December 26, 2007
If I say that X has probability p, what does that mean? What sort of thing is X, and what does the number p represent?
Philosophers have spilled a lot of ink on this question, with no clear answer emerging. Instead there are a handful of major schools of thought on the issue. Each school…
December 18, 2007
Meanwhile, the big Monty Hall book is slowly coming together. It seems like every day I discover new technical articles on the subject. Recently I thought to search through the PubMed database, looking for any articles that might have eluded the various other searches I have done. Most of the…
December 18, 2007
Along the same line, here we have Georgetown theologian John Haught discoursing on matters theological. I see that P. Z. Myers has already given Haught a proper reaming, but perhaps there is a bit more to say.
Haught is a pro-evolution theologian. He did a very good deed in testifying on behalf…
December 18, 2007
Meanwhile, former Archbishop of York John Hapgood weighs in on four recent books about religion and atheism. The first: The New Atheists by Tina Beattie. Sadly, I am familiar neither with the book nor the author.
Hapgood's essay is the usual gibberish from the high-minded wing of the Christian…
December 18, 2007
All sorts of items in the news about science, religion and politics. As a warm-up, here's Christopher Hitchens stating it plain about the odius denizens of the religious right:
Isn't it amazing how self-pitying and self-aggrandizing the religious freaks in this country are? It's not enough that…
December 13, 2007
Chris Matthews, from last night's Hardball. His guest was talk radio host Racheal Maddow.
MADDOW: Well, it's two sides of the same coin, as far as I can tell. And the real substantive story here is that almost all of the Republican candidates have argued against the separation of church and…
December 12, 2007
Well, I've been grading exams for about ten minutes, and I'm already depressed. (One of my students seems to think that one fourth is an integer. Get the idea?) So how about another post?
Here's Keith Olbermann from last nights' edition of Countdown proving once again why he is the only one…
December 12, 2007
Here is an interesting variation on the Monty Hall problem. For now I will simply present it cold, without indicating the context of where I saw it. Feel free to leave your proposed solutions in the comments. Everything from vague intuitions to hard-core Bayesian analysis is welcome.
Adam and…
December 7, 2007
Meanwhile, here's Chris Matthews in full tantrum after the Republican candidates were asked if they accepted Biblical literalism in the big You Tube debate:
MATTHEWS: Governor, I think you, like a lot of conservatives, believe in the original purpose of the Constitution as written. It's our sort…
December 7, 2007
There were a few bright spots in the way the media reacted to Romney's disgusting speech. Keith Olbermann offered these characteristically wise words:
In a milestone speech in 1960, the national candidate for the Democratic Party, John F. Kennedy, told this nation why his Catholicism would not…
December 7, 2007
Mitt Romney gave his big religion speech yesterday. It is a standard piece of anti-atheist propaganda. America is a relgious nation, those darn secularists are trying to take God out of the public square, I'm as crazy religious as all those evangelicals I'm pandering to even though they regard my…
December 3, 2007
The subject of biblical literalism came up at last week's Republican / You Tube debate:
Joseph: I am Joseph. I am from Dallas, Texas, and how you answer this question will tell us everything we need to know about you. Do you believe every word of this book? Specifically, this book that I am…
December 3, 2007
In other news, philosopher Mary Midgley offers some thoughts on the proper way to respond to ID. The title: A Plague on Both Their Houses.
You can probably guess what's coming, especially if you're aware of Midgley's history with Richard Dawkins (more on that later). If you're expecting Midgley…
December 3, 2007
Remember Guillermo Gonzalez? He was the astronomer from Iowa State University who was denied tenure earlier this year. The reason for the tenure deinal? Depends who you ask.
Gonzalez, you see, is a rising young star in the ID movement. He coauthored a singularly bad book entitled The Privileged…
December 2, 2007
If you followed the link in the last post and need to be reminded what a real journal looks like, you might want to have a look at the first issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach. I've only read the article titles so far, but they look pretty interesting. And since the editors are Niles…
December 2, 2007
Every once in a while the ID folks get into their heads to set-up an actual academic journal. You know, a place where they can lay out all that cutting-edge research kept out of the real journals by dogmatic Darwinian stormtroopers.
These journals invariably founder on their inability to find…
December 2, 2007
From the Louisville Courier-Journal:
There is a great educational injustice being inflicted upon thousands of children in this country, a large percentage of whom come from the Kentucky, Ohio and, Indiana areas. The source of this injustice is a sophisticated Christian ministry that uses the hook…
November 28, 2007
I have in front of me an anthology of bridge (as in the card game) essays entitled For Experts Only, edited by Pamela and Matthew Granovetter. Essay number six was written by Phil Martin, and is entitled “The Monty Hall Trap.” Sounds interesting, but I am most definitely not an expert at bridge…
November 26, 2007
I am pleased to report that Jim's comment in the big Creation Museum post is the 10,000th comment left at this blog since the jump to ScienceBlogs. As always, many thanks to all the folks who have stopped by to offer their thoughts!
November 25, 2007
Meanwhile, the Cincinnati newspaper The Enquirer brings us this delightful story about what a smashing success the Creation Museum has been:
Inside, visitors will walk through the Garden of Eden, see dinosaur bones, and watch the solar system unfold as “evidence of God's creativity.”
All of it…
November 25, 2007
Every so often a mainstream news outlet rediscovers that young-Earth creationists still exist. This leads to bemused, but respectful articles. The most recent example is this article from The New York Times Magazine. It was written by Hanna Rosin.
It's the usual perfunctory effort so typical of…
November 21, 2007
Impressive company I'm keeping! Two of my SciBlings have recently received some deeply cool honors.
Over at Stranger Fruit, John Lynch has received the Carnegie/CASE professor of the year award for the state of Arizona. Very nice!
Meanwhile, Jonah Lehrer of The Frontal Cortex has snagged a place…
November 21, 2007
From Tuesday's show::
OLBERMANN: Yes, I understand that. You know, one of the other you's in there is Karl Rove that story about him possibly being in charge of the presidential library, the creation museum of presidential libraries then. What does this tell us about the relationship of the…
November 21, 2007
The wonderfully named online magazine Jewcy, has been hosting a discussion about evolution and ID. Three entries so far:
Neal Pollack gets the ball rolling by suggesting that he wants his children to grow up “utterly intolerant” of creationism. My kind of guy!
Discovery Institute flak David…
November 15, 2007
In the Monty Hall problem, you are confronted with three identical doors, one of which conceals a car while the other two conceal goats. You choose a door at random, number one say, but do not open it. Monty now opens a door he knows to conceal a goat. He then gives you the option of sticking or…
November 15, 2007
Over at The Christian Century, biologist Joan Roughgarden serves up this review of Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution.
The good news is that Roughgarden is unambigously pro-evolution and anti-ID. She writes:
Behe's position has been criticized scientifically and theologically. The structures…
November 13, 2007
The New York Times is reporting that author Ira Levin has died of apparently natural causes at the age of 78:
Ira Levin, a mild-mannered playwright and novelist who liked nothing better than to give people the creeps -- and who did so repeatedly, with best-selling novels like “Rosemary's Baby,” “…
November 13, 2007
George Carlin once asked, “If you're going to have a rain dance, wouldn't you have to have rain dance practice? And what I'm wondering is, does it rain during practice? Because if it doesn't, how do you know if you have it right? And if it does, why bother with the dance in the first place.…
November 13, 2007
Robert Redford's new movie Lions for Lambs is struggling at the box office. It's also been getting largely negative reviews. But since I saw Bill O'Reilly and other right-wing outlets bashing it for its supposed anti-American bias, I felt honor-bound to go see it.
I guess there's no accounting…
November 7, 2007
You might have noticed that blogging has been a bit erratic lately, and I have fallen off my usual pace of updating every weekday. There's a reason for that! Regular readers of this blog are aware that I have a small obsession with the Monty Hall problem. I managed to convince Oxford University…
