March 31, 2008
Nicholas Kristof has a good column in today's New York Times. Here's a taste:
From Singapore to Japan, politicians pretend to be smarter and better- educated than they actually are, because intellect is an asset at the polls. In the United States, almost alone among developed countries,…
March 28, 2008
Christianity Today has now published a review of Michael Behe's book The Edge of Evolution. You might dimly recall this book, since it was briefly big news among the ID folks upon its publication last year. It disappeared pretty quickly on account of it being not only wrong scientifically, but…
March 28, 2008
The big Monty Hall book is rapidly coming together. I may even have the first draft done in the next few weeks. It's certainly been a lot more work than I expected when I began. Originally I envisioned a straight math book, where each chapter would present a different variation of the problem…
March 28, 2008
If you are not already familiar with Oxford's series of Very Short Introductions, I recommend having a look. I've read about two dozen of them to this point and have found them to be consistently excellent.
I've just finished reading the volume on Quantum Theory, written by John Polkinghorne. I…
March 25, 2008
The Olympics are coming, and with them a new opportunity for the holier than thou amongst us to urge boycotts in the service of political agendas. Anne Applebaum of Slate gets the party started with this essay. She doesn't actually call for a boycott, but she seems awfully sympathetic to those…
March 25, 2008
Have you been following this? P. Z. Myers got recognized at a screening of Expelled and was thrown out. Richard Dawkins, who was with Myers, did not get recognized and was allowed in. Hilarious! I think most people would agree with Dawkins' take:
The blogs are ringing with ridicule. Mark…
March 23, 2008
I suspect that everyone reading this has heard the story of what happened when P.Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins tried to attend a screening of Expelled in Minneapolis last week. Short version: P.Z. got recognized and was not allowed in. Dawkins was not recognized and was allowed in. If you've been…
March 14, 2008
Chris over at Mixing Memory argues, both in this post and in the subsequent comments, that he is. I think that claim is deeply silly and trivializes the term fundamentalist. I've been mixing it up with Chris and some of his readers in the comments to his post. Having spilled so many words on the…
March 12, 2008
The New York Times is reporting that Michael Heller, a Roman Catholic Priest and cosmologist from Poland, has won the 2008 Templeton Prize. The Christian Science Monitor offers some further details here.
In case you are unfamiliar with it, the Templeton Prize is a 1.6 million dollar (!!) prize…
March 12, 2008
This paper (PDF format) by British philosopher Simon Blackburn is getting some attention in the blogosphere. Let's have a look.
Blackburn addresses the question of what it means to respect religion, from the perspective of an atheist. The essay is perfect, by which I mean that it says exactly…
February 29, 2008
As usual, I'm late to this particular party. Over at BayBlab, a blogger calling himself “Anonymous Coward” offers up some choice words for the all-powerful, all-consuming, resistance-is-futile ScienceBlogs combine:
If you examine the elephant in the room, ScienceBlogs, the trend is maintained:…
February 26, 2008
From last night's Tucker:
CARLSON: This was my 20th--literally, I think it was my 20th Oscar night in a row where I didn't watch any of it.
WOLFF: It was really bad. I don't know if it's stagflation or bad weather or whatever, but I was just not in the mood, friend. I blame stagflation.…
February 24, 2008
That, minus the question mark, is the title of a new article by theologian John Haught in the current issue of The Christian Century. The subtitle is “Why the New Atheism isn't Serious.” Sadly, the article does not seem to be available online.
After reading that headline, I was expecting Haught…
February 24, 2008
The Christian Century has this interesting article about the relationship between evolution and Christianity, written by Amy Frykholm. Interesting not because it actually resolves the question in any satisfactory way, but rather because it states the problem in a more forthright manner than is…
February 11, 2008
Finally, The Christian Century has published this lengthy report of a visit to the Creation Museum. It was written by Jason Byassee. Most of the article is a bemused and slightly cynical account of the exhibits you find at the museum. It was the last paragraph that really caught my eye, however…
February 11, 2008
The Guardian series also contains this article from theology professor Richard Harries, arguing -- surprise! -- that evolution and Christian faith are compatible. Let's have a look.
Here's paragraph two:
As the Victorian novelist Charles Kingsley put it, God does not just make the world, he does…
February 11, 2008
In other news, the Guardian newspaper has posted a series of articles about various evolution related topics.
First up is this characteristically lucid entry from Richard Dawkins. I especially like this:
But what makes natural selection so special? A powerful idea assumes little to explain much.…
February 11, 2008
Meanwhile, over at Town Hall Dinesh D'Souza serves up yet another steaming pile of religious idiocy. His subject is an exchange between Rabbi Jacob Neusner and Pope Benedict. He opens with a gratuitous slap at Richard Dawkins:
Even so, Neusner's treatment of Christ could not be more different…
February 11, 2008
It will be a little while yet before I can get back to blogging regularly. But as a way of flexing my atrophying blogging muscles, let me direct your attention to another superlative column from Paul Krugman:
What's particularly saddening is the way many Obama supporters seem happy with the…
February 2, 2008
Here's a little brainteaser to think about if the Super Bowl ends up being a bit dull. Imagine that you are standing at the baggage carousel at an airport waiting for your bag. A percentage x of the bags from your flight have already appeared on the carousel and yours is not among them. How…
February 1, 2008
Via Mark Chu-Carroll I just read this article, from the USA Today, about a mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania who believes that fractions have no place in the elementary and middle school mathematics curriculum:
A few years ago, Dennis DeTurck, an award-winning professor of…
January 28, 2008
If you'll forgive another chess post, the annual grandmaster chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands is now complete. It was the first major tournament of the year, and it had a pleasingly unexpected outcome. Young phenoms Levon Aronian of Armenia and Magnus Carlsen of Norway were the…
January 28, 2008
Go read Paul Krugman's column. Money quote:
First, those who don't want to nominate Hillary Clinton because they don't want to return to the nastiness of the 1990s -- a sizable group, at least in the punditocracy -- are deluding themselves. Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect…
January 27, 2008
Journalism is dead, folks. Start with that. Can you point to a single mainstream media outlet, whether a cable news channel or network news broadcast or newspaper or newsmagazine, that you trust to give you the basic facts about anything? Cable news is now almost wall-to-wall gossip shows, where…
January 20, 2008
ID folks make numerous assertions said to represent scientific challenges to conventional evolutionary theory. These claims are uniformly wrong, which is one of the reasons scientists generally ignore them.
But ID folks also claim that adopting a design perspective could lead to great progress in…
January 20, 2008
Via The Chess Ninja, I see that Gary Kasparov has commented on the death of Bobby Fischer. I have copied his remarks below the fold.
With the death of Bobby Fischer chess has lost one of its greatest figures. Fischer's status as world champion and celebrity came from a charismatic and combative…
January 18, 2008
Former World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer has died of kidney failure at the age of 64. The New York Times has an informative article here.
For chess fans Bobby Fischer was the classic example of the need to separate the art from the artist. Away from the board Fischer was an emotionally disturbed…
January 15, 2008
We are all familiar with optical illusions. These are situations where your eyes misperceive the nature of some image or physical object.
For some time now psychologists and cognitive scientists have been discussing the reality of cognitive illusions. These are situations where people just don't…
January 15, 2008
As reported in this article in Reason Magazine:
My favorite response from any candidate about the evolution/creationism debate was from former Sen. Mike Gravel (Alaska). When LiveScience asked the senator if he thought creationism should be taught in public schools, Gravel replied, “Oh God, no. Oh…
January 12, 2008
I just got back from six days in San Diego, participating in the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings. Why “Joint”? Because they are jointly sponsored by the two major American mathematical organizations. I refer, of course, to the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and the Amercian…
