Bugger me, that describes the process I (not a PhD) have gone through trying to digest some papers so well it is eerie. I've been damned lucky. The worst pape

Bugger me, that describes the process I (not a PhD) have gone through trying to digest some papers so well it is eerie. I've been damned lucky. The worst paper, the one were I had to read most of the citations and quite a few of their citations before I got it was http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/1997/papers/p011.ps http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/1997/papers/p011.ps and yes it took over a month before all the pieces settled into the right corners of my mind. Perhaps more accurately, it took months for my mind to create the right corners for the concepts to settle into. But that was fine - I knew before I started it was the seminal paper on the subject, and so it would be worth whatever effort it took. The idea of wasting that inordinate amount of time going down that path with one dud after another makes me shudder in horror.