The first ten on today’s playlist:

At the dentist yesterday, the dental tech examining me and giving me a cleaning: “You have a lot of scars on the inside of your cheeks. Were you in an accident?”

Me: “No, just been hit in the face a lot of in my life.”

Conversation was sparse after that. But don’t ask about people’s scars if you don’t wanna know the answer, yeah?

Not that it will matter to anyone at all, but I won’t be following anyone to Mastodon, reading anything on Mastodon, using Mastodon, nor otherwise doing anything Mastodon-y. I don’t waste my time on trash tech.

Why does the IT Department always become the “fixers?”

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years. It happens in every company. IT becomes the go-to for any complex task.

And I think it’s this: troubleshooting is a rare skill and being able to dynamically execute a series of steps is as well. I’d guess that in the general population, the rate of those being present at a competent level is maybe 0.5%. Due to its nature those skills exhibit themselves at about a 20% rate in the IT world. This means that even though most IT people also are not good troubleshooters or systems-comprehenders either (still only 20%), the prevalence rate is 40x higher there than it is in the general population.

Thus, IT gets many, many non-IT tasks because they are literally the only group likely to be able to execute them at some acceptable level of competence.

Insane Clown Posse was not really wrong about magnets, by the way.

No one — and I mean no one at all — really understands how or why electromagnetic charge is a thing. It’s just a fact of the universe. There is no deeper understanding and may never be one. Yeah, physicists will prattle on about Noether’s Theorem and gauge symmetry and all that but that doesn’t really explain anything, but is just a very convoluted way of saying this: “Charge emerges from how the universe is, and we don’t know why, but here is a circular definition that convinces those without the mental horsepower to understand it that we know more than we do.”

As I’ve become more capable of understanding more and more of science over the years, it turns out that a lot of it is like that. That is, it’s deliberate obfuscation to conceal lack of knowledge from the hoi polloi, rather than explanatory.