I finally created a Twitter account, mostly so that I could find out who keeps tweeting about my posts. The little Twitter counter under the title consistently has some pleasingly non-zero number in it, so I thought I should find out what people are saying. Alas, whenever I click on the little number, it just…

Tomorrow I’ll be leaving for sunny Baltimore, Maryland. Tuesday evening I will be speaking at Johns Hopkins about the mathematics of Sudoku. To judge from the advertisement, it looks like it will be quite the party! Since its spring break around here, on Wednesday I will leave Baltimore to head over to Washington D.C. for…

I had two big deadlines this Friday for various projects, and I am happy to report that I made both of them. That means I finally have time to take a breath, and write the post you have all been waiting for. What happened at the U. S. Amateur Team East chess tournament!? That’s right!…

I spent the last weekend in scenic Parsippany, NJ, participating in the annual chess extravaganza known as the U. S. Amateur Team East. As big a chess fan as I am, I am mostly retired from tournament play. It’s too hard and stressful! For the first time in a long while, however, I managed to…

I am slowly working my way through the anthology Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative, edited by Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur. The book includes an excellent essay by mathematician Timothy Gowers titled, “Vividness in Mathematics and Narrative.” It makes a point that has often bothered me about mathematical discourse. Gowers opens with…

Philosophers William Lane Craig and Alexander Rosenberg recently debated everyone’s favorite question: the existence of God. You can find the video here. The entire event is close to three hours long, and so I have not yet watched the whole thing. I watched the twenty-minute opening statements, and then did a bit of random sampling…

Sorry for another post that’s all about me, but I received a pleasant surprise today. The Association of American Publishers just gave out their annual PROSE awards. The awards recognize excellence in scholarly publishing in some forty categories. One of those categories is “Popular Science and Mathematics.” The winner in that category? None other than…

Writing in the academic journal Metascience, philosopher Stefan Blancke has reviewed Among the Creationists. Blancke is a postdoc in the Department of Philosophy at Ghent University in Belgium. Together with fellow philosophers Maarten Boudry and Johan Braeckman, is the author of an important paper calling into question some of the arguments made by the pro-evolution…

Here’s a charming story for your Friday afternoon: Be careful what you post on Reddit. It may just get you canned. Earlier this week, an Applebee’s waitress posted a photo on Reddit of a receipt from an alleged pastor who, instead of leaving the suggested 18 percent tip, wrote “I give God 10%, why should…

Writing in the online statistics magazine Significance, Angie Wade, of University College London, has posted a review of Taking Sudoku Seriously. That’s the book about the mathematics of Sudoku puzzles that I cowrote with my JMU colleague Laura Taalman, published by Oxford University Press, for those not in the know. Anyway, did Wade like the…

Remember that scene in A Fish Called Wanda, where Kevin Kline, talking to a British woman who has cornered him in rhetorical combat, says, with maximal sarcasm, “Oh, you British are soooooo superior.” That’s pretty much how I feel when I read essays written by agnostics. By all means make whatever arguments it amuses you…

One thing I noticed during the years I spent attending YEC conferences was the extent to which pseudointellectualism was an integral part of their culture. The leaders of the movement frequently behaved in ways reminiscent of how non-scientists imagine that scientists behave. This is definitely a point of commonality between YEC and ID. A recent…

I finally got around to seeing Lincoln yesterday. Great movie! Daniel Day-Lewis is as good as you’ve heard. James Spader probably deserved a supporting actor nomination for playing the leader of a group of three people dispatched by Lincoln to encourage, cajole, and openly bribe wavering Democratic representatives. (The Republicans were the good guys in…

Today we have cause to celebrate. I am breaking the months-long chess drought at this blog. You see, the future game of the year was just played in the big chess tournament at Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands, and I could not live with myself if I did not share it with you. Playing…

As part of their ongoing campaign to botch as many personnel decisions as possible, the Obama administration recently announced that the Reverend Louie Giglio, of Atlanta, would deliver the benediction at the forthcoming inaugural. They rescinded the invitation, however, when an anti-gay sermon preached by Giglio many years ago came to light. The administration should…