Let's try to separate two important things here:

Dr. Oz holds a position specifically associated with surgeon, and nowhere have I found anybody saying that he isn't an excellent surgeon, regardless of what other non-surgery-related ridiculous beliefs he holds. If they're pissed about Oz, they might as well also write a letter to every dean who employs any scientist…

If he's a vice chair that likely means he's not a clinical appointment (which are generally yearly or multi-year contracts), but he's a tenured academic faculty member.

Some years ago the Guggenheim Museum had an exhibit on "Africa: The Art of a Continent," which began with a hand axe that was a) absolutely beautiful, as well as utilitarian, and b) approximately a million years old. It was a revelation to me of what our pre-Homo sapiens ancestors were capable of - and interested in.

SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY!

"To Engineer is Human" is a good start as is 'Engineers of Dreams" both by Henry Petroski.

Here are links to two blog articles I wrote, each of which has citations to several books on the topic:

One of my hobbies is reading books (including case studies) about failures in large complex systems. This is a very common pattern, so common that it has a name: the swiss cheese theory of system failure. All systems have layers or sequences of components. All components have holes (failure modes). For the most part,…

No, but it was used to make short animated pictures, often with amusing sayings. So much time was taken up in the making and viewing of these animated pictures, it inspired Virgil's warning, "Beware of Greeks bearing GIFs"

Why not Zoidberg?

Maybe that would just prove what an amazing man he really was and make people focus on his message instead of all the supernatural mumbo jumbo.

1. What civilization built Teotihuacan? What happened to them?

The problem is that all of the brains in California are working on designing things like phones and watches to be more expensive than they should be instead of designing things like desalination plants to be cheaper than they are. It’s a technical problem and there has to be a technical solution.

THE DEVIL’S NUT

Do lost manuscripts count? If so, I submit part two of George Berkeley's magnum opus, The Principles of Human Knowledge. He wrote it while he spent time on the continent, and the manuscript was lost somewhere in Italy. In part one of the Principles, Berkeley lays out a complete empiricist framework for epistemology…

Oh... lots.

My family has a group of wild turkeys that comes out of the woods from across the street over to our yard where my mother feeds them. I told her not too but she did and now they come back all the time and are a bit demanding about it. When I lived there I used to go to the door some afternoons and right outside the…

That was the most stupid line ever. When I saw that scene I sank in my seat in utter disappointment about this movie.

Having worked on cruise ships for 5 years in the mid 90's, the gradual change from ship to hotel was one of the factors I found most distressing during my time. The entire point of a cruise is to enjoy the ocean and all modern cruise ships are so hermetically sealed, that you will never smell the sea air anywhere…

Yeah, I commented over at XOJane about how people can't talk to ghosts because ghosts don't exist at all, and I never got more downvotes in my whole life.