I was over at Kuro5hin and ran across an article titled How-To: Write your doctoral thesis. I’ve never felt a desire to go for a doctorate in anything, but I’ve had friends who have gone down that path of insanity, so I gave the article a quick look through and found it’s a rather funny piece. Here’s a sample:
HOKAY, SO: You’ve been a slave for untold years. You want to enter the glamorous world where you can be pretentious and have people call you doctor. You want to have a silly hat and a cape. But to reach these goals, you need to produce a doctoral thesis.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘doctoral thesis’ as: A completely worthless document that will not be read, but which is apparently important to someone, because it requires nearly impossible tasks to complete. This definition is spot on.
Another particularly good bit from near the end of the article:
It is a well known fact that the three body problem of celestial mechanics has no solution. For you, it is worse: you must get five professors to be in the same room, at the same time, and with as little animosity towards you as possible. Hint that free booze will be offered post-defense.