MET-minutes seem to be "Metabolic equivalent of task" minutes [1]. In the paper, they give running an MET of 8 (paragraph 3 of Data Analysis section), so 2200 MET-minutes of running would be 2200/8 = 275 minutes, if I understand correctly.
I'm glad to hear that some schools have good internal mechanisms and a nontoxic culture, but unfortunately I suspect this is not the case in general.
In my case (a top school in the USA), even with copious and explicit evidence of misconduct, and a history of student complaints against my advisor, whistleblowing was a year-long nightmare during which the administration consistently backed the professor.
100% agree, this is the crux of the issue. Pretty much everyone I know, myself included, felt used and taken advantage of by their PhD advisors.
The combination of complete control over their students (mainly due to being able to decide when/whether they can graduate) and the pressure of tenure and the publishing race makes it no surprise that so many professors slide into abuse. Reporting abuse while still a student is obviously extremely risky, and even reporting it after graduating can cause a career setback by giving up the recommendation letter.
I wonder if it would be possible to expand the role of the PhD committee (which is currently pretty much relevant only for the thesis defense) to become a replacement for a single advisor.
To expand on your point a bit, it depends on the type of fluid. Newtonian fluids [1] (a good approximation for water and many other "normal" fluids) will be pulled into the groove regardless of how viscous they are. E.g., the cup would probably work for treacle (syrup). Custard is non-Newtonian; more specifically, it's probably a Bingham fluid [2], meaning it acts like a solid until enough shear stress is applied, and then it acts like a liquid. The problem here is that even if there's enough shear stress for the custard far from the walls to move, the custard deep in the corner will likely remain a solid. So the corner capillary effect won't work.
Corners are actually super effective at moving liquid using surface tension (assuming the contact angle is such that the surface is concave). The key is that at the front of the liquid, where it's very thin in the corner, the surface has a small radius of curvature => low pressure. If there's a lot of fluid filling up a corner, the radius of curvature is large => high pressure. So fluid naturally flows into the corner. This is used a lot in space applications, e.g., for propellant management devices [1].
The first analysis of the effect I know of is a paper by Concus and Finn (1969) [2], who realized that fluid can be carried arbitrarily high in a triangular groove, even against gravity, and proposed that trees may use this mechanism to carry water to their highest reaches. (The catch is that the fluid front becomes thinner and thinner as it gets higher. And it starts breaking down when it gets so thin that the continuum limit no longer applies).
If you like math, I'd highly recommend checking out Mark Weislogel's research [3] which deals with the dynamics of viscous flow in triangular grooves.
Shameless plug: chapter 4 of my Ph.D. thesis [4] gives an introduction to the subject.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_equivalent_of_task