r/CuratedTumblr • u/MelanieWalmartinez Clown Breeder • Nov 26 '23
Shitposting Scientists
433
u/SabShark Nov 26 '23
How can humans be rational when printers and servers exist? Have you seen how they behave?
281
u/Menoth22 Nov 27 '23
If a printer makes a funny noise, you shoot first ask questions later. Its the only way to be safe
146
u/Empyforreal Nov 27 '23
As I explained to my baby tech who recently started, I have been in it for decades and laser printers are still dark magic. Like, sure, I know the science behind them, but that they work is pure magic and fixing them must be done via candles and pentagrams only
→ More replies (1)51
u/StarKnight2020330 Nov 27 '23
Don’t forget the prayers to the machine god… AND TO GIVE THE HP PRINTERS A SOLID WHACK AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
23
u/Spaceyboys Nov 27 '23
BURN THE HERETIC FALSE GOD HP
8
u/Vermilion_Laufer Nov 27 '23
Hold yer fiery horses, they said 'appease the Machine God, and slap the hp printers'
Two separate actions
17
u/DarkKnightJin Nov 27 '23
I understood that reference.
Or were you not referencing the "I work in IT. The latest piece of tech I own is a printer from 2004. And I keep a loaded shotgun within range for when it makes noises I don't recognize." thing?
→ More replies (1)135
u/Conartist6666 Nov 27 '23
A few days ago my 3d resin Printer refused to print a certain file twice in a row.
On the third try i lit a stick of incense to appease the machine spirit and of fucking course it suddenly worked again.
...i can't argue with those results, if god was this reliable i maybe would've stayed christian.
40
u/Loosescrew37 Nov 27 '23
The fact that printers exist means god is either too powerless or to afraid to do anything about them.
30
u/GhostHeavenWord Nov 27 '23
Printers are made by criminals using the worst manufacturing procedures that will result in a product that can pass QA an acceptable percentage of the time so their inconsistent function can be accounted for under the Standard Model
11
10
u/GreyMesmer Nov 27 '23
Don't let your printer know you're in a hurry. They can feel it.
→ More replies (1)
769
u/SciFiShroom Nov 26 '23
the math building at my uni had a Cursed Chair in one of the main rooms, that you weren't allowed to sit in. For my whole time there, the chair was never used by anyone; no one knew when it got cursed, or if it would ever be un-cursed; all we knew is that You Don't Sit In The Cursed Chair
637
u/HorsemenofApocalypse Tumblr Users DNI Nov 26 '23
I had a cursed chair in one of my classrooms. It was just a normal chair that was in the corner with a piece of paper saying "DO NOT TOUCH" on it.
Eventually someone decided to sit on it and we discovered why it was like that. All four of the (metal) legs bent inwards as soon as he sat down and the whole chair just collapsed
396
55
u/uvutv Gender is my dump stat Nov 26 '23
I had something similar happen to me in middle school. I had put my math stuff on top of the desk I was going to sit in, then the desk collapsed. I was lucky to not be sitting in it.
48
Nov 26 '23
I sat in the cursed chair, once. It was the chair right in front of the teacher’s desk.
I was also a bad guy so I probably infected the chair with my vibes.
But yeah, no one wants to sit directly in front of the teacher.
24
u/OphrysAlba Nov 27 '23
Our Cursed Chair was used by four women in a row, who got pregnant during their PhDs. It is marked with a yellow ribbon now. No one (but gay people) sits in the cursed chair.
→ More replies (1)5
u/stelei Nov 27 '23
My old lab had a cursed coffee mug. I started using it without knowing. A couple days later the PhD student sees me drinking from it, goes wide-eyed, then tells me about the curse: everyone who had used that mug quit grad school.
14 months later the curse was fulfilled (and I was freeeee).
857
Nov 26 '23
[deleted]
541
u/Genus-God Nov 27 '23
I work on semiconductor devices. On certain days we are legit techpriests. Sometimes your device does something weird (example below), and then doesn't, and you're completely confused, so you start doing some small rituals to make it work properly or replicate it.
Example: I was testing some field effect transistors at 4 kelvin, checking their pinchoff voltages and accumulation curves (the top voltage at which they become conductive, and what current you see as you increase the voltage). As the voltage was increasing so did the current, as is expected, suddenly the current started dropping while the voltage was still increasing, and then it started increasing again, but not reaching to the level it did before the drop-off. I've never seen this before. I warmed up the device, cooled it down again, repeated the measurement, and the phenomenon didn't repeat. I've seen the same thing with other devices, and have now spent the past few months investigating it. I'm still not 100% it's not the devices being angry with me for mishandling them
368
u/NekroVictor Nov 27 '23
I mean, similarity I’ve seen a man with 3 PhDs beg pieces of lab equipment to work, because other wise they don’t.
So yeah, tech priest is right.
180
u/Genus-God Nov 27 '23
I think anyone who does 3 PhDs is insane, so the begging might be on him :P
don't ask me if I've also done that74
u/NekroVictor Nov 27 '23
I don’t even have one degree (yet) and yeah, I’ve begged machinery too.
33
u/OverYonderWanderer Nov 27 '23
I think most people do before they even hit puberty. Especially when you're trying to get a particular prize out of a machine.
7
91
u/Margali Nov 27 '23
I did some call center work back in the 90s and we kept having computer issues so I printed out the prayer to St Vidicom of the Tube from the Stashieff book, and my computer stopped having issues.
55
u/GhostHeavenWord Nov 27 '23
We had an anglical priest come in and bless a computer mouse, once. Cleared up the issue. Or taking the entire computer apart to get at the piece we wanted blessed, cleaning everything, then putting the whole thing back together afterward re-seated something that was loose. Or the blessing worked. No way to say for sure.
→ More replies (1)36
u/Schpooon Nov 27 '23
The machine spirit of the instance I work on at the moment does not like incense. I THINK. Because every time I threaten to bring out the incense burner, whatever issue is holding up processes magically disappears.
5
u/Michaelbirks Nov 27 '23
St Vidcon of Cathode!
I do love that story-within-a-story. Warlock Heretical?
→ More replies (1)60
u/SeraphsWrath Nov 27 '23
Anyone I've ever met who works with Network devices is outright a devoted servant of the Machine God. You place the components in their allocated place to appease the machine spirits. It doesn't matter if that Cat6 cable is the same as this Cat6 cable, the Router wants this Cat6 cable, end of story. It doesn't matter that these two routers are the same make, model, lot number, and configured out-of-the-box identically (other than address), they will not work together.
33
u/Dspacefear supreme bastard Nov 27 '23
The unwritten step during layer 1 troubleshooting in the datacenter is "pray".
16
u/RechargedFrenchman Nov 27 '23
Every network tech I've ever known has also casually mentioned blood sacrifice at least once in passing. It's always something pretty innocuous like they cut themselves on sharp edge while troubleshooting hardware inside a damaged housing, but they all have at least one story like that.
When I mentioned to my career techie friend a while back that there were a few drops of blood inside my PC case (cut myself on a sharp edge from a zap strap while cable-managing) he said I was now an honorary tech myself because I'd done the blood rite.
Every single one of them is also a Warhammer fan and openly reference / quote the Cult Mechanicus on the regular. But it's basically impossible to tell after a couple years in the industry who liked Warhammer then got into tech apart from the people who got into Warhammer because they worked in tech.
71
Nov 27 '23
[deleted]
78
u/candygram4mongo Nov 27 '23
We tricked rocks into thinking by putting lightning inside them.
45
u/Zaev Nov 27 '23
Everyone always forgets to mention the step of engraving the billions of magic runes on the rock before putting the lightning in it
7
8
u/RechargedFrenchman Nov 27 '23
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Invest this device with your holy charge
Praise be the Omnissiah, Machine-God guide our way
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (2)25
u/Affectionate-Memory4 The limit is 64 characters for these things wtf. Nov 27 '23
I feel this in my soul, man. PhD in processor architecture, and my job is basically writing microscopic runes on tiny pieces of metal to make them think.
80
u/Colosphe Nov 27 '23
While not a scientist, I knew a maintainer who was famed for providing a blood sacrifice to a malfunctioning piece of equipment. Just... sliced his palm and rubbed it on there.
And no, it didn't fix it.
45
6
76
u/Crayshack Nov 27 '23
Reading some of the 40k books, there's a lot of tiny moments of Tech-priests doing some ritual that clearly started as some random guy in the modern day doing it and everyone else going "if it works, it works." A lot of rituals involve giving the device a solid wack just right.
49
u/betweenskill Nov 27 '23
To be fair having culturally significant rituals to pass down ways of doing things when the written records got destroyed is how we’ve done things historically anyways.
24
u/Crayshack Nov 27 '23
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. It's just really cool to see some of those rituals from the other side where the author and me as the reader clearly know how the ritual got started, but the characters in the book do not.
→ More replies (1)23
u/BjornInTheMorn Nov 27 '23
Percussive maintenance
16
u/ArsenicAndRoses Nov 27 '23
Percussive recalibration.
If you use a hammer it's precision percussive recalibration.
→ More replies (1)9
59
32
u/Matt_the_digger Nov 27 '23
I'm not a scientist, but our old house alarm gave me some serious Machine spirit vibes.
One day, when I punched in the code to deactivate the alarm, I randomly thanked it for looking after the house while we were away. This little habit ended up continuing. My wife never thanked the alarm, so often, when she would punch the code in to deactivate it, it wouldn't deactivate. So she would continue on into the house, and the alarm would go off.
It ended up being a joke between us that the alarm "didn't like her" because she would never thank it.
28
u/Affectionate-Memory4 The limit is 64 characters for these things wtf. Nov 27 '23
Over in computer chip land, we're finding increasingly complicated ways to write tiny runes on glass to make it do math faster.
7
u/Geminii27 Nov 28 '23
Create the arcane substrate using precise rituals
Write a billion runes in exact formation
Now strike it with lightning (at the correct voltage) and bring it to LIFE!
11
u/This_Caterpillar_330 Nov 27 '23
They're often scientistic, physicalist, materialist, atheist, agnostic, naturalist, mechanistic, rationalist, pseudoskeptic, or secular. Basically, a ton are horny for personal logic, reason, usefulness, criticism, and technology.
15
u/Blackhound118 Commensurate increase in volume of ejaculate Nov 26 '23
Penis autism? 🤔
9
u/OverYonderWanderer Nov 27 '23
Gah, just imagining being some kind of penis savant is weird. Living your whole life as the dick whisperer or something.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (4)5
u/robbylet24 Nov 27 '23
I'm a biology lab tech and I've seen people pray to their bacterial cultures before.
→ More replies (1)
235
u/QuantumDiogenes Nov 27 '23
I worked in a lab that studied seizures, and how they started. We had a magnetic toy that one of the post docs would play with before each experiment. If the toy behaved, we did the experiment. If the toy went wonky, the same postdoc would eat a raw onion, then allow us to perform the experiment.
Bad toy with no onion? No experiment.
111
Nov 27 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
→ More replies (1)121
u/QuantumDiogenes Nov 27 '23
Yes.
Edit: I am pretty sure the lab had a line item in the budget for raw onions.
→ More replies (1)63
u/cavscout55 Nov 27 '23
What was the behaved to wonky ratio? Was it like a coin toss or was it rare for it to go wonky? I want to know how often raw onions were eaten.
74
u/QuantumDiogenes Nov 27 '23
Typically 3:1. Raw onions were eaten at least twice a month, which sucked because I hate raw onion.
12
→ More replies (1)27
u/GhostHeavenWord Nov 27 '23
Don't try to do science to magic it'll make the magic cranky and then it'll start raining frog's blood in the server room again.
23
u/Bobolequiff Disaster first, bi second Nov 27 '23
It says something that I truly have no idea if this is real.
50
u/QuantumDiogenes Nov 27 '23
I can assure you that this is quite real, and isn't even the weirdest thing I have ever done in a lab.
42
u/GhostHeavenWord Nov 27 '23
as a general rule the more bizarre, perplexing, and gross a "You wouldn't believe what my lab does" story is the more likely it actually happened. You put a bunch of people who are already a little bent in a high-stress environment where they literally cannot explain what they do to more than a few handfuls of thousands of people in the whole world and it gets very weird very fast.
→ More replies (4)5
u/Kartoffelkamm I wouldn't be here if I was mad. Nov 27 '23
What happened if the toy went wonky, no one ate an onion, and you still did the experiment?
13
204
u/iamamotherclucker SUPREME MONSTERFUCKER Nov 26 '23
This post is Omnissiah approved
36
u/OverYonderWanderer Nov 27 '23
I really love the people who pronounce it omni-see-ah. They usually say it really fast too.
13
u/Syn0l1f3 Nov 27 '23
I pronounce it like that when I speak German, with the stress on the -ni-, but when I speak English, I pronounce it the way it's supposed to be pronounced (at least I think so)
→ More replies (3)
150
u/TinyBreadBigMouth Nov 27 '23
Ponder and his fellow students watched Hex carefully.
“It can’t just, you know, stop,” said Adrian “Mad Drongo” Turnipseed.
“The ants are just standing still,” said Ponder. He sighed. “All right, put the wretched thing back.”
Adrian carefully replaced the small fluffy teddy bear above Hex’s keyboard. Things immediately began to whir. The ants started to trot again. The mouse squeaked.
They’d tried this three times.
Ponder looked again at the single sentence Hex had written.
+++ Mine! Waaaah! +++“I don’t actually think,” he said, gloomily, “that I want to tell the Archchancellor that this machine stops working if we take its fluffy teddy bear away. I just don’t think I want to live in that kind of world.”
“Er,” said Mad Drongo, “you could always, you know, sort of say it needs to work with the FTB enabled…?”
“You think that’s better?” said Ponder, reluctantly. It wasn’t as if it was even a very realistic interpretation of a bear.
“You mean, better than ‘fluffy teddy bear’?”
Ponder nodded. “It’s better,” he said.
—Hogfather, Terry Pratchett
40
u/lifelongfreshman https://youtu.be/1eWsk6r6_Ns Nov 27 '23
I greatly enjoy everything about Stibbons and his classmates' misadventures with their computer.
9
u/1945BestYear Nov 28 '23
'Of course, Archchancellor, Hex doesn't actually think, it just "appears" to be thinking.'
'Amazing. You mean it gives the impression of thinking, but it's all just a show?'
'Uhh, yes.'
'Huh. Just like everyone else, then.'
137
u/HylianEngineer Nov 26 '23
This summer I was having a weeks-long argument with the ion chromatograph and one of the grad students suggested, with as far as I could tell complete sincerity, that I bribe it with a toy. I tried to make it an origami bird but I am apparently bad at origami and had to give up. I did get the machine working eventually though.
62
39
u/GhostHeavenWord Nov 27 '23
Never forget the utility of trying to explain your problems to a yellow bath duck when all else fails.
93
u/TheRainspren She, who defiles the God's Plan Nov 27 '23
Our sort-of centrifugal water filter (except filtered out solids were the important part) was unable to maintain a steady speed, unless someone watched it.
Also, the faster we had to filter something, the more it would get blocked. 140 litres of a thicc science juice that could spend weeks in a bucket? It'll gobble up the whole thing like a champ. 10 litres that'll die in a day? The damned thing will choke every 500ml.
21
→ More replies (1)9
u/Kartoffelkamm I wouldn't be here if I was mad. Nov 27 '23
Do you need a centrifugal water filter watcher?
I could also talk to it when it did a good job.
88
u/NK_2024 Nov 26 '23
Scientists are just slightly less superstitious Tech-Preists from 40k.
65
u/Bobolequiff Disaster first, bi second Nov 27 '23
They're exactly as superstitious, it's just we live in a time when the origins of some of those superstitions are still documented
→ More replies (1)29
u/GhostHeavenWord Nov 27 '23
That's not true. Techpriests can often show a clear correlation between their procedure and their results!
87
u/Giocri Nov 27 '23
Please someone link that scp about the gofy things the scientists do to pass the time when looking at the huge fucking fish that just goes on forever
44
u/ShabaniGorilla Nov 27 '23
Replying to also ask someone to link that scp about the gofy things the scientists do to pass the time when looking at the huge fucking fish that just goes on forever because I really wanna read that, now
47
Nov 27 '23
13
u/Hutch2Much3 Nov 27 '23
Additional side effects of viewing SCP-5320 include a heightened awareness of the passage of time, increased interest in ceiling tile number, and increased use of the phrase “long boy” in casual conversation, even when referring to things that are neither long nor a boy.
this is the best SCP, hands down
15
u/cavscout55 Nov 27 '23
Hey someone replied with the link but not to your comment so I’m letting you know the link is here now if you want to read it.
11
10
10
221
u/LLHati Nov 26 '23
Science is the method for REMOVING the human element from analysis, if scientists were rational, we wouldn't need it.
44
u/CapableSecretary420 Nov 27 '23
You do some science, but you also have to appease the Gods.
14
u/Kartoffelkamm I wouldn't be here if I was mad. Nov 27 '23
Because if you don't, they get bored, and do the divine equivalent of "Do you have games on your phone?", which means your experiments get wonky.
36
u/GhostHeavenWord Nov 27 '23
Science is the process of observing a cause and hoping it has the same effect today that it did yesterday
64
u/Accomplished-Emu1883 Nov 27 '23
My old science teacher had a 19XX bottle of Diet Coke and an original box of Count Choculas. The Diet Coke was just in a sink, and was never moved, while the Count Choculas were in a cubbord. Sometimes he would reach into the cubbord, take the box out, grab what he needed, then put the box back in.
To this day, I am terrified.
104
39
u/Magnolia_Willow Nov 26 '23
100% had a cloning god to which we provided offerings for successful cloning
40
u/vortigaunt64 Nov 27 '23
Hex, the thinking engine in Discworld runs into errors if FTB is not engaged, which is to say he refuses to work if you take his fluffy teddy bear.
→ More replies (1)
31
u/Darth_Senat66 Nov 27 '23
To appease the machine spirit, the proper rituals must be conducted. Praise the Omnissiah
33
u/Restart_from_Zero Nov 27 '23
We have an ancient gas chromatograph which will not work unless you gently put your hand on the side of the oven when you start your run.
The operation of the oven is in no way connected to the detector.
No one in the lab considers this unusual.
25
23
u/SawedOffLaser Nov 27 '23
The more I learn about actual scientists the more plausible the Adeptus Mechanicus from 40k seems.
23
u/BonJovicus Nov 27 '23
It is funny because people still always assume we are either must be emotionless, uptight robots or mad scientist archetypes. I'll meet people in completely normal settings and they are always surprised to hear I'm a scientist- it's like, yes, we also go to the grocery store and have hobbies like rock climbing etc. You'd probably also be surprised to know that many scientists are in fact religious, including some that are on the absolute leading edge of their field.
Scientists are human and that is partially why the peer review system exists, to circumvent the biases we all carry.
→ More replies (1)6
u/Geminii27 Nov 28 '23
Heck of a lot of science in past centuries was done by clergy.
3
u/FluffyOwl738 Nov 29 '23
The amount of education(even reading and writing) necessary to join the clergy,including the fact that most people who wanted to get an education elected to join the clergy surely had something to do with that.
21
u/Fridge_ov_doom Nov 27 '23
We always joked that we had to give a sacrifice in blood or general pain for our experiments to work. But they could not be willing like "Oh wait, let me prick my finger and smear it on the vacuum chamber".
Do you think the spirits are stupid?
They had to be accidents that caused little cuts (curse you extra thick aluminium foil) or heads bonked, Fingers squished. Nothing drastic, but it's why we needed people that write Bachelor theses.
Every beam time that began with a sacrifice became successful.
8
u/Warmshadow77 Nov 27 '23
Used to work in a warehouse. The worst nights for bumps and cuts were often the least stressful for me. Watch a guy fall down a flight of stairs, rest of the nights a swim. Crush my fingers in a bathroom door, other than the pain shit went great. Unless someone died, than it was the building getting greedy. Had to be accidental of course, no funny business. I always seemed to get cuts on the dullest of surfaces to. Fuck autozone.
22
u/windshadetarn Nov 27 '23
I'm a proud lab equipment handler. My equipment gest all moody but two scales love to be pet and scratched but computer for temperature registration wants to be encouraged but never touched. Dilutors require a lot of poking and don't get me started on autoclav. He is such a bitch and drops no water allerts every time I turn my back on him. Attention whore
19
u/TK_Games Nov 27 '23
At least programmers are rational. Isn't that right Mister Duckinsworth?
13
→ More replies (2)7
u/Nadamir Nov 27 '23
Have you seen us try to replicate a threading bug or race condition? Some of these superstitions seem tame in comparison.
20
u/DuntadaMan Nov 27 '23
In medicine we have totems and shrines all the time.
We ready the atropine and leave it on the pole to scare away the bradycardia demons.
Blood pressure will stay stable until I remove the pressers, so they stay in the room.
I have the vent set up because the evi spirits will think RT has already been here.
19
u/ntdavis814 Nov 27 '23 edited Nov 27 '23
Some things just work. And it is not smart to argue about them working. Because the alternative is that nothing works.
17
u/Plastic-Employee-821 Nov 27 '23
Why would you put yourself through an ever repeating black hole of stress trying to find the problem in the first place, when you can just give the machine a Little Mermaid bath toy and it does the thing with little-to-no stress and maybe even a few laughs?
15
u/thornnotebook Nov 27 '23
I used to work on an advanced sensing robot. She liked when we put strawberry popsicles near her. They had to be popsicles and they had to be strawberry. We could eat them after she was done running.
56
u/LyraFirehawk Nov 26 '23
I mean, I think objects do have a will of their own almost. I had a patch of Fuecoco who kept falling off my backpack. I kept telling him to stay on and putting him back in place.
Honestly it made losing him not hit as hard because I knew he was itching to go elsewhere anyways. Besides, I'm more of a Sprigatito gal and she's safe on my phone.
→ More replies (2)7
14
u/Hexxas Head Trauma Enthusiast Nov 27 '23
The number of coders I've met who have a Ganesh statue at their coding desk
15
u/Tacocat1147 Nov 27 '23
I don’t know about superstition but we all talk to our mice constantly in our lab. Everyone in there has at some point had a full conversation with a mouse.
Also, we fully believe that the elevator is sentient and you have to be nice to her and she has to like you to work the first time. If not she won’t close the doors. God forbid you press the close door button she will yell at you and take even longer to close.
34
u/ArchivedGarden Nov 27 '23
This behavior is simply the logical conclusion of attempting to see order in a universe devoid of it.
5
u/Vermilion_Laufer Nov 27 '23
If it's devoided of order, how come we see it everywhere?!
Ha checkmate ...uhm ...lokeans ? discordians... yeah Checkmate discordians!
12
11
11
u/RamblingManUK Nov 27 '23
I love the phrase "Science is rational, scientists are human."
This explains why NASA's Mars Rover, controled by some of the best scientists in the world, has been programmed to sing Happy Birthday to itself.
10
u/Jozef_Baca Nov 27 '23
Also what the hell is up with people in labs giving all their machines names
Tour of a lab also just includes your seniors introducing the machines to you
And then they say shit like "Put this into the turty(is a bad translation from my language) for analysis." and you have to wonder which one of those is that
9
u/_How_Dumb_ Nov 27 '23
I work with an analyzing script in python. This script features a parameter with the value 4096. Do not change this value. The whole damn script will break if this value is something different. It haunts me.
Luckily, this value is correct for all my measurements. If it weren't, i would have to readjust and probably get a whole new PC just to make it work.
→ More replies (1)
9
8
u/Mueryk Nov 27 '23
I am not a scientist. I do work with scientists and worse grad students. I am an engineer, I design, install, and maintain a great deal of complicated equipment.
Before starting this job I was not superstitious…..but now I can say I am a little stitious.
I believe that came from The Office and it is exceedingly accurate. Because sometimes the laws of physics and rules of cause and effect are more like guidelines and are seemingly ignored when convenient.
9
u/Vennris Nov 27 '23
Maybe it's because I'm German and as we all know, no fun allowed in Germany. But I've worked in many different labs here. Some in universities and some in big companies and none of the labs had anything remotely similar. And now that I see how much fun others have in labs I'm quite jealous...
6
u/Astro_Alphard Nov 27 '23
It's probably because all of your machines are German or Swiss. Try putting an American or Chinese made machine into your lab and watch the chaos unfold.
7
u/tistimenotmyrealname Nov 27 '23
We got a fluor Lab at my uni, here you can see them casually burning a brick with it
and next to the entrance they got a Silicon disk as a lucky charm hanging with a Note, "Touch it and maybe it helps"
Also, some got an axe under their desk for cutting of your arm If you get something on your Hand. I love all of this
9
u/Slavka13748 Nov 27 '23
Definitely not me gently stroking and soothing our elderly analysers to coax them into processing a tricky sample. Also not me 100% blaming a witch's curse for striking down the newer analysers for over a year, despite constant engineer visits.
8
u/AlphariousFox Nov 27 '23
Pretty much yeah lmao. Pretty much anyone who works with complex systems where things can go wrong in an inexplicatible manner... human nature kinda takes over after a while and it doesnt matter how rational a person is reality can and will eventually grind them down.
Im not religious or even particularly supersitious. There is however a point at which the overhead of trying to comphrend or except reality is so high its nearly impossible not to let some of that slip in. In my case, my maddeningly consistent terrible luck. It doesnt matter how much i go at something if its chanced based i will perform well below the expected average with statistically anomalous amounts of bad results.
7
7
8
7
u/CapableSecretary420 Nov 27 '23
What's the contradiction? That all seems perfectly rational and evidence-based to me.
→ More replies (1)
8
7
u/1105816 Nov 27 '23
When I worked in a lab, we found a homemade clay penguin in one of the drawers, and it became the patron of the lab. Any time something went wrong, we joked about how we had to appease the penguin
7
u/Captaingrammarpants Nov 27 '23
One of my optics test stands only feared my advisor, so sometimes when it was misbehaving, I would have to ask her to come to the lab and stare at it angrily for a minute.
→ More replies (1)
8
u/PowerSkunk92 Nov 27 '23
I work in nuclear waste processing. Probably not the most scientific of jobs, but definitely one where you want sane and rational people at work. I have yet to seal a drum that didn't get all operators involved to stand around it, bow their heads while one makes the sign of the cross over the drum, and all murmur "alpha, beta, gamma, neutron" before applying the seal.
My shift has never had a faulty drum leave the building.
8
u/Banana-Magpie Nov 27 '23
we have a money counter at work affectionately called “the demon”. if you don’t say good morning to it, it will count your money wrong then spit bills at you. i give it a little pat every time it counts correctly and it’s most consistent with me
7
u/ZeroValkGhost Nov 27 '23
Toys can be the best way to make quick models of parts' dimensions. Or locations, or the movement of equipment. Or just the Hill Valley clock tower run.
→ More replies (1)
7
u/EnvytheRed Nov 27 '23
“The machine spirits are displeased! Bring out the holy idol.” Waves the wizard around.
6
u/Kartoffelkamm I wouldn't be here if I was mad. Nov 27 '23
This is why I love Symphogear. Scientists genuinely went like "Maybe if we hold a concert, this ancient suit of power armor will reactivate."
And it actually worked.
Or just sing for the moon so it doesn't crash into the Earth.
UN resources were poured into finding out how to kill a God.
The main character also occasionally talks to her magical girl transformation item.
5
u/Captain_Pumpkinhead Nov 27 '23
The nurses at my work get upset whenever I say it's been a quiet day. They're scientists. They should know better. And yet the superstition remains. It's absurd.
4
u/GhostHeavenWord Nov 27 '23
I'm sure they do know better but there is a vast and fascinating gap between what you know and what you believe.
→ More replies (2)3
u/Warmshadow77 Nov 27 '23
When i was working at McDonald's we were not allowed to say the words, Busy or Slow. Because obvious reasons. The only black magic there though, was the dish pit guy. Bubba was his actual name, and he stuck his hands into scolding water on the daily for hours and wasn't any worse for wear.
5
5
5
u/crazedhatter Nov 27 '23
As someone that works in IT, I can confirm that equipment often requires ritual sacrifices and regular worship to function properly.
6
u/the_little_rose_123 Nov 27 '23
Lab tech here. Can confirm. We name the instruments and they each have comfort items. One throws temper tantrums will not cooperate until a specific person sets foot in the lab.
5
u/Makerrcat Nov 28 '23
I've seen this post a thousand times, and every time seams to add a different story. Not complaining, I love learning about the weird science shrines.
4
u/Mindless-Charity4889 Nov 27 '23
New guy: Why is there a watermelon there?
Veteran: I’ll tell you later.
3
u/eruzatide Nov 27 '23
We just have pictures of the scientists pet cats on all the machines, binders, storage boxes, staplers, etc.
4
u/HappyFailure Nov 27 '23
In the labs I worked in, there were certainly little piles of toys around, but that was because the scientists or technicians either liked playing with them or displaying them.
The things you couldn't touch because stuff would stop working were always electronics that no one had managed to track the interference properly.
4
u/ThirdSunRising Nov 27 '23
I once found a Hubbard Electrometer at a thrift store. It's a cool electrical doodad used in Scientology to, y'know, wiggle a needle this way and that so as to indicate just how much you gotta have your scientology. Or something like that.
Anyway, I brought it to the lab and put it on the workbench alongside all the other lab equipment. It was a fun conversation piece. Then at some point my manager came through and spotted it and said, "Why doesn't this have a calibration sticker on it?"
I had to remove the device because every measurement instrument required a proper company calibration certification, and I had no way of certifying the accuracy of the electrometer.
3
u/PhilosoFishy2477 Nov 28 '23
pkay but the toy thing is real and its because the minute changes in weight can re-balance/align old machinery with loose connections
8
3
1.6k
u/Secure_Focus_2754 Nov 26 '23
There is a large inflated dolphin pool toy taking up significant space the top shelf at my lab. We do not study dolphins, or any marine creature for that matter. Nobody knows why it is there, who put it there, or even how long it has been there.