jrosenhouse | December 28, 2013Here's Spider (the orange one) and Emily from yesterday, having just been loaded into the back of my car.
See how happy they look! They were both expressing their joy with loud, some would say shrieking, meows. That's OK folks, no need to thank me.
As it happens, I also have a very large carrier that could fit both of them comfortably. Part of me was tempted to throw them both in and say, “Time to settle your differences, folks.” I decided against it; too reminiscent of Thunderdome. Two cats enter, one cat leaves.
Of course, we all knew where we were going:
For my local readers, yes…
jrosenhouse | December 26, 2013Proponents of intelligent design make a large number of arguments regarding the inadequacies of evolution, and the shortcomings of current scientific practice. All of these arguments are wrong.
That, however, is not the end of the problems besetting ID. There is also the fact that there really is no theory of intelligent design. For all their nattering about how ID has the makings of a scientific revolution, they are stuck nonetheless with a “theory” that actually asserts very little. There is ultimately nothing more to their argument than the claim that at some point in natural history,…
jrosenhouse | December 21, 2013Our first two entries in this series featured complex play drawn out over a large number of moves. So, for a change of pace this week, let's try something lighter. This problem was composed by E. Pedersen in the early 1940s. White is to move and mate in three:
Remember that white is moving up the board and black is moving down. Vertical files are labeled a--h from left to right, while horizontal ranks are labeled 1--8 from bottom to top. So the white king and queen are on a7 and f2 respectively, while the black king and rook are on a3 and h1 respectively.
White's task appears daunting,…
jrosenhouse | December 19, 2013Let's resume our discussion of this article, by William Lane Craig, in which he presents five arguments for belief in God. We found his first two arguments to be inadequate. Do his other three fare any better?
3. God provides the best explanation of objective moral values and duties. Even atheists recognize that some things, for example, the Holocaust, are objectively evil. But if atheism is true, what basis is there for the objectivity of the moral values we affirm? Evolution? Social conditioning? These factors may at best produce in us the subjective feeling that there are objective…
jrosenhouse | December 18, 2013Writing at Salon, Richard Cooper expresses dismay with recent superhero movies. Here's a sample:
I was reminded of this by Jor-El’s speech in “Man of Steel”:
You will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders.
How, though? Those watching him can’t fly, topple buildings or fire heat rays from their eyes. What else does Superman do other than these purely physical feats? The 1978 version of Jor-El warned: “It is forbidden for you to…
jrosenhouse | December 17, 2013Writing in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas famously presented his “five ways” to prove that God exists. He relied largely on extrapolations from observable phenomena in our daily experience to grand claims about the origins of it all. Thus, he argued from the presence of motion in the natural world to an unmoved mover behind it all, or from the contingency of existence in the natural world to the presence of a necessary existent, and so on.
These arguments have received detailed philosophical development over the years, from Aquinas and from many others, but they have not fared well…
jrosenhouse | December 16, 2013When I wrote my post last week about the existence of mathematical objects, I had not yet noticed that Massimo Pigliucci was writing about similar topics. More specifically, he is discussing cosmologist Max Tegmark's idea that ultimate reality just is mathematics. Here's Pigliuccia describing Tegmark's ideas:
The basic idea is that the ultimate structure of reality is, well, a mathematical one. Please understand this well, because it is the crux of the discussion: Tegmark isn’t saying anything as mundane as that the world is best described by mathematics; he is saying that the ultimate…
jrosenhouse | December 15, 2013In the rather fanciful position below, white is to move and force checkmate in six moves:
This problem was composed by H. Lepuschutz in 1936. It is a representative of what problem composers refer to as a “logical problem.” In a logical problem, white has some sequence of moves that seems to achieve his goal very quickly. This is called his “main plan.” Sadly, black has an adequate defense to the threat. So white executes a “foreplan,” the sole purpose of which is to neutralize the defense. Then white gets back to business and executes his main plan.
Please recall that vertical files…
jrosenhouse | December 14, 2013Back in August, I welcomed Spider the cat into my home. So how did that all work out?
That's Spider lounging in his basement room, aka the chess room. To judge from the liberal coating of cat hair, I'd say he likes that futon quite a lot. Spider's not much of a jumper, so I have no fear that he's going to jump on the table and bat the chess pieces around.
Here he is wrapped up in the mattress cover he uses as a sleeping bag. That's one of his favorite places to sleep. If he looks a bit nonplussed in this picture it's because I just woke him up.
Spider is a very timid cat, and it's…
jrosenhouse | December 12, 2013Over at The Economist, we have this brief interview with Edward Frenkel, a mathematician at Berkeley. We met Frenkel in this post from last week. Frenkel has a new book out called Love and Math, one copy of which is currently residing on my Kindle.
One part of the interview caught my attention:
Symmetry exists without human beings to observe it. Does maths exist without human beings to observe it, like gravity? Or have we made it up in order to understand the physical world?
I argue, as others have done before me, that mathematical concepts and ideas exist objectively, outside of the…
jrosenhouse | December 11, 2013It's finals week around here. Over the last two days I have graded just over a thousand calculus problems (many of them, let's face it, not worked out properly). So let's unwind with lighter fare tonight.
There are plenty of books and websites explaining the basics of scientific thinking. Riveting reading, certainly, but as a simple illustration of what's involved I've always liked the following piece of dialogue. It comes from Agatha Christie's novel Murder on the Links. This was the second Hercule Poirot novel (the first being The Mysterious Affair at Styles).
It will help to know…
jrosenhouse | December 10, 2013After posting this essay about skeptical theism last week, Michael Egnor showed up in the comments to heckle me. Egnor, if you are unfamiliar with him, is a blogger for the Discovery Institute, which does not bode well for the merits of his comment. He opened his remarks sensibly enough by conceding both that evil poses a great problem for Christians and also that he had no solution to offer. But then he went off the rails by claiming that atheists have no right to assert the problem of evil since, having rejected the existence of God, we lack an objective standard of morality from which…
jrosenhouse | December 10, 2013Philosophy is chock-full of fantastical thought experiments. Sometimes, though, the scenario we're asked to imagine is so fantastical that it undermines the point of the experiment. From my perspective, the “Mary's Room” experiment is one such.
This thought experiment was proposed by Frank Jackson in 1982, though the basic idea for it has a far longer history. It is meant to cast doubt on materialist understandings of the mind. Here's the essence of it, as presented by Daniel Dennett (quoting Jackson) in his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking:
Mary is a brilliant scientist…
jrosenhouse | December 9, 2013Friday was the last day of classes for the fall semester. We have finals this week. Then, a big pile of grading. Yuck! But then, winter break. Yay!
This semester I taught three sections of calculus. More specifically, I taught our first semester calculus course intended for students with weaker mathematical backgrounds. Essentially, we stretch the standard one-semester calculus syllabus over two semesters and use the extra time to review algebra and trigonometry.
I have taught this course a number of times, and I have yet to find a fully satisfactory way of doing it. The textbook we…
jrosenhouse | December 8, 2013This is the first of what I hope to make a regular feature here at EvolutionBlog: A chess problem for Sunday. By “chess problem” I do not mean the sort of thing where I show you a position from an actual game and ask you to find the best line of play for one side or the other. Those are fun too, but that is not what I will be showing here. Rather, I have in mind composed positions that illustrate an attractive and pretty idea. Chess composition is an art form that uses the rules of chess as its medium.
Many chess players are disdainful of composition, since it has little to do with…
jrosenhouse | December 6, 2013Over at HuffPo, Jeff Schweitzer serves up a cri de couer against religion. He writes:
Many factors have brought us to this sad state of affairs, but we can no longer ignore the 600 pound gorilla and trumpeting elephants in the room: religion is killing us. While our kids are being taught that god created gravity, children in Zaire are learning about Newton and Einstein. As children in Lichtenstein are being taught about the warping of space-time, American kids are learning that "people who do not believe in god" are incapable of understanding gravity.
Preach it!
American religiosity has…
jrosenhouse | December 6, 2013Around here it's the last day of classes for the fall semester. Yay! So how about we mark the occasion with some math humor.
Over at HuffPo, math teacher Ben Orlin contrasts actual headlines with what they would say if people were more mathematically savvy. Some examples:
Our World: Market Rebounds after Assurances from Fed ChairMathematically Literate World: Market Rebounds after Regression to the Mean
Our World: Firm's Meteoric Rise Explained by Daring Strategy, Bold LeadershipMathematically Literate World: Firm's Meteoric Rise Explained by Good Luck, Selection Bias
Our World: Gas…
jrosenhouse | December 5, 2013Rereading my post from Monday, I see there was one aspect of Vincent Torley's post that I neglected to address. Recall that Torley was at pains to explain why God might be innocent of the charge of hypocrisy, for demanding that we behave in ways that He does not Himself practice. Torley made two suggestions in that regard, and in Monday's post I gave reasons for thinking that those suggestions do not solve the problem.
Perhaps aware of the inadequacies of his arguments, Torley tries another gambit:
It appears that Loftus's argument from evil, like Dr. Sean Carroll's, is a powerful prima…
jrosenhouse | December 4, 2013In Tuesday's post I started discussing this essay (PDF format), by mathematician Doron Zeilberger. I wholeheartedly seconded the sentiments from the first part of the essay, in which he lamented the generally poor state of mathematical communication.
But I'm a little skeptical of this part:
The purpose of mathematical research should be the increase of mathematical knowledge, broadly defined. We should not be tied up with the antiquated notions of alleged “rigor”. A new philosophy of and attitude toward mathematics is developing, called “experimental math” (though it is derided by most of…
jrosenhouse | December 3, 2013Back in 2009, Chris Mooney, together with Sheril Kirshenbaum, wrote a book called Unscientific America. It purported to explain the origins of America's current antipathy toward science, and to make suggestions for what we might do about it. It created something of a stir in the science blogosphere. I was one of many folks who found the book disappointing, for reasons I explained in a lengthy, three part review (Part One, Part Two, Part Three). I pulled my punches somewhat, partly because at one time Mooney and Kirshenbaum were my colleagues here at ScienceBlogs, and partly because I was…