• AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    2 hours ago

    My PI: “Oh, we don’t use that microcentrifuge, it will ruin your results” Me: “Oh damn, how long has it been broken for?” PI: "No, it’s not broken. It’s cursed "

    I thought this was just exasperated hyperbole, but nah, there’s a lot of superstition here.

  • LaunchesKayaks@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    4 hours ago

    I work at an MSP and we all have little shrines of random shit on our desks that we’ve collected. The one guy has a mini filing cabinet under his desk of tech shit that’s nearly as old as I am (I’m 27).

    If we are ever told that we can’t have our shrines, we’ll all be devastated.

    • 1995ToyotaCorolla@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      3 hours ago

      In the corner of our office we have an old Win2k workstation. It is our pinball machine and the glue that holds our department together

      • LaunchesKayaks@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        3 hours ago

        That’s hilarious. We had a desk dedicated to Datto devices. It was the Datto Desk. We were really upset when it had to be cleared for a new employee. Now we have another desk dedicated to empty phone boxes and tissues.

        We are moving to a new building next year, so I’m sure we’ll come up with all new stuff to enshrine.

  • jetA
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    29
    ·
    11 hours ago

    Science is about empiricism, so i would expect scientists to try out the occult from time to time.

    Pascal’s wager with respect to machinery, maybe the toys don’t help, but what if they do?

    • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 hours ago

      My occult phase was from a different angle: I really enjoyed immersing myself in something I didn’t have to explain or justify objectively, where I could just enjoy the vibes and not think too hard.

      I think of it as analogous to how some of the people who are most into being submissive in a BDSM/sex context are people who seem the opposite of that in their careers/regular life. The contrast is a relief.

    • IEatAsbestos@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      3 hours ago

      More like the Mechanicus. The machine spirit will be displeased if we dont give it the required stuffed animals and proper awakening rites.

  • affiliate@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    61
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    20 hours ago

    i was in a group call with 6 mathematicians, and it came time to order our names in the paper we were writing. in math papers, the names are always ordered alphabetically. we had to pull up a picture of the alphabet because none of us could remember which way the letters are ordered.

    • pyre@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      46
      ·
      19 hours ago

      memorizing the order of the alphabet would take precious real estate that could instead hold a couple more digits of pi

    • Maalus@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      28
      ·
      20 hours ago

      You guys are mathematicians not letterematicians.

      Also, I’m doing engineering shit and I still need to count using my fingers when calculating something on a multiplication table

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        17
        ·
        16 hours ago

        As a math guy, obviously the order of the letters is: x, y, z, a, b, c, then the rest of them in whatever order I currently feel like.

        As a CS guy, obviously the order is sort( [ set of all letters ] ).

      • affiliate@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        20 hours ago

        exactly!

        and i am always in favor of counting with fingers. we were given them for a reason, might as well make the most of them. counting is hard enough as it is

            • Dragon "Rider"(drag)@lemmy.nz
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              10 hours ago

              That’s impossible, because it would require tracking each digit at once. Counting in binary is kind of possible with fingers, but not with phalanges.

              • Shareni@programming.dev
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                9 hours ago

                Counting in binary is kind of possible with fingers

                Kind of? It’s quite possible and easy. I spent an afternoon counting syllables to create shitty poetry, and my fingers started counting on their own. Now I can count to 31 on 1 hand and it’s surprisingly useful.

          • affiliate@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            11 hours ago

            yeah cohomology can be particularly rough. look on the bright side though, at least you now have the tools to answer this question:

  • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    97
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    24 hours ago

    See also, the Pauli effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_effect

    The Pauli effect or Pauli’s device corollary is the supposed tendency of technical equipment to encounter critical failure in the presence of certain people. The term was coined after mysterious anecdotal stories involving Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, describing numerous instances in which demonstrations involving equipment suffered technical problems only when he was present.

    An incident occurred in the physics laboratory at the University of Göttingen. An expensive measuring device, for no apparent reason, suddenly stopped working, although Pauli was in fact absent. James Franck, the director of the institute, reported the incident to his colleague Pauli in Zürich with the humorous remark that at least this time Pauli was innocent. However, it turned out that Pauli had been on a railway journey to Zürich and had switched trains in the Göttingen rail station at about the time of the failure.

    R. Peierls describes a case when at one reception this effect was to be parodied by deliberately crashing a chandelier upon Pauli’s entrance. The chandelier was suspended on a rope to be released, but it stuck instead, thus becoming a real example of the Pauli effect

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      15 hours ago

      I’ve wondered if mental state actually affects reality around us. Like some people who see paranormal shit are just more open to it or something while the presence of a skeptic prevents it from happening

      And people who just don’t have confidence that tech will work can cause random issues just by being present, but sometimes when a tech confident person comes to assist them, their confidence gets it to work properly.

      Maybe it has to do with particle/wave duality and the observer effect, and the simulation approximates things more when people aren’t paying as much attention or won’t likely investigate an issue closely after the fact, so the simulation gets sloppy because it’s approximating. But then when someone who will pay closer attention comes (or will come), the waves collapse into particles and it behaves as expected.

      Maybe those cases where a user claims something usually works when they do it a way that is clearly wrong to the more experienced observer, the approximation works out in their favour, but the collapse to particles makes it break like it was supposed to the whole time.

      Maybe Pauli understood some things about the technical equipment (and ropes?) that the others didn’t or was better at calibration and collapsed the wave more than usual.

      Though my guess for the chandelier is that someone first thought of the dropping it when he entered joke but then realized that saying they tried to do that and it failed would be even funnier plus save them a chandelier and be much easier and safer to pull off.

      • Vilian@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        2 hours ago

        Particle don’t have anything todo with a person observing it, it collapses if you try to observe it because the only way to observe a particle is launching another particle to it, and that changes the particle state

    • ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      22 hours ago

      Interesting, I seem to have the opposite condition - something breaks, then they ask me to look at it and by the time I get there it’s working perfectly again.

    • Mango@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      18 hours ago

      What if these people are actually bad people and we just can’t know why?

      • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        10 hours ago

        The article I linked says they’re unrelated.

        The Pauli effect is not related to the Pauli exclusion principle, which is a bona fide physical phenomenon named after Pauli. However the Pauli effect was humorously tagged as a second Pauli exclusion principle, according to which a functioning device and Wolfgang Pauli may not occupy the same room.

  • ThePyroPython@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    81
    ·
    1 day ago

    Yep. Ghosts in Machines are real.

    I have witnessed it first hand multiple times.

    At university there was an old 1st gen Makerbot 3D printer and if you took away one of it’s prints that were displayed around it, all of your prints would fail, even if you replaced it the printer held a grudge. And never EVER say a 100% certainty statement that the print would succeed like “it is printing ok, it will be finished in an hour”. Only say things like “the print is doing ok so far”.

    The electronics lab was throwing out five old Cathode Ray Oscilloscopes so our little maker group took them in and two were working fine. The other three weren’t displaying the trace on the screen. One of our members, a chap from Romania who in his youth spent his time fixing old TVs in his home country, said to let him have a look. I swear down he plugged them in, leant his ear against it, said to the scopes “shh it’s ok, we’ll look after you”, and gave them gentle taps on top just behind the screen, and all three jumped back into life in perfect calibration.

    And finally, my girlfriend at the time had a 1st gen iPod that would, at the most inopportune moments randomly wake itself up, play a few seconds of a random song, then shut itself down.

  • Kowowow@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    34
    ·
    1 day ago

    Thought emporium said that microbiologists are the most super stitisous and that if it took sacrificing a goat to get better results they would

    • Contramuffin@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      33
      ·
      1 day ago

      Just yesterday I had a CO2 valve close on me during an experiment while I was away for a moment. It takes effort to turn the valve so it couldn’t have just shaken closed or something. The valve was in the corner of the room and was blocked off by boxes, so nobody could have accidentally bumped it. And, besides, nobody was in the room anyways. Before the experiment I made damn sure that the CO2 valve was open, and even looking through the computer records (which records the CO2) says that the CO2 valve was open until I walked away.

      I still have no idea how the valve could have closed on its own. Now, I’m not saying it’s a ghost, but I am saying that I cannot think of a single non-paranormal explanation. I’ve clearly angered the science gods and I would do well to sacrifice some more cells to the science gods to appease them

      • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        13 hours ago

        We have a ghost living in our microwave. We’ve been sitting there, in the middle of a meal, and the damn thing turns itself on. Probably doesn’t help that half the town was built on an Indian burial ground.

      • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        21 hours ago

        Now, I’m not saying it’s a ghost, but I am saying that I cannot think of a single non-paranormal explanation.

        See, it’s not superstition. Scientists all say so.

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    21 hours ago

    I have some low-level projects where I am responsible for every byte of code running on very simple hardware.

    There’s still problems where I throw my hands up and say “Nope, haunted. I’ll try again later.”

  • Mango@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    18 hours ago

    Well now I gotta build a shrine in my lab. The COF tester, GC, and our UPC tester are all behaving badly.

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      3 hours ago

      01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01001111 01101101 01101110 01101001 01110011 01110011 01101001 01100001 01101000 00100000 01100100 01100101 01110011 01101001 01110010 01100101 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101111 01100001 01110011 01110100 01100101 01110010 01110011 00100001

    • MeowZedong@lemmygrad.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      11 hours ago

      You need to treat them nicely and maybe show a bit of romance. Poems, flowers, even a printed picture of flowers, something nice that will last is all it takes and your instruments will work perfectly for you. Each person may need to contribute individually to the shrine.

      I swear, some damned tech came in on a PM and removed my poem from my favorite HPLC and now it’s been acting up for me nonstop.

  • Mandy@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    24 hours ago

    Oh no, the orks became smart enough to he scientists, the green tide is too big to stop now

    • Mango@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      18 hours ago

      Eyyy, I understood this reference!

      I accidentally expressed interest to a fan once.

      • Mandy@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        11 hours ago

        There are only two types of fans.
        Those who tell you 50 books worth of lore the moment you have the smallest of interest.
        And:
        “Cool”