July 16, 2013
I went through an Orson Scott Card phase while I was in graduate school. I started with his most famous novel, Ender's Game, which I enjoyed immensely. I then proceeded, over the next year or so, to read all of the novels he had written to that point.
At that time I didn't know anything about Card…
July 16, 2013
This poor guy!
A 35-year-old Israeli man was rushed to the hospital on Friday after a snake suddenly emerged from the toilet he was sitting on and bit the man's penis.
The injured man told emergency workers that he noticed a strong burning sensation as he was using the toilet in his parents' home…
July 15, 2013
Paul Krugman tells you what you need to know about the vote by House Republicans to drop the food stamp program from the Farm Bill:
Something terrible has happened to the soul of the Republican Party. We’ve gone beyond bad economic doctrine. We’ve even gone beyond selfishness and special interests…
July 11, 2013
At the risk of turning this into the broccoli blog, HuffPo serves up an interesting companion piece to Tuesday's post. In the comments I remarked that no one is neutral about broccoli. You either love it or you hate it. Well, here come the geneticists to explain why that is:
Broccoli has…
July 10, 2013
In logic, a conditional is an if-then statement. “If it rains, then I will go to the movies,” that's a conditional. The question is, how should we assign a truth value to such a statement? This is a question of some importance to mathematicians, since every theorem is ultimately an if-then…
July 9, 2013
I'm all out of deep thoughts for the moment, so why not just have a look at this article about an attempt to engineer a better broccoli:
There it sits, a deep-green beauty at the farmers' market: that sweet, crisp nutritional dynamo we know as fresh local broccoli.
And then there’s this: a bitter…
July 9, 2013
Ever since Darwin, there has been one main argument against evolution. I am referring to the general feeling that things don't naturally get more complex over time. Evolution says that novel structures and functionalities can evolve through entirely natural means, but that is counter to intuition…
July 4, 2013
Over at Amazon, paleontologist Donald Prothero has posted a review of Among the Creationists. (The review will eventually appear in Skeptic Magazine as well.) Prothero is a familiar name to people with an interest in this issue, since he is the author of the magnificient 2007 book Evolution: What…
July 3, 2013
The percentage of Americans claiming no religious affiliation has been growing steadily over the last decade, and currently stands around twenty percent. This represents a significant weakening in the hold of organized religion on American culture. So, is this a good thing?
I say yes! Of course…
July 2, 2013
Just in case you were wondering whether weekly news magazines still serve any purpose, the answer is no. Go read this epic post, from Hemant Mehta, documenting the perfidy of Joe Klein in a recent Time magazine cover story. Klein, if you are not familiar with him, has long been one of the…
July 2, 2013
Morgan Freeman is one of those actors who is always good, even if the movie is bad. Most recently I saw him in in Now You See Me, which I enjoyed, despite its preposterous story. He is also a big science booster. He hosts the show Through the Wormhole on the Science Channel. So, all in all, I'm…
July 1, 2013
The liar paradox is the statement:
“This sentence is false.”
Let us refer to this sentence simply as L. The paradox comes when we try to assign a truth value to L. Is it true or is it false? If we declare it to be true, then what it says must actually be the case. But it says that it is false…
June 11, 2013
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…
June 10, 2013
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…
May 30, 2013
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 them, of…
May 29, 2013
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 of capturing the…
May 29, 2013
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…
May 24, 2013
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 up, the metal…
May 23, 2013
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…
May 22, 2013
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…
May 21, 2013
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…
May 20, 2013
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!…
April 26, 2013
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).
April 18, 2013
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…
April 16, 2013
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…
April 10, 2013
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…
April 5, 2013
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 chess had been played…
April 4, 2013
Just a quick post today, so have a look at this essay by Alex Beresow, over at Real Clear Science. He is advocating for chess to be a required subject in schools:
In the above video, the math/chess teacher says, “Chess trains logical thinking. It teaches how to make decisions, trains memory,…
April 3, 2013
It would be a serious dereliction of my bloggily duties if I did not comment on the big Candidates Tournament, recently concluded in London.
My comment is this: Wowee wow wow! What a great tournament!
This was the tournament meant to determine the next challenger for the current World Chess…
April 2, 2013
Via Massimo Pigliucci, I just read Gary Gutting's defense of his Catholic faith. Here's the opening:
An old friend and mentor of mine, Ernan McMullin, was a philosopher of science widely respected in his discipline. He was also a Catholic priest. I don’t know how many times fellow philosophers…
