Ponder and his fellow students watched Hex carefully. ‘It can’t just, you know, stop,’ said Adrian ‘Mad Drongo’ Tumipseed. ‘The ants are just standing still,’ said Ponder. He sighed. ‘All right, put the wretched thing back.’ Adrian carefully replaced the small fluffy teddy bear above Hex’s keyboard. Things immediately began to whirr. The ants started to trot again. The mouse squeaked. They’d tried this three times.
Ponder looked again at the single sentence Hex had written. +++ Mine! Waaaah +++ ‘I don’t actually think,’ he said, gloomily, ‘that I want to tell the Archchancellor that this machine stops working if we take its fluffy teddy bear away. I just don’t think I want to live in that kind of world.’ ‘Er,’ said Mad Drongo, 'you could always, you know, sort of say it needs to work with the FTB enabled… ‘You think that’s better?’ said Ponder, reluctantly. It wasn’t as if it was even a very realistic interpretation of a bear. ‘You mean, better than “fluffy teddy bear”?’ Ponder nodded. ‘It’s better,’ he said.
Our magical thinking is going to pay off when we finally discover magic’s real.
It’s gonna happen… eventually
After all, any science that is differentiable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
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 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
That’s hilarious. We had a desk dedicated to Datto devices. It was the Datto Desk. We were really upset when it had to be cleared for a new employee. Now we have another desk dedicated to empty phone boxes and tissues.
We are moving to a new building next year, so I’m sure we’ll come up with all new stuff to enshrine.
Science is about empiricism, so i would expect scientists to try out the occult from time to time.
Pascal’s wager with respect to machinery, maybe the toys don’t help, but what if they do?
My occult phase was from a different angle: I really enjoyed immersing myself in something I didn’t have to explain or justify objectively, where I could just enjoy the vibes and not think too hard.
I think of it as analogous to how some of the people who are most into being submissive in a BDSM/sex context are people who seem the opposite of that in their careers/regular life. The contrast is a relief.
