jrosenhouse | November 29, 2006Okay, I'm back. Did I miss anything?
Other than the giant kerfuffle between Larry Moran and P.Z. Myers on the one hand and Ed Brayton and Pat Hayes et al, on the other, that is.
Things started with this post, from Moran, on the subject of a recent lecture by philosopher Robert Pennock at UCSD. Some pro-ID sites were claiming that all students were required to attend. Moran sarcastically suggested that rather than require students to attend an anti-
ID lecture by Robert Pennock, the better approach would have been not to admit pro-ID students in the first place.
Ed Brayton was not amused…
jrosenhouse | November 15, 2006I will be travelling for the next ten days or so. First up is the big Math Symposium at Western Kentucky University, this Friday. I will be delivering two scintallating, edge-of-your seats barn-burners, both aimed at undergraduates. One will be on primes in arithmetic progressions, the other will be on using Bayes' Theorem to illustrate the differences between the Monty Hall problem and the game show Deal or No Deal. Fun!
Then it's off to Illinois for a conference on Extremal Combinatorics. I'm not speaking at that one, but I will have a chance to see some of the big names in my subject…
jrosenhouse | November 15, 2006John Wilkins has offered this reply to my criticism of his earlier essay on the subject of agnosticism. Well worth reading, even though I sitll think he's wrong. He seems to think that in order to be justified in asserting “X does not exist” you must be able to prove that X, indeed, does not exist. This seems like the wrong standard to me.
Biochemist Larry Moran weighs in with these worthy senitments:
John, with all due respect, if you walk like an atheist and talk like an atheist then, to all intents and purposes, you're a practicing atheist, whether you want to admit it or not. You can…
jrosenhouse | November 13, 2006For the final installment of my Dawkins series, let's have a look at what my SciBling, John Wilkins has to say. In this post, Wilkins takes issue with Dawkins' discussion of agnosticism. Dawkins believes that agnosticism is unjustified fence-sitting. Wilkins thinks Dawkins is wrong.
I'm with Dawkins. Let's have a look at the details.
Wilkins quotes Dawkins as follows:
Philosophers cite this question as one that can never be answered, no matter what new evidence might one day become available. And some scientists and other intellectuals are convinced - too eagerly in my view - that the…
jrosenhouse | November 10, 2006I'm not in the mood for a long blog entry today, so allow me simply to echo Orac's thoughts on the debut of the trailer for Spider-Man 3. It does, indeed, appear that it will rock.
The feature villain this time around is Sandman. I always liked him in the comic books. As I recall, he shows up for the first time in issue four of The Amazing Spider-Man. Spider-Man defeated hm by sucking him up into a vacuum. I trust they will come up with something less hokey for the movie.
Of course, Sandman later had a run-in with Hydro Man. The two inadvertently got fused together to form a gigantic,…
jrosenhouse | November 9, 2006Philosopher Thomas Nagel reviewed Dawkins' book for The New Republic. Sadly, the review does not seem to be freely available online.
Nagel begins with the standard talking points about Dawkins working outside his field of expertise and about how contemptuous he is of religion. After a few hundred words of this, he gets down to business. He describes the argument from design, and then offers two objections commonly levelled at it. Let me briefly mention the second one:
Second, the designer and the manufacturer of a watch are human beings with bodies, using physical tools to mold and put…
jrosenhouse | November 8, 2006One of the main themes coming from the punditocracy in the wake of yesterday's election is that the Democrats are making a mistake if they think anyone likes them. This was strictly an anti-Bish result, apparently. If Demcrats start following those lunatic lefty impulses they're prone too, they'll quickly find the country rebelling against them. So much more important that they be bipartisan and centrist.
Mike the Mad Biologist and Firedoglake already have good discussions of this issue (available here and here respecitvely.)
I would only add to their analyses that precisely the same…
jrosenhouse | November 8, 2006Some initial reactions to the election results:
Last night's Democratic landslide is complete, 100%, unambiguous good news. P.Z. manages to see the cloud rather than the silver lining. Not me. Even the fact that I was grading papers during much of yesterday evening could not get the smile off my face.
Hillary Clinton won with 66% of the vote. As I recall, last time around she only received 54%. That's a huge gain, and it indicates she must have gotten a lot of votes in heavily Republican upstate New York. I've been skeptical of her chances of winning a national election in 2008. I…
jrosenhouse | November 7, 2006From TAPPED:
Our own Alec Oveis, who sadly left the Prospect few months ago, calls in from Connecticut, where he's volunteering on behalf of Chris Murphy (one of Tom's “Dropkick Murphys” positioned to defeat GOP incumbents this year). He reports that voter fury over robocalls is amazing and palpable at the polling site he's near. Several people have gone out of their way to tell him and other Murphy people that they're voting for Republican incumbent Nancy Johnson strictly out of anger at the harassing phone calls they've been receiving from the Murphy campaign. Alec and other's explanations…
jrosenhouse | November 6, 2006I'll return to my Dawkins series later in the week. But after all our exertions recently trying to resolve the mysteries of the universe, I find myself in the mood for a straight math post. So, inspired by some comments from this post, let's talk about perfect numbers.
A number is said to be perfect if it is equal to the sum of its proper, positive divisors. By “proper” divisor we mean a divisor not equal to the number itself. For example, the proper divisors of 20 are 1, 2, 4, 5 and 10. But since
1+2+4+5+10=22,
we see that 20 is not perfect.
On the other hand, the proper divisors of 28…
jrosenhouse | November 3, 2006My new essay for CISCOP's Creation and ID Watch site is now up. This time: Who Designed the Designer? There's a reason it's a classic!
jrosenhouse | November 3, 2006Speaking of grotesque misrepresentations of people's words, a few thoughts about the Kerry flap.
Here is what Kerry said to students at Pasadena City College:
You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.
The right-wingers were all over this, of course. Here's the elitist Kerry calling our troops stupid and uneducated. It is ridiculous that Kerry, a veteran himself, would actually think such a thing. But even if by some fluke he did think it, he would not…
jrosenhouse | November 3, 2006I have two more installments planned for my Dawkins series, but I think I will hold them over to next week. Instead we really must pause to consider the latest example of mind-boggling ID sleaziness.
The story begins with Tim McGrew, a philosopher at Western Michigan University. In the comments section to this blog entry, McGrew wrote the following:
Let me rephrase that: Myers has changed Wells's wording and then has the temerity to accuse Wells of misleading the reader at the very point where Myers himself has made the change in Wells's words.
Let me put that more bluntly: Myers is lying…
jrosenhouse | November 2, 2006Next up is Gregg Easterbrook's review of Dawkins. Overall the review was a pleasant surprise. Given Easterbrook's track record, I would have expected a barely coherent anti-Dawkins tirade. Actually the review is pretty thoughtful, and I agree with some of what he has to say.
But I also have a few disagreements. So let's get started:
Easterbrook begins with the obligatory description of the book's contents. He then agrees to some of the book's basic premises:
There's no doubt that all faiths contain their share of claptrap. There's no doubt religion has done the world considerable…
jrosenhouse | November 1, 2006Jim Holt wrote the review of The God Delusion for The New York Times. He is described as a regular contributor to the New Yorker and the The New York Times Magazine, and is apparently working on a book on the puzzle of existence. The review has a few good points to make, but mostly misses the boat.
Holt begins with this reasonable summary of Dawkins' book:
Dawkins's case against religion follows an outline that goes back to Bertrand Russell's classic 1927 essay “Why I Am Not a Christian.” First, discredit the traditional reasons for supposing that God exists. ("God" is here taken to denote…
jrosenhouse | October 31, 2006Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson wrote this lengthy review of The God Delusion for Harpers Magazine. She was unimpressed.
The review weighs in at 4599 words, but you'll find yourself almost a thousand words in before hitting anything substantive about Dawkins' book. Prior to that it's just a lot of snideness about how seriously Dawkins takes himself, about how he's preaching to the choir, and about what a crazed Darwinian fundamentalist he is. In this portion of the review, Robinson seems more interested in showing off how well she writes than in making actual points.…
jrosenhouse | October 30, 2006Physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote Nature's review of The God Delusion. The review itself is mixed: strong praise for parts of the book, exasperated criticism for others. But the following two paragraphs are what caught my eye:
Dawkins the preacher is less seductive. And make no mistake: this book is, for the most part, a well-referenced sermon. I just have no idea who the intended parishioners might be. In his preface, Dawkins claims he hopes to reach religious people who might have misgivings, either about the teachings of their faith or about the negative impact of religion in the modern…
jrosenhouse | October 30, 2006The reviews of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion are coming in, and they are mostly negative. That was predictable. Everyone knows, after all, that Dawkins is just one of those fanatical, frothing at the mouth atheists, who doesn't understand that religion is a beautiful and complex thing, despite the excesses of many of its practitioners. He's one of those silly people who believe logic and reason should be brought to bear on “The God Question,” despite the fact that sophisticated theologians gave up that approach long ago.
So I'm not surprised that the main reaction to Dawkins' book has…
jrosenhouse | October 27, 2006My cute little house looked a lot better before my meager possessions were strewn aimlessly across every flat surface. It didn't help that this was an unusually busy week at work. I did, however, manage to catch this spot-on essay from Michael Kinsley, at Slate. He writes:
Here in Washington, we're all competing to see who can be more po-faced about Mark Foley and the congressional pages. Who can deplore Foley's behavior the most? Democrats, sensing a deeply wounded Republican Party, are going in for the kill. It's the final evidence that the GOP is terminally corrupt: A congressman was…
jrosenhouse | October 23, 2006There's a big pile of bloggable items sitting on my desk, but they will have to wait. I will be moving in to my new house tomorrow! Very exciting.
We are also hosting an undergraduate mathematics research conference here at JMU this weekend, and I am organizing one of the sessions.
Which is my way of breaking the bad news that blogging will be sporadic at best for the remainder of the week. Sorry about that.