Experiments in Memory
(Warning: there is detailed talk of quiz books. That's QUIZ BOOKS.)
This is what happens when you convalesce. Cabin fever and stir craziness are inevitable. You have two choices: go all voyeuristic and start staring out the window, with some kind of telescopic or photographic equipment aimed at the most interesting open windows Jimmy Stewart-style.
Or you start looking inwards, into TVs and computer screens and books and your dark places. Introversion follows and you start to think that the outside world has gone a bit too weird and funky, funk-ee or funk-ay. I took the latter route. Then I started picking up old quiz books, and perhaps, I knew then that I was touching on madness. So here we go.
There are some great quiz books out there, but far more rubbish and hackneyed ones. The finest include all the University Challenge books, both Magnus Magnusson's recent ones, the Masterminds. In fact, any spin-offs from highbrow TV shows. The Daily Mirror ones from the mid-90s are brilliant too. They were beauties, remarkable for the sheer volume of interesting and challenging posers. I lost the first one and so many pages have fallen out of my second that I can't bear to read it in case another page or two slips out and disappears into the ether. Pondering such loss even makes me feel a tad bereft. For lost quiz questions are potential mistakes or blanks in actual quizzes.
There is also The Times's pink 1996 third edition quiz book. I hadn't seen it in ages and was wondering how I would do on every single one of the 2000 or more questions. They are short, but my, they are hard.
But it would be more interesting if I had an opponent, I thought as I was wrapped in my dressing gown, fag hanging from my lips, face unshaven. So I got one. He was younger and quiz competent. We would answer each question of the 1950 questions (there were not more than 2000 unless you count the multiple answers) and compare our scores.
We had patience and we had time. Oh yes, all the time in the world. Bedtime. Vampire time. Day for night etc. We played all of last Wednesday night. There was nothing else to do. I had already spent ten hours on the internet. Despite cushioning, pillows and squishy surgical fabric supporting my afflicted areas, my posterior could not take it anymore. Perhaps, this was healthier, than looking at MediaGuardian every 15 minutes.
This was the result of "Mega-Fun with The Times Quiz Book":
Subject: Him vs Me
Mixed Bag: 107 vs 161
Places: 88 vs 137
Words: 69 vs 143
Sounds 63 vs 118
Images 98 vs 150
People 95 vs 155
Events 72 vs 146
Discovery & Invention 65 vs 129
Nature 51 vs 129
Competition 80 vs 130
Final score: 788 vs 1384
Well, he didn't stand a chance to be honest. I had nine years on him.
Who was it? It was me. My 18-year-old self. That bright, centre-parted lad who should have ... actually I'm not sure. Done something. Probably.
My old habit of ticking off question answers I knew really was quite useful as a type of cumulative memory test.
Most enlightening were the percentage scores. It was 40.41 per cent versus 70.97 per cent. I had put on more than 30 per cent in the intervening period.
We all want to measure our progression, but there are few ways in which we can do it apart from comparing old scores and averages. In that case, it is difficult because we are working on different questions every time. I found that this was one way.
I wanted to know how much difference nine years can make. This was a kind of time capsule quiz which I could play against myself. I even wrote "This is great fun. I love this" in the margins. Sorry.
But the differences in percentages are telling, in my first two British Quiz Championships (1999 and 2000) I scored 44 and 39 out of 100, thus corresponding to my 40.41 percentage. Looking at my current overall question percentage score from questions answered correctly in Quizzing events, it is 63.8 per cent.
Therefore, considering that the Times questions are challenging enough to be comparable with those dished out at Grand Prix events is it possible that I have put on something like 25 per cent knowledge in the interim? Maybe so. I want to say to that racist cop who looks like Matt Dillon: "Yes, I have some idea what I am. I've been performing rigorous tests."
However, I did lose to my younger self in two of the 95 rounds. Shameful. I did used to know what cloisonne was, but over the passage of time, you encounter applique, decoupage, boiserie, cosmati work, and the clarity turns to a confusing blur.
In recent weeks I have found that my old quiz books remind you incontrovertibly what you still don't know and what you may never know. And, maybe, when I look back, I ache all the more for the absence of that particular knowledge, even after familiarising myself with its pages so many times before, even if it was nine years hence.
Looking back at the book, I realise it was one of the useful QBs that gave me the basis for my hard knowledge. I never realised how much I owed to it. I never knew the question on Brunelleschi and his cathedral dome before, but I certainly did when it came up at my first University Challenge audition. The same goes for George Hudson "the Railway King" at the 1999 British Quiz Championships.
The questions in quiz books are far more likely to come up in competitions than those that are not. It's obvious but it is true. Sometimes you never see the woods for the trees and this is one such instance. Long ago I entered into an addiction to the complete sensory overload of an encyclopedia, the quiz fact motherlode, which you mine like as a metallurgist would do with an ore. You can use them to write millions of questions. But few of these original questions will be asked because perhaps they are too hard and have never occurred to other setters.
It is all a balancing act. You must also take into account all the community quiz events you have participated in before, so you know what kind of questions will inevitably come up and what subject quotas there will be. You have to adjust and adapt yourself to the existing conditions rather than go batty with thousands of tiresomely pedantic questions that will never materialise. To master these considerations, is an incredibly difficult task.
On the other hand, you can always go for the Jesse solution - learn everything you don't know - because it is the only way to make sure. It's the nuclear solution. You have to be prepared for every eventuality. Short cuts, and there are a few, invite failure, but total supremacy of general knowledge facts, though it may leave no room for your sanity or social life, ensures that chance and luck become irrelevant.
But when we consider matters of progress something else enters the equation. There is a factor I am calling "Competition Inflation". Everyone's scores have gone up due to increased participation in tournaments, more learning, more internet communication, more awareness of what everyone else is doing. It is a new thing, an inevitable byproduct of a quiz circuit. How much would we have progressed without it and its inherent pressures. I would like to think: not half as much.
Then you still think: that's almost 30 per cent off a maximum. Now I must adjourn metaphorically to some washing facilities where I will scrub the stench of failure, the dirty omissions, brain farts, signs of incipient dementia, mind locks and all the sundry deficiences, by writing down every single question I did not get right on file paper and stare at names like Rick Grech until they are burned into the back of my eyeballs. And I'll do it too. Each of my eight bulging file will testify to the truth of this vow.
The ones that got away annoy me intensely. And now thet are amassing in such voluminous content, a novella could be written entitled, Things I Will Never Learn: A Tragedy in Quiz Facts.
I now realise you have to look back at what you weren't getting and what baffled you or filled your head with blankness. Dr Johnson said friendships are in a constant state of repair and the same is true of our general knowledge. I have this relentless urge to go on and on, to write more and more questions, ignoring the need to go back, maintain and consolidate.
Maybe some things will never lodge in the memory. They simply won't stick, no matter how many pen-marks you array it with. It's like sticking a trapezoid into a triangular hole.
Then again, drastic measures can be adopted. The last recourse, like someone tending to their prodigal sheep, you take aside and treat it individually and spend time with it: special time. You do it to the detriment of your teeming flock. But if it matters that much (and you are surely heading into nutter territory), you associate them with sounds and memories and places, And if that doesn't work, all over body tattoos will have to do.
Going through the book I am wont to repeat a mantra: everything comes up in the end. Everything.
If you quiz long enough and on enough occasions, you will hear every "acceptable" or "reasonable" trivia question in the world. As well as a mighty number of irresponsibly difficult and mindnumbingly inane questions. And, of course, a hefty bunch of sadistic specials written for the sole purpose of giving its setter jollies and you a sense of utter outrage.
This exercise also makes me glad I didn't play in quiz leagues earlier. That I bulked up my knowledge sufficiently enough before starting out, not to make me feel mediocre or middle of the road. I have to see through the haze of this 21st century and see that this pink Times quiz book is still bloody hard. The difference is that I am far better equipped to roll with the punches and I have given myself every opportunity, or more truthfully almost a decade, to turn myself into a QUIZZING MACHINE *cackles with maniacal delight*.
Random thought
All those questions about John Major, e.g. what qualification did he get apart from six O-levels? I am reminded this book was written BT - Before Tony. The question is: would I quiz better under a Conservative government? Worth considering.
So ... I gotta give you some trivia after all this pontificating
Ten things I have learnt since I was 18-years-old
In which film does Gene Kelly dance with a cartoon mouse? Anchors Aweigh
Who designed the Paris Opera? Charles Garnier
What was Buddha's original name? Siddhartha Gautama
For what is Y the chemical symbol? Yttrium
What is an onager? Asian wild ass
Which Russian composer was a professor of chemistry? Borodin
To which country do the Galapagos Islands belong? Ecuador
Who founded the Peripatetic school of philosophy? Aristotle
Which card game did Sir John Suckling invent? Cribbage
What do these Popes have in common: Leo X, Clement VII, Pius IV? All Medici
Ten things I have unlearnt since the age of 18
Which composer's name was Mahler's last word? Mozart
Who wrote: "Nature I loved, and, next to nature art"? Walter Savage Landor
What are the shortest electromagnetic waves of terrestial origin? Gamma rays
What is the chief complex of the Port of London? Tilbury
The Flaminian Way ran from Rome to where? Rimini
Who ordered the bombing of Dresden during WW2? Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris
What was the first spacecraft to be launched into orbit for the second time? The Columbia
Who said: "I can control the flow of paint"? Jackson Pollock
Who is regarded as the founder of modern set theory? Georg Cantor
Which Michelangelo painting was "censored" by Daniele da Volterra? The Last Judgement
Ten things I still haven't a clue about
What is the most westerly point of continental Europe? Cape Roca
Where did the Long March end? Yen-an in Shensi Province
Who designed the British Museum? Robert Smirke
Which dietary deficiency causes pernicious anaemia? Vitamin B12
Who was the formal head of the Soviet state from 1919-1946? Mikhail Kalinin
What was the first virus to be isolated? Tobacco mosaic virus
What is the largest living wild sheep? The argali of central Asia
What is the highest belt that has been awarded in judo? Red belt (10th dan)
What was Britain's most successful Olympic bobsleigh duo? Robin Dixon & Anthony Nash (gold medal winners in '64)
Who was the last emperor of Austria? Charles I (1916-1918)
One more thing
AXEL PAULSEN from Norway. Remember his name. No, he is not a black metal singer who has the stage moniker The Necronominator. He used to skate you know.
This is what happens when you convalesce. Cabin fever and stir craziness are inevitable. You have two choices: go all voyeuristic and start staring out the window, with some kind of telescopic or photographic equipment aimed at the most interesting open windows Jimmy Stewart-style.
Or you start looking inwards, into TVs and computer screens and books and your dark places. Introversion follows and you start to think that the outside world has gone a bit too weird and funky, funk-ee or funk-ay. I took the latter route. Then I started picking up old quiz books, and perhaps, I knew then that I was touching on madness. So here we go.
There are some great quiz books out there, but far more rubbish and hackneyed ones. The finest include all the University Challenge books, both Magnus Magnusson's recent ones, the Masterminds. In fact, any spin-offs from highbrow TV shows. The Daily Mirror ones from the mid-90s are brilliant too. They were beauties, remarkable for the sheer volume of interesting and challenging posers. I lost the first one and so many pages have fallen out of my second that I can't bear to read it in case another page or two slips out and disappears into the ether. Pondering such loss even makes me feel a tad bereft. For lost quiz questions are potential mistakes or blanks in actual quizzes.
There is also The Times's pink 1996 third edition quiz book. I hadn't seen it in ages and was wondering how I would do on every single one of the 2000 or more questions. They are short, but my, they are hard.
But it would be more interesting if I had an opponent, I thought as I was wrapped in my dressing gown, fag hanging from my lips, face unshaven. So I got one. He was younger and quiz competent. We would answer each question of the 1950 questions (there were not more than 2000 unless you count the multiple answers) and compare our scores.
We had patience and we had time. Oh yes, all the time in the world. Bedtime. Vampire time. Day for night etc. We played all of last Wednesday night. There was nothing else to do. I had already spent ten hours on the internet. Despite cushioning, pillows and squishy surgical fabric supporting my afflicted areas, my posterior could not take it anymore. Perhaps, this was healthier, than looking at MediaGuardian every 15 minutes.
This was the result of "Mega-Fun with The Times Quiz Book":
Subject: Him vs Me
Mixed Bag: 107 vs 161
Places: 88 vs 137
Words: 69 vs 143
Sounds 63 vs 118
Images 98 vs 150
People 95 vs 155
Events 72 vs 146
Discovery & Invention 65 vs 129
Nature 51 vs 129
Competition 80 vs 130
Final score: 788 vs 1384
Well, he didn't stand a chance to be honest. I had nine years on him.
Who was it? It was me. My 18-year-old self. That bright, centre-parted lad who should have ... actually I'm not sure. Done something. Probably.
My old habit of ticking off question answers I knew really was quite useful as a type of cumulative memory test.
Most enlightening were the percentage scores. It was 40.41 per cent versus 70.97 per cent. I had put on more than 30 per cent in the intervening period.
We all want to measure our progression, but there are few ways in which we can do it apart from comparing old scores and averages. In that case, it is difficult because we are working on different questions every time. I found that this was one way.
I wanted to know how much difference nine years can make. This was a kind of time capsule quiz which I could play against myself. I even wrote "This is great fun. I love this" in the margins. Sorry.
But the differences in percentages are telling, in my first two British Quiz Championships (1999 and 2000) I scored 44 and 39 out of 100, thus corresponding to my 40.41 percentage. Looking at my current overall question percentage score from questions answered correctly in Quizzing events, it is 63.8 per cent.
Therefore, considering that the Times questions are challenging enough to be comparable with those dished out at Grand Prix events is it possible that I have put on something like 25 per cent knowledge in the interim? Maybe so. I want to say to that racist cop who looks like Matt Dillon: "Yes, I have some idea what I am. I've been performing rigorous tests."
However, I did lose to my younger self in two of the 95 rounds. Shameful. I did used to know what cloisonne was, but over the passage of time, you encounter applique, decoupage, boiserie, cosmati work, and the clarity turns to a confusing blur.
In recent weeks I have found that my old quiz books remind you incontrovertibly what you still don't know and what you may never know. And, maybe, when I look back, I ache all the more for the absence of that particular knowledge, even after familiarising myself with its pages so many times before, even if it was nine years hence.
Looking back at the book, I realise it was one of the useful QBs that gave me the basis for my hard knowledge. I never realised how much I owed to it. I never knew the question on Brunelleschi and his cathedral dome before, but I certainly did when it came up at my first University Challenge audition. The same goes for George Hudson "the Railway King" at the 1999 British Quiz Championships.
The questions in quiz books are far more likely to come up in competitions than those that are not. It's obvious but it is true. Sometimes you never see the woods for the trees and this is one such instance. Long ago I entered into an addiction to the complete sensory overload of an encyclopedia, the quiz fact motherlode, which you mine like as a metallurgist would do with an ore. You can use them to write millions of questions. But few of these original questions will be asked because perhaps they are too hard and have never occurred to other setters.
It is all a balancing act. You must also take into account all the community quiz events you have participated in before, so you know what kind of questions will inevitably come up and what subject quotas there will be. You have to adjust and adapt yourself to the existing conditions rather than go batty with thousands of tiresomely pedantic questions that will never materialise. To master these considerations, is an incredibly difficult task.
On the other hand, you can always go for the Jesse solution - learn everything you don't know - because it is the only way to make sure. It's the nuclear solution. You have to be prepared for every eventuality. Short cuts, and there are a few, invite failure, but total supremacy of general knowledge facts, though it may leave no room for your sanity or social life, ensures that chance and luck become irrelevant.
But when we consider matters of progress something else enters the equation. There is a factor I am calling "Competition Inflation". Everyone's scores have gone up due to increased participation in tournaments, more learning, more internet communication, more awareness of what everyone else is doing. It is a new thing, an inevitable byproduct of a quiz circuit. How much would we have progressed without it and its inherent pressures. I would like to think: not half as much.
Then you still think: that's almost 30 per cent off a maximum. Now I must adjourn metaphorically to some washing facilities where I will scrub the stench of failure, the dirty omissions, brain farts, signs of incipient dementia, mind locks and all the sundry deficiences, by writing down every single question I did not get right on file paper and stare at names like Rick Grech until they are burned into the back of my eyeballs. And I'll do it too. Each of my eight bulging file will testify to the truth of this vow.
The ones that got away annoy me intensely. And now thet are amassing in such voluminous content, a novella could be written entitled, Things I Will Never Learn: A Tragedy in Quiz Facts.
I now realise you have to look back at what you weren't getting and what baffled you or filled your head with blankness. Dr Johnson said friendships are in a constant state of repair and the same is true of our general knowledge. I have this relentless urge to go on and on, to write more and more questions, ignoring the need to go back, maintain and consolidate.
Maybe some things will never lodge in the memory. They simply won't stick, no matter how many pen-marks you array it with. It's like sticking a trapezoid into a triangular hole.
Then again, drastic measures can be adopted. The last recourse, like someone tending to their prodigal sheep, you take aside and treat it individually and spend time with it: special time. You do it to the detriment of your teeming flock. But if it matters that much (and you are surely heading into nutter territory), you associate them with sounds and memories and places, And if that doesn't work, all over body tattoos will have to do.
Going through the book I am wont to repeat a mantra: everything comes up in the end. Everything.
If you quiz long enough and on enough occasions, you will hear every "acceptable" or "reasonable" trivia question in the world. As well as a mighty number of irresponsibly difficult and mindnumbingly inane questions. And, of course, a hefty bunch of sadistic specials written for the sole purpose of giving its setter jollies and you a sense of utter outrage.
This exercise also makes me glad I didn't play in quiz leagues earlier. That I bulked up my knowledge sufficiently enough before starting out, not to make me feel mediocre or middle of the road. I have to see through the haze of this 21st century and see that this pink Times quiz book is still bloody hard. The difference is that I am far better equipped to roll with the punches and I have given myself every opportunity, or more truthfully almost a decade, to turn myself into a QUIZZING MACHINE *cackles with maniacal delight*.
Random thought
All those questions about John Major, e.g. what qualification did he get apart from six O-levels? I am reminded this book was written BT - Before Tony. The question is: would I quiz better under a Conservative government? Worth considering.
So ... I gotta give you some trivia after all this pontificating
Ten things I have learnt since I was 18-years-old
In which film does Gene Kelly dance with a cartoon mouse? Anchors Aweigh
Who designed the Paris Opera? Charles Garnier
What was Buddha's original name? Siddhartha Gautama
For what is Y the chemical symbol? Yttrium
What is an onager? Asian wild ass
Which Russian composer was a professor of chemistry? Borodin
To which country do the Galapagos Islands belong? Ecuador
Who founded the Peripatetic school of philosophy? Aristotle
Which card game did Sir John Suckling invent? Cribbage
What do these Popes have in common: Leo X, Clement VII, Pius IV? All Medici
Ten things I have unlearnt since the age of 18
Which composer's name was Mahler's last word? Mozart
Who wrote: "Nature I loved, and, next to nature art"? Walter Savage Landor
What are the shortest electromagnetic waves of terrestial origin? Gamma rays
What is the chief complex of the Port of London? Tilbury
The Flaminian Way ran from Rome to where? Rimini
Who ordered the bombing of Dresden during WW2? Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris
What was the first spacecraft to be launched into orbit for the second time? The Columbia
Who said: "I can control the flow of paint"? Jackson Pollock
Who is regarded as the founder of modern set theory? Georg Cantor
Which Michelangelo painting was "censored" by Daniele da Volterra? The Last Judgement
Ten things I still haven't a clue about
What is the most westerly point of continental Europe? Cape Roca
Where did the Long March end? Yen-an in Shensi Province
Who designed the British Museum? Robert Smirke
Which dietary deficiency causes pernicious anaemia? Vitamin B12
Who was the formal head of the Soviet state from 1919-1946? Mikhail Kalinin
What was the first virus to be isolated? Tobacco mosaic virus
What is the largest living wild sheep? The argali of central Asia
What is the highest belt that has been awarded in judo? Red belt (10th dan)
What was Britain's most successful Olympic bobsleigh duo? Robin Dixon & Anthony Nash (gold medal winners in '64)
Who was the last emperor of Austria? Charles I (1916-1918)
One more thing
AXEL PAULSEN from Norway. Remember his name. No, he is not a black metal singer who has the stage moniker The Necronominator. He used to skate you know.
posted by That Quiz Guy at 1:44 PM
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