Shared with me by an Adjunct Professor:

> Christmas morning is the one time my family buys lotto tickets, for our Christmas stockings. As we scratched them off this morning....

> Prof: Wow. These are not random assortments of losing tickets. These are all **very** cleverly designed to be near misses. Probably someone who makes way more money than I do has invested a lot of time in designing a system that is set up to give you **just** enough hope that you want to keep playing, and don't perceive that the game is rigged and quit....

> Dad: Are you talking about the lotto, or about academia?