August 12, 2015
I'm finally home again after all my recent travels. Back to back math conferences is fun, but also a bit stressful and tiring. While I was away, my extended family welcomed two new additions:
Meet William and Charlotte. Charlotte is the one with the white detailing. My brother and sister-…
July 29, 2015
I'm writing this from my New Jersey office, which is to say that I am visiting the 'rents. But it's a very short visit. In fact, I'm mostly just using them for their garage. I'm stashing my car there for a few days while I go galavanting around to various math conferences, with a little vacation…
July 21, 2015
This is perfect:
The latest polls are out, and just as I predicted, I'm leading the Republican presidential race by a wide margin. You might be wondering how that could be. After all, it's hardly been a month since I entered the field and I've already alienated America’s largest immigrant…
July 20, 2015
So, has anything been happening lately?
Well, the Supreme Court got a big one right. Marriage equality is now the law of the land, which is a very good thing. There will be pockets of resistance for a while to come, but mostly this news has been met with the yawn it deserves. Of course gay…
July 13, 2015
I realize I've been away a little longer than usual, but I have a good excuse. I just spent the past week with my family at Beaches resort, on Turks and Caicos. You see, my father turned 80 this year, and we marked the occasion by schlepping the whole family down to the Caribbean.
My peeps!…
June 21, 2015
This past week has mostly been devoted to working on my magnum opus about mathematical anti-evolutionism. That has meant lots of frustrating hours staring at the computer trying to make words appear, coupled with many more annoying hours wading through poorly written creationist pseudomath. But…
June 14, 2015
This week we have very clever helpmate from Russian composer Viktor Chepizhny, that was published in the November 2014 issue of The Problemist magazine. The diagram below calls for helpmate in two. There are two solutions:
Recall that in a helpmate black moves first and cooperates with white…
June 11, 2015
Lee McIntyre has a good article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is discussing the wholesale assault on truth in our culture:
To see how we treat the concept of truth these days, one might think we just don’t care anymore. Politicians pronounce that global warming is a hoax. An alarming…
June 9, 2015
After publishing Among the Creationists back in 2011, I started to lose interest in the evolution/creationism issue. I felt like I said what I wanted to say (at least to the handful of people who read the book) and that it was time to move on to other things. Besides, ten years on ID does not…
May 31, 2015
For the past two weeks we have looked at calm, sane direct mate problems. Good stuff, but it's time to mix it up a little. So this week we return to the crazy world of fairy chess. We shall consider a relatively new fairy condition called “Take and Make,” which has taken the problem world by…
May 30, 2015
After writing yesterday's post, I found I was still muttering about Michael Ruse's paper. So I thought to myself, why should I just rant here at the blog? How about I get down to business and write a proper journal article about it?
Mentally I started doing just that. To my surprise, I found the…
May 29, 2015
Philosopher Michael Ruse has an article in the current issue of the academic journal Zygon. It is called, “Why I Am an Accommodationist and Proud Of It.” In it, he proposes to defend the notion that science and religion are simply independent of one another, and therefore cannot really be in…
May 28, 2015
Jerry Coyne is is on tour for his new book Fact Versus Faith: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible. That title's a little vague. What do you suppose the book's about?
It turns out that he was making a stop in Washington DC. Since that's not so far from my digs in Harrisonburg, I decided to…
May 24, 2015
I'm a little pressed for time today, so for this week's chess problem I've selected one of those old-fashioned efforts whose only point is a shocking key move. The following position was composed by Sam Loyd in 1868 and calls for mate in two:
Of course, white's force is so overwhelming that…
May 24, 2015
In less happy news, there is this:
John Forbes Nash Jr., a mathematical genius whose struggle with schizophrenia was chronicled in the 2001 movie “A Beautiful Mind,” has died along with his wife in a car crash on the New Jersey Turnpike. He was 86.
Nash and Alicia Nash, 82, of Princeton Township,…
May 24, 2015
A large majority of voters have approved gay marriage:
Ireland's citizens have voted in a landslide to legalize gay marriage, electoral officials announced Saturday--a stunningly lopsided result that illustrates what Catholic leaders and rights activists alike called a “social revolution.”
Friday'…
May 17, 2015
This week we have a straightforward direct mate problem for you. It was composed by Raffi Rupin in 1961, and calls for mate in four:
A quick look at the diagram shows that white has three potential mates that almost work: Ra3, Nc5, Ra7. Currently, though, none of these work. The rook on b3 is…
May 11, 2015
Philosopher Graham Oppy, whose book Arguing About Gods is well worth reading, has written an interesting survey of work by atheist philosophers over the last sixty years. Here's a taste:
The last sixty years have been a very fertile period for academic atheist philosopher critiques of theistic…
May 10, 2015
I have been shamefully derelict in my Sunday Chess Problem responsibilities. But that ends now! To get us back into the swing of things, I have selected one of my own. The following diagram calls for selfmate in five:
This was published in the June 1992 issue of the British Chess Magazine.…
April 27, 2015
It's been very hectic around here recently. In addition to the usual end of semester craziness, there's been one thing after another to fill my time. The book I've been editing forever had a major deadline last Monday, which pretty well killed that weekend. This past weekend was occupied by the…
April 15, 2015
You really must check in on the big morality discussion over at Uncommon Descent. Barry Arrington has done another post on the subject. It's just more snarling and buffoonery, but I do suggest browsing the comments. RDFish, the “idiot” who caused Arrington's latest fit of apoplexy, has shown…
April 14, 2015
I occasionally check in with the pro-ID blog Uncommon Descent, on the off chance they may have said something interesting. Sadly, the blog has mostly fallen on hard times. Nowadays it's mostly just post after post whose only point is to demean and insult people, or to proffer absurd…
April 14, 2015
I have now posted the final POTW for the semester. That's right! After this, there will no more POTWs until September. So go have a look, and tell me what you think.
April 11, 2015
Okay, I'm back from Tennessee. The talk went pretty well, and the conference was a lot of fun. So let's celebrate with another installment of Sunday Chess Problem!
Our last entry featured a series mover. It seemed to be well-received, and they happen to be fairly easy to blog. So let's try…
April 8, 2015
I'll be heading off to Knoxville, Tennessee on Friday afternoon. Saturday morning I will be giving the big keynote talk at an undergraduate research conference at the University of Tennessee. Do you think maybe I'll be talking about the Monty Hall problem? I think maybe I will! So, if you're…
April 7, 2015
One of the many problems with the essay discussed in yesterday's post is that it was poorly written. Finnis and George seemed to go out of their way to be as unclear as possible, frequently choosing tortured, ambiguous phrasings when clearer options were readily at hand. This is something of an…
April 6, 2015
Okay folks. The ninth Problem of the Week has now been posted. Only one more after this, so enjoy them while they last. I've also posted an “official” solution to Problem Eight, so feel free to have a look at that as well.
April 6, 2015
It's been complete bedlam at my house lately. I made one of my periodical forays into cultural Judaism this past weekend by hosting a Passover seder. My parents, my brother and sister-in-law and their two kids (ages eight and ten) and some friends, eleven in all, packed into my small house. It…
April 1, 2015
Sorry, I just realized I never got around to posting the link to the new Problem of the Week. I've generally been impressed with the comments that have been left on previous POTWs, so hopefully folks will find this one interesting as well. I think it's a little bit easier than the last two, but…
March 28, 2015
In this recent essay at The New York Times, philosopher Gary Gutting argues that the Catholic Church should reconsider its ban on gay sex and its opposition to gay marriage, for explicitly Catholic reasons. He is especially critical of “natural law” arguments against homosexuality.
It’s mostly a…
