Monday, July 9, 2012 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

[John Boy]

I've always pronounced it ee-neeyac, with a long e at the beginning. Is that wrong?

Dunno. I've seen the word written, but not many people talk about it so it's hard to know how it would have been pronounce if we've never heard it. I also say long-E sound.

They'd have to count that response as correct, though.

[John Boy]

Geez, that game made me wonder how the two contestants (excluded the champion) got on the show...... Some of their guesses were truly horrendous.

As much as it may seem unkind to say so, I don't know how anyone can dispute this. I mean, to end up with a negative 6 grand, that's really not much of a showing. Archimedes may not be widely known for his thoughts on pi, but when the last DD clue began with "Eureka!" didn't that really point to the guy?

Congrats to the champ on her march to what looks like a ToC berth.

This FJ was a head-scratcher for me. I wrote down "What is...." even as I was struggling with what to put next (good thing, or I never would have had time to complete an answer). At first I misread and thought they were looking for a brain STRUCTURE, and got stuck thinking about the pituitary gland. After rereading I started looking for a substance and (only to avoid having NOTHING written down) put down "insulin." But I kept thinking that couldn't be right, and started to think of something more in "control" of much of us, and at about the 28-second mark into the Think Music I came up with DNA, with just enough time to write it down. Good thing they weren't going for a long answer. Just under the wire.

From the 4th podium I got Scandinavian, Alban Barkley (proud of that get), Coral Sea, marimba, and ENIAC, to finish $11,600 ahead of a contestant who actually had a signalling device.

[the_phil]

Pet peeve time: i is no less "real" than pi is (or 2, for that matter).

If I went to the store and tried to buy i lbs of ground beef, I'd run into some problems. Pi lbs of ground beef? No problem (other than a bewildered college kid working in the meat department).

[Paucle]

Apocryphal or not, it's always amusing (from Sir Isaac Asimov):

He was sitting in on a class and the teacher berated mathematicians for attaching significance to imaginary numbers.

He stood up and announced to the teacher that the square root of minus 1 was as real as any other number. The teacher challenged him to hand him i pieces of chalk. He said he would as soon as the teacher handed him 1/2 a piece of chalk.

So the teacher takes a fresh piece of chalk and snaps it in two, handing him one of the pieces. Asimov announces, "This is one piece, not a half."

The teacher retorts that since it is half of a standard sized piece, that it should count as 1/2. Asimov responded (approximately) "Now you're springing an arbitrary definition on me. Besides, can you be sure this isn't a .48 or a .52 piece of chalk? Can you consider yourself to be able to speak with authority on the square root of minus one, when you're apparently shaky on one half?"

He reports that he was ejected from the classroom.

[goforthetie]

Pet peeve time: i is no less "real" than pi is (or 2, for that matter).

If I went to the store and tried to buy i lbs of ground beef, I'd run into some problems. Pi lbs of ground beef? No problem (other than a bewildered college kid working in the meat department).

1) If you tried to buy 35,345,023,423,004,235,389 pounds you'd have a problem. Same thing if you tried to buy -35 pounds. Are 35,345,023,423,004,235,389 and -35 not real numbers?
2) You'll never have exactly pi pounds of ground beef anyway.
3) Even if you did, that's not pi. That's a physical object that stands in as an example of what pi might represent.

[Woppy T]

I didn't even need my video-game playing, percussion husband sitting next to me to get Ocarina and Marimba. I was shouting at the screen so much, particularly at "irrational."

Please, no one is called a "Smoothie." And Alex's smirk at the camera just made me groan a second time.

When I heard 'Smoothie', I asked, 'Has anyone used that term since 1960?'

Han Solo, to Lando, in The Empire Strikes Back. Of course, that was a long, long, time ago . . .

[Austin Powers]

FJ I instantly got the accepted answer, but was debating the rest of the music on whether or not to cross out the D and put an R in... (thinking they may have intentionally included someone NOT Watson or Crick to throw us off the DNA trail.) Thankfully my decision to stick with first guess paid off.

Let's wait for the question to be posted, but I don't recall any reason why RNA would be wrong - it's in the nucleus, too, even if it doesn't stay there always.

Well, that's why I used the word 'accepted' over something like 'right' or 'correct.'

We can decide on our own whether or not something would be accepted, but unless it's explicitly said on the show (or in 1 VERY rare case, a post by TPTB on a forum. See: http://www.j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=3527 ), it cannot be a canonical response.

My relief comes from not having to attach a Roger Maris asterisk to my response.

Yeah, well that's not going to happen most likely. In the mean time, I say we count "RNA" right for poll purposes and such (though I'd be curious as to why anyone would pick RNA over DNA here).

[Woppy T]

The point is, DNA has been around for a while, but what it did took well over a half century to sort out.

Billions of years, actually.

[OrangeSAM]

Yeah, well that's not going to happen most likely. In the mean time, I say we count "RNA" right for poll purposes and such (though I'd be curious as to why anyone would pick RNA over DNA here).

IIRC, Mrs. OS's reasoning, based on the "control center" part of the clue, was that RNA controlled more activity within the cell.

[mitchparov]

Ooof. Hadn't watched in a few weeks, and I came back to last night's game. I say again: ooof.

[stevo4212]

Not such a great day, was it? I didn't even have a good day. Blanked on Archimedes, of all things. I've never heard of electric current referred to as juice.

I notice that Trebek has really toned down his personal insults. That's probably a good thin, treating the contestants with a little more respect.

[Le Master]

I've never heard of electric current referred to as juice.

You probably haven't being conscious of it, but you've likely heard it just from being alive.

[Bamaman]

I knew who the eureka guy was, but blurted out Euripides instead.

I don't think finishing in the red makes you dumb or a bad Jeopardy! player. You have to have some smarts to pass the test and the interview. sometimes you just get a bad run of categories. Or, after a long flight combined with nervousness, puts you in a bad mental frame of mind. You fall behind and start making stabs in the dark that you know are wrong, like pi being a prime number.

In the old games thread, Mark just posted a game where a four day champ didn't make FJ, was he stupid or a bad player?

[Austin Powers]

I knew who the eureka guy was, but blurted out Euripides instead.

I don't think finishing in the red makes you dumb or a bad Jeopardy! player. You have to have some smarts to pass the test and the interview. sometimes you just get a bad run of categories. Or, after a long flight combined with nervousness, puts you in a bad mental frame of mind. You fall behind and start making stabs in the dark that you know are wrong, like pi being a prime number.

In the old games thread, Mark just posted a game where a four day champ didn't make FJ, was he stupid or a bad player?

See, I think people make this correlation of "Bad on Jeopardy---->stupid." That's not true. The person in question was a doctor, and you don't get that far by being dumb. Plus, Jeopardy is a game of recall, but it is of quick recall, and a lot of times the stuff asked (smoothie?) isn't really valuable knowledge. Give a person thirty minutes and a timer and they might answer every question correctly.

But it was still painful to watch.

[alietr]

And anyone who has been up there will tell you -- it's easy to get flustered. Most, if not close to all, people don't, but it happens. And it happened to her. It was unfortunate because I'll bet she could have done well if she hadn't gotten a few early misses. She definitely seemed to get to an "aw, screw it" mode.

[harrumph]

Yeah, well that's not going to happen most likely. In the mean time, I say we count "RNA" right for poll purposes and such (though I'd be curious as to why anyone would pick RNA over DNA here).

Here's how I went with RNA - DNA seemed so obvious that I went with the "less famous" RNA to avoid possible negbait. (I'm not well versed in the exact biological processes).

[the_phil]

1) If you tried to buy 35,345,023,423,004,235,389 pounds you'd have a problem.

Maybe a physical problem, but in theory I *could* buy that much. I'd just have to wait to repopulate the cows of the earth... many times over.

Same thing if you tried to buy -35 pounds.

I could sell them 35 lbs. That's the same, no? In our ground beef transaction vector, we're just negating direction.

3) Even if you did, that's not pi. That's a physical object that stands in as an example of what pi might represent.

And there is the distinction. Pi is "real" because a physical object exists that represents it as a quantity. The same cannot be said for i terms. I'll concede on your ambiguity point from early ("imaginary" vs. "complex").

[Austin Powers]

And anyone who has been up there will tell you -- it's easy to get flustered. Most, if not close to all, people don't, but it happens. And it happened to her. It was unfortunate because I'll bet she could have done well if she hadn't gotten a few early misses. She definitely seemed to get to an "aw, screw it" mode.

I wonder what can be done about this.

Perhaps it is a confirmation bias at work, but gameplay has been really off for a good while now. I think the boards have been pretty darn good lately (yesterday's FJ was not exactly precise) but episodes like yesterday are painful to watch. Lot of nervous play, lot of players taking a while to get going, lot of "um" between category picks that make me want to reach for the mute button.

When Jennings was doing his thing, the show adjusted by giving the players more buzzer practice. I wonder if gameplay practice - answering a question from the podium, picking another category, taking turns doing this - would help. It would take some of the nerves off.

Perhaps they're doing this now; I wouldn't know. Perhaps they should do more of it.

It would take more time to film, but I think it would lead to a better product.

Note, this wouldn't fix every problem, nor should it. Wagering errors are actually fun; it gives an element of unpredictability to things, such as when a musicologist can be within striking distance of the win, get FJ right while the leader misses it, but loses because he only bets $200 (or whatever it was) on the FJ. Didn't see that coming, did you?

[Austin Powers]

Yeah, well that's not going to happen most likely. In the mean time, I say we count "RNA" right for poll purposes and such (though I'd be curious as to why anyone would pick RNA over DNA here).

Here's how I went with RNA - DNA seemed so obvious that I went with the "less famous" RNA to avoid possible negbait. (I'm not well versed in the exact biological processes).

DNA is "read" to make the RNA, which is then sent outside the nucleus to create proteins after being "translated" by ribosomes, with each base pair sequence leading to a different amino acid being recruited to form a chain that becomes a protein.

Except for the RNA which stays in the nucleus and does something completely different, or when it leaves the nucleus and regulates how other RNA do their thing. Or other stuff.

[hbomb1947]

And anyone who has been up there will tell you -- it's easy to get flustered. Most, if not close to all, people don't, but it happens. And it happened to her. It was unfortunate because I'll bet she could have done well if she hadn't gotten a few early misses. She definitely seemed to get to an "aw, screw it" mode.

I wonder what can be done about this.

Perhaps it is a confirmation bias at work, but gameplay has been really off for a good while now. I think the boards have been pretty darn good lately (yesterday's FJ was not exactly precise) but episodes like yesterday are painful to watch. Lot of nervous play, lot of players taking a while to get going, lot of "um" between category picks that make me want to reach for the mute button.

When Jennings was doing his thing, the show adjusted by giving the players more buzzer practice. I wonder if gameplay practice - answering a question from the podium, picking another category, taking turns doing this - would help. It would take some of the nerves off.

Perhaps they're doing this now; I wouldn't know. Perhaps they should do more of it.

It would take more time to film, but I think it would lead to a better product.

Isn't quality of gameplay (e.g., picking the next clue quickly, and not freezing up in the headlights, and taking instruction well when Maggie asks you to announce your pick more authoritatively) supposed to be selected for in the auditions? Isn't that the whole point of the mock game? Admittedly, there are probably some folks who look very sharp in the mock game -- they may totally come across as smoothies -- and then they get very nervous when they realize they're being taped for TV. Also, TPTB may well be making a conscious decision to subordinate quality of gameplay to other factors when choosing some people that they really like. After all, they're casting for an entertainment product; and some of the things that are criticised by the jboard community aren't a big deal, or even noticeable, to the general public viewing the show.