of Judaism known as Chasidism takes its name from one of the two groups commemorated on this holiday, although there is no direct connection. The other group was a nationalist organization lead by Matthias the Hasmonean and his son that mounted a revolution against the Seleucid King Antiochus IV, who had massacred Jews and desecrated the temple by sacrificing pigs. To avoid scrutiny by the Greek guards, the Jews hid their Torahs and pretended to be playing a game involving an object marked with the Hebrew letters Nun, Gimmel, Heh and Shin, a game still played today. With a name meaning “Rededication,” FTP name this Jewish holiday that commemorates the rebellion of the Maccabees and the miraculous eight-day endurance of a small vial of oil.
ANSWER: Chanukkah(Clear your throat, it’s a guttural Ch, not an aspirated H)
12. Among its staunchest opponents were Thomas Platt, and arguments for it comprise a full third of the Chicago Platform. Swayed by a William H. Harvey book, proponents of its use adopted the slogan “16 to 1” and convinced Henry Teller’s namesake faction to leave the Republican Party. Its use was ended in the “Crime of ’73” and the Specie Resumption Act, restored by the Bland-Allison Act, and required by one of the two Sherman acts. FTP, name this substance, believed by the 1896 Democrats to be the key to ending poverty, which William Jennings Bryan and the bimetallists wished to see coined “freely.”
ANSWER: free silver [accept bimetallism before “substance” is read]
13. As a quantum-mechanical operator, its eigenvalues are given by h-bar squared times its quantum number times the quantity that quantum number plus one and its eigenstates are given by spherical harmonics. It is also obtained as the 2-form Noether charge associated with rotational invariance, with the consequence that its conservation does not hold for generally curved spacetimes. The derivative of this quantity with respect to time gives the torque, and Kepler’s Second Law is one expression of its conservation. For ten points, identify this physical quantity, given in classical mechanics by the position vector crossed with the linear momentum vector.
ANSWER: angular momentum
14. It mentions people who “in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table.” Other figures in this work include the “Chinaman of Oklahoma,” people who “journeyed to Denver,” “died in Denver,” and “came back to Denver and waited in vain,” and others who “ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley.” Another passage refers to people who “sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox.” This work is dedicated to a man who met its author while both were at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute, Carl Solomon. FTP, name this poem that begins “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” a work by Allen Ginsberg.
ANSWER: Howl
15. Its level is greatly affected by the sudestanos and pampero winds. It contains the islands of Farallón , Hornos, and Martín García, and its banks form several shoals which bear names such as Honda, Rouen, and Arquímedes. Colonia and Tigre are on its banks, while a notable part of it extends from Punta Lara to Colonia del Sacramento. Formed out of the confluence of the Paraná, this area is overlooked by Buenos Aires and Montevideo. FTP, identify this river and estuary system of Uruguay and Argentina.
ANSWER: Rio de la Plata [or River Plate; or River of Silver]
16. This man’s first commission was for the Vincens House, on which he used a Gothic Revival style that he would later greatly alter. His other works include the Monumental Rosary in Montserrat and the Workers Cooperative in Mataro, although he is better known for buildings such as The Santa Teresa School and El Capricho in Cantabria. For Eusebi Güell, his friend and patron, he constructed a house and Park Güell along with some eponymous catacombs. At the end of his life he devoted himself to the construction of a cathedral that is still under construction, the Sagrada Familia. FTP, name this architect who designed numerous buildings found in Barcelona.
ANSWER: Antonio Gaudí
17. This man’s namesake inequality, a form of the Bonferroni inequality, states that for any finite or countable set of events, the probability of at least one of them occurring is no greater than the sum of the probabilities of the individual events. His namesake algebras satisfy the properties of a lattice, and his name is given to rings in which every element is idempotent. In 1938 Claude Shannon applied his theories to electrical switching circuits, showing that, with two variables, the operators “meet” and “join” could be used to simplify electromechanical relays, laying the basis for computer chips. For 10 points, name this mathematician whose work is associated with truth tables and binary mathematics.
ANSWER: George Boole
18. His twin brother was a god of lightning as well as a psychopomp, and guarded the sun during its nighttime journey through the underworld. In one story, he has sex with a female relative after getting drunk on four draughts of pulque. He recreated mankind at the beginning of the Fifth Sun by sprinkling blood from his penis over a bone taken from Mictlan with the help of his twin brother Xolotl [shoh-LOH-tull]. He committed suicide, or departed on a raft of snakes, after being shamed by his rival, Tezcatlipoca. Often identified with the morning star, FTP, name this benevolent Aztec god, known as the Feathered Serpent.
ANSWER: Quetzalcoatl
19. She was said to have dressed as an Amazon to ride a white horse around Vézelay Cathedral. In her senior years, she made trips to Sicily to deliver Berengaria of Navarre and to Spain to retrieve Blanche of Castile. Her progeny married such figures as Raymond of Toulouse, Alfonso VIII of Castile and Henry the Lion of Saxony. Her alleged liaison with her uncle Raymond of Antioch contributed to the collapse of the Second Crusade and led to the annulment of her marriage to Louis VII of France. FTP, name this queen who then wed Henry II of England and became the mother of John and Richard the Lionheart.
ANSWER: Eleanor of Aquitane [or Eleanor Of Guyenne; or Éléonore D’aquitaine; or Éléonore De Guyenne; or Aliénor D’aquitaine; or Aliénor De Guyenne; prompt on partial answer]
19. He wrote that “poets are far rarer births than kings” at the beginning of a poem dedicated to Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland, while he claimed that “Venus’ ceston every line you make” at the end of a sonnet “to the most noble lady,” Mary Wroth. He wrote about a “brave infant of Saguntum” who crawled back into its mother’s womb after seeing that the city had been destroyed in a Pindaric Ode “to the immortal memory and friendship of that noble pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Morrison.” His poem “Slow, Slow, Fresh Fount” came from his play Cynthia’s Revels, and his other dramatic works include The Devil is an Ass and masques on Bartholomew Fair. FTP, name this Jacobean dramatist, the author of The Alchemist, Every Man in His Humour, and Volpone.
ANSWER: Ben Jonson
21. In 1954, this composer was posthumously awarded a Tony Award for his unwitting contribution to the Broadway musical Kismet. He arranged an Arabian melody as a favor to Darya Leonova, for whom he also orchestrated a setting of the satiric poem At Some Folks Houses. This artist’s farce Bogatyry, or The Heroic Warriors mostly consists of themes from other operas, while his B minor symphony is frequently performed. His operas include The Tsar’s Bride, which is lost, and the fourth act of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mlada, although they are less well known than the suite of Polovetsian dances excerpted from his most famous work, or his tone poem In the Steppes of Central Asia. FTP, name this research chemist and composer of Prince Igor.
ANSWER: Aleksandr Porfirevich Borodin
22. One of this man’s works features a painter named Einar, his wife Agnes, and a gypsy girl named Gerd who mades fun of the titular priest. Many of this man’s title characters are clergymen, including one that vows to cure the world of sickness after a half-gypsy girl invites him to her mountain church of ice and another that commits suicide after falling in love with Rebecca West. Several creators appear in his works as well, such as the sculptor Arnold Rubek in When We Dead Awaken and Oswald Alving in Ghosts, although best known is Halvard Solness, the title character of The Master Builder. FTP, name this author of such dramas as An Enemy of the People, Hedda Gabler, and A Doll’s House.
ANSWER: Henrik Ibsen
24. The formula underlying this phenomenon gives the wave number of H alpha. That formula may be derived rigorously by considering a transition to the second excited state with the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, or by invoking the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom, and involves the Rydberg constant. H alpha corresponds to a wavelength of about 655 nm so, like most of the lines in this series, it is visible. For ten points, name this set of hydrogen emission lines named for a Swiss mathematician, which correspond to transitions to the n = 2 state.
ANSWER: Balmer series (or lines)