XKCD: Work (1741) - A Look at the Dedication Behind Success

[mfb]

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/work.png

Alt text: Despite it being imaginary, I already have SUCH a strong opinion on the cord-switch firing incident.So true and relevant. It gets even more extreme in publications. Random text example (here: CMS Higgs discovery paper - all time estimates are guesses):

The energy deposited in the ECAL [years of work were spent on the readout] is clustered both with general clustering algorithms [43] [someone probably did their PhD on this] and with algorithms that constrain the clusters in $\eta$ and $\phi$ to the shapes expected from electrons and photons with high p_T [44][more than 1 PhD thesis]. These specialised algorithms are used to cluster electromagnetic showers without any hypothesis regarding whether the particle originating from the interaction point was a photon or an electron[someone spent months investigating if this would improve the performance]; doing this for electrons from Z -> ee events provides a measurement of the photon trigger [a year of work], reconstruction[another year], and identification[another year] efficiencies, as well as of the photon energy scale[more than year] and resolution[also more than a year].

I wrote more about that topic a while ago.

 

[fresh_42]

This sounds pretty much as if

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0932633390/?tag=pfamazon01-20

could bring you great joy! (also available in translated versions)

 

[OmCheeto]

... the cord-switch firing incident.
...

I once almost got fired because my socks were too short.
The only reason I didn't get fired, was because my mother passed away, two days before the "inquisition", and everyone felt sorry for me.

Not sure what this has to do with your post, other than, absurdity is universal, at pretty much every level.

 

[jackwhirl]

I used to wonder why things cost as much as they do. Cars, for example.
This is why.