jrosenhouse | July 2, 2013Morgan Freeman is one of those actors who is always good, even if the movie is bad. Most recently I saw him in in Now You See Me, which I enjoyed, despite its preposterous story. He is also a big science booster. He hosts the show Through the Wormhole on the Science Channel. So, all in all, I'm a Morgan Freeman fan.
Here's a short interview with Freeman, in which he briefly addresses the evolution question. Let's have a look:
Do you believe in “intelligent design?” No. Let me clarify that answer. Because intelligent design is exactly what we see. But does that come from some being? I…
jrosenhouse | July 1, 2013The liar paradox is the statement:
“This sentence is false.”
Let us refer to this sentence simply as L. The paradox comes when we try to assign a truth value to L. Is it true or is it false? If we declare it to be true, then what it says must actually be the case. But it says that it is false. We would thus have a sentence that is both true and false, which is not possible. On the other hand, if we declare it to be false then we are affirming precisely what the sentence says. That makes it true! So, once again, we would have a sentence that is both true and false. We get a…
jrosenhouse | June 11, 2013Adam Laats is an assistant professor of education and history at SUNY Binghamton, and he is the author of Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes Era: God, Darwin, and the Roots of America's Culture Wars. Over at his blog, he has posted a review of Among the Creationists. So, what did he think?
Rosenhouse's book is required reading for any outsider who hopes to understand the world of American creationism in the twenty-first century. Rosenhouse deliberately eschews the simple, satisfying approach of most outsiders. He does not belittle or deride these ideas or their adherents, though…
jrosenhouse | June 10, 2013I was in Kentucky for most of last week, visiting friends. I ended up in Bowling Green, stopping along the way in Morehead and in Loveland, OH (near Cincinnati). My friends in Bowling Green took me to Mammoth Cave National Park, which is really quite spectacular. All in all, an enjoyable trip.
I'll be hitting the road again on Wednesday for a little over a week. Part of that time will be spent visiting the 'rents at my New Jersey office, but I'll be spending several days in New York City as well. A mix of business and pleasure.
There's plenty of blog fodder out there. ID backbencher…
jrosenhouse | May 30, 2013I've been a Stephen King fan for a long time, so you can imagine my excitement at the fact that he has two books in the queue over the next few months. His novel Joyland will be available next week, while his Shining sequel, Doctor Sleep comes out in September.
I'll be reading both of them, of course, but for now I want to call attention to this interview with NPR's Terry Gross. You see, he said the following about belief in God:
I choose to believe it. ... I mean, there's no downside to that. If you say, 'Well, OK, I don't believe in God. There's no evidence of God,' then you're missing…
jrosenhouse | May 29, 2013A while back P. Z. Myers wrote a snotty, obnoxious post about how much he hated the big Les Miz movie. Now, I happen to be a bit protective of Les Miserables. I regard the original novel as the finest ever written, and I think the stage version of the musical does a good job of capturing the novel's spirit (far better than any of the many non-musical movie versions). The movie musical certainly had its problems (Click here for my review), but overall it was pretty good. If it was truly the worst movie experience of his life, as P. Z. claimed, then I must assume that he sees only the very…
jrosenhouse | May 29, 2013A while back I engaged in an exchange of blog posts with paleontologist Robert Asher. It started with an essay Asher wrote for HuffPo, extolling the virtues of reconciling science and religion. I felt his arguments were insufficient, and said so in this post. Asher eventually replied. I felt his arguments were still insufficient, so I replied again.
During the exchange, Asher suggested it was unfair of me to criticize him for not addressing various theological issues, since he was only writing a short essay. I thought that was reasonable, so I suggested we exchange books. I sent him a…
jrosenhouse | May 24, 2013A while back I did a post about counterintuitive math problems. However, I deliberately held one back, since I was using it as my Problem of the Week for that week. So here it is:
Suppose a steel beam, one mile long, is fastened securely to the ground at each end. As the
day heats up, the metal expands. Let us assume that at the hottest part of the day, the metal
is actually one mile and one foot long. Let us further assume that the beam is fastened in such
a way that it can only buckle upward, and not side to side. Your problem is to estimate how
high the beam will rise above the ground.…
jrosenhouse | May 23, 2013Number theory is chock-full of easily stated problems that are very difficult to solve. One such is the twin primes conjecture, which asserts simply that there are infinitely many twin primes. I'll assume you know what a prime number is. Twin primes are primes that differ by exactly two, such as 3 and 5, 5 and 7, 11 and 13, 17 and 19, or 101 and 103.
Of course, everyone knows there are infinitely many primes. If you have not seen it before, here's one easy way to prove that fact. We assume for a contradiction that there are only finitely many primes, let's say k of them. Then we can…
jrosenhouse | May 22, 2013Pope Francis said some interesting things at mass yesterday. From the Vatican Radio website:
Wednesday's Gospel speaks to us about the disciples who prevented a person from outside their group from doing good. “They complain,” the Pope said in his homily, because they say, “If he is not one of us, he cannot do good. If he is not of our party, he cannot do good.” And Jesus corrects them: “Do not hinder him, he says, let him do good.” The disciples, Pope Francis explains, “were a little intolerant,” closed off by the idea of possessing the truth, convinced that “those who do not have the…
jrosenhouse | May 21, 2013Eric Hedin, an assistant professor of physics at Ball State University, has come under fire for an honors course called, “Boundaries of Science.” The problem: the course appears to be little more than thinly veiled Christian evangelism. From The USA Today:
“BSU appears to offer a class that preaches religion, yet gives students honors science credit,&rdqu; foundation attorney Andrew Seidel wrote to Gora. “BSU appears to have a class with a non-biologist undermining genuine science and scholarship of the Ball State biology department by teaching creationism, a religious belief ...…
jrosenhouse | May 20, 2013Nate Silver provides the antidote to some dubious statistical reasoning on the part of certain conservatives. He was replying in particular to this column from Peggy Noonan. A column, mind you, that opens with, “We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate.” Goodness! Then she presents evidence like this:
The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration. The Journal's Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who'd donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney…
jrosenhouse | April 26, 2013Since I always have time to let you know about developments in my life, I feel compelled to mention that today is my fortieth birthday. I'm even happier, though, that today is the last day of classes (not counting finals, of course).
jrosenhouse | April 18, 2013Here's an interesting interview with Susan Jacoby on the subject of atheism. I don't agree with all of her points, but it's worth reading the whole thing. Here's an interesting excerpt:
Certainly one of the first things I thought about as a maturing child was “Why is there polio? Why are there diseases?” If there is a good God why are there these things? The answer of the religious person is “God has a plan we don’t understand.” That wasn’t enough for me. There are people who don’t know anything about science. One of the reasons I recommend Richard Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion, is that…
jrosenhouse | April 16, 2013Today's reading is from Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead, published in 1943.
Okay, just calm down. Yes, I know, she was crazy. She took some good ideas about freedom and indviduality and took them to absurd degrees. In her novels, characters say things to each other that no human beings have ever said to one another. All true.
But she certainly had her moments! I started reading the novel on a whim, and I was surprised by how gripping and suspenseful I found the story. It's actually pretty hard to put down, as long as you don't mind that the action is occasionally interrupted so the…
jrosenhouse | April 10, 2013I'll be disappearing into my little hidey hole for the next week or so, as I try to get past a few deadlines. One of those deadlines is coming this Friday, when I will be giving the banquet talk at the MAA Section Meeting, at Salisbury University in Salisbury, MD. Goodness! That's a long drive. Should be a fun meeting, though.
jrosenhouse | April 5, 2013I had not intended for this to be such a chess heavy week, but here's a brief, but informative, essay on the history of the design of chess pieces:
Prior to 1849, there was no such thing as a “normal chess set.” At least not like we think of it today. Over the centuries that chess had been played, innumerable varieties of sets of pieces were created, with regional differences in designation and appearance. As the game proliferated throughout southern Europe in the early 11th century, the rules began to evolve, the movement of the pieces were formalized, and the pieces themselves were…
jrosenhouse | April 4, 2013Just a quick post today, so have a look at this essay by Alex Beresow, over at Real Clear Science. He is advocating for chess to be a required subject in schools:
In the above video, the math/chess teacher says, “Chess trains logical thinking. It teaches how to make decisions, trains memory, strengthens will power, motivates children to win and teaches them how to deal with defeat. It's the only school subject that can do all this.”
That is a very interesting insight. Not only does chess help train the brain, but it also teaches children basic life skills. In our culture, we hand out…
jrosenhouse | April 3, 2013It would be a serious dereliction of my bloggily duties if I did not comment on the big Candidates Tournament, recently concluded in London.
My comment is this: Wowee wow wow! What a great tournament!
This was the tournament meant to determine the next challenger for the current World Chess Champion, Viswanathan Anand of India. The participants were eight giants of the chess world, who qualified for the tournament in various ways. Going in, virtually everyone would have picked Magnus Carlsen, of Norway, as the clear favorite. Levon Aronian and Vladimir Kramnik were also plausible winners…
jrosenhouse | April 2, 2013Via Massimo Pigliucci, I just read Gary Gutting's defense of his Catholic faith. Here's the opening:
An old friend and mentor of mine, Ernan McMullin, was a philosopher of science widely respected in his discipline. He was also a Catholic priest. I don’t know how many times fellow philosophers at professional meetings drew me aside and asked, “Does Ernan really believe that stuff?” (He did.) Amid all the serious and generally respectful coverage of the papal resignation and the election of a new pope, I often detect an undertone of this same puzzlement. Can reflective and honest…