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I’ve Always Liked New Orleans
Posted by jrosenhouse on December 21, 2012 This is encouraging: The Orleans Parish School Board, which controls the curriculum and policies for six schools in New Orleans, voted Tuesday to ban the teaching of creationism as science and a “revisionist” history course touted in Texas. Although none of these six New Orleans schools currently teaches creationism or “intelligent design,” outgoing Orleans Parish…
Responses to Newtown
Posted by jrosenhouse on December 20, 2012 I don’t have anything in particular to say in response to the massacre in Newtown, CT. The usual folks are making the usual arguments, of course. Many are suggesting that teachers and principals should be packing heat. Unless you’re going to make combat training part of teacher certification, that sounds like a bad idea. Having…
Coyne vs. Nelson
Posted by jrosenhouse on December 19, 2012 Jerry Coyne has an interesting post up reporting on an e-mail he received from Paul Nelson. Nelson is a prominent young-Earth creationist, though he also circulates freely among the ID folks. Nelson, annoyed by Coyne’s emphasis on the importance of natural selection in evolution, sent Coyne an e-mail, part of which I now reproduce: Skepticism…
The More Things Change … Part Two
Posted by jrosenhouse on December 11, 2012 I am happy to report that my back is doing much better now. Not quite good as new yet, but rapidly getting there. In this previous post I mentioned that spending a lot of time flat on your back does allow you to get a lot of reading done. Lately I’ve been having a go…
A Reply to Robert Asher
Posted by jrosenhouse on November 29, 2012 Back in February, paleontologist Robert Asher wrote this essay for HuffPo. The essay was called, “Why I am an Accommodationist,” and it defended the compatibility of science and religion. As regular readers of this blog are aware, I don’t much care for that view. So I wrote this reply. After a long break, Asher has…
Reviews of Three Books on the Evolution of Evolution
Posted by jrosenhouse on November 28, 2012 The current issue of e-Skeptic features three book reviews I recently wrote, discussing books related to the evolution of evolution. The three books were Darwin’s Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution, by Rebecca Stott; Darwin the Writer, by George Levine; and American Genesis: The Evolution Controversies from Scopes to Creation Science, by Jeffrey Moran. I…
The More Things Change…
Posted by jrosenhouse on November 26, 2012 One benefit of spending a lot of time lying down waiting patiently for your back to feel better is that you get a lot of reading done. I just polished off the novel Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1920. (Short review: Enjoyable, but not as good as Elmer Gantry.) Anyway, the main story…
Regular Blogging Will Resume … Eventually
Posted by jrosenhouse on November 20, 2012 Sorry for the longer than usual blog hiatus. Get your violins ready, but I am currently suffering through one of my periodical bouts of lower back pain, which makes it very painful to sit up for more than a few minutes at a time. The last two weeks or so have been spent remaining vertical…
Edis on Among the Creationists
Posted by jrosenhouse on November 1, 2012 The Reports of the National Center for Science Education has just posted a new review of my book Among the Creationists. The reviewer is Taner Edis, professor of physics at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri. Since Edis’s own books on science and religion, The Ghost in the Machine and Science and Nonbelief are among…
Hating on Nate Silver
Posted by jrosenhouse on October 31, 2012 I recently heard a pollster remark, “When you give conservatives bad polling data, they want to kill you. When you give liberals bad polling data, they want to kill themselves.” That attitude has been well on display recently in the right-wing freak out over Nate Silver’s website. Silver currently gives Obama a 72.9 percent chance…
Romney on FEMA
Posted by jrosenhouse on October 30, 2012 Here’s Mitt Romney, from one of the Republican primary debates (moderated by John King of CNN): KING: You’ve been a chief executive of a state. I was just in Joplin, Missouri. I’ve been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with whether it’s the tornadoes, the flooding, and worse. FEMA is about…
More Politics
Posted by jrosenhouse on October 24, 2012 So, I saw Paranormal Activity 4 on Monday night. Short review: Pretty disappointing, but I’ll still go to Paranormal Activity 5 on opening night. I am happy to report, however, that my skills as a political prognosticator took a big hit from the debate. You see, one reason I was especially unenthusiastic about watching the…
Politics and Stuff
Posted by jrosenhouse on October 21, 2012 You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been blogging much lately. That’s partly because this is an especially busy time of the semester. Try grading a thousand midterm exam problems in a few days and see how many brain cells you have left over for blogging. Mostly, though, it’s my general unhappiness with the way the…
Great. It Just Had To Be An Atheist Math Professor.
Posted by jrosenhouse on October 3, 2012 Here’s a charming story: A math professor at Michigan State University allegedly stripped naked, ran naked through his classroom and screamed “There is no f*cking God!” before police apprehended him, according to several reports. The professor’s name has not yet been released, but online, students said he was “eccentric,” and that they “could probably have…
Do Mathematical Objects Exist?
Posted by jrosenhouse on October 2, 2012 I am slowly working on an article for Skeptical Inquirer about the ways in which religious apologists use mathematical arguments in their rhetoric. Among these arguments are the familiar creationist claims about probability and information theory, but there is also a family of arguments based on the effectiveness of mathematics itself. The basic argument is…