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Boredom Chasers?
yuggler asks: "Ever found yourself in a boring meeting, class or lecture? Sure! Does anyone know of something to do to make time fly? I feel that somekind of simple game, at the most requiring paper and pen would be the ultimate soultion. So, my question to you is: Does anoyone know of a game with childishly easy rules, yet with a depth that can keep the player(s) spellbound for a small eternity?
An excellent example of what I'm trying to describe is the game Sprouts which only takes 30 seconds to learn, but will take a good portion of your meetings to fully understand. I am currently being tormented in a Swedish highschool, and feel in desperate need of something to get me through classes like Swedish, and Chemistry, while waiting for the programming and technology-classes."
Get a ti calculator like a ti86 or ti89. I got the link cable for the computer and downloaded tons of games for my ti86. Tetris was the most played game. nd it was really easy to play games in math class ;)
You can get games such as tetris, mario bros, galazian, othello, defender, boulder dash, and so many others all clones of course. Try to get the ones written in assembly (not ti basic) because they run fast.
"You can kill a man, but you can't kill what he stands for. Not unless you first break his spirit."-Smoking man,X-Files
I can usually fight off boredom by thinking critically about the topics being covered. Then when I feel myself getting bored, I start to think of good points to raise or questions to ask. If those tactics don't work out, I recommend reading Flow : The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Amazon)
...all I had was a piece of string and a stick!
Step 1. Buy Handspring Visor or Palm Pilot
Step 2. Download and sync Chessgenius
Step 3. Enjoy
First of all:
/point finale/. Lectures in general, IMO, are rather pointless exercises in pseudo-education. For me at least, with a topic of anything more than nominal complexity, a textbook is invaluable while lectures, put simply, are a waste of time. I'm surprised that slashdot has turned up so many droids-in-training! Seriously, though. My suspicion is that people like the psychological kick in the ass associated with waking up early,going to class, etc.; it makes them feel as though they're sacrificing something to 'learn', and therefore that they have more to lose by slacking, and therefore they'll study harder on their homework, and therefore do better, and therfore attribute this to going to class, therefore, they go to more class, and the current educational model perpetuates itself. ( The model, I believe, is analogous to that used by many major religions to maintain piousness: Show up at place X at time Y every N days and you're saved! ) So long as you're disciplined enough to focus on the time on the homework w/o the psychological guilt-crutch, then you can skip almost unlimited amounts of time.
;) You can write the rules to the game in about four instructions, and it can be played on any size of board or grid. Better still, each individual piece is never moved after being placed on the board (until removed -- which doesn't happen frequently enough to be annoying (unless the pieces are your own ;) ) ), which means that 'Go: Napkin Edition' can be played whenever you have a pencil handy.
* Paying attention in class is not necessarily necessary, especially if you already know the subject,
But whatever works for you...
* And as for your actual problem: Learn Go. (aka 'Wei Chi', which certainly yields more relevant hits in Google
Oh, did I mention that the gameplay requires more thought than Chess? And that GNU-based Go servers and clients are available at all over the known Internet, as well as (passable) AI oppoents?
Okay, so it's two players... but once you get good, you'll want to practice constantly, and it's the sort of game conducive to experimentation and situation-analysis. In particular, books of Go problems are quite fun... take a look at one of the problems, and go to your lecture. By the time lecture is over, you just might have solved it.
- undoware.ca
The link to sprouts mentioned in the original query seems to have an error in attribution.
Take a look at: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc97/4_5_97/mathla
There's a bunch more info on game play, theory, and mathematical background on the game at that link, as well as this link: http://www.forum.swarthmore.edu/news.archives/geom etry.research/article399.html to a strategy by John Conway on a strategy for game play.
As an aside, I knew a guy at RPI who in 1981 or so wrote a program to play the game and graphically display the results... if you wanted it to, it would show all the possibilities as it tried different moves, too! Pretty amazing feat considering the capabilities of the computers we had available at the time.
Also, only the the biggest prick of a prof would pick on you if he saw you weren't paying attention, especially if he knew you knew your stuff.
r emote_control_watch.cfm. You can also use social engineering to cause all sorts of trouble. Or you could always resort to forging a doctor's note stating you have narcolepsy and get one of these free voicemail boxes so they can call in and hear the "doctor's" anwering service, then return the call at your leisure. The whole bottom line I think, is that if you think you're so smart that you don't need to pay attention in class, then you should at least be smart enough to amuse/entertain yourself. Did you really need an Ask Slashdot for this?
Wow. If that's true, I guess most of the teachers I had in High School qualify as BIG PRICKS. I always had a sneaking suspicion about this, but I wasn't sure until now.
Want to know what to do in class? Hack. Classrooms are fun to hack. Back in school, I purchased the smallest universal remote I could find, and used it to mess with the TV/Projection Panels and VCRs in the classes I had. Now you could use something like these happy little devices http://www.quemex.co.uk/, http://www.surprise.com/likes_dislikes/gadgeteer/
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
I've spent hours and hours in highschool playing chess with a friend sitting next to me. It does require a paper, a pencil and an eraser rather than just a paper and a pen, though.
- Tal Cohen
My friends play Pente in class all the time. It is a bit like Go. The rules are simple but strategy can get very complex. Here is a simple explanation.
My solution is to get a Palm and play Patience, but that's beside the point.
"This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons."
Another simple game. Can be played verbally or written on paper if silence is needed, or email if distance is a problem.
First person {says|writes|emails} "Tree". Second person does "Fluid". First person does "Tree". Second person goes "Fluid". And so on.
Until someone says "Sap!" at which point they are declared the winner.
Of course you could win every round by just saying "Sap!" first time, but that would be boring. The skill is saying "Sap!" on the go before your opponent wants to say it, thus causing the maximum amount of annoyance to them! It is very rewarding to get through about ten echoes of 'Tree - Fluid' and then hit 'Sap!' and have the other person go "I WAS JUST GONNA SAY IT!!!". Ahh, satisfaction. Similarly there is great pain in being 'Sapped' just as you are about to say it.
When played face-to-face there can be a lot of psychology and body-language involved. Look for any sign of hesitation in your opponent, that's normally a sign of an impending 'Sap'. Have no mercy, hit back straightaway.
Strangely I cant find any web sites devoted to Tree-Fluid...
Baz
To make it a challenge for yourself, remember that classical origami does not allow for tearing ,cutting, or using flat surfaces to get a good crease! Once you pick up the paper, it doesn't leave your hands until your creation is complete. And the no tearing rule makes it particularly challenging because most patterns want a square piece of paper, and most of the paper you'll encounter in the wild isn't square. Folding cranes out of business cards without tearing off the extra bit is a particular hobby I enjoy because with the thicker paper it's hard to get the head to come out right.
If you're really bored with that, and you want to play some tricks on your teachers, you can search around the net for some "adult" origami patterns to fold and leave on other people's desks.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
If you're in Sweden, isn't there some hot Swedish girl nearby you can stare at during the class?
there are (or at least there were, last time I checked) some unsolved problems in graph theory that can be attacked with pencil and paper.
Make a planar (in 2-d and no edges cross each other) graph where each node has no more than three connections. Each node also has to be no more than three hops from any other node. Can you get more than twelve nodes? Can you prove that nobody else can, either?
I have scribbled away many an intriguing hour playing with this.
Liberty uber alles.
Ahh, the many hours of meetings that I've spent folding paper. I did, however, tend to get in trouble for folding paper during middle and high school.
For some serious challenges, try memorizing more complicated models like Kawasaki's rose. (diagram) (makes a nice tip, too. the rose in Origami for the Connoisseur is easier to learn...) Or learn to make modular origami stuff (origami that uses multiple units that are [generally] all the same). (instructions)
A great place to start is Joseph Wu's Origami Page.
The myth that a thousand paper cranes will bring good luck and health is much older than Sadako's story, although she did try to fold 1,000 while she was sick with leukemia. She finished 644 before she died, and her classmates completed the rest. There are two books about her story: Sadoko and the Thousand Paper Cranes and Child of the Paper Crane .
It's also not true that "classical" origami is extremely restrictive. Most of the rules mentioned were added by outsiders. There are many very old designs (such as connected cranes) that require cutting. It is an interesting challenge to follow those kinds of restrictive rules, but they are not really requirments with a long history.
The Origami FYI covers these and many other interesting points.
fnord
If you sit at the back, get you and your buddies to each select a 'keener' - ie, a student who is known for asking inane, overly complicated questions in order to demonstrate their attentiveness, interest, and intellect at the expense of about 50 students to who just want to learn the material in under an hour.
At any rate, each time your selected keener raises their hand, you get a letter; the goal, of course, is to spell bingo. You will be amazed at how attached you will become to your keener of choice.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I slept through many of my lectures, mostly because they failed to sutain my interest. However, I did go to nearly all of mine, because occasionally, a topic came up that piqued my interest, and that made it all worthwhile. I remember troff being mentioned as an aside when someone asked how the lecture notes were formatted, and that prompted me to go off (outside the lecture, on my own time), and learn about it insude and out. That single comment made up for going to the other less interesting lectures. The end result was that I graduated with lesser marks than others in the year, but probably knowing more about Unix than pretty much all of them, and it's payed off later in my career.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
When I got really bored in class, this is what I used to do. Draw out an 8x8 grid and pencil in step numbers in each square starting anywhere, and moving around the board with valid chess knight moves. The objective is to hit every square exactly once.
Its not too tough, but it requires a bit of planning to get it right, and it keeps your mind occupied for a while.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
This was done when Al Gore gave a commencement speech at MIT in 1996.
#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}
F(#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}%cF(%s))
...the tricky part is that it has to be planar.
which means that you have to be able to draw it out on a piece of paper without any of the lines crossing.
But, don't be discouraged--it was fun to solve the problem that you did, right?
I have worked on it for a while, keeping a list of "forbidden subgraphs", but I keep losing track of the work. Still, it's fun, and you can spend a lot of time (at least with my approach).
What I am doing with it is starting with the maximal circuit (I don't know the terminology--the biggest loop in it that isn't directly short circuited) and the maximal one connected to that.
Or something like that. LIke, draw a 4-sided figure with a triangle on top and see if you can stay planar, starting from there, and exceed 12 nodes. I think I might have proved (by tedious lists of drawings) that you can't, but I don't remember which ones i finished.
Somewhere in this process you may end up with some clever insight into the problem. I don't think I have yet, but I do seem to remember something...
Oh well, getting old.
later
Liberty uber alles.
sorry, didn't see this. does /. have an option to get email sent to you when someone replies to your post? That would be nice.
N-e-way, I'm still checking to see if that is a solution I have seen before. It looks different to me. One solution that is easy to describe is if you take a tetrahedron and chop off the tip of each corner (exposing a triangle). Use the vertices for nodes and the edges for edges.
There is another one, more later.
mike
Liberty uber alles.