
Nuclear Power Professionals Are Serious About Joking - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/why-nuclear-power-professionals-are-serious-about-joking-around
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stefco_
This reminds me of an excellent talk on paramedic work at motorcycle road
races in Northern Ireland given by the late Dr. John Hinds [1]. These guys
crash into things at up to 200mph with unsurprisingly grisly results, which
makes Dr. Hinds's calm technical descriptions and gallows humor all the more
fascinating. What's especially crazy is that the paramedics have to ride
motorcycles at 180mph+ to get to the crashed riders! (Northern Ireland didn't
have helicopter ambulances at the time of the presentation).

I highly recommend the video. Hinds was an excellent speaker with an excellent
sense of humor. The technical details of motorcycle injuries and their
treatments are very interesting, but I think the coolest part is the proximity
of the riders and doctors to catastrophe and how it leads to an integration of
the morbid and the banal.

[1] [https://youtu.be/MsZBXlTHPCg](https://youtu.be/MsZBXlTHPCg)

(edited out repetitive phrasing)

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jacquesm
> 180mph+

That's rather excessively fast. It might end up with some tricky recursion
issues where other paramedics will have to fix the first ones on even faster
motorcycles.

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cjslep
The stark dark humor is just a way to cope with the crushing seriousness of
reality. For instance, our undergrad reactor thermohydraulics class's
professor was notoriously strict because there's just no tolerance for failing
to do the math for cooling a reactor. But one of the very few ways he would be
humorous would be to call a meltdown an "uncontrollable rearrangement of
geometry" with a wink and a nod precisely to both convey the seriousness of
the issue and to use the needlessly absurd technical language to make us more
empathetic to the common person, and therefore make us more readily
internalize the seriousness.

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solotronics
a datacenter exploded due to fume build up in the backup power fuel tanks and
we called it a rapid expansion of air

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lb1lf
Doesn't Elon Musk refer to it as a RUD - Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly - event
whenever a launch vehicle opts out of existence?

I love these euphemisms.

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jballanc
Not just Elon Musk, that's a fairly common "euphemism" in the world of
rocketry.

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lb1lf
In my line of work - subsea handling equipment - the going phrase when things
go really, really bad appears to be "EEE - Entropy-Enhancing Event"

Looks much better in the post mortem reports than the equivalent "Sh-t just
blew up on us!!!"

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itchyjunk
I've always enjoyed dark humor. Though not because I have higher intelligence.
It's fun to get away from cliche and melodrama with any type of humor. And
dark humor seems to be fitting for possibly bad situations. I wouldn't joke
about death at a funeral but I might when someone talks about possible doom
and gloom and death is abstract ways.

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dfc
I kept waiting for the author to use the term gallows humor. I was a little
surprised when I got to the end and the phrase was never used.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallows_humor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallows_humor)

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maxxxxx
Same thing for doctors. I was at a party with a ton of doctors and it was the
funniest and also most gruesome party I have ever been to.

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dailyvijeos
I worked at a nuclear consulting co. where network hostnames were Simpsons’
characters and people backed into parking spaces out of habit.

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samstave
My grandfather, a Norwegian, was a nuclear engineer for GE his whole career
and helped build Hanford.

He was also the funniest person in my family.

