Thought emporium said that microbiologists are the most super stitisous and that if it took sacrificing a goat to get better results they would
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.
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.
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
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 ] ).
You forgot i, j, k
It’s actually x, y, z, a, b, c, i, j, k, e, and then whatever, they don’t matter.
You forgot p, q
They can be handy and come before e
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
No, counting with fingers is bad. Count with phalanges instead. It’s more efficient
Just be sure to do it in binary. You gotta squeeze all of the value out of those phalanges.
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.
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.
Drag is in pain when drag tries to fully extend the middle or ring finger with all others clasped.
I do trig for a living. I don’t remember how to do long division at all.
What set of poor life choices led you to that??
(Kidding)
This is glorious
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.
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
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
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.
So scientists are warhammer orcs?
More like the Mechanicus. The machine spirit will be displeased if we dont give it the required stuffed animals and proper awakening rites.