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.

I used to do a similar ritual, and it was really reassuring. Might be an autistic thing for me though lol.

To be fair you could call that following the empirical evidence despite it running against theory, which is good science.

The time it takes to draw said worm is possibly critical for survival of the subsequent step...

"For no reason" means, "condition not being controlled for".

To give in to superstition is bad science.

at a previous lab we had "PCR amulets" (little plastic animals)

the failure rate was SIGNIFICANTLY higher when you used a machine without placing a plastic animal on it

i kept threatening to cut one open to see if it had a magnet inside and my supervisor warned me that a grad student might cut me open if I damaged any of the animal amulets lmao

The science is finding how and why the superstition works.

You do not mess with the juju

Sure, like for example the time spent drawing the worm gives them time to remember to take the absolutely vital step they didn't do.

Well tell that to NASA with their peanut superstition.

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.

But what if the condition is the lack of worm drawing?

Anedotally this is why I didn't like bio, none of the labs really ever worked and we always fudged some data.

You have to draw an ugly worm on others for a variable

Astronauts aren't scientists, they're military. The military are all in on superstition.

That's not totally true. Sure, many are military, but not all. I think all of the pilots are though, for obvious reasons.

H-h-hey now, nobody said that the worm drawing was ugly!? Nor did people say that the worm was attractive.

Hrm, someone claiming to be from HR now wants to talk with me (do we even have an HR?)...

microbiologists would do live sacrifices of animals if they even suspected it improves success rate

maybe it introduces some critical contaminant (many such cases)

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

The Jargon File in general is such a treasure

"We switched brands of litmus paper and now everything's in shambles!"

Because once you get good enough at Sky you can go to Sky 2?

needs ‘x’ amount of less blue freq light

i love this story

I mean the relation between those isn't wrong but like... we can't simulate complicated physics. At least not at any reasonable speed.

Several billion mice would like to tell you a secret

The supervisor actually killed them, plot twist

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.

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.

While not specifically science, my engineering department on board ship started slapping Mechanicus purity seals on our equipment to keep it working.

The Secret of NIMH?

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

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

The results of my master's thesis were used for two papers in Nature Communications. So much of the data was fudged and I was either asked to leave out data points, sets of data that didn't fit the hypothesis, or I was looking how my supervisor just deleted numbers until it looked good. I was so incredibly embarrassed and angry. I declined the offer to do a PhD under the same supervisor. Oral gavage yourself with your dick my dude.

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.

seeing that jargon file has an extensive page on retrocomputing feels like figuring out that there were archeologists in ancient egypt

We had a distiller in the department. We'd roll over a cart fill a carboy.

I knew drug company scientists who didn't trust anything in academia for this reason. The incentives were aligned on the wrong side of dishonesty. If stuff didn't work out in pharma you just moved on to the next idea.

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.

That's an interesting take. I worked in a pharma startup once and they were grinding cutthroat bitches, but yeah, they were very focused on what they wanted to achieve. The most unethical thing - apart from absolutely ignoring human decency and worker's rights - was probably exploiting funding for Covid research for cancer research. To be fair tho, it was the early days of Covid and their initial cancer target was structurally similar to a molecule in sars cov 2. And the CEO slept like 3 hours a day and was always one of the first ones to turn in applications for some funding contest, which is why he often got them. You have to get the money for your work somehow. And we did use the money for the development of the covid drug, it is just that we also used it to run the same tests and get equipment/reagents for the cancer targets.

Praise the Omnissiah.

Of all of the Apollo astronauts only one was a scientist.

Out of the entirety of the Apollo missions we got one scientist on the moon. It's pretty clear whether US governments intentions lay.

The percentage of scientists to non-scientists is depressingly low.

It's 42

What is a geographer? Seems like a super broad category. Are you a cartographer? Surveyor? Or do you just like, talk about mountains and the shape of the coast line?

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.

Apollo, yes. I don't think it's for reasons you might be implying (what are they, that they're going to space to kill stuff?). They have to have people who can endure high-gs and stress. Pilots are already proven for this. A civilian they have to test and train up from nothing. I don't think it's some kind of secret military plot. It's just convenience and accessibility.

That's the thing: we do a bit of everything. I work in the development department for a very small city with a LOT of complicated development. We have a dozen employees for the wholencity, so having a wide skillset is necessary as I wear a lot of hats.

I am the GIS department, half the Planning department, lanning, and code enforcement. I analyze stormwater discharge, review rainwater harvesting water treatment plans, Dark Sky compliance, and other plan review I'm needed for.

If I have to get too deep into complicated engineering, construction code, or legal issues, I coordinate all third-party review services. I also handle any interlocal development-related issues (county and state compliance and water, fire, and school district).

I also act as the recording secretary for most public meetings, handle non-police Open Records, and run the city website.

I'm always stressed and super busy, but I'm also someone who thrives on spinning plates and chasing squirrels versus being bored doing the same thing day to day.

But what's the question?