June 20, 2011
We mathematician types like solving polynomial equations. The simplest such equations are the linear ones, meaning that the variable appears to the exponent one. They have the general form:
\[
ax+b=0.
\]
If you remember anything at all from your basic algebra classes, then you know that this is…
June 17, 2011
I spend a lot of my free time reading, one result of which is a long list of rhetorical pet peeves. Little phrases and expressions that, for me at least, immediately make the writer look like an amateur.
Starting a sentence with “Uhm” or “Hmmmm,” for example. This is an especially common one…
June 15, 2011
Chris Mooney has has a new article in The American Prospect about the Republican war on expertise. There are a lot of interesting nuggets, but Chris somehow manages to avoid making the really obvious point.
First, let's set the tone:
Increasingly, the parties are divided over expertise--with…
June 14, 2011
Some encouraging news:
Baptisms in the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant denomination, have dipped to their lowest point in 60 years, according to a new report.
Last year, there were 332,321 baptisms in the church, which is 17,416 less than 2009, according to the report…
June 14, 2011
Over at The American Prospect, Paul Waldman has a helpful rundown of the views of the Republican Presidential candidates on religion. Here's a sample:
But if you're a Republican voter looking for the most devout candidate, you've got yourself an embarrassment of riches. There's Tim Pawlenty, who…
June 7, 2011
We New Atheist types are used to having hyperbolic claims leveled against us. A while back author Ron Rosenbaum, writing at Slate, wrote “And some of them [the New Atheists] can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor…
June 3, 2011
So, I went to the midnight show of the new X-Men movie yesterday. Short review: Wowee wow wow! What a great movie! Best comic book movie in quite a while, and since there have been several good ones that's really saying something. Longer review below the fold. Only minor spoilers ahead, but if…
June 2, 2011
That's the title of a new paper from Elaine Ecklund and Elizabeth Long, published in the academic journal Sociology of Religion. I'm playing catch-up here, since other bloggers have already discussed this paper, but why should they have all the fun?
But first, a story. Many years ago, when I was…
May 31, 2011
Truly there is no end to the vapid inanity the HuffPo Religion section will post. Our latest example comes from David Lose, in an essay titled, “Has Atheism Become a Religion?” Want to take bets on whether the answer is “No”?
I don't recall who first said it, but it has been wisely noted that if…
May 25, 2011
It hasn't been the best week for Israel. President Obama gives a perfectly sensible speech saying publicly what everyone already knows, and the vile right-wing noise-machine presents it as “throwing Israel under the bus.” As Jeffrey Goldberg explains, Netanyahu seems hell-bent on a course that…
May 23, 2011
Jerry Coyne calls our attention to this abstract, from a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
We show how to measure the failure of the Whitney move in dimension 4 by constructing higher-order intersection invariants of Whitney towers built from iterated Whitney disks…
May 23, 2011
The BECB, that is. (That's the big evolution/creationism book, for those not up on the local slang.) Many years ago, my thesis adviser, exasperated that I was “putting the finishing touches” on my thesis for about two straight months, told me heatedly that at some point you have to stop revising…
May 16, 2011
Update, May 17, 2:35 pm: Many thanks to Jerry Coyne for clearing up the question of Richard Dawkins's views on human inevitability in evolution. As I thought, Dawkins does not hold the view Ruse attributed to him. Coyne has Dawkins's response to Ruse's piece, so follow the link and go have a…
May 13, 2011
Animals With Stuffed Animals. The name says it all.
May 9, 2011
In last week's post we discussed perfect numbers. These were numbers, like 6, 28 and 496, that are equal to the sums of their proper divisors. We referred to Euler's formula, which claims that every even perfect number has the form
\[
2^{p-1} \left(2^p-1 \right),
\]
where the term in parentheses…
May 7, 2011
Except for the part about getting up early on a Saturday, I've always kind of liked graduation. Quite a few of our graduating majors have had several courses with me, so it was nice to be able to congratulate them and meet their families. And since our stadium here is currently under construction…
May 6, 2011
Time for a quick quiz. Who here finished all his grading today and, with the exception of scraping his carcass out of bed tomorrow morning to go to graduation, has now officially started his summer break? If you answered me, you're right! So let's get caught up on some blogging.
We start on a…
May 2, 2011
In last week's post, we discussed Mersenne primes. These were primes of the form:
\[
2^p-1, \phantom{x} \textrm{where} \phantom{x} p \phantom{x} \textrm{is prime.}
\]
I mentioned that such primes are relevant to the problem of finding perfect numbers. So how about we flesh that out?
Let's define…
May 1, 2011
Writing in The New York Times, Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari bring some blessed common sense to the subject of teacher salaries:
WHEN we don't get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don't blame the soldiers. We don't say, “It's these lazy soldiers and their bloated…
April 29, 2011
Today is the last day of classes around here, meaning that I am just too darn happy to work up the righteous indignation needed for a proper blog post. So your homework is to go read this excellent essay from Russell Blackford. It is mostly directed at the recent chest-thumping of Michael Ruse,…
April 26, 2011
Over at The New Republic, Georgetown University history professor Michael Kazin writes:
No group in American politics gets more respect than independent voters. Pundits and reporters probe what these allegedly moderate citizens think about this issue and that candidate, major party strategists…
April 25, 2011
Like all moderately curious people, I'm sure you've often wondered whether it's possible for
\[
N=a^k-1
\]
to be a prime number, where a and k are positive integers. Well, I'm here to answer that for you!
To avoid trivial cases, we shall assume that k is at least two. Of course, I'm sure we all…
April 23, 2011
I'm sure I don't need to tell you this, but the U. S. Chess Championship is currently going on in St. Louis. I have been dutifully following the games online, of course.
It is one of the great cruelties of chess that forty perfect moves can be undone by one moment of carelessness. We amateur…
April 22, 2011
Update: Saturday, 2:48 am. The original version of this post contained an unkind remark directed towards Josh Rosenau. My intention was facetious hyperbole, but upon further reflection I've decided that my remark is too easily misunderstood as personally acrimonious. For that reason I have…
April 21, 2011
As soon as I am done teaching this afternoon I will hop into the Jason-mobile and sally forth to scenic Roanoke, Virginia. I will be giving my Monty Hall talk at Roanoke College this evening at 7:00. If anyone reading this is familiar with the campus, I will be speaking in Massengill Auditorium…
April 19, 2011
Given all the semi-coherent venom coming from people like Michael Ruse and Jacques Berlinerblau lately, I'd say the Chronicle of Higher Education is lucky to have David Barash in its stable of bloggers. This recent post is a most welcome affirmation:
Two decades ago, I wrote a book proposal for a…
April 18, 2011
Prior to my journey to the University of Maryland last week, I mentioned to my classes that I would be seeing Richard Dawkins speak. On a whim, I asked how many of them had heard of Dawkins. I have about sixty students in three courses this term. The number who raised their hands? Six.…
April 18, 2011
The Guardian has an interesting dialogue between Sam Harris and Robert Winston on the subject of science and faith. I have some problems with both gentlemen, but, surprise!, I have bigger problems with Winston. Let's consider some excerpts. Harris first:
Religious language is, without question…
April 8, 2011
Having had so much fun during my last sojourn to the University of Maryland, I decided to repeat the experience this past Wednesday. Richard Dawkins was speaking, you see.
Here he is on stage during the introductions:
I attended with Douglas Gill and Clinton Jenkins, both of the University of…
April 5, 2011
Time to lighten the mood around here. So how many of these are you doing wrong?
