Rough Theory

Via Mark Liberman at Language Log, Lawrence Saul has assembled a piece on academic conference papers as an episode of 24. I think I’ve seen this plot somewhere before…

Episode	The following events take place on February 9, 2007, between the hours of:
1	Midnight – 1:00 am Paper exists in skeletal form, with preliminary results. All seems well until hero exposes shadowy bugs in implementation of core routines.
2	1:00 am – 2:00 am Hero assembles crack team of students and postdocs by email. Suffers moral anguish knowing that one or more will need to be sacrificed for greater good.
5	4:00 am – 5:00 am Team shows signs of cracking under pressure. Hero reverts to “motivational methods” from covert and troubled past. (Episode contains flashbacks.)
6	5:00 am – 6:00 am Tensions flare. Team members put aside personal differences when late-breaking experiments yield better than expected results.
7	6:00 am – 7:00 am Long overdue literature search reveals large body of related work. Scarce resources must be diverted to decipher its relevance.
8	7:00 am – 8:00 am One by one, key members of team disappear for coffee, precisely when they are needed most.
10	9:00 am – 10:00 am Student who cannot let go of old ideas must be “retired”.
11	10:00 am – 11:00 am Hero is trapped in committee meeting. A secretive channel is opened for instant messaging, enabling further progress.
13	Noon – 1:00 pm Hero, exhausted, responds without thinking to knock at door. Undergraduates swarm office with questions about Monday’s homework assignment.
19	6:00 pm – 7:00 pm Sluggish CPUs reveal rogue team member (previously retired in episode 10) running unauthorized background processes.
22	9:00 pm – 10:00 pm Rumor of extended deadline is picked up on Internet chatter. Sources are tracked down and ultimately discredited.
23	10:00 pm – 11:00 pm Figures and references added to paper, which consequently overflows to ten pages. Frantic pruning. Rough draft submitted at 10:58 pm.
24	11:00 pm – Midnight Proofreading reveals extensive typos and sign errors. Paper teeters on brink of eight page limit through multiple revisions. In act of ultimate sacrifice, hero removes all self-citations. Final submission: 11:59:59 pm.