September 4, 2012
Going through withdrawal now that the London games are over? Well, you can console yourself with the thought that the Chess Olympiad is going strong, in Istanbul, Turkey. The United States has a very strong team, with top twenty players Hikaru Nakamura and Gata Kamsky taking care of business on…
September 3, 2012
I'm currently reading Scott Aikin's and Robert Talisse's book Reasonable Atheism: A Moral Case for Respectful Disbelief. I'm finding it a strange experience. I agree with most of their substantive points, but I always find it off-putting when writers start boasting of their own civility and…
August 30, 2012
I have a new post up over at HuffPo. I discuss, and find wanting, the argument made by Daniel Sarewitz in this op-ed from Nature. Here's a taste:
Sarewitz' argument backfires in that it calls our attention to the key difference between science and religion. It is sometimes said that religion…
August 29, 2012
As you know, I recently wrote a book describing my experiences in attending creationist conferences. Over a period of several years I attended one such event after another, often spending many hours a day listening to vicious, ignorant nonsense.
I mention this to establish my high tolerance for…
August 27, 2012
Well, it looks like I have my next book project lined up! This one's a bit of a departure for me, since I will be an editor this time as opposed to an author. I will be editing a tribute volume to Raymond Smullyan, to be published by Dover Publications probably sometime next year.
I've…
August 26, 2012
Yoram Hazony, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says He does! I suppose that's good news for someone like me, but the basis for Hazony's argument strikes me as a bit dubious. Here's the opening:
Today's debates over the place of religion in modern life often showcase the claim that belief in…
August 23, 2012
Jerry Coyne directs our attention to a harrowing, but important, article from The New York Times Magazine. It is a profile of Jerry DeWitt, a former Pentecostal preacher who discovered, after more than twenty-five years in the biz, that he no longer believed any of the things he was preaching.…
August 22, 2012
I am at a loss for good blog fodder today, so how about an amusing chess-themed puzzle I recently came across? It's a simple question: What is it that the queen cannot do that a king, rook, bishop, knight or pawn can all do? Good luck!
Come to think of it, here's another puzzle I've always liked…
August 21, 2012
During my recent trip to New York I found some time to visit the American Museum of Natural History. I wanted to see their spider exhibit, you see.
Of course, step one was finding the place. Seventy-eighth and Central Park West, as I recall. Ah, this looks right:
The exhibit itself was a bit…
August 21, 2012
Mathematician Tanya Khovanova has just posted a review of the Big Sudoku Book. She writes:
I received the book Taking Sudoku Seriously by by Jason Rosenhouse and Laura Taalman for review and put it aside to collect some dust. You see, I have solved too many Sudokus in my life. The idea of solving…
August 20, 2012
A while back I did a post criticizing the idea that theistic evolution is a form of intelligent design. My argument was that theistic evolutionists accept modern evolutionary science as essentially correct, but also believe that it is not the whole story. This is relevantly different from those…
August 20, 2012
Let's get the week started off right:
Moss Bluff Elementary School in Louisiana is looking to streamline lunch payments by implementing a palm vein scanner program, but some parents aren't pleased.
A letter to parents this week informed them of the new scanner that will allow the school's nearly 1…
August 17, 2012
Massimo Pigliucci has a post up that is partly about the issue of realism vs. anti-realism in the philosophy of science. He describes the issue as follows:
To put it very briefly, a realist is someone who thinks that scientific theories aim at describing the world as it is (of course, within the…
August 16, 2012
My cat, Emily, tends to get a bit sulky when I leave her for long periods of time. So when I returned home from New York the other day, having been gone for a week, I was not surprised when she did not greet me at the door. Par for the course, I thought. She'll appear on her own in five to ten…
August 16, 2012
The Big Monty Hall Book is now more than three years old, but new reviews still appear occasionally. The latest one comes from the magazine Significance, published by the Royal Statistical Society. The reviewer is Tom Fanshawe, a statistician at Lancaster University in England. Alas, the review…
August 16, 2012
An amusing tidbit, from HuffPo:
The U.S. population has reached a nerdy and delightful milestone.
Shortly after 2:29 p.m. on Tuesday, August 14, 2012, the U.S. population was exactly 314,159,265, or pi (π) times 100 million, the U.S. Census Bureau reports. The U.S. Census Bureau's Population Clock…
August 15, 2012
One thing I have learned from more than a decade of teaching mathematics is that it is very easy to bamboozle people with numbers and equations. I do it all the time in my calculus classes, and that is when I am bending over backward to be as clear as I possibly can.
Creationists are especially…
August 14, 2012
Remember that scene in Die Hard, where Bruce Willis drops a huge pile of explosives down an elevator shaft, blowing up the lobby of the building and killing a few terrorists, but also shattering the building's huge glass windows? You might recall that right after he does that the officious deputy…
August 13, 2012
During my time in New York, I had lunch with some friends from England. We were discussing evolution and creationism, and religious fundamentalism more generally. Somewhere along the line I mentioned that creationists routinely use mathematical arguments in their writing, and one of my friends…
August 9, 2012
I'm on the road, again. I've been in New York City since Tuesday, and I am currently sitting in my tiny room at a Comfort Inn near Central Park on 71st Street. Alas, I've been sworn to secrecy regarding the purpose of my trip (ooooooh), but suffice it to say that after this afternoon the business…
August 2, 2012
Jerry Coyne has a sourpuss post up about his lack of enthusiasm for the Olympics:
This year, I can’t get energized at all. I watch the highlights on the evening news, but the revelation that Phelps has become the most decorated Olympian of all time leaves me cold. And I never watch the evening’s…
July 31, 2012
In this post over at HuffPo, Rabbi Adam Jacobs serves up one of the standard replies to the problem of evil. After recounting a harrowing story of having to subject his 16 month old son to a difficult medical procedure, he writes:
I have found this story to be helpful for explaining to people the…
July 30, 2012
With all of my recent travels, I feel like most of the last few weeks have been spent either on the road or preparing to go on the road. I will be making another pilgrimage to New York next week, mostly business this time, but some pleasure as well. As a result, a lot of good blog fodder has been…
July 25, 2012
I'm back in Virginia again, after another successful trip. This time I was mostly in Kentucky, visiting various friends.
It's a shame that nowadays Kentucky is known primarily for bourbon, horse racing and creationism, since it's really a very beautiful state. Among my ports of call was…
July 20, 2012
Here's Texas Republican representative Louie Gohmert explaining the cause of the killings at that Colorado movie theater:
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said Friday that the shootings that took place in an Aurora, Colo. movie theater hours earlier were a result of “ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian…
July 19, 2012
It's been fun spending a few days at home in Virginia, but it's time to hit the road again. Tomorrow I will hop into the Jasonmobile and head west. Since I seek out only the choicest tourist destinations, I will be spending time in Loveland, OH; Bowling Green, KY; and Morehead, also KY. Fun! I'…
July 18, 2012
Via Andrew Sullivan, we have this interesting essay, by Jacob Weisberg, discussing why Mitt Romney is struggling to defend his history at Bain Capital. The whole essay is worth reading, but I especially liked this part:
Romney’s Bain career is a story about rising inequality. It’s telling that…
July 18, 2012
In the course of a generally favorable review of Among the Creationists over at The Panda's Thumb blog, Matt Young wrote the following:
Nevertheless, he takes a dim view of, for example, an argument that reinterprets original sin as the selfishness that drives evolution. I will not go into detail…
July 17, 2012
Another day, another review of of the Big Evolution/Creation Book. This time it's Matt Young over at The Panda's Thumb. His verdict?
Among the Creationists is well written, well formatted, and well organized (though I thought that most of the content of the endnotes should have been incorporated…
July 16, 2012
The BECB (that's the The Big Evolution/Creationism Book, for those not up on the local slang) has now been reviewed in the academic journal Evolution and Development. The reviewer is Rudolf Raff, a prominent biologist at Indiana University. The review is available here, though I think you need a…
