jrosenhouse | August 12, 2015I'm finally home again after all my recent travels. Back to back math conferences is fun, but also a bit stressful and tiring. While I was away, my extended family welcomed two new additions:
Meet William and Charlotte. Charlotte is the one with the white detailing. My brother and sister-in-law just adopted them from a local shelter. Actually, that picture looks a bit like a two-headed cat, so here's another one:
Looks like they've taken over the really important room.
The word is that William and Charlotte have settled in quickly to their new home and are getting along fine with…
jrosenhouse | July 29, 2015I'm writing this from my New Jersey office, which is to say that I am visiting the 'rents. But it's a very short visit. In fact, I'm mostly just using them for their garage. I'm stashing my car there for a few days while I go galavanting around to various math conferences, with a little vacation thrown in for good measure.
Tomorrow I'll be taking a train up to New York City. (Though it looks like riding NJ Transit is a bit risky these days.) A few days of vacation come first. Figure I'll catch a few shows, eat some good food (I might just have to stop by Katz's Deli at some point),…
jrosenhouse | July 21, 2015This is perfect:
The latest polls are out, and just as I predicted, I'm leading the Republican presidential race by a wide margin. You might be wondering how that could be. After all, it's hardly been a month since I entered the field and I've already alienated America’s largest immigrant population, seen dozens of my high-profile business deals implode one after the other, and publicly insulted a national hero’s military service, all while not offering a single viable policy idea. But none of that matters at all, and my candidacy continues to surge forward, because none of you—not a single…
jrosenhouse | July 20, 2015So, has anything been happening lately?
Well, the Supreme Court got a big one right. Marriage equality is now the law of the land, which is a very good thing. There will be pockets of resistance for a while to come, but mostly this news has been met with the yawn it deserves. Of course gay people should have their marriages recognized by the state. Most people have figured that out by now. You can find the text of the decision and the dissents here.
The legal argument seems pretty straightforward to me. Writing at The New Republic, Brian Beutler spells it out:
As both a moral and…
jrosenhouse | July 13, 2015I realize I've been away a little longer than usual, but I have a good excuse. I just spent the past week with my family at Beaches resort, on Turks and Caicos. You see, my father turned 80 this year, and we marked the occasion by schlepping the whole family down to the Caribbean.
My peeps! There's Mom, Dad, my older brother Neil, my niece Sonia and nephew Noah (age 8 and 10 respectively), and my sister-in-law Elana. I'm sure you can figure out who is who.
Actually, Dad and Elana got a little shortchanged in this one. So here's Noah trying to get Grandpa's attention:
And here's Dad,…
jrosenhouse | June 21, 2015This past week has mostly been devoted to working on my magnum opus about mathematical anti-evolutionism. That has meant lots of frustrating hours staring at the computer trying to make words appear, coupled with many more annoying hours wading through poorly written creationist pseudomath. But miracles do happen, since I actually finished a first draft tonight! Alas, it's currently eleven thousand words (not including bibliography and abstract) which is way too long for a journal article. (Maybe I can find some way to turn it into two articles!) Whole sections are going to need to be…
jrosenhouse | June 14, 2015This week we have very clever helpmate from Russian composer Viktor Chepizhny, that was published in the November 2014 issue of The Problemist magazine. The diagram below calls for helpmate in two. There are two solutions:
Recall that in a helpmate black moves first and cooperates with white to contrive a position in which black is checkmated in no more than the stipulated number of moves. Normal chess logic does not apply! To be clear, we are looking for a sequence of this form: black moves, white moves, black moves, white gives mate. You should keep in mind that white is moving up the…
jrosenhouse | June 11, 2015Lee McIntyre has a good article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is discussing the wholesale assault on truth in our culture:
To see how we treat the concept of truth these days, one might think we just don’t care anymore. Politicians pronounce that global warming is a hoax. An alarming number of middle-class parents have stopped giving their children routine vaccinations, on the basis of discredited research. Meanwhile many commentators in the media — and even some in our universities — have all but abandoned their responsibility to set the record straight. (It doesn’t help when…
jrosenhouse | June 9, 2015After publishing Among the Creationists back in 2011, I started to lose interest in the evolution/creationism issue. I felt like I said what I wanted to say (at least to the handful of people who read the book) and that it was time to move on to other things. Besides, ten years on ID does not seem to have recovered from the big Kitzmiller decision, and lots of people more qualified than I have the creationism beat covered.
Recently, though, I've gotten interested again. I've slowly been working on my magnum opus about mathematical anti-evolutionism, and I've been perusing the most recent…
jrosenhouse | May 31, 2015For the past two weeks we have looked at calm, sane direct mate problems. Good stuff, but it's time to mix it up a little. So this week we return to the crazy world of fairy chess. We shall consider a relatively new fairy condition called “Take and Make,” which has taken the problem world by storm over the last few years. I was a little skeptical at first, since it seemed a little too contrived to me, but I have gradually become a convert. There is a lot of room for intriguing themes with it.
Here's how it works. In Take and Make chess, when a unit of either color makes a capture, it…
jrosenhouse | May 30, 2015After writing yesterday's post, I found I was still muttering about Michael Ruse's paper. So I thought to myself, why should I just rant here at the blog? How about I get down to business and write a proper journal article about it?
Mentally I started doing just that. To my surprise, I found the article practically writing itself. I quickly had an outline of what I wanted to say, started composing paragraphs, and thought about various books and articles I would want to cite. I started to get excited. Figured I could toss it off in a week, and then get back to my various other unfinished…
jrosenhouse | May 29, 2015Philosopher Michael Ruse has an article in the current issue of the academic journal Zygon. It is called, “Why I Am an Accommodationist and Proud Of It.” In it, he proposes to defend the notion that science and religion are simply independent of one another, and therefore cannot really be in conflict.
The article is not freely available online, but I will transcribe a few bits as we go. It is nothing that Ruse hasn't been saying for years, however. The paper goes on for fourteen pages, but it is ultimately nothing more than God of the gaps stuff. There are certain questions that science…
jrosenhouse | May 28, 2015Jerry Coyne is is on tour for his new book Fact Versus Faith: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible. That title's a little vague. What do you suppose the book's about?
It turns out that he was making a stop in Washington DC. Since that's not so far from my digs in Harrisonburg, I decided to go. Then again, much as I love Jerry, DC is far enough so that I wouldn't make the drive just to see him. So I found someone to proctor the exam I was giving in my summer course, and decided to make a whole day of it.
Of course, since this is a post about Jerry Coyne, I feel honor bound to show…
jrosenhouse | May 24, 2015I'm a little pressed for time today, so for this week's chess problem I've selected one of those old-fashioned efforts whose only point is a shocking key move. The following position was composed by Sam Loyd in 1868 and calls for mate in two:
Of course, white's force is so overwhelming that were this a normal game he could quickly force checkmate in a few moves. However, there is only way to accomplish mate in two, and that is by starting with 1. Kc4!.
Boom! White unpins the black rook and exposes himself to checks. Even better, this is a waiting move. White threatens nothing, but…
jrosenhouse | May 24, 2015In less happy news, there is this:
John Forbes Nash Jr., a mathematical genius whose struggle with schizophrenia was chronicled in the 2001 movie “A Beautiful Mind,” has died along with his wife in a car crash on the New Jersey Turnpike. He was 86.
Nash and Alicia Nash, 82, of Princeton Township, were killed in a taxi crash Saturday, state police said. A colleague who had received an award with Nash in Norway earlier in the week said they had just flown home and the couple had taken a cab home from the airport.
Nash won the Nobel prize in economics for his work on game theory, but he also…
jrosenhouse | May 24, 2015A large majority of voters have approved gay marriage:
Ireland's citizens have voted in a landslide to legalize gay marriage, electoral officials announced Saturday--a stunningly lopsided result that illustrates what Catholic leaders and rights activists alike called a “social revolution.”
Friday's referendum saw 62.1 percent of Irish voters say “yes” to changing the nation's constitution to define marriage as a union between two people regardless of their sex. Outside Dublin Castle, watching the results announcement in its cobblestoned courtyard, thousands of gay rights activists cheered,…
jrosenhouse | May 17, 2015This week we have a straightforward direct mate problem for you. It was composed by Raffi Rupin in 1961, and calls for mate in four:
A quick look at the diagram shows that white has three potential mates that almost work: Ra3, Nc5, Ra7. Currently, though, none of these work. The rook on b3 is pinned by the black bishop on g8, and therefore cannot move. The c5 square is covered by one of the black rooks, while the a7 square is covered by the other.
So, black currently has everything covered. But he's stretched pretty thin, meaning that white may be able to contrive a decoy.
The key move…
jrosenhouse | May 11, 2015Philosopher Graham Oppy, whose book Arguing About Gods is well worth reading, has written an interesting survey of work by atheist philosophers over the last sixty years. Here's a taste:
The last sixty years have been a very fertile period for academic atheist philosopher critiques of theistic arguments. Among large-scale works that have attempted to establish that theistic arguments are unsuccessful—i.e. not such as ought to persuade non-believers to change their minds—we should certainly mention: The Existence of God (Wallace Matson, 1967), The Miracle of Theism (John Mackie, 1982),…
jrosenhouse | May 10, 2015I have been shamefully derelict in my Sunday Chess Problem responsibilities. But that ends now! To get us back into the swing of things, I have selected one of my own. The following diagram calls for selfmate in five:
This was published in the June 1992 issue of the British Chess Magazine. It later received a commendation in the tourney award.
Recall that in a selfmate, white moves first and forces black to give checkmate in no more than the stipulated number of moves. Black, for his part, does everything in his power to avoid giving checkmate. It's a complete inversion of normal chess…
jrosenhouse | April 27, 2015It's been very hectic around here recently. In addition to the usual end of semester craziness, there's been one thing after another to fill my time. The book I've been editing forever had a major deadline last Monday, which pretty well killed that weekend. This past weekend was occupied by the MAA section meeting in Roanoke, VA, which I decided fairly last minute to attend.
Of course, it hasn't been all stress and hard work. My birthday was yesterday (I'm 42!), and since yesterday was also the day of the semester-ending math department picnic, everyone sang me happy birthday. But…