Why scientists are crazy

Or at least my version of the story; which may be a wave, a particle, neither or both. Ask Schrodinger's cat.

My particular brand of madness reached new heights shortly after a final full-stop on a research report. Or perhaps it is rather a symptom of ScAD - Science Affective Disorder. That empty and slightly lost feeling you get after completing a specific research task.

You spend so much time preparing the experiment, collecting data, making feverish promises to the scientific deities of GoodData and NonInstrumentFailure while hoping for the best. And then you have it - endless streams of alpha-numerics that form an overwhelming mass threatening to drown even the most determined swimmer in scientific waters. The time for alchemy has arrived, turning that heap of information into nuggets of knowledge. You sift, discard, cleanse and apply the dark magic of statistical analysis to emerge triumphantly with....
.....
.....
two measly little tables, barely filling half a page.

All your effort, hours of wrist-breaking mouse work, swearing at the vagaries of software that suddenly refuse to plot a simple time-series graph as it has done a thousand times before.... everything is condensed in those two little blocks.

But listen closely, and you might hear those blocks talk. They whisper of trends, possible futures and .... wait.... yes....

'more data is required'!