Formatting

Writing a paper is pain. And when you have to follow a specific formatting, it becomes worse. I am currently working on 5 papers to be written by end of this week in two different formatting sets.

One set of paper is going for our group's annual report to be printed for group's sponsor meeting in June. The standard formatting paper, and the subject of this post, provided by our group staff for the purpose is very amusing. For example, the example table format in the paper reads:

Table 1: Example Table.

Research Time vs. Results
Time	Results	How to Improve Results
4h/day	Good	Keep going
8h/day	Terrible	Coffee + fresh air
12h/day	What’s the results?	Heard about girl/boyfriend and commitment?

Now some one in our group staff had a pretty good sense of humor (this format has been passed along for a long time now..no one knows who wrote it originally.). It makes me smile within the chaos of trying to fit the table/figure within a single page with their titles and all those normal pains. Another example:

References:

Moos, D. and Nolen-Hoeksema, R., 1989, How to annoy busy researchers with trivial pursuits: Psychobabel Today, 1, 63-64.

How can you remain mad after this? It doesn't make the task easier but it surely help improving the mood...