{"id":819,"date":"2006-11-16T08:22:27","date_gmt":"2006-11-16T08:22:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/11\/16\/pimp-me-time-sinks\/"},"modified":"2006-11-16T08:22:27","modified_gmt":"2006-11-16T08:22:27","slug":"pimp-me-time-sinks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/11\/16\/pimp-me-time-sinks\/","title":{"rendered":"Pimp Me Time Sinks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The fad of the moment among the physics majors is a shareware game called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blitwise.com\/ptanks.html\">Pocket Tanks<\/a>, in which players on opposite sides of the screen fire various weapons at one another, adjusting the launch angle and overall power in order to hit the target. Every time I walk into a room with two or more students in it, they seem to be playing Pocket Tanks. They jokingly justify it as studying for the projectile motion problems on the Physics GRE, and to the extent that being able to predict the range of a particle based on sketchy information about angles and relative launch speed can help, they should kick ass on the test&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m thinking of this in part because I&#8217;m going to spend something like six hours proctoring exams over the next two days, most of those hours the early-morning ones where I&#8217;m not really competent to review NSF grant proposals or any of the more professionally useful things I might be doing. Which means I&#8217;m in the market for some good ways to waste time.<\/p>\n<p>So, recommend some time-wasters to me. The rooms where I&#8217;ll be watching students take tests have Internet-connected computers in them, so what should I be doing with them to pass the time? Preferably something that doesn&#8217;t involve sound (as one of the computers doesn&#8217;t even have speakers attached), and bonus points will be awarded for Web games with actual physics content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The fad of the moment among the physics majors is a shareware game called Pocket Tanks, in which players on opposite sides of the screen fire various weapons at one another, adjusting the launch angle and overall power in order to hit the target. Every time I walk into a room with two or more&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/11\/16\/pimp-me-time-sinks\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Pimp Me Time Sinks<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-silliness","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}