Tuesday, 21st November 2006.

Giving it a hundred and ten per cent

This morning, Em told me that she'd had a dream about Simon Cowell.

In her dream, she said, she'd discovered that he was a scientist in his spare time. As someone who works with scientists on a daily basis, I have to say I found this scenario rather amusing. It's not so much the image of Cowell in a white lab coat complimenting his high-banded trousers, mixing chemicals in a darkened lab and muttering "Fools! I'll destroy them all...". Nor is it the prospect of a catastrophic falling out with his colleague, Dr. Walsh, over who has the best Ph.D candidate.

No, instead I'm gripped with the image of Simon Cowell sitting on the editorial board of a prestigious journal, pouring scorn over a research paper he's been looking at:

"As submissions go, that was...extremely average. It wasn't a disaster, by any means. But I don't think you deserve to be in this journal. Let's look back at your article, at what we've just witnessed. Your theories are nothing we haven't seen before, your results are unpolished and sloppy, the citations were either mind-numbingly predictable or just plain derivative, and there was that whole thing in the middle with the three histograms that was just *weird*. As a whole, it just didn't hang together very well. It reminded me of the sort of hypothesis and proof that you'd come up with...in the middle of some sort of game / contest at the faculty Christmas party after a few beers, you know?"

"Simon, be reasonable. I mean, the students think he's great; he sounds confident, self-assured...you don't have the experience in laminar flow systems to really be able to make those sort of judgements. No offence, Simon, but you just don't know what you're talking about. "

"Louis, shut up. Look, Dimitri. I like you. You're a nice guy. But I honestly don't think you're symposium material. I see you in a quiet, backwater institution somewhere, lecturing a group of mature students in a science refresher course. This is just a world apart from your comfort zone. I'm sorry, but you just don't have the X squared factor."