As I haven't taken the time to study the seemingly hundreds of posts that have popped up since this afternoon, you'll have to forgive me if I duplicate some points that have already been made, but there are a few topics I'd like to touch on for a moment. 1) "Science biography bad!" Like all sweeping generalizations, I think this statement would do more harm than good if taken to heart without reservation. Granted, many bad science biography questions have been written over the years, and a good number of them don't reward those with thorough knowledge of the field. But that doesn't mean good science biography questions can't still seek to reward legit science knowledge. For example, a question built around clues discussing ideas developed by the scientist which are known under his name, i.e. "With someguy who I can't remember this scientist developed a namesake empirical rule relating the log of the range of alpha radiation to the radioactive time constant of the emitting atoms" or "He found that alpha particles are occasionally deflected at large angles by gold atoms in a famous 1909 experiment with Marsden" (both answers are Geiger, by the way). I'm typing these clues from memory, so please refrain from spazzing out and posting detailed corrections if one of the words happens to be misleading. Maybe these aren't the best examples available, but there are science biography questioins which reward experts first, but yet also become accessible to laymen at the end, a goal which fewer and fewer question writers seem to care about these days. The trend anymore, judging from packets I've been forced to edit in the past few years, is to write a question on a fairly technical scientific topic, using line after line of densely worded jargon without ever considering if it could be answered at the end by anyone else but a science player, resulting in numerous rooms at tournaments with questions that not just go dead, but leave the players with a headache in the process. I think well-written science biography questions which address the content of the scientist's work in a way favoring science players but which also remain accessible (at least at the end) to laymen should be encouraged, if done in moderation (say, 1 tossup a round). I want to say here that I'm not seeking to pick on science people with this. In fact, I think questions whose overwhelming volume of technical content combined with no effort at general accessibility is one of the greatest problems with question writing in every field; it just so happens that the current discussion combined with the general nature of science questions means that this is where it is being noticed most. I know I said I had two points, but I've either forgotten what the second one was or already mentioned it without being conscious of it (that's the effects of Everclear for you). I think it was something along the lines of "This is a game that at its heart will always, by its very nature, reward shallow surface knowledge and is only slightly related to how smart you are, but that in the great scheme of things, there's nothing wrong with that, especially if attempts to fix this seriously undermine the enjoyment it provides", or some such crap. Anyway, until my next "this is what's wrong with the game" rant... Kelly
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