April 4, 2011
Let's get clear on one thing. Terry Jones, the delightful Florida pastor who burned the Koran the other day, thereby setting in motion a sequence of events that has led to several days of violence and bloodshed, is a bigot, and a jerk, and many other unsavory things. But if he is made to suffer…
April 3, 2011
CNN's Fareed Zakaria has by far the most intelligent take that I've seen on the Quran burning by pastor Terry Jones of Florida:
Let's talk for a moment about the Quran burning in Florida and it's consequences. Most Americans are repulsed by the offensive actions of Pastor Terry Jones, a publicity-…
March 30, 2011
As a professional mathematician I get to visit a lot of scenic tourist destinations. Like Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania! I'll be giving a colloquium talk to the math dept. at Slippery Rock University tomorrow afternoon. The topic? The Monty Hall problem. Surprise!
See ya when I get back.
March 30, 2011
My number theory course has recently moved on to things that are a bit more technical and esoteric than our earlier fare, so I haven't felt they would make good blog fodder. If you need a quick math fix (and who doesn't?), you can have a look at this guest post I wrote for the Oxford University…
March 29, 2011
Having communicated for so long by blog and e-mail, it was a pleasure to finally meet Jerry Coyne in person last night. He was speaking at the University of Maryland. It was not the easiest trip in the world. Driving was out of the question since it would have involved braving the Beltway near…
March 29, 2011
The Bronx Zoo has misplaced one of its cobras:
Lookout, New York -- a poisonous cobra snake may be on the loose today from the Bronx Zoo.
In a statement released Saturday, the Bronx Zoo said that their reptile house was closed after a staff member noticed that an adolescent Egyptian cobra was…
March 28, 2011
I get it that some people do not like the New Atheists. But surely when you're writing things like this:
And this is why I think the New Atheists are a disaster, a danger to the wellbeing of America comparable to the Tea Party.
you have simply placed yourself outside the community of people who…
March 26, 2011
Well, here's a happy development. It seems that today is Richard Dawkins' seventieth birthday. So happy birthday and best wishes for many more!
March 24, 2011
Permit me an amusing juxtaposition.
Here's Mira Sucharov, a political scientist at Carleton University in Canada, explaining why atheists and religious folks often talk past each other:
Put simply, believers are asking the question, “Can a commitment to contemplating the sacred help us better…
March 17, 2011
Here's an interesting item from HuffPo. The following appeared as an essay question on the SAT:
Reality television programs, which feature real people engaged in real activities rather than professional actors performing scripted scenes, are increasingly popular. These shows depict ordinary…
March 16, 2011
My last post has provoked a few replies. Especially the part about the problem of evil.
In my review of the new book by Giberson and Collins I was critical of their treatment of the problem. Michael Ruse, always classy, opens his response thusly:
Given that they are both committed Christians,…
March 10, 2011
Francis Collins and Karl Giberson have a new book out called The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions, published by InterVarsity Press. It is yet another defense of theistic evolution.
I'm always a bit conflicted when I write about this topic. On the one hand I do…
March 7, 2011
The BECB, that is. That's the big evolution/creation book, for those not up on the local slang. Finished the first draft last night. Very cool.
On the other hand, looks like I just lost my excuse for sporadic blogging...
February 28, 2011
The big number theory course has moved on to modular arithmetic, which means we have been discussing Fermat's Little Theorem. Personally I've always thought that name is just adorable. As it happens, I already did a post on this topic. But since that post is close to a year old, and since I did…
February 27, 2011
I am arriving very late to the party on this one, but I would like to reply to one portion of this post from Jean Kazez. She writes:
Likewise, I don't see much point in discussing religion/science incompatibility in the public square. We can all agree on very plain and simple things--if science…
February 25, 2011
If you can forgive another chess post, the current issue of The New York Review of Books has a review, by Gary Kasparov, of a new biography of Bobby Fischer. The chessplayers among you won't find much you didn't already know, but the essay is well done nonetheless. Go have a look:
It would be…
February 23, 2011
The US Amateur Team East is one of the biggest and most exciting chess tournaments on the calendar. The comraderie of playing as part of a team, coupled with the complete absence of cash prizes, makes for a generally mellow experience. Having not played in a year I was a bit worried about…
February 18, 2011
I will be spending the next few days in sunny Parsippany, NJ, participating in the annual chess extravaganza known as the World Amateur Team Chess Championship. I'm mostly retired from tournament play these days, too stressful, but I always poke up my head to push the wood at this one. I get to…
February 14, 2011
Sociologist Phil Zuckerman of Pitzer College has been a hero of mine ever since he published (in 2008) an excellent book called Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment. He studied Sweden and Denmark, where atheists predominate, and showed rather…
February 14, 2011
The big number theory class has moved on to prime factorizations and the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. As it happens, though, I've already done a post on that subject.
Looking back at what I wrote then I see that I left out one important detail. I asserted without proof (though I did provide…
February 9, 2011
I'll bet someone out there can help me with a technical question. I need to embed a chess diagram into a LaTeX document. It's for the evolution/creation book (don't ask). I know there are a variety of packages available for doing that, but I'm having trouble finding anything very helpful on the…
February 9, 2011
This is clearly the result of my earlier blog post.
Our customers have told us they want real page numbers that match the page numbers in print books so they can easily reference and cite passages, and read alongside others in a book club or class. Rather than add page numbers that don't…
February 7, 2011
My number theory class has moved on from Pythagorean triples. Lately we've been talking about the Euclidean algorithm. Specifically, it's an algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor (gcd) of two numbers.
Of course, there are lots of ways finding the gcd. You could simply list all of the…
February 7, 2011
Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers (here and here respectively) have taken note of a session at the upcoming AAAS Annual Meeting entitled: Evangelicals, Science, and Policy: Toward a Constructive Engagement. They object to this intrusion of religion into a science meeting. In the comments to their…
February 7, 2011
Elaine Howard Ecklund has a confusing post up at HuffPo. It is confusing because it is very unclear what exactly she wants.
There is strong evidence that religion is resurging among students on America's top university campuses. Yet, a large number of academic scientists firmly feel that they…
February 7, 2011
The BECB (the big evolution/creatio book) has been all-consuming lately. I've been struggling to meet my April 1 (no foolin!) deadline, which led me to spend virtually every waking moment last week either in the classroom, grading papers, or writing. My worry wasn't so much finishing the…
January 31, 2011
In chess news, Hikaru Nakamura took clear first place at the annual chess extravaganza in Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands, ahead of world champ Viswanathan Anand, former world champ Vladimir Kramnik, and current world number one Magnus Carlsen. Here's Gary Kasparov explaining the significance of…
January 30, 2011
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, “Gosh, it sure is neat that we can generate all Pythagorean triples from one simple formula, but what happens if we try an exponent bigger than two? That is, can you find nontrivial integer solutions to the equation
\[
x^n+y^n=z^n
\]
when n is a…
January 28, 2011
From The San Francisco Chronicle:
A California university professor has been charged with peeing on a colleague's campus office door.
Prosecutors charged 43-year-old Tihomir Petrov, a math professor at California State University, Northridge, with two misdemeanor counts of urinating in a public…
