Just how boring are lectures, exactly?

Boring enough to make Princeton students play poker against each other. Via the Times:

Allan Rubin, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University, banned laptops in his 120-strong class on natural disasters after discovering that some of the students were playing online poker during his lectures.“What I found, and it was getting worse over the years, was that a larger and larger fraction of the students just had their heads buried in their laptops as I lectured,” he said.“I know from teaching assistants who were wandering around when the laptops were open that they were surfing the Web. They were playing poker with each other."

I've got money on the guy sitting in the back.(image source: patdollard.com)