I Have Been Assimilated

Captain's blog, stardate 8239.2....
Being assimilated into college life takes a while but I think I've done a pretty good job. Just ask my mom because she came to see me today and it was amazing. She said I was doing great and everybody missed me, and we walked all over Harvard Square and all over Boston and talked to each other and had a totally awesome time.

She even helped me plan my lesson for SAT Prep tomorrow. I'm going to be focusing on vocab questions so she suggested I talk about important prefixes to know and how to break words down so you don't need to memorize too many. I picked out some practice questions from the study guide and also made up some of my own which were way more exciting than the book ones. To wit:

1)      The means in which words are ----- on the SAT creates the impression that the test-writers are trying to hide -------.

(A)   Concealed .. bias      (B) Obscured .. obscenities         (C) Presented .. solutions             (D) Divulged .. profanity        (E) Explicated .. comprehension

[The correct answer is B. And the sentence is totally true. It looks like all the sentences were full of curse words and the test writers hid them with dashes.]

2)      The dispute over whether Kirk or Picard was a more ----- captain has raged for decades, ----- fans and turning them against each other.

(A)   Efficacious .. consolidating          (B) Inept .. abetting        (C) Competent .. polarizing         (D) Mercurial .. mitigating    (E) Mundane .. petrifying

[The correct answer is C. By the way this is a very important point of contention.]

3)      The SAT is quite ----- and  features pointless questions which fail to test ------.

(A)   Paradoxical .. ingenuity         (B) Intriguing .. perspicacity         (C) Inadequate .. perusal              (D) Abominable .. prescience  (E) Deficient .. aptitude

[Answer: E. This is completely and utterly true. Even I admit it and I teach test prep for the stupid thing. At least I get to use lots of vocabulary words, which is fun, so it's not a total loss.]

But I know when you all read the title of this post you were hoping for Borg references. Well, I shall not disappoint! Enjoy two of the lamest Borg jokes ever invented, by yours truly.

Q: What do you call a Borg who beats around the bush?
A: Circumlocutus of Borg.
[Circumlocution is a cool word. In related jokes, a Borg who speaks very clearly would be Elocutus of Borg.]

Joke #2 coming right up:
The Borg assimilated a high school student who ended up having to take physics. At first he did very well thanks to the knowledge of the rest of the Collective. However, when he took a test on circuits, he did very badly. The first question was "What is the voltage across a resistor in a circuit?"
The Borg's answer was:
The voltage is the product of the square of the current across the resistor, the inductance, the electric field, the force on the circuit, the potential energy, and the time elapsed.
Voltage = (Current)(Resistance) = (Current)(FUTILE) = (Current)(Force)(Potential Energy)(Time)(Current)(Inductance)(Electric Field).

Many thanks to physicists for assigning every letter in the alphabet to some physical property or another so that my horrible physics joke could exist.

D&D

Captain's blog, stardate 2718.2...
(Yes, it's a smaller number than the previous stardate, but that happens in Star Trek all the time. They just used random numbers.)
Anyway, back on topic...what's the topic again? Right, Dungeons and Dragons. I like to play D&D, but I was just looking over the rules and noticed something kinda weird.
Your average guy on the street has a walking speed of 6 squares. Each square is the equivalent of 5 feet according to the player's handbook, so that's 30 feet.
Nothing weird so far, but hang in there.
The player's handbook also says that one round of battle, which can include two move actions, takes approximately six seconds. A typical combat encounter includes five player characters and an equal number of monsters, each of whom gets a turn every round.
Let's see just how fast your average guy can walk, shall we?
Six seconds divided by 10 gives us the length of one character's turn: .6 seconds. This is equivalent to .00016666 hours.
If our average guy takes two move actions, which is completely permissible, and walks his maximum speed on both of them, he goes 60 feet, which is .011364 miles.
So, he's walking at a speed of 68.18 mph. (And still has time for a minor action, like drinking a potion, before his turn ends!)
If he's wearing 40 pounds of armor, his speed goes down to 5 squares, so he can only walk 56.82 mph.
And of course should he decide to run, he can move at his normal speed+2. So with his armor on, he can run 79.55 mph. Without it, he can run 90.91 mph!
So...yeah...

But it's a really fun game anyway. Hopefully I'll get to play (with John and Maggie) this afternoon.
This wasn't really news, but I thought it was cool.

Oh, and since I'm still in the mood to write limericks, I'll sum up this post:
Who says D&D isn't fun?
Just look at how fast you can run!
90 miles per hour's
Incredible power
Too bad your attack rolled a 1.