Publish or Perish

A colleague of mine helpfully told me that the way you know you're ready to publish a research paper is when you are completely and utterly sick of it. Well, I've been working on this particular paper for the last three years. Every week for the last year I would think to myself, this is it, gonna submit the paper by the end of the week. And then something would come up. A bug in one of my codes, infinitesimally small inconsistencies in the data that my advisor insists on reconciling, just one last bit of analysis. Well, as of yesterday afternoon, I think I've ironed out the last bug and analyzed everything that can be analyzed.

And now, how sick am I of this thing?

Well, I'd like to take the computers that I used to work on my research and every single piece of paper that ever bore anything whatsoever to do with this project and burn them in a huge pyre in a field. Then I want to grind the ashes into a fine powder and scatter them over a volcano. Then I want to drop an A-bomb on the volcano. Then I'd like to generate an earthquake so that the A-bombed volcano will sink into the ocean. Then I want the ocean to evaporate. Then I want to compact the entire mass of the planet into such a small radius that the earth becomes a black hole that radiates away so much mass that soon it leaves behind only a naked singularity that causes the end of the universe, so that all of the matter and radiation that ever comprised any piece of equipment that ever had anything to do with my project will cease to exist for all of eternity.

Yeah, I'm ready to publish.