jrosenhouse | December 3, 2013In an opinion piece for the New York Daily News, published in July 2012, mathematician Edward Frenkel and school superintendent Robert Ross write:
This Fourth of July will forever be remembered in the history of science as the day when the discovery of the Higgs boson was announced. The last remaining elementary particle among those predicted by the Standard Model of three forces of nature finally revealed itself through painstakingly assembled data of billions of collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, the most sophisticated machine ever built by humans.
But one important aspect of this…
jrosenhouse | December 2, 2013Over at Uncommon Descent, Vincent Torley serves up a long post about the problem of evil. He was responding to this post by John Loftus, but Torley's post can mostly be read independently of what Loftus wrote.
I devote a chapter of Among the Creationists to the problem of evil. I open the chapter like this:
Pride of place among theological problems must surely go to the problem of evil. That there is something incongruous in the picture of a just and loving God presiding over a world of extravagant cruelty and suffering is obvious to even the most unreflective person.
Indeed. I've…
jrosenhouse | December 1, 2013Magnus Carlsen of Norway has won the big chess match against the defending champion Viswanathan Anand of India. This result was not surprising, though some were probably expecting Anand to put up more of a fight than he did. Only ten of the scheduled twelve games were played, with Carlsen winning three and the other seven being drawn.
This is the best thing to happen to chess in Scandinavia since Bent Larsen, “The Great Dane.” Larsen's own run for the World Championship ended abruptly when he lost six straight games to Bobby Fischer in 1971.
Anand's loss in Game Five is broadly…
jrosenhouse | November 14, 2013But such exciting draws! Carlsen tried the Reti Opening again in Game Three, but this time got less than nothing. Anand was pressing for most of the game, though it seems that Carlsen always had enough counterplay to draw. The crucial moment is shown below:
White's queen is looking a bit sad, and it is clear that black has some advantage. Now the famously materialistic computer recommends the cold-blooded 29. ... Bxb2, eating the free pawn and scoffing at white's obvious counterplay down the e-file. Instead, Anand played the calmer 29. ... Bd4. He eventually won a pawn, but white was…
jrosenhouse | November 11, 2013I guess it's been obvious for a while now that I've largely lost interest in blogging. It seems the last vestiges of my SIWOTI syndrome have abandoned me. I still read as much nonsense as ever, but whereas previously I would have rushed to the blog to vent, now I mostly just shrug.
Still, I'm not quite ready to give up the blog altogether. I've been blogging for more than ten years, and I've met so many great people as a result that I'm reluctant to give it up. Part of my recent lethargy is the result of a fairly grueling semester in which, among other new commitments, I'm teaching a…
jrosenhouse | September 8, 2013The second Problem of the Week has now been posted. More of a puzzle this week, rather than a conventional math problem. Enjoy! I've also posted a solution to last week's problem. Enjoy that too!
Gotta run now. Breaking Bad is on in just over two hours, and I have to begin my preparations.
jrosenhouse | September 4, 2013I'm teaching a lot of calculus this term, and we just spent the last class period or two talking about straight lines. That makes sense. Calculus is especially concerned with measuring the slopes of functions, and straight lines are just about the simplest functions there are.
Now, the textbook we're using this term, like pretty much all textbooks, defines a linear function as one that can be written in the form
$latex y=mx+b$
I hate that!
It's not that it's wrong. It is perfectly true that straight lines, and only straight lines, can be expressed with equations of that form. But defining…
jrosenhouse | September 2, 2013Things move quickly in the math world. It was only the end of May that we heard of a stunning development regarding the long moribund twin primes conjecture. The problem is to prove that there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers that differ by two, such as 3 and 5, or 17 and 19, or 101 and 103. The development was that a previously unknown mathematician named Yitang Zhang proved that there are infinitely many pairs of primes whose difference is...wait for it... no greater than seventy million. Seventy million is certainly a long way from two, but it is even farther away from…
jrosenhouse | September 1, 2013Our school year started last Monday. My teaching muscles atrophied a bit over the summer, so last week's classes were the pedagogical equivalent of stretching exercises. But starting tomorrow we're really going to hit the ground running. Do you know what that means?
That's right! It means that Problem of the Week makes it's triumphant return. This term's theme: A Tribute to Sam Loyd.
Problem One has just been posted. It's a fairly straightforward algebra problem, but good if you're in the mood for some mental calisthenics. New problems will appear every Monday. Enjoy!
jrosenhouse | August 21, 2013I think it's been obvious for a while now that my enthusiasm for blogging comes and goes. Lately, it's been in a “goes” phase for longer than usual. But, I do have one piece of personal news that I feel compelled to share with all of you. Have you guessed what it is? (The title might have given things away.)
Meet Spider:
He's awfully cute, don't you think? I guess you can call him a rescue, in the sense that I rescued him from a colleague who suddenly has a two-year old and infant twins. Apparently Spider was very unhappy with all the noise and chaos, and my colleague felt it was best…
jrosenhouse | July 16, 2013I went through an Orson Scott Card phase while I was in graduate school. I started with his most famous novel, Ender's Game, which I enjoyed immensely. I then proceeded, over the next year or so, to read all of the novels he had written to that point.
At that time I didn't know anything about Card as a person, but there were clues in his novels. Though I enjoyed most of his novels, there were a few lemons in the batch as well. Most egregiously, there was an awful piece of dreck called Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. The title should have been a giveaway.
Then there was…
jrosenhouse | July 16, 2013This poor guy!
A 35-year-old Israeli man was rushed to the hospital on Friday after a snake suddenly emerged from the toilet he was sitting on and bit the man's penis.
The injured man told emergency workers that he noticed a strong burning sensation as he was using the toilet in his parents' home in the norther Israeli town of Nofit. At that point, the man looked down and saw a snake in the toilet. He then "ran from the room in horror" to call paramedics.
"This is the first time I've seen a snake bite like this," a paramedic said, according to Your Jewish News. “Luckily, all tests seem fine…
jrosenhouse | July 15, 2013Paul Krugman tells you what you need to know about the vote by House Republicans to drop the food stamp program from the Farm Bill:
Something terrible has happened to the soul of the Republican Party. We’ve gone beyond bad economic doctrine. We’ve even gone beyond selfishness and special interests. At this point we’re talking about a state of mind that takes positive glee in inflicting further suffering on the already miserable.
And later:
To fully appreciate what just went down, listen to the rhetoric conservatives often use to justify eliminating safety-net programs. It goes something…
jrosenhouse | July 11, 2013At the risk of turning this into the broccoli blog, HuffPo serves up an interesting companion piece to Tuesday's post. In the comments I remarked that no one is neutral about broccoli. You either love it or you hate it. Well, here come the geneticists to explain why that is:
Broccoli has certainly earned its healthful reputation as a superfood, yet its flavor remains more controversial. But why is it that some people simply can't stand the taste, while others love it?
The answer might partly come down to genetics, explains John E. Hayes, Ph.D., assistant professor of food science and…
jrosenhouse | July 10, 2013In logic, a conditional is an if-then statement. “If it rains, then I will go to the movies,” that's a conditional. The question is, how should we assign a truth value to such a statement? This is a question of some importance to mathematicians, since every theorem is ultimately an if-then statement.
In some situations it seems easy enough. If it actually rains and I do go to the movies, then we would say the statement is true. If it rains and I don't go to the movies then the statement was false. Simple! But what if it doesn't rain? You might be inclined to say that we just should…
jrosenhouse | July 9, 2013I'm all out of deep thoughts for the moment, so why not just have a look at this article about an attempt to engineer a better broccoli:
There it sits, a deep-green beauty at the farmers' market: that sweet, crisp nutritional dynamo we know as fresh local broccoli.
And then there’s this: a bitter, rubbery mass that's starting to turn yellow around the tips, all bumped and bruised from its long trip from the field to the supermarket.
Thomas Bjorkman, a plant scientist at Cornell University, examined the store-bought specimen like a diagnostician, unflinchingly but with a certain compassion.
“…
jrosenhouse | July 9, 2013Ever since Darwin, there has been one main argument against evolution. I am referring to the general feeling that things don't naturally get more complex over time. Evolution says that novel structures and functionalities can evolve through entirely natural means, but that is counter to intuition.
Richard Dawkins has quite properly mocked this as, “The argument from personal incredulity.” The evidence against evolution is that I find it hard to believe! Of course, expressed in that way even creationists can see the argument has little force. What they need, therefore, is a way of giving…
jrosenhouse | July 4, 2013Over at Amazon, paleontologist Donald Prothero has posted a review of Among the Creationists. (The review will eventually appear in Skeptic Magazine as well.) Prothero is a familiar name to people with an interest in this issue, since he is the author of the magnificient 2007 book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters, among many other books. So what did he think?
Rosenhouse's approach in this book is to recount vignettes and anecdotes of his experiences at various creationist conferences and venues, intermingled with his dispassionate and extremely lucid dissection of the…
jrosenhouse | July 3, 2013The percentage of Americans claiming no religious affiliation has been growing steadily over the last decade, and currently stands around twenty percent. This represents a significant weakening in the hold of organized religion on American culture. So, is this a good thing?
I say yes! Of course, claiming no religious affiliation does not necessarily make you an atheist, but that's okay. It's not really religion per se that bothers me, but organized religion. Disorganized religion seems a lot less pernicious. So I see this particular trend as an unambiguous good.
Unsurprisingly, though…
jrosenhouse | July 2, 2013Just in case you were wondering whether weekly news magazines still serve any purpose, the answer is no. Go read this epic post, from Hemant Mehta, documenting the perfidy of Joe Klein in a recent Time magazine cover story. Klein, if you are not familiar with him, has long been one of the hackiest of hack journalists. He pops up occasionally as a talking head on cable news shows, but he has never, not even by accident, said anything interesting or insightful during his appearances. Anyway, after reading Mehta's post, go read Dale McGowan's essay in the Washington Post.