Scientist go to conferences held at exotic places. They go to winter schools where they teach in the morning and ski in the afternoon. Researchers are getting paid for following their passion and pursuing their hobby.

If they are group leader they have the freedom to choose their subjects of study. Scholars are trusted by society (may be not in the US, but surely so in Germany) and admired for their intelligence by their relatives. They go to work ill-dressed and are proud of it. And they do not sit behind their desk all day (unless you are a theoretician). This sounds like an ideal job.

Ideal

Scientists that have made observations, or have obtained their results from a calculation or a simulation want to present these findings in a figure. If you are an old-fashioned scientist you use as format a dull plot with a labeled x-axis and a labeled y-axis and a curve mapping points on these axes. If you are a young guy or girl you spicy your paper up by presenting your data in fantastically shining 3D plot (from which it is always quite difficult to extract the quantitative information contained in the plot) . Usually the labels are scaled in such a way that they show cosmetically appealing numbers like 0, 1, 2. If the labels would contain numbers like 0.645 x 10^-3 we scale the axes and report in the caption what the scaling factor is. In such a way anybody that checks the figure gets all information and could - if needed - repeat the experiment or the calculation and check his graph against the published graph.