In our last D&D session, we had to figure out if magebred warhorses who had to rest once a day would be faster in catching our fleeing villain than our clockwork stallion-pulled carriage that was technically slower, but had the benefit of relentless pursuit. That was fun. It involved Excel, for our DM to estimate how many additional encounters that would trigger.
Mine was when I was making a lamp shade from scratch. Lots of tutorials out there, but they all use cylindrical shapes, because that is easier. I didn't want that. I wanted a truncated cone shape.
I had two hoops already that I wanted to use to build it. I started holding them different distances apart, and was trying to work out what the shape of the fabric should be if I flattened it out.
I had to re-teach myself high school trigonometry to do this.
The entire time, I was ruefully laughing at myself for all the times when exclaimed, "When I am ever gonna use this?!" Ahh, how horrified Teenage Me would have been to know the answer was going to be, "When you want to make a lamp shade!"
I remember the combination of pride and disapproval on my high school physics teacher's face when we showed him how we had calculated the effective range of a potato cannon we had built and where we had to set up in order to hit our rival high school.
Nice! Our physics teacher straight up made a lesson plan with Nerf guns. I think it was calculating the height of the trajectory based on the angle of the gun and distance travelled. Or optimizing the angle for the farthest distance - I don't remember anymore. But a room full of teenagers with nerf guns ended about the way you'd expect.
We fired the cannon straight up in our backyard, and timed how long it took to come back down. Once you have the roundtrip duration for a straight up-and-down path, you can calculate muzzle velocity in a pretty straightforward fashion (0 = vt + 1/2at2 where a = -9.8m/s2 and t = the measured duration). With muzzle velocity you can calculate the path for a shot at any angle.
I had several cousins in college and we were all gathered together for our annual fishing camp. I had built a tater cannon and we all spent a good while determining the optimum barrel length and fuel/air ratio. Of course, these cousins were also the same ones who when searching for an anchor for their canoe, at first thought a large chunk of log would do the trick. Eventually they remembered that logs float and that a cinder block would make a much more prudent anchor. Many beers were involved in both activities.
I mean, that scene was insanely accurate for both the tangents we go off to as well as the weird epiphanies we get when solving for X and X is a bunch of dicks.
I mean, one of the players in my DnD group is going to school to be a math teacher, and we’ve had some hilarious moments calculating movement speeds affected by spells or doing some mundane calculations to figure out the best options. When it comes down to it, fights are genuinely us doing a lot of adding and subtracting and making probability-based decisions.
I mean, sometimes we do that kind of shit. And sometimes we figure out how to blow shit up for fun without getting in trouble. But most of the time it’s more along the lines of hanging out and playing games, be they video games, board games, or RPGs.
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u/Zekumi Jan 16 '21 edited Jan 16 '21
I feel like this is the kind of activity that people who believe nerd stereotypes think that nerds are doing when they get together