Oh, Rats
A: Good morning! I’ve ordered a new mouse for my PC, and left your name as the backup person to contact if I’m not here. Thanks!
B: Should I put out a piece of cheese so it can find its way here?
A: I don’t know about you, but this place is such a maze that even when I smell the cheese, I never find it. I’m beginning to think it’s just cheese-scented air freshener.
B: More than likely. The first one to find the cheese is allowed to escape. I think.
A: I thought that the first person to find the cheese dropped through a trapdoor into oblivion, as an example to others. 
One of these days, remind me to tell you the story about the researcher who decided to study whether rats are smarter than graduate students.
B: I will definitely want to hear that story, but it scares me to think the researcher found out the rats may have been smarter.
A: So, the short version is that, after a night in a bar debating with a colleague, a researcher designed an experiment that proceeded thusly:
(Editor’s note: possibly apocryphal, but funny nonethless)
Two identical mazes were built; one rat-sized, one graduate-student-sized. At the end of the rat-sized maze was a piece of cheese (or maybe a blob of peanut butter; I forget). At the end of the human-sized maze was a $5 bill.
For the first phase of the experiment, there was always a reward at the end. In the second phase of the experiment, there was only a reward intermittently. In the third phase, the researcher gradually decreased the frequency of the reward, until after a while, there was no reward.
The researcher found that after the reward had been gone for a while, the rats quit running the maze. The graduate students, however, continued to run the maze in hope of a reward.
Personally, my conclusion is that the rats had better food, housing, working conditions, and possibly better stipends than the grad students.
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