December 27, 2006
Commenter Sastra, replying to my previous post on this subject, offers what I thnk is a perfect characterization of much of the response to Dawkins' book:
From what I can tell, most of the sophisticated critics of Dawkins feel that he failed to address what I like to call the Argument from…
December 27, 2006
Yesterday I linked to P.Z. Myers discussion of a common anti-Dawkins meme. Specifically, that Dawkins' arguments in The God Delusion are hopelessly superficial, and that his failure to ponder seriously various works of academic theology render his book incomplete at best, and vapid at worst.…
December 26, 2006
Speaking of the Monty Hall problem, I recently came across this terrific essay (PDF format), by Jeffrey Rosenthal, a professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Toronto. Rosenthal discusses several variants of the Monty Hall problem, and shows how a clever application of Bayes'…
December 26, 2006
Actually, many of the questions Marilyn vos Savant got asked in her column are positively ingenious. They also provide a lot of food for thought. Here are a few that caught my eye. As always, feel free to hash them out in the comments:
I need glasses to see things at a distance. When I look…
December 26, 2006
Many of you are familiar with the old Monty Hall problem. You might also be aware that it rose to prominence as a result of a column in Parade magazine by Marilyn vos Savant. After Savant's initial discussion of the problem, she received a flood of angry letters, some from actual mathematicians…
December 26, 2006
In my post about H. Allen Orr's review of Dawkins' The God Delusion, I commented that Orr begins with a standard anti-Dawkins argument: that he doesn't give adequate consideration to all of the internecine philosophical and theological disputes that surround religious questions. P. Z. Myers has…
December 22, 2006
Evolutionary biologist H. Allen Orr has this lengthy essay in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Officially it's a review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Joan Roughgarden's Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist, and Lewis Wolpert's Six…
December 19, 2006
Winter break is the time to complete all of those annoying chores you've been putting off during the term. For example, yesterday my car passed its inspection. Woo hoo!
And today, Isaac and Emily passed their inspection. By which I mean the vet found that they're in good health (though Isaac,…
December 19, 2006
John Lynch has an excellent summary of what a rotten year it's been for ID:
January
Dembski:
Just as a tree that has been “rimmed” (i.e., had its bark completely cut through on all sides) is effectively dead even if it retains its leaves and appears alive, so Darwinism has met its match with the…
December 19, 2006
In other news, the Cobb County sticker kerfuffle has now been settled.
You might recall that this was the case where a small Georgia school district decided to paste warning labels inside their high school biology textbooks. The labels asserted the following:
This textbook contains material on…
December 19, 2006
In the course of his lengthy discussion of the report on the Sternberg affair, mentioned in the previous post, Ed Brayton links to this discussion of the ID paper that started all the controversy in the first place. The discussion is by Ronald Jenner, of the Section on Evolution and Ecology at the…
December 19, 2006
Ed Brayton has the must-read post of the day.
Remember Richard Sternberg? He's the former editor of the journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. A while back he published a pro-ID paper in the journal. Sternberg was a research associate at the Smithsonain Institution at the…
December 18, 2006
A while back we Science Bloggers were asked to provide personal photographs to Seed CentCom. This is what they did with them. I'm the strikingly handsome fellow directly behind Shelley's owl. Go have a look!
December 18, 2006
The New York Times has has this remarkable article about the high school teacher in New Jersey who was using his class as a mission field:
Before David Paszkiewicz got to teach his accelerated 11th-grade history class about the United States Constitution this fall, he was accused of violating it.…
December 15, 2006
Writing for The Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby offers a typically muddled argument against atheism. The column's title: “Atheism's Bleak Alternative”. Most of the column describes various atrocities perpetrated by secularists against religious people, particularly in England. But it's the last three…
December 14, 2006
From the BBC:
The blogging phenomenon is set to peak in 2007, according to technology predictions by analysts Gartner.
The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.
The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped…
December 14, 2006
Everyone knows the first rule of holes: When you're in a hole, stop digging.
Apparently no one told Discovery Institute lackey Casey Luskin. He's still trying to pretend that their inane charges against the Judge in the Kitzmiller decision have any merit. Recall that their latest brainstorm is…
December 14, 2006
There was a remarkable exchange on the MSNBC show Hardball yesterday, between host Chris Matthews, and commentators Roger Simon and Chris Cillizza:
MATTHEWS: Yes, well, isn't it funny, Roger--and I love the way you cover politics. You get the richness of it. You have fish fry dinners with Jesse…
December 13, 2006
Time for another installment of, “How bad have things gotten for the ID folks?”
It is now almost a year since the big ruling in the Dover case. As I'm sure you recall, that's the one where the ID folks put their most formidable legal and scientific talent in front of a Court, and the Court…
December 13, 2006
New Scientist has this article about the latest attempt by ID proponents to pretend they care about science:
This is my second attempt to engage in person with scientists at Biologic. At the institute's other facility in nearby Fremont, researchers work at benches lined with fume hoods, incubators…
December 12, 2006
Larry Moran has an excellent review of Francis Collins' silly book The Language of God. You don't really appreciate Ken Miller until you have contemplated the far daffier arguments made by Collins. Moran writes:
The second persuasive argument is the presence in all of us of a God-shaped vacuum.…
December 12, 2006
Be sure to have a look at Sahotra Sarkar's essay at The American Prospect. He describes the recent shift of emphasis on the ID side away from biology and towards physics instead. Sarkar writes:
Initially largely unnoticed by their critics, creationists began to co-opt the fine-tuning argument…
December 11, 2006
The all encompassing Science Blogs Combine has gobbled up two more members. Go say hello to Orli over at Neruontic and to the group over at Integrity of Science. As if I didn't have enough to read!
December 11, 2006
Chess Life is reporting that David Bronstein has died of unknown cuases at the age of 82.
Bronstein resides on a short list of players, along with Paul Keres and Viktor Korchnoi, who can vie for the title of Greatest Player Never to Win the World Championship. His peak came in the late forties…
December 11, 2006
From The New York Times:
Holocaust deniers and skeptics from around the world gathered at a government-sponsored conference here today to discuss their theories about whether six million Jews were indeed killed by the Nazis during World War II and whether gas chambers existed.
In a speech opening…
December 11, 2006
According to the Site Meter, I've received over 13,000 hits today. I assume that means some large fish in the blog pond has linked to me. So, thanks for the link! Anyone want to fess up?
December 8, 2006
If you made it through that last post and thought about it for a while, you might think that I pulled a fast one.
At a few places I commented that if x is any element of an arbitrary ring, then we know that x0 = 0.
That is a certainly a familiar fact about the integers. There we think of x times y…
December 8, 2006
Some of the commenters to yesterday's post raised some interesting questions on the subject of dividing by zero. So interesting, in fact, that I felt the subject deserved another post.
My SciBling, revere, of Effect Measure: writes the following:
OK, I shouldn't jump in here because I'm an…
December 7, 2006
As mentioned in the previous post, the BBC article contains video of Dr. Anderson explaining how his work allows us to evaluate the expression 00. I'll save you the trouble of having to watch it. Here it is:
We define the number N=0/0. The number N stands for nullity, and is the new number Dr.…
December 7, 2006
Mark Chu-Carroll beat me to this BBC story about a computer science professor in England claiming to have resolved a twelve-hundred year old problem. The story begins:
Dr James Anderson, from the University of Reading's computer science department, says his new theorem solves an extremely…
