Sunday Funnies

-Schlock Mercenary Mr. Aliss' accent explained.
-TwoLumps Melted ice-cream.
-xkcd
-Girl Genius Zeetha and the Smoke Knight show off. ALERT: GG is black-and-white for a bit due to Medical Alarums for their colorist Cheyenne. Please see the page for fundraising info to get his kidneys back (he's better, but there was emergency doctoring. Expensive emergency doctoring.)
-No Need For Bushido New page Monday.
-Delta Bravo Sierra. Bullet counting.
-Digger Ed will go on the adventure as less dangerous than meeting with his former in-laws.
-Dreamless The General has a secret too.

Not Updated, fie!

-Dresden Codak
-Lackadaisy
-My Ninja Family
-Gone with the Blastwave
-Argghhh!onauts has time to snark, oh yes, but draw comics? Gotta wash his hair. And I do mean "hair", singular. It is named Fred and it gets polished every Saturday.

Sunday Funnies

-Schlock Mercenary Captain Tagon is having chemically-enhanced dreams.
-TwoLumps Power outages=no TV cartoons.
-xkcd
-Girl Genius The tragic story of Mr. Hissypants.
-No Need For Bushido Ken, strangely enough, is there for the killin'.
-Delta Bravo Sierra. Fill CONEX, empty CONEX. For this they went to basic?
-Digger Nobody invites the troll queen to a god-killing.
-Dreamless A doll, a grave, and a confrontation.

Not Updated, fie!

-Dresden Codak
-Lackadaisy
-My Ninja Family
-Gone with the Blastwave
-Argghhh!onauts is, shall we say, *non-periodic*

Sunday Funnies

-Schlock Mercenary "Stick a fork in him" has new meaning.
-TwoLumps The writers of Two Lumps are suffering the effects of all that global warming they say is settled. In the spirit of bipartisanship I hope they stay warm and safe, and I told you so.
-xkcd
-Girl Genius Zeetha and the cavalry have arrived!
-No Need For Bushido New page expected Monday. Shonen thinks maybe, possibly, it is time to retreat.
-Delta Bravo Sierra. Newsmonkeys, goats for promotion, and Port-a-let choruses.
-Digger Trusting that Jhelm is in fact an honorable man.
-Lackadaisy TWO new pages! Ivy is displeased with Rocky.
-Dresden Codak The Process.
-SPECIAL FOR VALENTINES' DAY! Dreamless A bit more relationship-oriented than I usually prefer in my webcomics, but it has a neat premise. What if everytime you fell asleep, you saw another person living his life, and he could see yours? Oh, and it's 1942 and you are American and he's Japanese ....

Not Updated, fie!

-My Ninja Family
-Gone with the Blastwave
-Argghhh!onauts is but a fleeting, misty-colored mem'ry ....

Tenure is not usually a blood sport

“ACADEMIC politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” -H. Kissinger

University politics can be nasty, but not usually in the assault/battery/fatalities kind of way -- more the pointed remark at the senior faculty luncheon or taking the last chocolate chip cookie at the midweek seminar. Really, they don't even throw punches.

Denial of tenure for this biology professor, however, went south in a bad way.

I don't know what the standing of U. Alabama-Huntsville is in the biology world. Apparently it has a good engineering rep, but I suspect it isn't in the top 10 for biology research. I also am not certain what flipped Dr. Amy Bishop's kill-bit, but I have my suspicions.

A) She had not published any papers since 2006.
B) She was tenure-track
C) Her degree was from Harvard.

Taken all together, something isn't right. A tenure-track professor is a paper-writing MACHINE, since, guess what, one of the important considerations for granting tenure is how many papers are written and how often they are cited. Also, as I have mentioned previously, huge swaths of research (that get processed into papers) are usually done by graduate students. I would really like to know if Dr. Bishop had any grad students, and if not, why not. Could be a propensity to fling equipment, could be an inability to get grants that would pay for them, either way bad sign.

Another dirty secret of academia is shoving a hapless candidate through a thesis committee and getting them a PhD just to get them out of your hair (and your lab). Usually these folks are just smart enough to *really* get in trouble, but not dumb enough to expel. The only way to get rid of them is to graduate them, where they become Someone Else's Problem. Plus the expectation of those with Harvard degrees is often that they have finished with the hard part and all they have to do is coast (and bask in the admiration of those unfortunates who earned their degrees from lesser, mortal institutions.)

My suspicion is that Dr. Bishop resented that the only position she could find with her Harvard doctorate was at U. Alabama-Huntsville, persuaded herself that they should at *least* give her tenure for the Harvard degree even though her research had tapered off, and when it was made clear that no, she would be judged by the same standards everybody else was, her carefully constructed rationalization of why people didn't admire her blew up in a big way.

For Everyone not in the Pacific Northwest

My deepest sympathies on the whole solid water thing.