That sounds like a beautiful evening to me
I think your work description is so interesting. I’ve been a job coach since college in an organization like you describe here. I’ve been able to partner up with a social worker who does fundraising and admin sides of our organization. It’s hard to identify with her sometimes but we still reach across lines a lot. It’s a thrill to read about what you do Spice Weasel.
Sometimes we want to avoid these questions – like the pilot who only admitted he ‘transported aluminium tubing’. I do get the usual engineer/Prof/IT responses, but once upon a time I only got an uncomfortable silence:
Q: What do you do?
A: I’m a psychiatric nurse.
( … cue sound of tumbleweed drifting across desert landscape)
I see a contradiction here. Either I’m aware that advertising is affecting my buying decisions, or it is subliminal.
definition: subliminal
adjective
PSYCHOLOGY
- (of a stimulus or mental process) below the threshold of sensation or consciousness; perceived by or affecting someone’s mind without their being aware of it.
Thank you! I love my work. It takes all kinds to run the ship. I enjoy working with direct service staff to figure out their vision for their programming and then translating that vision to funders to actually make it happen.
Never mind. Sorry.
I’m not necessarily saying that the exact same person is saying both, contradictory things (though I suppose that there’s someone who might), but I hear and see those statements regularly.
Q: So, you’ve never asked other psychiatric nurses about their oddest patients, have you?
People have this really interesting characteristic where they think that everyone else is affected by things, but they are uniquely immune. Everyone else has confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, gets overly emotionally invested in their own POV, overestimates their abilities, is manipulated by advertising, but not me.
Ok, I see your point and it makes sense. In retrospect, I probably should have differentiated between subliminal as in “not noticing”, and subliminal as in “flashing millisecond images of Oreos to trigger people into wanting cookies”. I realize there was a big kerfluffle over the latter some years back.
Nonsense. I don’t time to discuss it though, because I need to go to the kitchen and get some cookies.
If I cut you off in traffic, understand I am heroically dealing with a number of injustices and conflicts and that it was accidental as I am having a challenging day.
If you cut me off in traffic, well, I might assume the same. But many would assume you did it intentionally, are a card-carrying Trumpista, smell rank and unpleasant, are a moron and a sociopath, that your mother has a chances on her nose, that you struggle with basic concepts like shapes and abstract thought, and, lacking judgement, are forever doomed to repeat your purchase of Ford Festivas in perpetuity…
I’m standing my ground on this one.
I could argue the issue of how widespread the hobby of video gaming is but that’s not the point I was trying to make. My point is that I don’t play video games but I am self-aware of what that means. I know what I don’t know.
Do you mind me asking which Air Force?
United States. Electronic countermeasures, to be specific.
I worked for many years in the manufacture of air filter media. Yes, it’s obscure; no, I didn’t dream of doing that when I was little.
The big misconception is that air filters trap particles bigger than the holes in the filter medium, and that’s all that’s going on. The truth is that they do do that, but they do much more. In fact the tiniest particles are easy to capture because they jump around so much due to Brownian motion. (Side note: Einstein worked on the issue of Brownian motion in airborn particles.)
While I’m on the subject, the science of particles floating in air is called “aerosol science”, and an air suspension of particles is an “aerosol”. It was just a technical term. Then at some point advertising people decided “aerosol” sounded good as a marketing term for spray cans. As time went by, it came clear that many consumers thought “aerosol” meant “in a can having propellant”, so ad people started referring to pump dispensers without propellant as “non-aerosol”. This drives me up a wall because those dispensers are indeed aerosol dispensers, just propellant free ones.
Which brings us to a joke from the world of aerosol science:
The governor of Kentucky decides he wants his state to produce more winners in horse racing, so he calls together his elite cadre of scientists, namely, a geneticist, an aerodynamicist, and an aerosol scientist. He explains what he wants. The geneticist speaks first: “Obviously this is a breeding challenge. We need to use genetics to create the strongest horses.” Then the aerodynamicist says, “But it’s not just strength, it’s also the aerodynamic drag we need to understand.” To which the aerosol scientist replies, “Yes! Let’s begin by assuming the horse is a sphere…”
This is hilarious for aerosol scientists, who often use an assumption of sphericity as a simplification tool.
You’re welcome!
I was chatting with the nurse who was setting up my colonoscopy IV last week. I mentioned that I’d worked in a hospital in the same system, in inpatient psychiatry. She responded as people often do that she’d be too afraid of the dangerous patients. In the time during which I worked inpatient psych (7+ years-ish over 4 different facilities), one patient assaulted a staff member.
I saw this thread as being about common questions from ‘outsiders’, rather than about black humour between caring professionals - about which I couldn’t possibly comment 
I had the opposite experience with calc—all those max-min problems. It was fascinating to me to discover, for example, that virtually every type of packaging took its shape and size from calculus. Why are all soda cans the same shape and basic form? Because math!
Calculus is the mathematics of motion and change. It’s also useful for adding up an infinitely large number of infinitely small things. It’s good for torturing engineering students taking courses in electromagnetic field propagation as well.
I’ve never checked to see if soda cans are shaped to minimize material for a given volume. I’ll have to check that out.