Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
They want me to sign a form specifically stating which days I won’t work on.  Since I’m tentatively scheduled to teach 5 days a week, this means there’s no way to schedule my “furlough” days on days without classes.  I am forced to miss class.  Right now my choices are refusal or fraud (i.e. [...]

By Thoreau
The other night, at dinner with some Evil Fiziks Types, one person from a school with an unusual policy said that he doesn’t like the policy, and he thinks it should be changed in part because it would help with recruitment of faculty from under-represented groups.  Such faculty candidates tend to be hot commodities [...]

Charlie Stross sums it up:
The subjects vary — crime and penal policy, healthcare, don’t get me started on foreign policy — but there is an ideological approach in America that is distinguished by one common characteristic: words and deeds utterly lacking in the quality of mercy.
There is a cancer in the collective American soul — [...]

By Thoreau
Since posts related to partisan politics elicit long and acrimonious threads, for the remainder of my time at this new Evil Fiziks Lair I will only blog about academic and geeky topics that won’t elicit rancorous debate, like diversity in academia, whether Balrogs have wings, which edition of D&D is the best, creationism vs. [...]

By Thoreau
What happens when an idiot posts an inflammatory essay under somebody else’s name?  One poor history professor found out.

By Thoreau
Calm down joe, and let me explain why.
I admit that I haven’t had a chance to examine much of the information concerning torture prosecutions.  From what little I have seen, the immediate prosecutions are likely to focus on low level people and will probably leave some bad practices untouched.  I could complain, but (1) [...]

By Thoreau
I drove to the new Evil Fiziks Lair today, and the campus entrance is now named the “Henley Gate.”  Thanks for the donation to alma mater, Jim!

By Thoreau
I’m spending 2 weeks at a research institute.  Fiziks paradise, in fact.  We’re right on the ocean, we have enough caffeine to run our own AA meeting, and there are all sorts of brainy Evil Fiziks Types here.  For the next 2 weeks, this building full of Evil Fiziks Types is my new Evil [...]

By Thoreau
Greenwald has a post up about the fact that those of us who were right for 8 years are still considered “not serious”, even when information comes out vindicating us (like, say, a former Homeland Security Secretary saying that terror alerts were based on politics rather than serious intelligence).  The basic charge seems to [...]

Something I’ve been meaning to link for awhile is my friend Dave’s encomium to the humble bowl of Pho. Thanks to Dave I have stopped taken Pho for granted.