Two ancillary comments, if I may
1) Anyone who's been perusing ASR for more than a week or so
should be able to devise an experimental protocol to test the scientist's hypothesis in the XKCD cartoon above.
2) Robert Pirsig's
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance* left one durable lesson with me. Pirsig's narrator goes off on a diatribe about instruction manuals. Based, presumably on his own experience, he muses any company serious about its products would never waste the time of their "good" engineers with the low-value task of writing the instruction manual. Rather, the biggest
waste of space, goldbricking engineer on the payroll gets that task.
Come to think of it -- I did actually write the manual (more to the point, a series of protocols) for a turnkey glycoprotein analytical workstation that was developed under the
aegis of my first RFT employer 'way back in the very early 1990s.
The manual was pretty good, though, if I do say so myself.
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* It was required reading for a
molecular biology laboratory class when I was an UG. Why, yes, the professor
was insane (or, at the least, very, very maladjusted) -- but that's another story for another time. Not the worst book I've ever read, but it's probably
on the spectrum, so to speak. Intro to philosophy, the hard way.