Thursday 25 June 2015

The term "First Gentleman" is used in the United States for the husband of a state governor

Your targets this week:

 1+ out of 6: Well done, you beat us and we'd have won with you on our team!

I got bored again, so there's another bonus round all the way at the bottom! Do check it out!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The secret German
4) The metallurgist
5) The rich-person otherkin

The ones that got away
1) According to the book of Genesis, on what day did God create man?
2) Acclaimed actor Donald Sutherland (most recently noted for playing President Snow in The Hunger Games movies) was born in Canada's third least populous province - which one?
3) Which of the Democratic Party's declared candidates for the 2016 United States Presidential election is a Senator for Vermont? (No, it's not Hillary Clinton.)
4) What is Kanye West's middle name?
5) 2 point question: What picture completes this group?

Question 5


The answers


Our excuses


How did you do? Would you have beaten us and helped us win (1 or more points)? Let the world know with the poll below, then read on for my alternative questions (loosely) inspired by this week's Ones That Got Away!


My alternative questions
1) Thought by many to be the cradle of civilization, what word meaning 'between rivers' describes the area of the Tigris-Euphrates river system?
2) Canada's smallest province is Prince Edward Island. The fourth son of George III, the Prince Edward in question was never king himself, but was the father of which other British monarch?
3) No relation to Elizabeth, Chief Justice Earl Warren chaired an investigation into what event? The 889-page final report was presented on September 24, 1964.
4) Recorded after leaving Chicago State University aged 20, what was the name of Kanye West's debut studio album?
5) 2 point question: In my super-great Harry Potter fanfiction (Harry Potter and the Trivia of Quizkaban) I've created a new Hogwarts house called Quizzlefun! You know all the mascots of the four canonical houses above, but can you work out what animal is Quizzlefun's mascot? Here's an exclusive sneak-peak to help you work it out:

Hermione rolled her eyes.

"Honestly, Harry, given how often it allows me to show off knowing something without any need to explain why I know it, I'd have thought you'd have read Hogwarts: A History by now!"

"Look," sighed Harry, "all I want to know is what animal Quizzlefun's mascot is, can't you just tell me?"

"Oh Harry," Hermione replied smugly, "I can't just tell you things, how are you to learn!" She thought for a minute. "Ah, how about this. If Gryffindor plus Ravenclaw equals gryphon, and Gryffindor plus Slytherin plus Quizzlefun equals Chimera, then what does Quizzlefun equal?"

The answers


How did you do on my alternative questions? Have another poll!
 
Bonus round: Gimme 10!

After last week's experiment with 'double or nothing', I've decided to try a new question idea this time around. Below you'll find five more questions loosely inspired by this week's Ones That Got Away, but each has four possible answers. As usual, you get 1 point per correct answer, but once again you have to decide how many answers you're confident of. If you provide an incorrect guess you'll score 0 for that question! So look over each question and decide whether you want to give 1, 2, 3 or all 4 answers. Your target is to score 10 points (although if you think that's too easy, feel free to set your own goal) - no poll for this one, but feel free to let me know how you did by other means!

Oh, and one last thing: perfect spelling is required!

1) Along with Genesis, which four other books of the bible make up the Pentateuch?
2) What are the middle names of the last four US Presidents? To help, those Presidents are Barack H. Obama, George W. Bush, Bill J. Clinton and George H. W. Bush (and yes, you need both names for that last one to score).
3) What four countries in the Commonwealth of Nations have a larger population than that of the UK?
4) What four singles where Kanye West is credited as the lead artist have reached the top 5 in the UK Singles chart?
5) What four Latin words feature in the Hogwarts motto? In English it is usually translated as 'never tickle a sleeping dragon'.

The answers


Thursday 18 June 2015

The Poisson distribution is the best probability distribution. Probably.

Don't forget: if you haven't voted in my 'When Do You Quiz?' Poll, do please spare a moment to do so here!

We won this week, but could you have done even better?

Bonus! I've added some extra fun to the alternative questions this week, so do have a go at them as well!

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The left-fielder

The ones that got away
1) The first law school for women in the US was originally named after which cross-dressing Shakespeare character?
2) Mary has a purse containing 50 coins totalling exactly 1 dollar. Mary drops 1 coin, what is the percentage chance that coin is a penny? The available coins are 1 cent, 5 cents, 10 cents and 25 cents, and you need to be within 5% to get the point.
3) What is the name of the main family in Downton Abbey?
4) Of the two quotes that follow, one is attributed to Vladimir Putin, the other to a member of House Lannister in Game of Thrones. For 1 point, which is which?
"There are no men like me. Only me."
"Sometimes it is necessary to be lonely in order to prove that you are right."

The answers


Our excuses


How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more correct)? Let the world know with the poll below, then read on for my alternative questions (loosely) inspired by this week's Ones That Got Away!


My alternative questions

With only four Ones That Got Away this week I thought I'd get a bit more creative to offer slightly more bang for your blog-reading buck. For one week only you're getting twice as many alternative questions, which come in two formats: 'Straight Up' and 'Double or Nothing'.

'Straight Up' questions are simple fact-based trivia with 1 point available for each correct answer. Points scored on these questions are safe regardless of what happens next.

'Double or Nothing' questions have two possible responses, and it's up to you whether you provide one or both answers. Giving one correct answer scores you 1 point, giving two correct answers scores you 2 points but if you give two answers and either is wrong you'll score nothing for that question! After you read each question you'll have to decide whether you'll play it safe with one answer, or risk it all by going for two. Good luck!

Part 1: straight up: 
1a) What two-word phrase is used by modern critics to label Shakespearean works that are not easily categorized as comedy, tragedy, or history?
2a) If I toss a (fair) coin twice, what is the probability it will land on the same side both times?
3a) Whose 'Book of Household Management', a guide to running a household in Victorian Britain, has sold millions of copies despite advice including boiling pasta for nearly 2 hours?
4a) If 'Raymond Richard' is the author George R. R. Martin, then who is 'Ronald Reuel'? (Surname suffices.)

Part 2: double or nothing:
1b) Two of Shakespeare's canonical plays have titles wherein all words begin with the same letter. Name one or both. (Obviously one-word titles don't count.)
2b) A GCSE maths question was doing the rounds a few weeks ago concerning someone called Hannah and a bag of sweets. Consternation abound concerning the equation n² - n - 90 = 0. Give one or both values of n that satisfy it. (Note: you should not take into account what n actually represented in the original exam question.)
3b) The title characters of both a 1937 animated film and a 1950 animated film were scullery maids. Name one or both.
4b) Vladimir Putin's surname is written as 'Poutine' in French, which is hilarious because poutine is a Canadian dish traditionally consisting of french fries and two other ingredients. Name one or both.

The answers


How did you do on my alternative questions? Have another poll! (Remember the maximum possible is 12 points!)

Monday 15 June 2015

Pub Quiz Poll: When do you quiz?

Following my Pub Quiz Poll about team sizes, here's another data gathering exercise. Pretty simple: when do you quiz? Please vote for whichever day of the week you most often attend a pub quiz. If you regularly attend more than one quiz a week, please choose the day you quiz more often or, if you attend more than one equally regularly, pick which you'd continue to attend if you could only go to one. (Sorry if that gives you a hard decision - I've kept the poll to 'one vote per person' so that people who regularly attend multiple quizzes don't skew the results too much.)

Results will be discussed in due course (and hopefully with a slightly quicker turnaround than the last poll!).

Pub Quiz Poll Results: Team size limits

Earlier this year I ran a poll asking what you think the team size limit should be at pub quizzes (if, indeed, you thought there should be a limit at all). Five months later I've remembered to have a look at the results, and they were fairly conclusive. As you can see below, a team size of six seems to be the prevailing opinion, picking up precisely half of the votes to date. Around one in five voters preferred to see quartets of quizzers, while one in seven think five heads are the perfect number.



I can't say I found these results all that surprising; in my experience of quizzing the most common team size limit is six, and I doubt that's a coincidence. Still, it's mildly interesting to note that even numbers seem to be preferred, while it's good to see the often under-represented non-integer team size getting a mention as well.

Not pictured: pretending it isn't a problem
All of this does raise the question of what to do about levelling the playing field between smaller and larger teams. The simplest solution to me is to have a size limit, and a six player cap (at least for a normal pub setting) is a good balance between letting people have a good social experience without too many players feeling they have no chance. There are times when this isn't necessarily practical though, be it a long-running quiz with long-held traditions, or simply a cultural issue (as noted on the original post, it's quite rare to encounter team size limits here in Montreal). There's also the question of what a quizmaster faced with an unexpectedly large group should do - your landlord won't be happy to see a large group heading out the door regardless of the quizzing reasons.

The latter case is probably more easily dealt with: one ad hoc fix is to let big groups play but explain they can't win the top prize (or, as I've seen at some venues, have a separate 'big team prize'). Another quite common choice is to ask the big team to split in two, although this needs a quizmaster who's either alert to collusion or good at persuading them to be competitive.

Handling a situation where large teams are an established part of the quiz requires more creativity. A careful balance has to be struck between the smaller teams feeling hard done by without the larger teams (and their all-important larger spending power) feeling unfairly targeted. The one successful solution I've seen (and discussed in the comments here) are multi-answer questions where the number of required answers is the same as your team size. ("For five points, name as many landlocked African countries as your team size", for example.) Choosing the correct questions for this is difficult, but it ties the difficulty directly to your team size making it feel perfectly fair.

If you have any other suggestions to balancing team sizes do let me know, either in the comments or on Twitter, and keep an eye out for another Pub Quiz Poll coming soon!

Friday 12 June 2015

The Canadian Navy's motto is 'Ready Aye Ready'

Your targets this week:

We won this week, but could you have done even better?
The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The secret German
4) The metallurgist
5) The rich-person otherkin

The ones that got away
1) In the Canadian navy, what rank is immediately below rear admiral?
2) Despite its 'Peach State' nickname, Georgia's peach production is lower than which of its neighbouring states?
3) In which country did George Foreman fight Muhammad Ali in the Rumble in the Jungle? You can give either the current name or its name at the time of the fight.
4) What do the letters of the US TV channel 'CNN' stand for?
5) Which Russian wrote the existentialist novel Notes from Underground?
6) Which company was behind the first FIFA World Cup football to be made with the now iconic black-and-white design of hexagons and pentagons?
7) And in which year was that World Cup?
8) Where in the body would you find the 'IT band'?

The answers


Our excuses


How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more correct)? Let the world know with the poll below, then read on for my alternative questions (loosely) inspired by this week's Ones That Got Away!


My alternative questions
Question 4
1) The highest-selling single computer model of all time, how much RAM does the Commodore 64 have?
2) Having granted a patent for the land to Robert Heath in 1629, North and South Carolina are named after which monarch?
3) What term for a type of punch derives from the arm's motion mimicking the action of swinging a scythe?
4) Which television network's logo is this? Its name translates to 'island' or 'peninsula'.
5) Give a year in which Dostoyevsky was alive.
6) The 2006 FIFA World Cup ball was the Adidas +Teamgeist, with the plus sign included so the name could be trademarked as the regular German word Teamgeist could not. What does Teamgeist translate to in English?
7) The 1970 World Cup was the last time the Jules Rimet trophy was awarded, as Jules Rimet himself had stated it could be kept by the first team to win the tournament how many times?
8) Z'roa, a lamb shankbone appears on the Seder Plate, part of what religious festival?

The answers


How did you do on my alternative questions? Have another poll!

Thursday 4 June 2015

Prince's real name is Prince

Your targets this week:

We won this week, but could you have done even better?

The attendees
1) The statistician
2) The doctor
3) The secret German
4) The metallurgist
5) The rich-person otherkin

The ones that got away
1) Featuring artists including Joy Division and Anna Domino, now-defunct Factory Records was one of the most influential labels of the 1980s. In what city was it based?
2) In what year did Enron file for bankruptcy amid a massive financial scandal?
3) Which of these is not a real Prince song: 'Computer Blue', 'Easy 2 Tease Me', 'Glam Slam', 'Horny Pony', or 'Raspberry Beret'?

The following 3 questions all have answers of the form "blank the blank" (e.g. 'Gordon the gopher'):

4) What skating move involves crouching near the ice on one foot while holding out the other leg which looks kinda like a gun?
5) What 2001 movie starring Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, but lost out to A Beautiful Mind?
6) What 24 year-old rapper is also known as 'DJ Stank Daddy' and 'Wolf Haley'?

The answers


Our excuses


How did you do? Would you have beaten us (1 or more correct)? Let the world know with the poll below, then read on for my alternative questions (loosely) inspired by this week's Ones That Got Away!


My alternative questions
Question 5
1) Which US Government organization has nicknames including The Pickle Factory, The Company, and Virginia Farm Boys?
2) Before shortening to Enron, the company was to be named 'Enteron', but made the change after the realization that Enteron approximates the Greek for what body part?
3) Who is the first female in line to the British throne?
4) There are four Olympic disciplines of figure skating: men's singles, ladies' singles, pair skating, and what other? Unlike the other three, in this discipline competitors must skate to music with a clear beat or rhythm.
5) Indicated on this floor plan, in what building would you find the Queens' Bedroom?
6) What Tyler was a leader of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt in England? (Spelling counts!)

The answers


How did you do on my alternative questions? Have another poll!