Quote of the day, value of labour edition

Here’s Derek Lowe talking about “passion”:

• The hours you put in (In The Pipeline)

An idiot frantically digging a ditch with a spoon looks like a more passionate worker than someone who came through with a backhoe three hours ago, and is now doing something else.

He’s talking about pharmaceutical chemistry (“The author also spends too much time talking about the Good Old Days when people worked hard, with lousy equipment. In the dark! In the snow! And without all these newfangled kits and time-saving reagents!”), but the analogy applies just as well to every other field, including public education, manufacturing, finance, agriculture, and computer graphics.  (Kids these days with their Matlab code… in my day, we wrote singular value decomposition routines in C, from scratch! Uphill in the snow both ways!)