The Internet Time Travel Database
He can read her face, and can tell that she agrees the opinion that he himself is too
politic to speak aloud: that the papers being delivered today are not that good. They are
not very interesting. They are parsimoniously doled out fingernail parings of thought,
bloated into full length by badly written prose and extensive recapitulations of material
with which an audience of this kind would already be familiar. They are evidence that the
desire to bide one’s time in order to do good science has be sublimated to the constant
drive to publish; as the saying goes, the committees that hand out funds and grand tenure
cannot read, but they can count.
1 English variant