information theory:
Both in comments, and via email, I've received numerous requests to take a look at the work of Dembski and Marks, published through Professor Marks's website. The site is called the "Evolutionary Informatics Laboratory". Before getting to the paper,...
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Posted on September 17, 2007 9:00 AM • 178 Comments •
While reading Mandelbrot's text on fractals, I found something that surprised me: a relationship between Shannon's information theory and fractals. Thinking about it a bit, it's not really that suprising; in fact, it's more surprising that I've managed to...
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Posted on July 27, 2007 2:31 PM • 44 Comments •
Multiple people have written to me, after seeing yesterday's algorithms basics post, asking me to say more about sorting algorithms. I have to say that it's not my favorite topic - sorting is one of those old bugaboos that...
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Posted on February 28, 2007 3:30 PM • 51 Comments •
I haven't taken a look at Uncommon Descent in a while; seeing the same nonsense get endlessly rehashed, seeing anyone who dares to express disagreement with the moderators get banned, well, it gets old. But then... Last week, DaveScott...
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Posted on February 5, 2007 11:30 AM • 56 Comments •
Being a Nice Jewish BoyTM, Christmas is one of the most boring days of the entire year. So yesterday, I was sitting with my laptop, looking for something interesting to read. I try to regularly read the Panda's Thumb, but...
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Posted on December 26, 2006 12:38 PM • 13 Comments •
Ω is my own personal favorite transcendental number. Ω isn't really a specific number, but rather a family of related numbers with bizzare properties. It's the one real transcendental number that I know of that comes from the theory of...
Posted on August 7, 2006 9:00 AM • 54 Comments •
I received an email from someone with some questions about information theory; they relate to some sufficiently common questions/misunderstandings of information theory that I thought it was worth turning the answer into a post. There are two parts here: my...
Posted on August 6, 2006 12:39 PM • 32 Comments •
While taking a break from some puzzling debugging, I decided to hit one of my favorite comedy sites, Answers in Genesis. I can pretty much always find something sufficiently stupid to amuse me on their site. Today, I came across...
Posted on July 31, 2006 4:03 PM • 77 Comments •
I've been taking a look at William Dembski's paper, "Information as a Measure of Variation". It was recommended to me as a paper demonstrating Demsbki's skill as a mathematician that isn't aimed at evolution-bashing. I'm not going to go into...
Posted on July 27, 2006 11:50 AM • 8 Comments •
Back when I first started this blog on blogspot, one of the first things I did was write an introduction to information theory. It's not super deep, but it was a decent overview - enough, I thought, to give people a good idea of what it's about, and to help understand why the common citations of it are almost always misusing its terms to create bizzare conclusions, like some ["law of conservation of information",][conservation]
[conservation]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_conservation_of_information "wikipedia on Dembski's law of CoI"
This is a slight revision of that introduction. For the most part, I'm just going to clean up the formatting, but once I'm going through it, I'll probably end up doing some other polishing.
Posted on June 24, 2006 5:06 PM • 28 Comments •
I was recently sent a link to yet another of Dembski's wretched writings about specified complexity, titled Specification: The Pattern The Signifies Intelligence. While reading this, I came across a statement that actually changes my opinion of Dembski. Before reading...
Posted on June 16, 2006 12:54 PM • 56 Comments •
As I mentioned yesterday, I'm going to repost a few of my critiques of the bad math of the IDists, so that they'll be here at ScienceBlogs. Here's the first: Behe and irreducibly complexity. This isn't quite the original...
Posted on June 13, 2006 10:50 AM • 80 Comments •
