The Hydrological Snark
A colleague of mine pointed me to an extraordinary paper. It is funny, but there is much truth below the surface. It seems to be on hydrological modelling, but I think it is for anybody who deals with the analysis of complex systems.
The paper’s title is “The Hunting of the Hydrological Snark”, here is a link to the paper’s site at Wiley’s. The full reference is
V. Andréassian, N. Le Moine, T. Mathevet, J. Lerat, L. Berthet, and C. Perrin. The hunting of the hydrological snark. Hydrological Processes, 23:651–654, 2009.
The paper describes the steps required to hunt the hydrological “snark”, an “hypothetical, unknown and unseen monster”, which supposedly is a hydrological system, the hunt is a perfect model of the snark, and the hunting party the hydrological modellers. I’d highly recommend it for reading!