October 22, 2010
Turns out I have a blog. Who knew! A combination of lack of time and, frankly, lack of enthusiasm have kept me from the blogosphere lately, but I thought I would poke my head up just to let y'all know I'm still here.
So let's see. I have a busy weekend on tap. Tomorrow is JMU's annual…
October 14, 2010
An interesting exchange between moderator Wolf Blitzer and Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell, from a recent debate.
BLITZER: Let's give you a chance to respond to some of the things she said because in a television appearance back in 1998 on Bill Maher's show you said evolution is a…
October 12, 2010
I should probably warn you that this is a long one. So either get comfortable or go elsewhere!
Josh Rosenau has a post up, replying to this earlier post from Jerry Coyne, who was discussing this L. A. Times article about the recent secular humanist conference in Los Angeles. At the conference…
October 6, 2010
The reason for the recent blog drought, I am happy to report, is that the book writing has been going well lately. I shot past the 80,000 word mark the other day, which leaves just 20,000 to go. Alas, it is now clear that the first draft will be somewhat overlength, so I am not quite as close to…
September 27, 2010
People I respect keep telling me there is marvelous work being done in the area of theology. I have never encountered it, and not for lack of looking. Sometimes I wonder, though, whether perhaps I am just reading the wrong things. The religion and theology section of my university's library is…
September 22, 2010
Jerry Coyne has an important post up responding to this awful essay by Peter Doumit, posted at the BioLogos website. Doumit's essay has nuggets like this:
Divine revelation comes in two forms: the Word of God (including both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition) and the Work of God (including…
September 22, 2010
If you are looking for some popcorn reading, have a look at this post from John Farrell, over at HuffPo. He takes John West of the Discovery Institute to task for parroting ye olde “Darwin was a big, fat racist!” canard. Here's the conclusion:
So, what is one to make of these ceaseless…
September 22, 2010
Let's see to what my homeys have been up.
Richard Dawkins, that little rabble rouser, is rightly vexed by the respectful treatment the Pope has been receiving during his trip to England.
Addressing a crowd of roughly 15,000 people, Dawkins unleashed this:
Joseph Ratzinger is an enemy of humanity…
September 20, 2010
Recent editions of Monday Math have seen us working pretty hard. So how about we lighten the mood a bit and think about fractions.
Let us start with the obvious. Fractions have tops and bottoms. Got that? Numerators and denominators exist only in elementary and middle school math classes.…
September 14, 2010
This comes from Jerry Korsmeyer's book Evolution and Eden: Balancing Original Sin and Contemporary Science, published in 1998. Korsmeyer is both a physicist and a theologian.
The tremendous amount of time it took for the simplest elements of matter to form themselves into stars, and to make the…
September 14, 2010
Via Jerry Coyne I have just come across this op-ed, from the USA Today, by Chris Mooney. The title: “Spirituality Can Bridge Science-Religion Divide” My initial reaction: No it can't!
Mooney's argument is a standard one:
Across the Western world -- including the United States -- traditional…
September 13, 2010
Time for the big finale! We now have all the pieces in place to establish the divergence of the sum of the reciprocals of the primes.
Recall that we have the Euler product expansion of the harmonic series:
\[
\sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac{1}{n}= \prod_p \left( \frac{1}{1-\frac{1}{p}} \right)
\]
We…
September 9, 2010
Over at Huffington Post, Denis Alexander hawks his new book Biology and Ideology: From Descartes to Darwin, coedited by Ronald Numbers. It features an essay by Alister McGrath entitled, “Evolutionary Biology in Recent Atheist Apologetics.” McGrath, if you are unfamiliar with him, is a Christian…
September 8, 2010
Here's an interesting article from The Washington Post. It's title? “For Math Students, Self-Esteem Might Not Equal High Scores.”
It is difficult to get through a day in an American school without hearing maxims such as these: “To succeed, you must believe in yourself,” and “To teach, you must…
September 8, 2010
My alma mater is number one! Whoo hoo!
September 7, 2010
As part of my research for my book on evolution and creationism, I have been reading a lot of books and articles about how to read the Bible. From this reading I have learned a great deal, but I also find certain things a bit puzzling.
For example, consider the book Reading the Bible Again for the…
September 6, 2010
It is time to continue our quest to prove that the sum of the reciprocals of the primes diverges. We have one more ingredient to put into place. I am referring to the notion of a Taylor series. The idea is this: Some functions, like those from trigonometry, are difficult to evaluate precisely.…
September 6, 2010
Recently i have been browsing through a book called What About Darwin?, which is a collection of quotations from various worthies regarding -- surprise! -- Charles Darwin. One that jumped out at me was a statement from Calvin Coolidge. This is from a letter he wrote to his father:
I see [Oliver…
August 26, 2010
With classes set to start on Monday I am not in the mood for heavy fare. So how about some entertainment blogging!
Like all sensible people I am a big fan of the James Bond movies. That none of them, let's face it, are actually all that good, does not affect my inability to change the channel…
August 25, 2010
P. Z. Myers had heart surgery yesterday, to implant a few stents. It was all very worrisome, but since he is already back to yelling at HuffPo it seems that things will work out OK.
Best wishes for a speedy recovery, P. Z.
August 23, 2010
We begin with a joke. What's a logarithm? It's a birth control method for lumberjacks. Hahahahaha! Believe it or not, one of my high school math teachers taught me that.
Actually, logarithms are a computational tool for turning products into sums. They are defined as follows.
\[
\log_a b=x \…
August 22, 2010
For the past few days I have been intending to do a big post about the proposed “Ground Zero Mosque,” in which I would gather up and comment on what various other people had said. Alas, I have not had time for that. So let me instead just do a quick post.
I have no problem whatsoever with the…
August 17, 2010
And speaking of evidence for God, here's Matt Rossano putting forth an interesting idea:
Now this may seem too whimsical to be taken seriously, but the important point is this: however one envisions convincing scientific evidence of God, let's suppose we've got it. Let's further suppose that this…
August 16, 2010
Monday Math is off this week. School starts in just two more weeks, and I have been making a last push to have as much of my books done as I can before it does. Cuts into my blogging time, alas.
Which is a shame, since there is plenty of fodder. For example, Peter Enns has a new essay up over at…
August 12, 2010
That's the Big Monty Hall Book for those unfamiliar with the local slang. The review appeared in the May issue of The American Statistician, not freely available online, alas. The author was Michael Sherman of Texas A & M University. Here's the opening:
Jason Rosenhouse states on the last…
August 8, 2010
In this week's edition of Monday Math we look at what I regard as one of the prettiest equations in number theory. Here it is:
\[
\sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac{1}{n^s} = \prod_p \left( \frac{1}{1-\frac{1}{p^s}}\right)
\]
Doesn't it just make your heart go pitter-pat?
You are probably familiar with…
August 8, 2010
By now you have no doubt heard that a federal judge in California has struck down Proposition Eight, a voter referendum that outlawed gay marriage. Go here for a quick summary of the basic facts.
I have not had a chance yet to read the entire decision, and I do not intend to attempt a legal…
August 4, 2010
The second good post comes from Frank Schaeffer, making an argument that usually gets you dismissed as a village atheist. Here's the set-up:
There is a verse in Timothy that says that all Scripture is for our edification. This verse, not the many Bible stories of the many killings “ordained by…
August 4, 2010
I can't quite believe I am writing this, but the HuffPo religion section actually has not one, but two, good posts up. The first is from Victor Stenger talking about some of the daffier misapplications of quantum mechanics. It makes a nice follow-up to Monday's post about Michael Shermer's essay…
August 3, 2010
Here's Rod Dreher giving lectures about civility:
What is it with science-oriented advocates who consider contempt a virtue? Who, exactly, do they think they are going to persuade? (You could say the same thing about sneering political bloggers, sneering religious bloggers, and, well, sneerers in…
