In which everyone's time is wasted.

The Committee on Divine Retribution meets for one of only two reasons.

1) A student with borderline personality disorder who has cheated at nearly everything she has ever attempted believes she can slime her way through an academic misconduct hearing with some obviously concocted "evidence" that proves her innocence.

2) The course instructor is a dick who believes a student's failure to follow (or creative interpretation of) course instructions warrants dismissal from the university.

I estimate that the last several hearings, all of Type 2, resulted in monetary loss on the order of $10,000, considering the number of deans, department heads, faculty, students and full-time staff required to convene a hearing. I would like to be able to support my fellow faculty, but they have to give me something -- anything! -- to work with.

Rest in peace, William.

Today I learned a friend has gone.

How brief the distance between life and death! In fact there is none. Life is but death's vestibule, and our pilgrimage on earth is but a journey to the grave. The pulse that preserves our being beats our death march, and the blood which circulates our life is floating it onward to the deeps of death. To-day we see our friends in health, to-morrow we hear of their decease. We clasped the hand of the strong man but yesterday, and to-day we close his eyes. We rode in the chariot of comfort but an hour ago, and in a few more hours the last black chariot must convey us to the home of all living. Oh, how closely allied is death to life!

From the Reverend C. H. Spurgeon's "The Good Man's Life and Death."

It's all over.

Don't panic, but my mother is now on Facebook. This means that the internet as we know it has only a few more weeks before complete collapse. Few of us will survive this apocalypse, but those of us who do will take the following precautions:

• After Mom friends you, deactivate your Facebook account.
• Remove the Facebook app from your iPhone and delete all Facebook bookmarks from your browser.
• In preparation for the downfall of society, stockpile fresh water, canned goods, and toilet paper.

I have purchased a small homestead in Wyoming and my car is packed with axes, guns and enough ammunition to see me through 2025. I'll see (some of) you on the other side.

The end of a bad day.

Tuesdays are tough here at the Angry Castle. The Angry Kid gets up at 6:30 a.m. and doesn't stop until 8:00 p.m. because of gymnastics and homework. Because she is unwilling to not do her homework, and she is too tired to think straight after gymnastics, we have the Tuesday night shitstorms followed by the Tuesday night meltdowns.

After all the tears and the ruckus come hugs and snuggling and bedtime stories. When she's deflated she always wants me to read the same thing -- "The Highwayman." This is not a particularly soothing tale, and I can't explain why it might be comforting to her, except perhaps because the repetitious verses and strong meter are somewhat hypnotic. Tonight it didn't take her all the way down; she also wanted "Shameful Death" and "Lochinvar."

She wants only poetry when she feels sad.

Pencils can be used as deadly weapons.

The collateral damage of the number of papers I have pushed out the door this year includes the amount of time I must now devote to responding to questions from copy editors. My 120 page manuscript for [Hoity-Toity Review Journal] resulted in half a page of trivialities, such as changing the labels on figure panels and removing the italics from a priori. The extensive mathematics were typeset perfectly and the copy editor repaired bibliographic errors with no help from me.

Contrast this with the 40 page piece of crap chapter for the sleazy [Handbook of Crappy Chapters That Only Libraries Will Buy But That The Publisher Will Make Piles of Money On Because Someone Managed to Convince a Bunch of Reasonably Well-Known Scientists to Write Crappy Chapters For It]. The queries from the copy editor required half a dozen pages, and contained such nuggets of wisdom as requiring a reference to be added to the bibliography for the study referenced as George Washington (1732-1799), asking if it wouldn't be better to write "variance analysis" instead of "analysis of variance," pointing out that John Fitzgerald Kennedy's first name is not John but rather Johnfitzgerald, and finally, finally! the insight that my surname is not Professor but rather Fessor. I asked the production editor if the copy editor was, in fact, human, and he confessed that the process was at least partially automated.

This is a good thing, because I was ready to go hunting for the moron. I'm pretty sure it would have been a justifiable homicide.

Quiz time!

One of these species does not live under my deck. A virtual cookie for the first person to guess correctly!

1. Mice
2. Raccoons
3. Skunks
4. Groundhogs

On the fine art of writing a scientific paper: a secret message to my graduate students.

A scientific paper has to be written in such a way that people will read it. The problem is that very few people are going to want to read it. There is no white-coated scientist who spends her spare minutes voraciously reading not only all the papers relevant to her work but also all the papers that are only tangentially related. Oh, okay, there are a few, but even they don't want to read our papers.

Getting someone to read your paper is like getting someone to eat a cookie with a mysterious gooey center. You need to present your cookie so that it seems palatable. You need to convince the reader that the mysterious center is the sweet, creamy middle of a Hostess Ding Dong and not a clump of spider eggs. Your idea, the central theme of your paper, is that mysterious gooey center.

Your paper has to begin by telling the reader about the sweet, creamy middle. "It's okay!" you need to shout. "It's not a clump of spider eggs!" However, you can't just jump into the creamy middle and then start flinging hunks of cookie at your reader's face. You need to go back to the edge of the cookie, telling them about the creamy middle from interesting different perspectives. After they've nibbled around the edge you can get them to bite deeper into the cookie, into the support structure of the creamy middle.

If you do it right, the reader won't even realize he's eating a cookie. It will seem to him that he's eating an unrolled cinnamon bun, a pretty much straight road with signposts saying "This way to the warm, sweet, gooey, slightly underdone middle that's the best part of the cinnamon bun!"

Hmm. I need to make a run to the 7-11.

Someone hasn't thought this through.

I have received a missive from some LSU official informing me that, as a holder of LSU football season tickets, I am considered an athletic booster. One of the many things I am forbidden to do as an athletic booster is to provide to any enrolled student athlete any academic assistance, including tutoring, editing of papers, assistance in completing coursework, or the use of a computer.

I used to hang out in a biker bar. Does that count?

see more The Daily What

I'm not condoning anything this guy has alleged to have done, but it's nice to know that at least at one time there existed at least one tenured professor somewhere who belonged to a biker gang.

This is what summer is supposed to be.

Let X equal the set of papers I wanted to complete this summer, where N is the cardinality |X| of the set X. Let Y equal the set of papers I actually completed this summer, where M is the cardinality |Y| of the set Y.

I am happy that M=N, and also that |X ∩Y| > 0. I am less happy that
|(X\Y)∪(Y\X)|>1. I am fucking thrilled that M>4.

Parenting joy #2997

The Angry Kid is in the shower singing "Rehab" at the top of her lungs.

Is there an app for this?

I need a gmail filter that sends a custom vacation message to certain people. The filter needs to scan the message for the latest date mentioned and determine the geographical location of the sender. It must next add four weeks to that latest date. The longitude of the sender's geographic location must be advanced by 180^o and the latitude multiplied by -1. After triangulating the dry land nearest to the rotated coordinates, the filter must finally send the following "vacation" message:

Thank you for your email. I am [on dry land nearest the point exactly half-way around the globe from you]. I will not have email contact until [computed date], but I will try to respond to your message as soon as I return.

I need a tip.

Is anyone familiar with Vyukrama Kapalaneti? I'm having some difficulty avoiding the drowning part.

The more you know.

Have you ever wondered whether you are plagiarizing? Do you think you see a confusing gray area between paraphrasing a few sentences and cutting and pasting those same sentences from a web site? Does the definition of plagiarism in the student handbook seem overly long and too complicated to be relevant to your five-page term paper? Relax; I'm here to help.

The Angry Professor's guide to plagiarism is simple and easy to remember. There are only two rules.

First: If anything except turning off your computer happens after you have highlighted text and pressed "Control-C" then you are plagiarizing.

Second: If you find yourself trying to paraphrase someone else's words to avoid plagiarizing then you are plagiarizing.

If you fail to follow this simple guide then you will be charged with plagiarism. When this happens, there is only one additional rule to remember: Do not claim that you handed in an earlier version of your paper by mistake. This tired excuse is used by every plagiarist ever caught in the act and we are sick of hearing it. 'Fess up and take your lumps like the big boy or girl you are.

A hitherto unknown circle of hell.

Today finds me at a musical event sponsored by Ellesiouville's large neohippie community. Although outdoors, the smell of patchouli is stifling. Obnoxious vegan evangelists are lined up in front of the gluten-free pizza cart, all wearing leather shoes. Willing to pay exorbitant prices for organic snacks, they all nonetheless smoke like chimneys. One woman sitting near me has a two-word vocabulary, responding only "Right on" to any statement addressed to her.

Inexplicably, there are some folks running around in large fuzzy headpieces scaring small children. My best guess is that this represents some kind of performance art, like a really bad Blue Man Group. The Angry Kid responds in typical Angry fashion by rolling her eyes.

It is quite impossible to convey how dreadful this is. I don't know why I've tried.

This doesn't seem hard to me.

If the for-profit "universities" like Kaplan and Phoenix train their students as well as they claim, and if their students really get all the great-paying positions they brag about in the television commercials, then these "universities" should be willing to provide the financing for their students. Wouldn't this be a great investment? Not only would they make their outrageous profits on tuition and fees, but they would also recover the interest on the student loans. This seems to be a win-win situation, and I don't understand why these "universities" would even want their students to apply for federal financial aid.

Unless it's all bullshit, of course.

Parenting Joy #2715

Someone brushed the cat with my toothbrush.

Parenting Joy #2714

The dentist can now yell at you for someone else's terrible oral hygiene.

Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky.

Anubis has been with us for several months and we now have suspicions about how she became a stray. She was found in the Northern Wilds of Square State last July and languished at the Humane Society until we adopted her in September.

Anubis is a big, sweet bundle of issues. Most severe of these are separation anxiety and noise phobias. We tried crating her during work, but she ate her way through the steel doors of two airline crates and broke off many of her bottom teeth in the process. We tried restricting her to the laundry room and she ate through the door. We've lately begun just leaving her out, and she spends the day, quite happily, in her open crate.

However, fireworks, gunshots and thunder turn her into a quivering, panicky mess. (Remember she was found in July?) If we are home, she hauls all 60 pounds of herself into my lap during a storm, or crawls onto our pillows (and heads) if we happen to be in bed. This morning a nasty storm passed through and she was home alone, uncrated, listening to the thunder.

To understand what happened next, you need to know that we live in a ranch house, and many of the windows are of the old, steel louvered type. They open with a crank and the screen (or storm) is hooked to the inside frame. Because of the louvers, I figure only the thinnest and most determined of thieves would attempt to gain entry that way, and because my neighbors are retired and home all day, I leave the windows open while we're at work.

Anubis panicked during this morning's storm. She found the open window in my daughter's bedroom, a window with a sill approximately 4.5 feet above the ground. Somehow, she got up to the level of the window, ripped through the screen, and forced her chunky body through the louvers and fell 6 feet to the ground. Then she scaled the fence into the neighbor's back yard, and entered their livingroom through their patio door.

Apparently she needed someone's lap to sit in.

A film to watch.

At some point over the past year, I stumbled on this film. I highly recommend it. It's available on instant play at Netflix.

I'd like to force some of my colleagues to watch it, à la A Clockwork Orange.

Edited to add: If the link above doesn't work for you, try this one. The title of the film is The Philosopher Kings.

My favorite student interaction of the year.

"Professor, can you tell me what's going to be on the exam? I don't have time to study everything."

A joke any 8-year-old can appreciate.

I told the Angry Kid today about a grownup who works for us in the government who posted pictures of his penis on the web. This was really stupid, she agreed.

Then I told her that his name was Mister Weiner. If she had been drinking milk, it would have come out of her nose.

These aren't just committee meetings.

As part of my new hard-shoes duties, I have been appointed to the Council For Divine Retribution. This is the board that oversees cases of academic misconduct. I agreed to this appointment for two reasons. First, the other appointments were worse. Second, I thought I would get some satisfaction from meting out justice.

Uh, no. No satisfaction here. This is pure human tragedy. This is watching futures being snuffed out, reputations destroyed, and florid psychopathology. I'm not meting out justice. I'm burying rotting corpses.

Where I've been.

A number of things happened to me while I was on sabbatical. While most of these were marvelous (it was such a great year!), some of them occurred while I was absent and unable to defend myself. These not-marvelous things resulted in my being required to spend a huge amount of time since January in meetings. Some meetings were not so onerous, but others require that I wear grown-up clothes and hard shoes and have a working knowledge of Robert's Rules of Order.

I am now unfortunately very familiar with the denizens of the LSU's higher administrative offices. I also know more about university politics/policies that I ever cared to learn. I've had to respond to requests for input on various issues from various deans. I've had to read and become familiar with the Faculty Rules, the Student Handbook, and the University Charter. I have to go to random addresses by random administrators. I've listened to addresses in which words like "deliverables,""market forces," and "consumer model" are tossed around.

The best part of these multiple Steering/Senate/Council/Advisory Committee meetings is the petit fours. I eat lots of them, just to punish whoever dragged me into all this. I hope someone gets a headache every time I bite into one of those luscious little nuggets of sugar and cream.

This photo needs a caption.

It draws to a close.

I am nearing the end of my second on-duty quarter, having handled over 500 students since January. It could have been horrible, and while it was bad, I have survived. Despite the handful of truly hopeless students (stories to be saved for a time when my head gets back to blogging), they were mostly really good.

I have two more lectures to deliver, a movie to show, a review session and two finals. Then summer stretches out in front of me like a glorious, paradisiacal landscape, marked by nothing but all the fantastic research I shall accomplish. I keep pinching myself; it's too good to be believed!

So this is a shout out to all my peeps on the quarter system. Hang in there! Margaritas at my place after final grades are in.

Thank god that's over.

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me...
...a vile microorganism.

On the second through tenth days of Christmas my true love gave to me...
...gastrointestinal distress.

On the eleventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me...
...one puking child.

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...
...twelve loads of laundry, one puking child...