I regret not taking the time to explore an observation I made years ago at UW, and tried to measure where Dilbert cartoons could be found and what fraction they were of displayed cartoons on doors and bullitin boards.
From time to time I had reason to stroll through some of the engineering buildings, or chemistry or match, and now and then the business school. Fifteen/twenty years ago Dilbert was all over the place in physics (I had some) and computing and engineering, but not at the business school. Other cartoons appeared there, so it wasn't a department dictum on decorum.
I wish I'd checked on life sciences and arts and language too.
Since Dilbert so often skewered pointy-haired bosses and HR, it's no surprise that the strip wouldn't pop up on grad student doors so much in those regions. (Not that HR has many grad students – the relative number of grad students would skew total counts to the hard science departments.)
From the speed with which the strip was dropped I suspect there was great relief in the relevant management and HR corporate quarters at the excuse for revenge.
I read in one of his books, as an aside, his explanation for a positive thinking approach – that good luck came to those who claimed it would come. It seemed a kind of magical thinking for someone who professed to be quite rational.
He announced that he was taking Pascal's Wager when he no longer had anything to lose. That doesn't seem quite cricket, but I suspect God will take him anyway – perhaps to his surprise.
And perhaps he'll learn what might have been.
Lewis has Aslan tell Lucy that nobody is ever told what might have happened. In one sense that's true. We're linear people, and absorbing the branching tree of life's possibilities is more than we were made to understand. But I wonder if being confronted with who we could have been is part of Judgment Day.
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