I think you miss the point of the jokes. In all honesty... there is a large component of "nerd behavior" which is captured well in it. There is a tendency among

I think you miss the point of the jokes. In all honesty... there is a large component of "nerd behavior" which is captured well in it. There is a tendency amongst us, which I have as much as anyone else, to ignore the practical, common sense aspects of every day life, in the favor of theoretically perfect. The joke isn't about being logically or internally consistent, the joke isn't about slapstick schadenfreude, the joke is that in worrying about the energy optimization he forgets or fails to just accomplish the actual task, and undoes any possible gains (it doesn't need to be stated, because everyone gets it). And it isn't unrealistic - I've watched teams get into debates over how to perfectly optimize some corner of code, and ignore the fact that it doesn't matter for the use case, because that bit is rarely run or happens fast enough that it isn't a bottleneck anyway. At my makerspace I've seen people go down crazy design rabbit holes and come up with overly-complex designs to do a task when there is a simple practical solution that they are over-looking (e.g lets figure out how to 3d print this internal piece to snap in and stay fixed permanently, and spend hours on it, instead of just using the super-glue we need for other parts anyway to hold it in place). It is fun to go down these rabbit holes sometimes. It is also annoying and humorous when we do it and waste a bunch of effort on it, and there is a simple, common sense solution staring us in the face.