J’Accuse/Blast/Moon Pie/Harrison Bergeron/Terrier Tussle April 2005
Tossups by Chicago A (Bruce Arthur, Tim McElroy, David Press, Andrew Yaphe)
1. This compound is sometimes used as an alternative to rock salt for deicing roadways. An inherited deficiency of ornithine transcarbamoylase can inhibit its production, and this compound is measured along with creatine when looking for problems within the kidneys. It is formed by taking two molecules of ammonia and one of carbon dioxide and transforming them in an eponymous cycle. For 10 points, Friedrich Wöhler started the discipline of organic chemistry by artificially synthesizing what organic compound which is the chief nitrogenous waste of mammals?
ANSWER: urea
2. Friedrich Nietzsche called the prelude to this opera “the first example of hypnotism by means of music.” It begins on the banks of the river Scheldt with a request by King Henry for help fighting the Magyars. Ortrud accuses the female lead of killing her brother Godfrey, which leads to a duel between Telramund and the title character, who defeats but spares Telramund and agrees to marry Elsa. In act 3 a vision of a swan taking the title character away leads to Elsa asking him his name, which causes him to return to Heaven at the end of the opera. For 10 points name this Richard Wagner opera about the son of Parsifal.
ANSWER: Lohengrin
3. This figure destroyed the demon Putana by sucking the life breath out of her breast, and when he was abducted by Trinavarta he became extraordinarily heavy, which caused the demon to fall out of the sky. Both of those demons were set on him by his evil uncle Kamsa, whom he killed after a wrestling match in Muratha. The son of Devaki and Vasudeva, he performs the Rasa dance and plays the flute to summon the Gopis. For 10 points name this eighth avatar of Vishnu, the adviser of Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita.
ANSWER: Krishna
4. The title character of this novel receives the nickname “Plain Buttons” because he is not allowed to wear any official insignia. When he is near death, he asks Captain Danforth of the Levant to come to his room, which is decorated with a map and a picture of George Washington. His life changes after he is put on trial for helping Aaron Burr, when he offends a judge who is also a veteran of the Revolutionary War by saying that he would be happy if he never heard another word about the United States. The judge takes him up on the offer, and he spends the rest of his life on navy vessels. For 10 points, name this 1865 work about Philip Nolan by Edward Everett Hale.
ANSWER: The Man Without a Country
5. In the 1970s, he worked against the sanctions on the apartheid governments in South Africa and Rhodesia, saying that they only helped the Communists and that much worse regimes in Africa deserved punishment. He chaired a committee in the 80s that investigated the possibility of a volunteer army and he helped to remove the draft. However, he was not liked by all, as many protested his involvement with Pinochet’s government when he received his Nobel Prize in 1976. His main contribution is an analysis of how monetary manipulation by the government has negatively impacted the economy in his Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. For 10 points, name this economist of the Chicago school, co-author of Free to Choose and full author of Capitalism and Freedom.
ANSWER: Milton Friedman
6. Remants of the defeated force in this confrontation launched the Nien conflict. This revolt broke out in the mountains east of Sichuan province as an anti-taxation protest, and, while ill-organized, it prospered due to the ineffectiveness of the imperial government under the corrupt official Ho-shen. It raged for three years before Emperor Chia Ch'ing overthrew Ho-shen and assumed effective power and systematically pacified the effected area through resettling and conscription. Its leaders promised personal salvation to all followers, as well as the return of both the Buddha and the Ming Dynasty. For 10 points, name this rebellion against the Manchus, which took its name from a type of flower.
ANSWER: White Lotus Rebellion or Pai-lien Chiao Rebellion
7. The Wahlund effect can lead to deviations from it, as can a process known as introgression. In 1908 one of its formulators published his explanation in response to comments made by Udny Yule. A colleague of William Bateson was unable to answer Yule’s question and thus presented it to his friend, a British mathematician. Assortative mating, inbreeding, and various types of natural selection will also cause deviations. Describable in its most famous instance by the binomial expansion of quantity p plus q squared, as well as by Punnet squares, For 10 points, identify this equation, used to predict genotypic frequencies within a population.
ANSWER: Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium
8. The protagonist’s mother dies of eating too much fish, while one of the men whom he takes to be his father suffocates on his party badge. The protagonist himself is put in a mental institution and becomes a painter after being convicted of a murder he didn’t commit. He has a voice which can break glass, and is very fond of the Pied Piper-like power wielded via the titular instrument. For 10 points, name this 1959 novel about the dwarf Oskar Matzerath, a work of Günter Grass.
ANSWER: The Tin Drum [or Die Blechtrommel]
9. His early Saint Praxedis was copied from Felice Ficherelli, while his only mythological work, Diana and Her Companions, was an imitation of Titian. He imitated Erasmus Quellinus in his first surviving work, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, while he followed The Procuress with his first mature work, Girl Asleep at a Table. He began using small dabs of paint called “pointillés” in works like The Glass of Wine, which, like most of his paintings, features the two-color tile for which his hometown is famous. For 10 points, name this artist of Allegory of Painting, a Dutch painter best known for his View of Delft.
ANSWER: Johannes Vermeer
10. David McLellan has written several books on this thinker’s early life, while his political thought has been written about by Shlomo Avineri and Hal Draper. His writings during the 1870s include the Notes on Adolph Wagner, an attack on the Paris Commune called The Civil War in France, and 1875’s Critique of the Gotha Program, which includes a famous sentence about abilities and needs. His Theses on Feuerbach asserts that while philosophers have offered various interpretations the world, our business is to change it, and the revolutions of 1848 inspired another text which announced that a specter was haunting Europe. For 10 points, name this German author of Das Kapital.
ANSWER: Karl Marx
11. It was attacked by General Bel Riose, but after Brodrig joined his effort the war was called off by Cleon II. It established control over the Four Kingdoms under the administration of mayor Salvor Hardin, but under the Indburs it became a rigid plutocracy which was easily overthrown by a mutant known as the Mule. It was established on the planet Terminus by Hari Seldon as a scientific refuge to shorten the interregnum after the collapse of the Galactic Empire. For 10 points, name this society whose history is told in a series of novels by Isaac Asimov.
ANSWER: Foundation
12. After this man divorced Ann Eliza Webb, she went on a lecture tour to attack the principles of his group. His ascent to the presidency led Lyman Wight, James Strang, and Sidney Rigdon to form breakaway sects, after which he led a move to Council Bluffs. His success on a trip to England in 1840, where he founded the Millenial Star magazine, sparked his rise to prominence. When he died in 1880, he was replaced by John Taylor. Thirty years earlier, he had been appointed governor of a newly-created territory by Millard Fillmore. As head of the Twelve Apostles, he put forth the Nauvoo Covenant. For 10 points, name this second President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the successor to Joseph Smith.
ANSWER: Brigham Young
13. A poem about it by Thomas Hood notes that it stood “shadowless like Silence” in the misty morn, and notes that “no lonely bird would sing” into its hollow ear. Another poem about it notes that sometimes “whoever seeks abroad” may find it “sitting careless on a granary floor” or on a furrow sound asleep. That poem concludes with a famous image of “gathering swallows” twittering in the skies after noting that the titular phenomenon has its music too. In the first of that poem’s three stanzas, we encounter some bees who think warm days will never cease and some fruit which is filled with ripeness to the core. For 10 points, name this time of year which John Keats labels a “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”
ANSWER: autumn [“Ode: Autumn” and “To Autumn”]
14. The name's the same: one in 1908 proclaimed new maritime laws, one in 1933 attempted to counteract the worldwide depression, while another one in 1866 led to the drafting of the British North America Act. One held only a year later expelled the Prussians from Luxembourg, which was declared neutral, while another one banned the merging of Schleswig and Holstein, whose succession crises it settled. More famously, two of them offered resolutions to the Belgian War of Independence. For 10 points, name these international meetings, the first of which was convened in 1830 to address Greek independence.
ANSWER: London Conference [accept any reasonable synonym of Conference; prompt on London]
15. They are split into the uqaal, those who are wise and learned, and the juhhal, who are not allowed to read the sacred texts. Their religious figures are called ajawid and the Hikma is studied by them. Radio DJ Casy Kasem is a well-known member of this group that holds sacred their five-colored star. As opposed to Islam, this religious group eschews individual prayer and believes in reincarnation. For 10 points, what is this religious group that calls itself the “People of Monotheism” and is spread throughout the Levant, but mostly in Lebanon.
ANSWER: Druze
16. The protagonist of this work turns down the oral sex offered him by his co-worker’s wife Stacey, but later gets a blow job from a woman named Mirabella while driving a rented tangerine Camaro through the Nevada desert. He meets his first wife, Phyllis, when they are both students at MIT, but after they have four children he decides to divorce her so that he can marry Reverend Larson’s wife Julia. His greatest success is a program called DigitEyes, which makes him rich when E-O Data is sold to Apple in the early ‘80s. Haskells Crossing, Willow, and Middle Falls are the places referred to in the book’s title. For 10 points, name this 2004 work about the life of Owen Mackenzie, the most recent novel of John Updike.
ANSWER: Villages
17. It is usually climbed by three major routes: the Normal, Polish glacier, and Polish traverse. A river that shares its name with this mountain flows west from it for about 120 miles before reaching the ocean north of Vina del Mar. To its south is the Bermejo Pass, which is the location of a famous statue of Jesus Christ. Its summit was first reached by a European in 1897, when Matthias Zurbriggen did it. For 10 points, name this mountain in the Southern Andes, which is the tallest in South America.
ANSWER: Mount Aconcagua
18. Introducing a covariance matrix can allow for correlations in data when calculating the Mahalanobis version of this. For binary data, the Hamming version calculates this based off the number of common 1's. Minkowski gave the generalized version, for which the Manhattan or city block version is the specialized case when the exponent is one. For 10 points, what is this metric most commonly calculated using the Euclidean method, for which you take the square root of the sum of the squares of the differences of each component of two points.
ANSWER: distance
19. During the 1780's, he authored a series of works known as "The Continentalist." Later, he founded the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, which sought to build an ideal industrial town in Paterson, New Jersey. From 1799 to his death, he served as President General of the hereditary Society of Cincinnatus, a post that critics used to accuse him of monarchism. More controversial was his affair with Maria Reynolds and his payment of hush money to her husband, and although unknown at the time, his most boneheaded move might have been the intentional creation of a national debt—even worse than agreing to a July 12, 1804 meeting with Aaron Burr. For 10 points, name this first Secretary of the Treasury.
ANSWER: Alexander Hamilton
20. Its namesake hypercharge together with its namesake isospin are described by the group SU(2) cross U(1). It is described by the second term in the Lie group formulation of the Standard Model, which does not provide a way to calculate its namesake mixing angle. The discovery of the particles that mediate this earned Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer the Nobel Prize in Physics, and it is the only force that affects neutrinos in a significant manner. This can be observed in beta decay and it is mediated by the W and Z bosons. For 10 points name this force which is combined with the electromagnetic force in the theory of Glashow, Weinberg, and Salaam.
ANSWER: weak nuclear force
Extras
They appeared in the novel The King Kong Effect as the murder weapon. Their venom has formed the basis of a new set of painkillers that are designed to fight chronic pain as an alternative to Celebrex and Vioxx. The drug, Prilat, is delivered directly to the spinal cord much like the animal uses its harpoon tipped proboscis to deliver its venom to fish that wander to close by. For 10 points, name these marine snails whose most distinguishing feature is their intricate colored and geometrically inspired shell.