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My math instructor was telling how he was sick during ther weekend and out of boredom, he simply got his graphing calculator and thought about the parametric equations for the spirograph. I sounded such a wierd pastime so he even said "What do you want me to do? Chase some watter buffalos?" And that was really funny.

That somewhat reminded me of the time when I was really young, I had nothing to do while at home. Upon seeing that we have a bunch of encyclopedia, I decided to list down the precious stones and their characteristics such as specific gravity and hardness. I admit that it's the wierdest pastime I ever had. Now, I am too busy with my studies although I still occassionally do some extra research on some topics of my interest, but never had enough time to carefully read those.

Anyway, this makes me wonder, what is the nerdiest task you have done out of boredom? Tasks that you are not expected to research or work on, but just decided to do out of nowhere because you're simply bored?

I once spent a summer solving solitaire, or peg solitaire if you prefer, for the "english" or "cross" board. Not satisfied with the solution to the case where the central peg is removed, I went on to solve for the case where an arbitrary peg is removed.

Another summer, I played a card game called calculation. The wikipedia entry reckons that a solution rate of 3 in 5 is good, but I reckon I was doing a lot better than that. I ended up playing it because playing patience, or solitaire if you prefer, I did about a hundred trials and came up with odds of less than one in ten of winning, and that was using a pretty complicated algorithm for dealing with the deck. As the makers of instant lottery tickets know, thats not enough of a reward rate.

Nerdiest...
Playing D&D
Writing Star Trek Fan Fic
Arguing with friends about Star Trek or Star Wars
Going to afternoon math lectures (and taking notes)

Least popular past time...
crocheting... XD (apparently only old people do it)

I think hands down, out of all the ones listed in this thread, yours are THE nerdiest passtimes. simply put, you win.

It seems to me that curiousity mixed with experiment is a good combination for a scientist- we have the makings of to be great scientists.

For the christmas break during my high school senior year, I was addicted to card games. I was trying to get the world record for the longest winning streak in free cell, but every time after my seventh winning streak, I make mistakes and lose the game. I had to erase the records and start back to zero. I got tired of it so I decided to try solitaire, spider solitaire and finally minesweeper. But such addiction only lasted for the about a month. I don't have the patience of jestingrabbit to do complicated stuff such as algorithm.

The_Bartner has some interesting pastime, which I may have also done except for the rolling of dice.

nerdiest passtimes: reading the encyclopedia, my book on formal logic, simone debeauvoir's the second sex. (I haven't read fictinon in a while).

Mine would be scouring the dictionary for strange words to confuse people with, Minesweeper(I got expert down to 113 seconds), and when extreme boredom hits, I pull out old math books and complete the lessons we didn't get to.

My boredom go-to is Minesweeper. Unfortunately, so much of my time is taken up by *actual* nerdy things (learning Linux/Unix, studying, reading, etc.) that I don't have time to develop more nerdy "pasttimes" lol.