You bet there's a story about a load-bearing sticker in IT circles.
While not specifically science, my engineering department on board ship started slapping Mechanicus purity seals on our equipment to keep it working.
While not specifically science, my engineering department on board ship started slapping Mechanicus purity seals on our equipment to ~~keep it working~~ appease the machine spirit.
FIFY
Praise the Omnissiah.
Are you an Ork from Warhammer 40k? LMAO
No, they’re clearly Imperial.
Sounds about right for engineering nerds. I was a deckie and y'all were basically wizards as far as I was concerned
microbiologists would do live sacrifices of animals if they even suspected it improves success rate
Several billion mice would like to tell you a secret
The Secret of NIMH?
The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy
and then some bozo says that biology is just complicated chemistry and chemistry is just complicated physics and we can simulate physics
curious thing is that i never hear biologists or chemists saying that, only some physicists and techbros. just trying to simulate your way out of small organic chemistry problems will make you even more hopelessly lost than you were before
As a (micro)biologist, I totally support that notion. Biology is, indeed, chemistry, which is in turn physics, which is in turn mathematics.
The problem is, good freaking luck simulating biological processes on a physical level. We do biology and not physics, because it's a reasonable shortcut we have to make to work on what's important without waiting another millenia for a decent enough physical simulation.
This is why I'm a geographer. We know what we are.
I get to gleefully embrace my role as generalist who fanboys over real science.
I mean the relation between those isn't wrong but like... we can't simulate complicated physics. At least not at any reasonable speed.
some people would tell you that we can simulate small bits of chemistry but it's flat out wrong (i might be biased as i've wrangled for a year with computational chemists about results that don't conform to reality) and even then errors are so large that's it's useless
I was involved with a project trying to simulate growth of a crystal cluster a couple of years ago. The guy doing the coding said it would be easy. It never worked and never came remotely close.
in my case the size of the system was so small they didn't have that excuse, yet they were only ever able to get correct results after experimental data was handed over to them, zero predictive power, useless
said it would be easy
Ah, the innocence of inexperience. (Giving them the benefit of the doubt of course. )
I work on old undocumented c/c++ spaghetti code for embedded systems. In multiple planning meetings I have gotten to use lines like "this looks like a single character change but testing it makes me really nervous" and have gotten zero pushback or raised eyebrows.
It's usually a few laughs and often another engineer or our manager will chime in to agree with me and describe some more of the context or whatever, lol.
Model fetishism
A Story About 'Magic', from ESR's "Jargon File"
Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).
You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic' and ‘more magic'. The switch was in the ‘more magic' position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the ‘more magic’ position before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the ‘more magic’ position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.
We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on ‘more magic’.
1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note that the switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side of the switch was connected to the switch body (usually the body is connected to a separate earth lug, but there are exceptions). The body is connected to the computer case, which is, presumably, grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn't necessarily at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage drop/jump which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by someone who found out the hard way that there was a potential difference between the two, and who then wired in the switch as a joke.
reminds me of this copypasta
As someone who works on a big robotic mingun for the Navy you would not BELIEVE how close to home the Adeptus Mechanicus hits for me. For starters we have written procures that need to be followed to the letter like a ritual and deviating from it at all, especially during a spot check can get you in serious trouble.. Technicians are also really goddamned superstitious and for good reason. If you accidentally cut yourself on the equipment, it will start to work as if it's accepted your blood sacrifice. The mounts also all have names and their own personalities. If you do anything that displeases the machine spirit's they will not work. My favorite story I was told by one of my instructors in school was the time a bunch of Aegis techs sacrificed a live chicken to their their radar and sealed its bones inside a metal box and attached it to the radar console, after which it started working flawlessly. That is until the CO came by and saw this box stuck to it and ordered it be taken down. THE MOMENT it was taken down, the radar cut off and REFUSED to work. After countless man hours of troubleshooting this thing and finding nothing wrong, they have to fly a tech rep out to figure out what the hells the matter with this thing. They tell him what happened and his response? He puts the box back on the console becuase he knows what sort of black magic runs this equipment and lo and behold it starts working again. Whoever originally made the Machine Cult got it spot on what kind of culture a bunch of technicians would develop if left on their own for a millenia
The Jargon File in general is such a treasure
I like the koans page
Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
seeing that jargon file has an extensive page on retrocomputing feels like figuring out that there were archeologists in ancient egypt
The supervisor actually killed them, plot twist
I had a labmate who insisted on ph testing distilled water. Not because he was concerned about contamination, but because it was part of the ritual.
Is lab grade distilled water more guaranteed to be neutral pH? Because I tested some random distilled water from walmart and it was like 5.5. I then went down a rabbit hole and learned that distilled water is so pure that it just sucks up carbon from the air.
it will vary, just after distillation (or RO/ion exchange) it should be closer to 7 then it goes down as carbon dioxide gets absorbed. that's why it's buffered everywhere where it matters
Not only the CO~2~, but also the glassware you put the water in for measuring can very significantly alter the pH. Some scientists I know systematically screened different, presumably clean, containers because of this effect before progressing with their experiments.
We had a distiller in the department. We'd roll over a cart fill a carboy.
I used to do a similar ritual, and it was really reassuring. Might be an autistic thing for me though lol.
i remember reading recently that it was discovered that a lot of studies regarding microplastics are likely wrong. because nitrile gloves used to operate in the laboratory gives off microplastics, so there is basically no uncontaminated samples.
so, always check your presumably "clean" samples too!
You might, or might not be surprised to hear I tested for variables like that regularly lol.
I wonder if many superstitions in rational secular people could just be bad terminology for behavior that can have some good reasons behind it.
One is using intuition to access your brain power in a way that's different than conscious thought and verbal reasoning. For me at least, when I have spent months and even years troubleshooting or upgrading different parts of a system, I develop an intuition where I can track down certain types of issues really quickly or with very limited information.
There are often things that, in the wise words of Mr. Plinkett, you didn't notice -- but your brain did.
Second, and most important, is the ubiquitous one-two punch that there are always hidden variables and that they are by definition not easy to predict.
I have had my time wasted by way dumber and more seemingly random things than that worm drawing. I'm not a biologist but I could still speculate a bunch of potential reasons that, while wrong, would still be way more predictable than actual issues I've dealt with at work and home.
I can also predict that in that situation I would absolutely keep doing the drawings. My line of reasoning here applies to many other situations as well: The world is complicated. There could be a helpful effect from some part of the drawing process, or there could be no effect, OR there could be some crazy interaction of 3 different variables. Don't change anything, finish the current task, then decide if figuring out the cause & effect is worth doing next. (some of that also comes from my internal voice tasked with keeping my adhd in check)
"For no reason" means, "condition not being controlled for".
To give in to superstition is bad science.
The science is finding how and why the superstition works.
But what if the condition is the lack of worm drawing?
To be fair you could call that following the empirical evidence despite it running against theory, which is good science.
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
