> I understand your frustration, but it must be remembered that all > science questions aren't pitched at scientists necessarily, but at > all players regardless of their fields of interest. In an ideal world > the scientist (who ostensibly has the most knowledge) should get the > tossup earliest, but I don't think science questions (or any > questions, regardless of the genre, really) should be approached with > the attitude that _only_ those persons in the field should get them. In writing science biography questions, it is very easy to write questions that require absolutely no knowledge of science to get. Therefore, these are not true science questions, they are history questions to which the answer is a scientist. For example, consider the now (hopefully) outdated clue about Michael Faraday being appreticed to a bookbinder at age 14. This tells you nothing about Faraday's work, nor does one need to know anything about Faraday's work to get the tossup on him. You don't even need to know who Faraday is, because this question brings in a clue which is effectively a 1-to-1 association. On the other hand, if you started out talking about a person's actual scientific accomplishments, I would be more inclined to accept that as a science-like question. For example, if you write something like, "In the 1930s, together with Leo Szilard, this man developed a refrigerator without moving parts," then someone who knows more about Einstein's scientific work than just "photoelectric effect/relativity" would be rewarded for their science knowledge. Another commonly used clue for Einstein in the past has been the clue about his namesake coefficients used in spontaneous photon absorption and emission. Similar clues are available for many of the big names in physics. Writing a question in that way, with a biographical giveaway at the end would reward science knowledge and convert a mostly biography tossup into a science tossup. One other problem with many science biography tossups, especially those written by non-scientists, is the problem of fluff in the form of "style bloat" which ACF guidelines explicitly recommend against (in fact, Subash had a note about it on the site when he was editing Regionals). The tendency is to write questions that start with, "His early work on thermodynamics blah blah followed by some work on optics blah blah..." This is bad. Bad because it is not uniquely identifying and tells you nothing of the substance of the person's work. Ok, great, he studied optics. So did a ton of other people. If you intend to write science biography, instead of this sort of static, try including specific, detailed information. For example, "His early work on (topic X) was published (publication Y) in (year Z)." This rewards both historic and scientific knowledge and leaves out meaningless information. > Furthermore, lots of people are only known for one thing. Examples > which spring to mind include William Calley, Mussolini, and William > the Conqueror. The Williams, probably. I guess you could say that Mussolini was known for only one thing, but by that reasoning, so were Hitler and Stalin. We still write questions about them though. Again, while I'm not qualified to speak about other fields in the sciences, if you want to write biography questions about physicists, there are plenty of physicists out there who are famous for many different things (Rayleigh and Kelvin, for example). So if you're intent on writing a scientist biography question, pick someone who's famous for more than one thing. > > science biography bad. > > I continue not to understand this position, and so far have never had > it explained such that I am completely enlightened. Why is "science > biography" bad? I have been told that this is because scientists > almost never are taught biography in their classes; even conceding > the point that all science questions are and ought to be written > solely for scientists (which I do not), I wonder how many musicians > are taught musical biography. Are music biographies then bad as well? Biography questions should be limited to one or two per packet, excluding political and military leaders and writers. Seeing as how music is already confined to about 1 or 2 tossups per packet, too much musical (or art, or science) biography swamps actual music knowledge. Also, biography questions outside of the aforementioned categories tend to be a crutch for players who don't know much about a given topic and are too lazy to research it. "Hmm, I don't know much about (insert subject) so I'll just write a pointless biography question! That'll go over well!" That doesn't mean that there aren't good biography questions out there or that they should never be written, but it does mean that they should be used sparingly.
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