Nobody likes a riot except looters and journalists. - Ben Aaronovitch

Most people don’t see half of what’s in front of them. Your visual cortex does a shit load of imaging processing before the signal even gets to your brain, whose priorities are still checking the ancestral savannah for dangerous predators, edible berries and climbable trees. That’s why a sudden cat in the night can make you jump and some people when distracted, can walk right out in front of a bus. Your brain just isn’t interested in those large moving chunks of metal or the static heaps of brightly colored stuff that piles up in drifts around us. Never mind all that, says your brain, it’s those silent fur-covered merchants of death you’ve got to watch out for.

“Like when you kiss me,” she said. “Is it enjoyable because of the physical sensation or is it because you think it should be enjoyable?”
Good question, and we quickly developed experimental protocol which unfortunately left us too knackered to record our results properly and thus invalidated any conclusions. We have faith in the methodology, though, and continue to repeat the experiment on a regular basis.
And people say science is dull.

There's no glamour in infrastructure," he said as he filled our glasses again. "Steve and wee little William, right? They make stuff everyone uses every day but nobody thinks about the plumbing until it goes wrong.