This is a little friendlier than what the OP describes, but in particle physics there’s a conflict over “East Coast Metric” vs. “West Coast Metric.” (Yes, it would make an awesome gangsta rap song.) It has to do with how to combine space and time. One gets the plus signs and one gets minus signs, but there’s no objective way to assign which gets which. So some textbooks do it one way and some do it the other way.
If you want to start a flame war among particle theorists, you’d probably have to go for something a little more emotive. Like the anthropic principle. (There’s a fundamental constant of the universe called the cosmological constant, and the actual value of it is considered highly unnatural–meaning not what you’d guess offhand from combining the other constants in a natural way–which leads to arguments over whether it’s set at a value that makes life possible, since the “natural” value wouldn’t. The idea that the possibility of life/consciousness constrains physical parameters is known as the anthropic principle and is highly contentious.)
Then there’s the ever-popular String Wars. Is-string-theory-a-scientific-theory-or-isn’t-it. There’s an entire blog dedicated to it (Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong.)
This. I work in graphics/publications (giving CS Master Collection a good hard ride in any given week) and am still running into pockets of ignorant Mac snobbery in the most unlikely places.
Fact is that whereas the Adobe apps used to be developed on/for Macs and poorly ported to Windows, the last four or five generations have been developed the other way around. And as you point out, the differences between the versions and capabilities are microscopic.
Apparently you’ve never had the misfortune to work on a federal government contract. I’ve sat through meetings to come up with coding standards (the government requires deliverable code to follow a published standard, but you’re allowed to define your own standard) where 10 people on the the taxpayers’ dime spent 20 minutes arguing whether a tab should expand to 2 spaces or 3 spaces. We also spent 45 minutes arguing the aforementioned curly brace placement issue.
The good thing about code standards is once you finally have one, the holy wars are over and the losers have to suck it up and shut up (well, they should shut up, but they don’t. But it’s easy to shut them down with “just follow the fucking standards. It’s part of the award fee”).
You particle guys have all the cool wars, all we have in quantum information is Miguel Navascues. Of course, you can get a bit of a brawl going by talking about the interpretation of quantum theory (not so much arguing for any particular one, but merely by claiming that interpretation is anything else than meaningless).
There are no holy wars among substitute teachers. We all tend to agree that we aren’t paid enough and kids should treat us better.
However, motherhood has the most divisive of holy wars I’ve ever run across: the SAHM vs. WOHM. If you don’t believe me, go find a mommy message board. If those women knew each other in real life they would scratch each others’ eyes out. Or at least give each other some really biting back handed compliments.
More to the point, some conservative christians equate preventing implantation of a possibly fertilized egg (which Plan B/Morning After pill does) with abortion. This leads some pharmacists (either due to direct personal belief or due to indirect societal pressure) to refuse to stock/dispense it.
Within the family there are people caught in the autism therapy wars, basically ABA vs. everything else. It’s one of those fields divided into one effective therapy that a large number of people hate on, a handful of otherwise-sensible therapies that don’t do any real good, and a whole metric shitload of feel-good therapies that don’t do anything except waste the individual’s very narrow effective treatment window.
I had to look up what those were. Ivory tower me…yeah.
In academic library land:
Librarians and faculty status/tenure
DDA(demand-driven acquisition) or not
Just-in-case collections vs. Just-in-time collections
Deathly silence Vs. talking allowed
Food Vs. no food (I think this one has been settled in favor of food, but it may still be debated some places)
I’m sure there are a bunch. We’re an argumentative bunch when you get right to it.
One language I use (Go) has it matter to the compiler, but that was an executive decision. There’s a language-wide style guide that’s enforced by a program called gofmt, which formats files with correct indentation and such. Most of the stuff will compile without a fmt, but a few such as wrong-line curly braces cause a compile-time error. Of course, this isn’t a matter of the compiler sucking so much as the language writers saying “if you can’t play nice we’re taking your damn toys away.”
Whether 'tis noble to provide more “value-add” to the customer so as to seem the more worthy consulting company and therefore keep the contract longer, or to follow LEAN methodology and only do the work you’re paid to do while informing the client whatever additional work may be needed so long as they’re willing to pay for it.
Yeah - that is the war I wanted to bring up: Cloud vs False Cloud vs On-Premise vs Hosted software and data solutions.
Why anyone would be so daft as put their data onto one or two local machines, where they are dependent on some internal clown in IT jacking it all up on a bad day, that’s just asking for trouble.
In sound engineering, analog vs. digital is actually a whole World War of different battle theaters - digital mixing board partisans versus the “You’ll have to pry my cold dead hands from my analog board” types, analog tape “warmth” versus digital computer recording flexibility and a hundred other little areas. But those two are the biggies.
Oh, and there is a right way and a wrong way to coil cables, and if one of you go and pick up one of my cables and start wrapping it between your palm and your elbow, I might have to get rough. Seriously, in some TV studios, coiling an expensive Triax cable wrong is a firing offense.
Employer mandated vaccines for nurses. I don’t get it. There’s a group of people who have studied science for 4+ years, who explain and administer vaccines to other people, and who are livid and outraged when asked to get a flu shot so they don’t Typhoid Mary their geriatric patients. WTF? I think it’s a “You’re not the boss of me!” thing, more than any scientific standing.
Clean Bag Technique. There’s this thing we’re supposed to do as home health care nurses involving a clean trash bag, an embarrassing amount of newspaper, and draping the hell out of the surface you put your nursing bag on with said newspaper. Then more stuff about clean sides and dirty sides and…I wouldn’t care so much, except that NO ONE CAN SHOW ME IT DOES ANY GOOD! A bunch of “evidenced based medicine” nurses and they can’t find me a study where this has actually reduced infection or cross infection rates. Know what it *does *do? Takes extra time. Creates extra waste. Makes me buy a newspaper that I don’t read. Worst, it makes the patient feel like I’m judging their housekeeping and looking down on them for being disgusting slobs. Now, don’t get me wrong - if someone IS a disgusting slob, I drape away and don’t care what they think. But that’s less than 5% of my patients. The rest are better housekeepers than I, in the home where I plunk my bag on the floor after a long day at work! This is the favorite topic for my supervisor and I to argue about. I do it because she is, in fact, the boss of me, and she wants it done, but that doesn’t stop me from saying, “cite?” every time she brings it up!
I understand there was a similar Nursing War in the 80’s when it was proposed that nurses wear gloves when doing procedures that might expose them to patient’s blood. That one’s pretty much over, thanks to clear evidence in its favor.
I can agree with that. Though it’s great for making the library feel more like a bookstore, it can be really frustrating to try to find things if they’re not organized in an easy-to-find manner.
I’ve worked in a few different libraries, and the only one that did the “deathly silence” rule was a private school who had a library run by folks with no MLIS. It was torture.
Also, most of the libraries I’ve worked in either had a “no food” or a “no food near the computers” rule. If it’s not near expensive equipment, it seems to be a more lax rule.
There’s starting to be a trend of taking reference collections and reassigning those materials to circulating collections for smaller libraries. Why? It’s not getting used in reference for the most part.
From what I understand, there are a lot of cataloging-based arguments; now that the standards have changed dramatically, I can only imagine it’ll continue.
