From Pandagon:

The feed­ing pipe was thick, thicker than my nos­tril, and would not go in. Blood came gush­ing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept push­ing until the car­ti­lages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe nei­ther in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drown­ing man — my lungs felt ready to burst. The doc­tor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shov­ing the pipe far­ther and far­ther down. Only when it reached my stom­ach could I resume breath­ing, care­fully. Then she poured some slop through a fun­nel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-​​hour so that the liq­uid was absorbed by my stom­ach and could not be vom­ited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit.… Grrrr. There had just been time for every­thing to start heal­ing dur­ing the night when they came back in the morn­ing and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could stand it no longer. As it hap­pened, it was a Sun­day and no bosses were around. They sur­rounded the doc­tor: “Hey, lis­ten, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It’ll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool.” The doc­tor was in tears: “Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can’t do that.… ” And so they stood over my body, curs­ing each other, with bloody bub­bles com­ing out of my nose. On the 12^th day, the author­i­ties sur­ren­dered; they had run out of time. I had got­ten my lawyer, but nei­ther the doc­tor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again.

[tags]fascism,political activism,war on terror,link,quote[/tags]

Super­sti­tion and anti-​​science can mean life and death Help save the Tripoli Six:

The most likely diplo­matic com­pro­mise — that the medics will be con­demned to death, with this being com­muted to a life sen­tence — is unac­cept­able. They are inno­cent, and the law and sci­ence can prove it, if they get the belated opportunity.

(Via Aeti­ol­ogy.) [tags]pseudoscience,politics,third world,antiscience,political action,blogging[/tags]

Uni­ver­sity Diaries points out a prob­lem, sur­pris­ingly typ­i­cal, with a Chron­i­cle of Higher Ed col­umn:

This brief com­ment has all the ele­ments of one pop­u­lar pro­fes­so­r­ial response to phe­nom­ena like RMP: Snob­bery, self-​​preening, will­ful blind­ness, and false assumptions.

[tags]generation gap,academia,rate my professors,quote,link,Chronicle of Higher Education[/tags]

Peo­ple, even in the Acad­emy, need to have lives. They should not be work­ing 20-​​hour days, or seven-​​day weeks. Their minds suf­fer, their work suf­fers, and their abil­ity to per­form and excel suf­fers. At Nobel Intent: “Bring­ing flex­i­bil­ity to sci­ence”:

A speaker from the Uni­ver­sity of Florida described the over­all goal of these pro­grams as allow­ing a career with mul­ti­ple exit and entry points, so that fac­ulty may cope with var­i­ous chal­lenges in their lives with­out penalty or end­ing their careers. Sev­eral clear themes emerged as the pro­grams were described in detail. Three insti­tu­tions were using the money to set up coor­di­nat­ing groups with neigh­bor­ing insti­tu­tions to facil­i­tate the hir­ing of cou­ples where both halves are on the aca­d­e­mic track. Once hired, the empha­sis was on allow­ing var­i­ous forms of leave in the face of newly arrived chil­dren (includ­ing via adop­tion), fam­ily emer­gen­cies, and ill­ness. These leaves included relief from teach­ing duty, sus­pen­sion of the tenure track time line, cre­ation of a part-​​time fac­ulty posi­tion, and even small “pro­duc­tiv­ity main­te­nance” grants to help fac­ulty stay on top of the field while on leave. One other aspect that received atten­tion is the tran­si­tion out of the lab and into retire­ment; sev­eral insti­tu­tions planned on cre­at­ing posi­tions that allow fac­ulty to either exit grad­u­ally or to con­tinue to work at a reduced level.