Submitted 2 weeks ago by QuinnyCoded@sh.itjust.works to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/ca051b9e-73ef-4c5a-a179-14e571a0e6c7.jpeg
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
You do not mess with the juju
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.
The Jargon File in general is such a treasure
seeing that jargon file has an extensive page on retrocomputing feels like figuring out that there were archeologists in ancient egypt
i love this story
“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?
needs ‘x’ amount of less blue freq light
Well tell that to NASA with their peanut superstition.
Astronauts aren’t scientists, they’re military. The military are all in on superstition.
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…
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.
You have to draw an ugly worm on others for a variable
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?
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
This is why I’m a geographer. 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
Model fetishism
Anedotally this is why I didn’t like bio, none of the labs really ever worked and we always fudged some data.
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.
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.
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 workingappease the machine spirit.
FIFY
Praise the Omnissiah.
The supervisor actually killed them, plot twist
DrBob@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
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.
RustyShackleford@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
I used to do a similar ritual, and it was really reassuring. Might be an autistic thing for me though lol.
fullsquare@awful.systems 2 weeks ago
maybe it introduces some critical contaminant (many such cases)
felbane@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“We switched brands of litmus paper and now everything’s in shambles!”