in movies, when a scientist is held hostage and is forced to make a bomb or virus, like my guy, those villains don’t know shit about science. just make a gumball machine, my dude
eighth grade science fair volcano, but fancylooking
i just want once where the villain is like, you are too late, i detonated the device and instead of doom and gloom it is just confetti sparklers with abba’s waterloo playing and the scientist is like, bitch you thought
every time a scientist gets kidnapped to build a terrible weapon, they think about just bullshitting it, but then a tiny voice in the back of their mind says, but don’t you want to see if you can? don’t you want to laugh madly as you show them all? don’t you want to just go feral?
Honestly when’s the next time you’ll get this kind of grant funding?
Not to get all serious on this delightful post, but it just occurred to me that the US government kept scientists working on the Manhattan Project in the dark about what they were working on because if they knew they were building an actual doomsday device, they ABSOLUTELY would have either sabotaged it or quit. Turns out real life villains are more cunning and real life scientists are more upstanding than in fiction.
I thought the Manhattan project was just a marvel thing????
Nope! I’m not sure how the Manhattan Project is portrayed in the Marvel movies (although now I’m curious to see how they might have spun it), but the Manhattan Project was the development of the first atomic bomb in the 1940s. And the vast majority of people working on it had no clue what they were building.
I think part of it really was that if people knew what they were building, they would have quit, but the secrecy also had a lot to do with keeping American military secrets from reaching The Enemy. You know, this kind of stuff:
According to Wikipedia, "probably no more than a few dozen men in the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on atoms was involved.“ When scientists started to figure out what they were building, they were told they’re making a “gadget”. *insert eyeroll*
When the scientists and workers who built the bombs turned on the radio and heard about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they instantly knew what they had been working on. Imagine, the sudden realization that you played a hand in the deaths of 200,000 people. You’re a scientist; you’re supposed to make the world a better, more enlightened place, not dole out death and devastation.
But scientists, being humanists, continued to try to mitigate the damage of the bomb after finding out what it really was:
Some who had realized how dangerous it could be before the bombs were launched tried to persuade the president or the military that it was unnecessary to have to actually launch the bombs.
After the bombings, The Pugwash Conferences were established to try to outlaw the use of atomic weapons globally.
Oppenheimer, the physicist who was the lab director at Los Alamos and literal “father of the atomic bomb”, went on to lobby for international arms control (and was later accused of being a Communist and stripped of his security clearance).
TL;DR Basically, in real life, scientists will not want to work on your villainous death device unless they literally don’t know what they’re working on, and when they figure it out, they will try to convince the villain not to use the death device, and when the villain inevitably uses the death device, they will continue to try to do damage control. And this, kids, is why you never accept a job working for the US Military.
I am prostrate with the revelation that the result of Disney’s referencing Howard Stark’s work on ‘The Manhattan Project’ in the vague way they did has been the existence of people who recognize the phrase but think it’s a comic book thing.
So interestingly enough, a lot of this thread could be talking about Back to the Future!
Doc Brown literally stole radioactive material from terrorists who wanted him to make them a bomb, and gave them a bomb housing full of pinball machine parts. His obsession with time travel is canonically due to a desire to ensure that his participation in the Manhattan Project didn’t end the world.
He’s got PTSD, and it’s why everyone in the town thinks that he’s… off. It makes the plot of Back to the Future a bit sad, honestly.
My grandfather contributed to the Manhattan Project. He died when I was very small, but the story of his career has been passed down through my mom and her sisters.
He was a physicist in Chicago at the time, and one of the projects he contributed to while he was with the University of Chicago was part of the Manhattan Project, only he didn’t know that at the time. When he found out, he went into a deep depression. He couldn’t work, couldn’t function.
His doctor advised him to move south, somewhere with a warmer climate, so he moved his family to Florida. From then on, he turned his attention to space and never spoke about his work in Chicago again. He poured his energy into working for NASA’s Apollo program, co-founding a company, and disassembling and reassembling every bit of new technology he could get his hands on just out of curiosity.
He found a way forward through sharp change, but I understand he carried the weight of his work with him until the day he died.
This is literally the most heart warming story I have read on Twitter so far.
I think this is exactly what friends should do, and I feel everyone deserves people like this.
A barn rasing:
a collective action of a community, in which a barn for one of the members is built or rebuilt collectively by members of the community.
because you cannot, you CANNOT, build a barn on your own, and without it, you will not be able to survive.
What a fuckin’ gem of a sentence. “What we did today was a barn rasin”
“Not all heroes…”, etc., etc. This is one way heroism looks.
I think adults need summer vacation. Like let’s just close down all our jobs for three months and play outside. Please. I’m so tired.
I worked for the US side of a company where the main financial decision makers were headquartered in Spain for a while.
And in August? Basically everyone in Spain goes on vacation the entire month.
And since the financial decision makers were all gone, and my job was to ask for financial decisions, I had a much reduced workload every August.
I still had to show up to the office, which sucked.
Anyway, this is a long post to say that other countries get this. We should demand it here.
And more.
When a job says “unlimited time off” ask what their average usage is. Ensure you match it.Minimum.
When a job says “you get X days off” use them. Keep a sharp eye on roll over limits year-to-year, leave no hour behind.
These are not health or mana potions to save for a boss fight.
Do not answer your phone on vacation. Do not check your email. Do not feel the need to explain.
I took last week off because I hadn’t played Super Mario Bros. 2 in a long time and I said, “This is a good week to play Super Mario Bros. 2.”
I regularly take off at least 1 day to have my hair done. Hair! I could have it done on a Saturday, I don’t, because Saturday’s are my time. Hair time is hair time.
Sometimes I take a day off because the weather is frightfully good or frightfully bad.
Do you remember how cheap movies are during the day, during the week, around lunch time? At least once a month I take a day off to go to the movies and eat snacks and cavort slowly and casually.
To hustle is to make your boss richer.
To lazily sashay down a boulevard with a fizzy water and no plans and less thought? Divine.
Time off is not a reward.
Time off is part of your compensation.
The fancy business term for this is “Employee Value Proposition.” It is the sum of the question, “why do you want to work here” – money + benefits + etc.
If you are in an interview and someone says “why do you want to work here” and they are a suit person, say something to the effect of, “Your employee value proposition is significantly higher than your competitors. I value X, Y, Z of your compensation package, firm’s reputation, product’s reputation, and the current course of your management team.”
If you do not have time off, or enough time off, I wish for you an expedited and profitable exit to a situation where you do.
it’s amazing how ordinary objects can become so significant to only the owner
when my aunt’s best friend passed away, my younger brother was four years old. at his funeral, my brother went up to her and gave her a nickel. he told her very solemnly that it would make her feel better. she smiled for the first time in days, and tucked it in her wallet.
when my brother was 22, his best friend passed away unexpectedly. my aunt drove three hours to be there for him at the funeral. she went up to my brother, gave him a big hug, and then gave him a nickel. it was the same nickel; she had kept it in her wallet for 18 years, and now it’s on a necklace that he never takes off.
what i’m trying to say is that the love you put into the world will always find its way back to you.
