August 2, 2010
Michael Shermer has has an excellent essay responding to Deepak Chopra's “quantum flapdoodle.”
Chopra's use and abuse of quantum physics is what the Caltech quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann calls “quantum flapdoodle,” which consists of stringing together a series of terms and…
August 1, 2010
Last week we saw that every positive integer greater than one can be factored into primes in an essentially unique way. This week we ask a different question: Just how many primes are there?
Euclid solved this problem a little over two thousand years ago by showing there are infinitely many primes…
July 30, 2010
Novelist Anne Rice, best known for her series of novels about vampires, has some choice words for institutional Christianity:
For those who care, and I understand if you don't. Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being “Christian” or to…
July 27, 2010
A few weeks ago I spent a day at the Virginia Home Educators Convention in Richmond. These are the religious home schoolers we are talking about, meaning creationism was very well-represented indeed. Ken Ham gave several keynote talks. Yay!
I never got around to doing a proper write-up of the…
July 26, 2010
If you are in the mood for a little light reading, have a look at this account of Skip Evans, formerly of the National Center for Science Education, conversing with some of the local creationists in Madison, WI.
It's almost a shame that an apparently sincere and pretty decent guy like Kevin has…
July 25, 2010
In my last math post I casually mentioned that the sum of the reciprocals of the primes diverges. That is
\[
\frac{1}{2}+\frac{1}{3}+\frac{1}{5}+\frac{1}{7}+\frac{1}{11}+\frac{1}{13}+ \dots=\infty
\]
That seems like a hard thing to prove. Certainly none of the traditional convergence tests…
July 21, 2010
I only have time for a quick post today, so how about another quote from Elmer Gantry? Keep in mind that this was published in 1927. See if it sounds familiar:
In some ways he preferred New Thought to standard Protestantism. It was safer to play with. He had never been sure but that there…
July 19, 2010
Over the past week or so I have been dutifully plugging a hole in my literary education. I am reading Sinclair Lewis' novel Elmer Gantry. If you are unfamiliar with the story, the title character is a rudderless, narcissistic, unsavory fellow who, through a series of somewhat implausible events,…
July 18, 2010
Blake Stacey directed me towards a terrific tool for embedding TeX code into a web page. So how about we do ourselves a math post!
Remember the harmonic series? No doubt you encountered it in some calculus class or other. It's the one that goes like this:
$$
1+\frac{1}{2}+\frac{1}{3}+\frac{1}{4…
July 15, 2010
Any time I am looking for something to blog about, I know the HuffPo religion section will serve up something delicious. In this essay, Peter Enns of the BioLogos Foundation exposes the naivete some people bring to reading the Bible:
I've read enough of the New Atheists to see a pattern in their…
July 14, 2010
Be sure to read this excellent post by Julian Sanchez addressing the old chestnut, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”
Sanchez was replying in particular to an appallingly bad essay by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate. How bad? Here's one sample:
Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists…
July 13, 2010
Jerry Coyne has a post up reporting on new polling data on science and religion coming out of Virginia Commonwealth University. Jerry notes that the numbers for the evolution questions are broadly consistent with what past surveys have found. I mostly agree, but there was one number that jumped…
July 12, 2010
Karl Giberson has a new column up at the Huffington Post.
Jerry Coyne and I had an interesting exchange yesterday that will appear in a brief video on USA Today's website at some point. The question related to the compatibility of science and religion. Can one accept the modern scientific view of…
July 8, 2010
Yesterday afternoon I checked my e-mail and found something from the ScienceBlogs management. Apparently there was to be a new blog around here sponsored by PepsiCo. that was to focus on nutrition and other food related issues. I only skimmed the e-mail and did not really think much about it. I…
June 29, 2010
It will continue to be bloggus interruptus around here for a while. There are two main reasons for this. One is simply that I have two books under contract, both of which must be at least substantially done by the time school starts up again at the end of August. That means I am already spending…
June 24, 2010
My cat, Isaac, died on Monday. He never did anything like a normal cat, and that includes the manner in which he died. He went from no symptoms to multiple organ failure in less than a week. We'll come to that in a moment.
Cats like Isaac are the reason people own cats. If he were a person…
June 10, 2010
Over the past few years I have asked a fair number of creationists what it is they find so objectionable about evolution. They have a great many complaints, but the one I hear most often is some version on the problem of evil. Evolution by natural selection is a cruel and wasteful process. It is…
June 8, 2010
Have a look at this interview with Boston University religion professor Stephen Prothero. It contains a number of interesting nuggets, but this is the part that jumped out at me:
Baer: Proselytizing atheists like Dawkins have carved out a niche within a largely religious public sphere. Would a…
June 6, 2010
Over the past few weeks I have been working my way through season three of Dexter. Somehow I had gotten my Netflix cue out of order, so that they actually delivered the final disc, number four, to me before sending me the other DVD's. This particular disc contained only a single episode, the…
June 3, 2010
Last year I attended a paleontology conference in Cincinnati. While I was there I attended a session on science and religion, during which a parade of people trumpeted the warm relationship between the two. Predictably, there was much bashing of the New Atheists, with Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris…
June 1, 2010
On most issues my politics are decidedly left-wing, but there is one big exception to that. That exception is Israel. On the subject of Isreal I get very right-wing.
When I look at Israel I see a Western-style democracy that has achieved extraordinary things in just sixty years. Their…
May 26, 2010
Or so Karl Giberson seems to think. Early in his essay he writes:
This might suggest that Ken Ham and his Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., are becoming less relevant, as they speak for -- and to -- an increasingly smaller band of hyperconservative biblical literalists. Ham's followers,…
May 26, 2010
The Dalai Lama had an op-ed in The New York Times the other day. Alas, he got off to a very bad start with this:
WHEN I was a boy in Tibet, I felt that my own Buddhist religion must be the best -- and that other faiths were somehow inferior. Now I see how naïve I was, and how dangerous the…
May 24, 2010
Martin Gardner has died at the age of 95. He was a prolific writer in three different areas: mathematics, magic and debunking pseudoscience. Since those happen to be three of my favorite things in life you can imagine how big a fan I was of his writing. His book Puzzles From Other Worlds made a…
May 20, 2010
I have now had a chance to read Elaine Howard Ecklund's new book Science vs. Relgion: What Scientists Really Think. It is worth reading, despite her annoying decision to include social scientists, but not mathematicians, in her definition of “scienitst.” I also did not care for her obvious…
May 11, 2010
Could this fantastic match have ended in any other way than with a tremendous tactical slugfest?
The final game of the big chess match took place today, with the score tied and Topalov playing white. Topalov did what Topalov does: he overplayed a slightly better position, allowing Anand to unleash…
May 9, 2010
I've gotten a bit behind in my chess match coverage. Time to remedy that!
Last we saw Anand had blundered away an easily drawn endgame in Game Eight. This allowed Topalov to tie the match. Undeterred, Anand came out swinging in Game Nine. Topalov decided he had had enough of Anand's Catalan,…
May 5, 2010
You didn't think I'd forgotten about the big chess match, did you?
Topalov won game eight to tie the match with four games to go. His win had more to do with Anand's carelessness than it did with his own cleverness, but hey, a win is a win. The momentum has completely shifted to Topalov now. It…
May 5, 2010
Via Jerry Coyne, I came across this essay over at the BioLogos website. The author: Steven Benner. The title: The Dangers of Advocacy in Science. The key paragraphs:
This provides another reason why it is easy to be confused about what science is and what scientists do. The imagery of science…
May 5, 2010
As part of his ongoing campaign to make himself as buffoonish as possible, Joe Lieberman devised a brilliant idea for dealing with American terror suspects:
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) thinks he's found a work-around on the whole Miranda rights debate for U.S. citizens accused of terrorism: Strip…
