Sydney traffic works with a reversed version of that.
The cheaper car has right of way, because they’ve got less to lose. 
10 Likes
Easier to defend then Master and Slave IDE connectors when giving Phone support for a major PC manufacturer.
9 Likes
How about master cylinders and slave cylinders in hydraulic systems? The terminology is apt, and since it’s referring to mechanical devices rather than living beings, it doesn’t strike me as too fraught. You step on the brake pedal, which depresses a piston (either directly or, in the case of vacuum-assisted power brakes, through a vacuum booster) inside the master cylinder, which in turn sends that hydraulic pressure through the brake lines to the four slave cylinders, one at each wheel, and that pressure moves the slave cylinder’s piston to press the brake pads against the brake rotor (or, in the case of drum brakes, the shoes against the drum). Essentially, the slave cylinders are forced to move when the master cylinder tells them to.
4 Likes
Maybe its the mindset.
If you are chatting about Master and Slave cylinders in a hydraulic system, all people involved probably have some familiarity with Hydraulic systems and the terminology used.
Contrast that with a Clueless End Luser Valued Customer who wants to add a second CD-Burner to a system that shipped with the original drive set to Cable Select on a Motherboard that would only except two drives on the IDE Port if they were Slave and Master.
2 Likes
In the railroad world we called the engine “Mother” and the secondary engine used with over 20 cars (don’t quote me on that number) was called the “slug”. So “Mother-slug” was a common phase I used to hear a lot, and found weird then, and weird now…
11 Likes
I’ve never met anyone who seemed legitimately offended by the terms, mostly just lots of jokes about these:
OTOH I’ve heard a lot of people in electronics industry complain about the frequent ambiguity of these terms. And with decreasing use of connectors having actual pins, it gets pretty abstract to call something like this HDMI end “male”:
11 Likes
Well, since it’s internally female but externally presents and behaves as male, I’d call it a trans male connector. Your example just illustrates how our old binary way of viewing the world is outdated. Society needs to accept the whole spectrum of LGBTQ connectors.
[scurries away]
8 Likes
My previous employment was at a company that was in audio visual engineering. We dealt with connectors a lot. I always found, as a woman, the male/female thing to be super awkward. But then you couldn’t use receiver because that has a specific meaning in audio/visual. So I guess it’s functional but it is awkward. As USB becomes more universal the male/female connector issue is going away.
7 Likes
Where I’m at the connectors are so complicated that it’s all cable end/jack/jumper designators. The place before that was all socket/pin.
6 Likes
16 Likes
That is so true! Never fits till you’ve rotated it 180o at least twice. Along the long axis, that is. Rotations along the two shorter axes don’t count.
5 Likes
Interestingly, the idea of the Superposition becomes infinitely more true once you start to rotate the USB stick through non-Euclidean space… 
9 Likes
indeed!
6 Likes
I am always surprised the number of people who do not know the “C” in “USB-C” stands for Cthulhu.
9 Likes
ahem
I don’t mind a little wandering, but please try to stay within the same acreage as the tracks, thank you.
7 Likes
To get back on track, no one has brought up the K-word yet. What do we make of the man who wrote If, and Recessional, and The Sons of Martha, and many other works I admire, but who also wrote The White Man’s Burden, The Vampire, and more?
Oh, the years we waste and the tears we waste
And the work of our head and hand
Belong to the woman who did not know
(And now we know that she never could know)
And did not understand!
Kipling was apparently working through some issues with his own marriage at the time, but still…
9 Likes
Much the same story with Lovecraft. His rather eyebrow-raisingly virulent xenophobia and racism was remarked upon by many of his friends, and it kinda makes me feel less bad about his life ending in penury and near-obscurity.
Still! I find great value in the abhorrent monsters he helped drag into our unsuspecting plane of existence, so I’ll continue to revel in their eldritch unspeakability even as I fart in the general direction of ol’ Howard’s ghost.
13 Likes