6-phds-and-no-sense sometimes people try to tell me that scientists are paragons of rationality and I have to break it to them that I have yet to work in a lab that didn’t have at least one weird secret shrine in it

6-phds-and-no-sense new guy: why is all of the equipment in this room covered in toys? me: dONn’t touch those new guy: me: they need the toys to function. if they don’t all have toys they get jealous. new guy: new guy: me: when something breaks just take the wizard and wave it around for a while. they seem to like that.

thebaconsandwichofregret Science is rational, scientists are human.

eabevella In Taiwan we have a special brand of snacks named 乖乖 (literally means “well behaved” but in a casual way like when one’s compliment a child or a pet of being good) that has green package. It has become the lucky charm in the IT industry because engineers believe it will make machine acting good (like the name of the snack) and stay in green light (like the color of the snack’s package) when a 乖乖 is put on top of a server. It is the only food allowed in a server room and the biggest semicondoctor company in Taiwan (which is also the biggest worldwide) even commissioned the snack factory to make a customized version with blessing on the package.

This is how a server room is blessed by 乖乖. You put at least one on top of each server. It’s important that the engineers change them before the expire date because legend says the snack looses it’s power after expire date.

You’ll hear engineers swearing up and down that their server room crushed down the one time they forgot to change the snack. Or some newbie ate the forbidden snack put on top of their server and caused a disastrous crush down.

The 乖乖 religion later spread to all people who want their machine to act nice. In the lab we put 乖乖 on ultra-low freezer (you really don’t want it to drop dead along with your 2 years’ worth of sample/data), mass spectrometer etc.

When Taiwan’s about to launch the first self made satellite in 2017, the develop team even put 乖乖 around the satellite model to prey for a successful launch (it did). This shit is real.



wyndelinewriter Y'all laugh. But in my very first computer diagnostics class we were taught that the first thing you did was bow three times touching ground to appease the computer demons that live inside to make it work. My brother is an Airframe/powerplant mechanic and in his first avionics class he was taught that all electronics work because of magic smoke. You let the magic smoke out, it doesn’t work anymore.

baaahumbug My University anatomy lab has Kumar who is an articulated human skeleton. When things go wrong you have to tell Kumar a joke. If things still don’t work out it means he didn’t think it was a funny joke so then you have to make yourself the joke and do a little dance or sing a song for him. Our lab has several computer stations which sit 4 people each. Where I sat had Kumar standing to the right of us, looking over our shoulder. My lab partner and I obviously did something to upset Kumar during that first lab prac. Maybe cheating and googling the answers that first day, maybe throwing our bags carelessly at his feet and failing to greet him, maybe it was my insatiable obsession with bones in which I rudely proceeded to touch Kumar’s sexy finger bones up. We shall never know. But ever since that first practical, which went perfectly, every single goddamned practical after that had equipment malfunctions. Every session, 5-10 minutes in would have whatever equipmemt we were using not work. And it would work PERFECT for every other group that session, and every group before and after us using the exact same equipment. It baffled our lab instructor at first but he just came to accept it halfway through the semester, as did we. As soon as he finished giving the demonstration he’d come over to us and joke around “so what’s it going to be today?” And wait for 5-10 minutes with us until, without fail, something would fail or stop working. I’ll have to use those anatomy labs again next year and I’m going to buy Kumar an apology present, drop to my knees and beg him for forgiveness.