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.

I have some low-level projects where I am responsible for every byte of code running on very simple hardware.

There’s still problems where I throw my hands up and say “Nope, haunted. I’ll try again later.”

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

Anyone who builds their own PC kit knows about the Blood Sacrifice

Whatever you do, do not touch that one BNC cable. Just trust me on this.

Yep. Ghosts in Machines are real.

I have witnessed it first hand multiple times.

At university there was an old 1st gen Makerbot 3D printer and if you took away one of it’s prints that were displayed around it, all of your prints would fail, even if you replaced it the printer held a grudge. And never EVER say a 100% certainty statement that the print would succeed like “it is printing ok, it will be finished in an hour”. Only say things like “the print is doing ok so far”.

The electronics lab was throwing out five old Cathode Ray Oscilloscopes so our little maker group took them in and two were working fine. The other three weren’t displaying the trace on the screen. One of our members, a chap from Romania who in his youth spent his time fixing old TVs in his home country, said to let him have a look. I swear down he plugged them in, leant his ear against it, said to the scopes “shh it’s ok, we’ll look after you”, and gave them gentle taps on top just behind the screen, and all three jumped back into life in perfect calibration.

And finally, my girlfriend at the time had a 1st gen iPod that would, at the most inopportune moments randomly wake itself up, play a few seconds of a random song, then shut itself down.

Thought emporium said that microbiologists are the most super stitisous and that if it took sacrificing a goat to get better results they would

Oh no, the orks became smart enough to he scientists, the green tide is too big to stop now