A behavioural researcher was training some pigeons to press buttons when lights
came on.  She got bored with this, and started tossing rewards into the cage at
random.  To her surprise, she found that if a pigeon had been, say, standing on
one leg in the corner when a reward had come, it would continue to stand on one
leg in the corner for weeks afterwards.

Observation suggests that computer programmers are no more intelligent.
If someone finds that their program seems to start working when they add
zero to the end of all their equations, or when they increment a variable
using a case statement, they will continue to do this for the rest of their
career under the happy impression that it works some magic with compilers.

When other programmers tell them that this is crazy, this is, of course,
because they have their own, different, set of pigeon theories.

	Martin