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gregladen | July 16, 2016I just came across this and realized it was essential to tell you about it. Or, maybe, I'm the last person to learn of it.
Exploding Kittens: A Card Game About Kittens and Explosions and Sometimes Goats.
Apparently ...
Exploding Kittens is a card game for people who are into kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats.
In this highly-strategic, kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette, players draw cards until someone draws an Exploding Kitten, at which point they explode, they are dead, and they are out of the game -- unless that player has a Defuse card, which can defuse…
gregladen | July 13, 2016Manga is the Japanese sounding but not used so much in Japan term for a form of cartooning art that has its roots from before World War II but that emerged in its common form during the post war Occupation period. Early used in political cartooning, Manga style drawing is now used for a wide range of expression, and has a place in illustrating a wide range of products, read by Japanese citizens of all sorts and ages. Outside of Japan, Manga is the starting point for the wildly popular Anime style of expression, which of course brings us to...
Pokeman go
But, we are not here to talk about…
jrosenhouse | July 5, 2016I had a book deadline this past Friday. Making that deadline, which I did, thank you very much, has been all consuming for the past two weeks. And now I am on the road until July 16. So, the blog darkness will persist for a while.
Sorry about that...
gregladen | June 28, 2016Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau and Enrique Peña Nieto, have made a joint announcement. As reported by NPR:
President Obama and his counterparts from Canada and Mexico are preparing to unveil an ambitious new goal for generating carbon-free power when they meet this week in Ottawa.
The three leaders are expected to set a target for North America to get 50 percent of its electricity from nonpolluting sources by 2025. That's up from about 37 percent last year.
Aides acknowledge that's a "stretch goal," requiring commitments over and above what the three countries agreed to as part of the Paris…
gregladen | June 28, 2016In the US, it is time to start blowing stuff up and setting stuff on fire, because we are so patriotic!
Here is the science of sparklers, to keep it interesting:
gregladen | June 28, 2016Two related, but contrasting, items on Brexit.
The climate change connection to Brexit is unclear and mostly negative. It is simply true that we benefit from international unity when addressing a global problem, and the EU is a powerful forward looking entity that could address climate change more effectively than the collection of individual nations in the EU otherwise might. With the UK out of the EU, AGW may be somewhat harder to address.
Or, maybe not so much. The EU is still only one entity among several dozen, so having this small shift may not be that big of a deal.
But the Brexit-…
gregladen | June 27, 2016Television and movie producers currently have a good deal in Great Britain, not in small part due to stability in various markets and some funding. For example, Game of Thrones, an HBO production, is filmed in Norther Ireland with funding from the European Regional Development fund.
Both the stability and some of the funding for various productions is now at risk because of the Xenophobic whiny baby Leavers.
This may be on the smaller end of negative effects of the UK leaving the EU, but it is a microcosm of the bigger problem, and likely to get a disproportionate share of attention if The…
gregladen | June 24, 2016Yes, Finding Dory is right about this.
Having multiple hearts isn't as odd as it might seem. Although one might be advised to keep one's brain and one's heart, as well as one or two other organs, separate when making important decisions, a heart and a brain are metaphorical of each other in this regard. Nervous systems can exist and function without brains, but in many animals clumps of neurons known as ganglia concentrate neural function. The same sort of electric and chemical interactions occurring across a network of neurons can have more complex functions when the neurons are grouped…
gregladen | June 23, 2016This is one of four related posts:
Should You Install Ubuntu Linux?Installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTSHow to use Ubuntu UnityThings To Do After Installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Some Linux/Ubuntu related books:Ubuntu Unleashed 2016 Edition: Covering 15.10 and 16.04 (11th Edition)Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop: Applications and AdministrationThe Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction
Linux isn't for everyone, so I'm not going to try to talk you into using this superior operating system if you have some reason to not do so. But if you have a computer that runs Windows, it isn't that hard to install Ubuntu.…
gregladen | June 21, 2016This is bad news and good news, but mostly good news. No matter what you think of nuclear energy (and I'm one of those people who give it a stern look and remain suspicious), it does tend to produce electricity with the addition of much less fossil carbon into the atmosphere than, say, burning coal. So, we probably don't want to see a wholesale reduction in the use of nuclear energy too quickly, and we may even want to see some new plants built.
The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant is the only working nuke plant in California, and it is famously located in an earthquake-rich locality. The plant…
jrosenhouse | June 20, 2016In April I gave a presentation on the Monty Hall problem, at the Museum of Mathematics in New York. That talk has now appeared on YouTube. Here it is:
The talk is about fifty minutes, with twenty minutes of questions afterwards. There's also a short introduction by Jason Rosenfeld, who is a statistician with the National Basketball Association. I certainly won't hold it against you if you lack either the time or the interest to watch the whole thing, but you might enjoy the card trick I do starting at the ninth minute.
jrosenhouse | June 19, 2016Back to chess! My quest for the expert title continued at the Continental Class Championship in Herndon, Virginia this weekend. Full report to come.
While I was there, I played in the big Saturday night blitz tournament. Blitz chess is rated separately from regular chess, and with good reason! The time control was the traditional five minutes for the whole game, with no delay or increment. Going into the tournament, my blitz rating was an even 2000, but that was a provisional rating based on eighteen games. You need to play twenty before it becomes a real rating.
The blitz tournament is…
aardvarchaeology | June 16, 2016 Toby Martin 2015, The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England
Back around Christmas I reviewed the first three chapters of Toby Martin's big book about Anglo-Saxon cruciform brooches. Those are the technical chapters dealing with typology and chronology, and I loved them. They are rock solid. Now I've read the remaining four chapters that deal with the societal interpretation of the brooches. In the following I am going to use the author's given name because Martin is me.
I think Toby's investigations and interpretations here are excellent. I particularly like his painstaking study of how…
jrosenhouse | June 13, 2016Edward Feser thinks we atheists have overlooked a few things:
The mentality is summed up perfectly in the notorious “Atheist Bus Campaign” of 2009 and its preposterous slogan: “There's probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” As if atheism promised only sweetness and light. As if the vast majority of human beings would not find the implications of atheism -- that human existence has no purpose, that there is no postmortem reward to counterbalance the sufferings of this life, nor any hope for seeing dead loved ones again, etc. -- far more depressing than any purported…
jrosenhouse | June 12, 2016The latest issue of The Problemist showed up in my mailbox recently. It contained a very nice selfmate that I've chosen for this week's problem. This is one of those really clever ideas that I think you can only show once. The problem was composed Alexei Oganesyan, and was awarded this year. It calls for selfmate in nine:
Let me remind you that in a selfmate, white plays first and tries to force 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 mate. It's a complete inversion of normal chess logic…
gregladen | June 10, 2016Shawn Otto's The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It is a very important and excellent book, just released.
I have a review of it, but after going to the book launch the other day, decided to rewrite some bits. But I'm currently more nomadic than usual and this is not a good time to so such important work, so I'll not likely post the review until Monday.
But I wanted to let you know about the book.
jrosenhouse | June 9, 2016Speaking of the intellectual collapse of ID, its other major blog, the Discovery Institute's “Evolution News and Views” also seems to have fallen on hard times. How else to explain the presence of this article, by Steve Laufmann?
Laufmann addresses the question, “Is Intelligent Design Science?” He divides his answer into five parts. We shall come to them in a moment.
Now, as I discuss at some length in Among the Creationists questions about what is, and is not, science generally leave me cold. Lately there's been some hand-wringing among certain physicists about whether string theory and…
jrosenhouse | June 8, 2016At various times over the last few years I have declared ID to be dead. One of my reasons for saying that is the complete intellectual collapse of Uncommon Descent (UD).
When William Dembski started the blog, it was intended as an outpost for serious commentary on intelligent design and related topics. Not for them the standard creationist pyrotechnics, which had made anti-evolutionism a laughingstock among educated people. No, UD was going to show the world that anti-evolutionism did not have to be the domain of crazed religious demagogues, but could instead be defended rationally by…
jrosenhouse | June 7, 2016The inevitable has now occurred. Barring something earth-shattering, Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee for President. She is the first woman to become the nominee of a major political party. In fact, she is the first woman even to be a serious candidate for President.
In her speech tonight, Hillary took time out to make a gracious mention of Bernie Sanders and all that he has accomplished in his campaign. Her audience cheered. Bernie, for his part, made only a brief, classless mention of Hillary (making hey of the fact that it was she who called him). His audience booed…