I am sure you are all in orange alert prep for the Tournament of Champions, but I thought I would post this now anyway as a bit of a distraction. I am sure you have all read the Zarefsky, Mitchell, and Perkins article from the Winter 1990 issue of The Annals of Arcane Debate Statistics that showed, scientifically, that the likelihood of Westminster winning the TOC was heavily correlated with weather patterns:

It is my hope to advance the statistical study of debate by looking at something often ignored by people who spend their time cutting cards or interacting with other people: How do changes in the temperature of the Mesosphere affect elim winning percentages when broken down by side, and accounting for number of times the word substantially is in the topic.

For those of you who are novice climatologists, I have included a basic chart of the atmosphere to clarify what we are looking at before moving on:

In order to be scientific, we must first design an experiment- a crucial part of which is a control group. So below we can see the average winning percentages for each side when ignoring weather, Blue is neg, Red is Aff, there is a 5% margin of error:

Next we need to generate a list of variables that we need to control for. Things that could effect the percentage that we want to limit include:

-number of new affs

-skill disparity between the teams

-% of the judging pool made up of MSU alums who vote neg regardless of what happens in the debate

-% of Harvard judges who do the opposite

– (Number of hours the debaters spend reading the3NR)(Amount of time they spend cutting cards)/((1 million -#of dates they have been on)(number of minutes spent in the sun)), also known as the “no value to life” coefficient , abbreviated as “no life”, first established in the article “You seriously posted a comment to nitpick about that?” in the Journal of Habitual Nitness by Anton Uchi and Anon.

Next I am going to include a bunch of huge blocks of quoted text so that my relatively short post, such as “that zimmerman card sucks” will actually seem quite long.

Scott Phillips writes:

It is really hard to use grammar and punctuation when your fat fingers are focused exclusively on making jokes and references that 99% of your readers won’t get because they haven’t watched every episode of Seinfeld 50 plus times, have not yet read all the books you skimmed looking for quotes you could later dish out to appear smart, and don’t watch Woody Allen movies. Seriously, kids today just do not work as hard at debate as I did despite the fact that I then brag about how I always went for the same argument and how crappy it was.

Roy Levkovitz had this to say”

I mean, I’m not gonna lie, I don’t know much about these statistic type things, or math type stuff. But on the other hand, I definitely know more about everything than these jokers. Sure I get sat on a lot of panels, but I chalk that type stuff up to blatant anti-semitism. I mean, sure I don’t start flow type stuff until the rebuttals cause I am too busy dropping G’s playing 1c-2c heads up limit 5 card stud, but I mean come on, don’t these guys know how substantial my skills are? They are way more than 3%.

In a previous article, Batterman 2008 wrote

Heidegger asserted that working for Roy, combined with the eclipse of being, threatens the relation between being and human Dasein. Loss of this relation would be even more dangerous than a nuclear war that might “bring about the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth.” This uncontroversial claim is widely acknowledged by most people in debate. Heidegger apparently thought along these lines: it is possible that after a nuclear war, life might once again emerge, life without Roy, but it is far less likely that there will ever again occur in an ontological clearing through which life could manifest itself.

And by using my hot tub time machine, I will now quote an article from 2012 by Miles and Kirshon

Dude, I can’t believe we brought about the Mayan apocalypse by IMing Phillips so many debate questions, and then no matter what he said immediately arguing with it even when he agreed with us.

Next I had to rank tournaments according to a formula designed to maximize both participation in regional debate, and the quality of the tournaments themselves. The forumla I used was:

(Number of states represented)X(Number of teams)(Number of key coaches present)(zero) + (number of TOC bids awarded)= X.

Then I took X and subtracted X and just used the results packet from the 1912 Galway NY Invitational where the resolution debated was ‘ Resolved: Nothing substantial enough will happen this year that will later be turned into the highest grossing movie of all time despite it sucking substantially and/or blowing substantially and/or then being beaten by dances with all or nearly all smurfs”. I had recently uncovered this results packet at a garage sale where I was purchasing vintage T-shirts from BBQ restaurants.

Since there were only 7 teams at this tournament, and no elims, I had to use the central limit theorem

With which I was able to scientifically prove the following:

1. There is a 1 to 1 relationship between flipping aff and later on in life having crushing regrets.

2. Baseball Sucks

3. At any point where the temperature is high enough such that hell is not freezing over, the neg has a better elim win percentage.

Next, I used the complex computer modeling techniques of Rocky 6 to figure out what would happen if Roy came back and debated today

The results are here:

1. Roy Levkovits (29.9, however many rounds it would be to win every tournament)
2. Layne Kirshon—Kinkaid (28.86216216, 37 rounds)
3. David Mullins—Westlake (28.85625, 32 rounds)
4. Ellis Allen—Westminster (28.83025641, 39 rounds)
5. Will Thibeau—Glenbrook South (28.75263158, 38 rounds)
6. Andrew Arsht—Rowland Hall-St. Mark’s (28.73684211, 19 rounds)
7. Thomas Hodgman—Pembroke Hill (28.73538462, 13 rounds)
8. Matthew Pesce—Woodward (28.69210526, 38 rounds)
9. Daniel Taylor—Westminster (28.69179487, 39 rounds)
10. Alex Miles—St. Mark’s (28.66666667, 18 rounds)

The computer also simulated Roys wiki page.

Randomly, the simulation also produced this:

Interesting data to say the least.