Adam Laats is an assistant professor of education and history at SUNY Binghamton, and he is the author of Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes Era: God, Darwin, and the Roots of America’s Culture Wars. Over at his blog, he has posted a review of Among the Creationists. So, what did he think? Rosenhouse’s book…

I was in Kentucky for most of last week, visiting friends. I ended up in Bowling Green, stopping along the way in Morehead and in Loveland, OH (near Cincinnati). My friends in Bowling Green took me to Mammoth Cave National Park, which is really quite spectacular. All in all, an enjoyable trip. I’ll be hitting…

I’ve been a Stephen King fan for a long time, so you can imagine my excitement at the fact that he has two books in the queue over the next few months. His novel Joyland will be available next week, while his Shining sequel, Doctor Sleep comes out in September. I’ll be reading both of…

A while back P. Z. Myers wrote a snotty, obnoxious post about how much he hated the big Les Miz movie. Now, I happen to be a bit protective of Les Miserables. I regard the original novel as the finest ever written, and I think the stage version of the musical does a good job…

A while back I engaged in an exchange of blog posts with paleontologist Robert Asher. It started with an essay Asher wrote for HuffPo, extolling the virtues of reconciling science and religion. I felt his arguments were insufficient, and said so in this post. Asher eventually replied. I felt his arguments were still insufficient, so…

A while back I did a post about counterintuitive math problems. However, I deliberately held one back, since I was using it as my Problem of the Week for that week. So here it is: Suppose a steel beam, one mile long, is fastened securely to the ground at each end. As the day heats…

Number theory is chock-full of easily stated problems that are very difficult to solve. One such is the twin primes conjecture, which asserts simply that there are infinitely many twin primes. I’ll assume you know what a prime number is. Twin primes are primes that differ by exactly two, such as 3 and 5, 5…

Pope Francis said some interesting things at mass yesterday. From the Vatican Radio website: Wednesday’s Gospel speaks to us about the disciples who prevented a person from outside their group from doing good. “They complain,” the Pope said in his homily, because they say, “If he is not one of us, he cannot do good.…

Eric Hedin, an assistant professor of physics at Ball State University, has come under fire for an honors course called, “Boundaries of Science.” The problem: the course appears to be little more than thinly veiled Christian evangelism. From The USA Today: “BSU appears to offer a class that preaches religion, yet gives students honors science…

Nate Silver provides the antidote to some dubious statistical reasoning on the part of certain conservatives. He was replying in particular to this column from Peggy Noonan. A column, mind you, that opens with, “We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate.” Goodness! Then she presents evidence like this: The second…

Since I always have time to let you know about developments in my life, I feel compelled to mention that today is my fortieth birthday. I’m even happier, though, that today is the last day of classes (not counting finals, of course).

Here’s an interesting interview with Susan Jacoby on the subject of atheism. I don’t agree with all of her points, but it’s worth reading the whole thing. Here’s an interesting excerpt: Certainly one of the first things I thought about as a maturing child was “Why is there polio? Why are there diseases?” If there…

Today’s reading is from Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, published in 1943. Okay, just calm down. Yes, I know, she was crazy. She took some good ideas about freedom and indviduality and took them to absurd degrees. In her novels, characters say things to each other that no human beings have ever said to one…

I’ll be disappearing into my little hidey hole for the next week or so, as I try to get past a few deadlines. One of those deadlines is coming this Friday, when I will be giving the banquet talk at the MAA Section Meeting, at Salisbury University in Salisbury, MD. Goodness! That’s a long drive.…

I had not intended for this to be such a chess heavy week, but here’s a brief, but informative, essay on the history of the design of chess pieces: Prior to 1849, there was no such thing as a “normal chess set.” At least not like we think of it today. Over the centuries that…