jrosenhouse | April 1, 2013Looks like I've just added Ian McEwan's new novel to my reading list:
During one of their Brighton rendezvouses, after a round of oysters and a second bottle of champagne, Tom Haley asks Serena Frome the question every mathematician longs for her lover to utter:
I want you to tell me something...something interesting, no, counterintuitive, paradoxical. You owe me a good maths story.
Frome (“rhymes with plume”), a twenty-something blonde blessed with the looks of Scarlett Johansson might be the last person one would expect capable of satisfying Haley's request. But readers of Booker-winning…
jrosenhouse | March 29, 2013Let me wrap up the week's blogging by directing you to two essays related to things we've been discussing this week.
The first is Mohan Matthen's review of Thomas Nagel's book in The Philosopher's Magazine. I refer you to it partly because it's an interesting essay in its own right, but also because he seizes on precisely the Nagel quote that caught my attention in this post. Matthen writes:
This is perhaps the moment to come back to the strange pronouncement to which I earlier alluded. Nagel writes, “With regard to evolution, the process of natural selection cannot account for the actual…
jrosenhouse | March 28, 2013Over at Lapham's Quarterly, John Jeremiah Sullivan has
an excellent article on the subject of animal consciousness. Here's the opening:
These are stimulating times for anyone interested in questions of animal consciousness. On what seems like a monthly basis, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly. New animal behaviors and capacities are observed in the wild, often involving tool use—or at least object manipulation—the very kinds of…
jrosenhouse | March 27, 2013It has not been a good week for those who oppose same-sex marriage. The Supreme Court heard two relevant cases this week, and to judge from the questioning they seem likely to render a decision far more favorable to same sex marriage advocates. Of course, the questioning is not always a reliable guide. After all, Obamacare seemed to be circling the drain after the oral arguments. Still, it was a pretty rough day at the office for the lawyers advocating for discrimination. Meanwhile, politicians are tripping over each other in their rush to come out in favor of same sex marriage. It wasn…
jrosenhouse | March 26, 2013I only have time for a quick post tonight, so let me direct you to one of my favorite math videos. It's of Arthur Benjamin, a mathematician at Harvey Mudd College in California. Art is also a professional magician, and is especially well known for his skill as a lightning calculator. The video is fifteen minutes long, but very enjoyable.
Just so we're clear, his calculations are not tricks. He really is doing what it looks like he's doing. The only portion of the video that could be described as a trick is the part where he determines the missing digit of a seven-digit number after…
jrosenhouse | March 25, 2013Occasionally I rant about the general awfulness of mathematics textbooks. If I were to express my major objection in the most charitable possible way, it is that most textbooks are written like reference books. They are usually very good at recording the basic facts of a subject and proving them with admirable rigor. If you just need to look up some elementary theorem or formal definition, then by all means consult a textbook. The trouble, though, is that textbooks are seldom written from the perspective of a student encountering the material for the first time.
If I were to express…
jrosenhouse | March 25, 2013Edward Feser has replied to my earlier post about some of the responses to Thomas Nagel's new book. Feser took exception to my remarks. Let's have a look.
EvolutionBlog’s Jason Rosenhouse tells us in a recent post that he hasn’t read philosopher Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos. And it seems obvious enough from his remarks that he also hasn’t read the commentary of any of the professional philosophers and theologians who have written about Nagel sympathetically -- such as my own series of posts on Nagel and his critics, or Bill Vallicella’s, or Alvin Plantinga’s review of Nagel, or Alva Noë…
jrosenhouse | March 22, 2013Sadly, the big basketball game went the way everyone expected. Which is to say that we lost. Badly. Indiana 83 -- JMU 62. Ouch!
As it happens, my former academic home, Kansas State University, also lost. This one was a big upset, since, despite being the 4th seed, they lost to 13th seed La Salle. So, a bad day all around.
In more important sporting news, at the halfway point of the event, Magnus Carlsen and Levon Aronian have a big lead over the pack in the big chess tournament to determine the next challenger for the World Championship. The action is happening in London. The chess…
jrosenhouse | March 20, 2013Check it out!
Of course, now we have to play Indiana. Considering that it was a minor miracle that JMU made it to the tournament at all, while Indiana is among the favorites to win the whole thing, I'm not optimistic about our chances. History is against us, since no 16th seed has ever beaten a 1st seed in the history of the tournament. Then again, everything never happened prior to the first time it happened, so maybe we have a chance after all!
jrosenhouse | March 19, 2013The math department here at JMU has a Problem of the Week competition, and it just so happens that, this semester, I am running it. Every week I choose a problem for the consideration of all who choose to participate. (Well, I actually bribe my students to participate by offering them a bonus point for each problem they get right, but whatever.) A randomly selected winner from among the correct answers gets a five dollar gift card to Starbucks. Mostly it's just a way to get the students thinking about amusing mathematical brainteasers outside of their regular coursework.
Anyway, I am…
jrosenhouse | March 19, 2013Philosopher Thomas Nagel recently published a book called Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. The general consensus was that the book delivered considerably less than it promised. H. Allen Orr's negative review from The New York Review of Books was pretty typical of the response, if somewhat more polite than some.
I have not read Nagel's book, so I don't have a strong opinion about it. Based on what I've read about it, however, I suspect I wouldn't like it. For example, here is part of a quote from Nagel, as presented by Orr…
jrosenhouse | March 15, 2013I've recently had it called to my attention that Among the Creationists has been reviewed in Perspectives on Science and the Christian Faith. That's the journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, an organization of Christian scientists. They are generally sympathetic to evolution and mostly have little patience for ID and creationism. On the other hand, they definitely like their evolution with a heavy theistic gloss. When I wrote the book, I was especially curious about how it would be received in quarters like this. So let's have a look.
The reviewer is Robyn Pal Rylaarsdam of…
jrosenhouse | March 14, 2013Slate has an interesting article, by Tara Haelle, discussing a math problem that recently received some attention on Facebook. The problem is to evaluate this expression:
$latex 6 \div 2(1+2)$
Obviously, the challenge here is not the arithmetic itself. It is to figure out the order in which to do the operations. I suspect most people would naturally do
the parentheses first, leading to this:
$latex 6 \div 2(3)$,
but what now? We could argue that we should first multiply the two by the three, leading to this:
$latex 6 \div 6$,
which is obviously equal to 1. Alternatively, we could…
jrosenhouse | March 13, 2013By now I'm sure you've heard that we have a new Pope. He is Jorge Mario Bergoglio, form Argentina, but from now on he will be known as Pope Francis. It appears he is a doctrinaire right-winger on issues related to homosexuality, abortion and conctraception, which is no surprise. Andrew Sullivan provides other reasons for concern. On the other hand, he does seem to have a genuine commitment to speaking out on behalf of the downtrodden. He took his name from Saint Francis, who famously took a vow of poverty. He also has a background in science, specifically chemistry, so perhaps he will…
jrosenhouse | March 12, 2013Writing at The New Republic, Paul Berman has an interesting, if rather lengthy, article about Les Miserables, the book. I like his opening:
The most famous and revealing scenes in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables get underway fairly late in the novel—on page 1,280 in the Pléiade edition—at the moment when the physically powerful Jean Valjean pries loose an iron-bar sewer grill in a Paris street and prepares to escape into the underground tunnels, carrying on his back the half-dead body of young Marius, the barricade fighter. It is 1832, a year of insurrections. Marius has been battling against…
jrosenhouse | March 11, 2013Writing in The Week, Damon Linker has a strange essay arguing that atheists who are honest about the consequences of their beliefs ought to be sad and mopey. The subtitle of his essay is, “That godlessness might be both true and terrible is something that the new atheists refuse to entertain.”
This is a trope that arises from time to time in anti-atheist rhetoric, but it is one I find incomprehensible. Partly this is because I contrast atheism with the alternatives on offer, and find it fares well in the comparison. The most common forms of Christianity, for example, tell me that human…
jrosenhouse | March 10, 2013I have now returned form my travels in Baltimore and Washington DC. The big Hopkins talk went well, I think. Then I moseyed on down to Washington DC to hang out. This past week was spring break around here, though you would never have known it from the weather.
While I was in DC, I took advantage of the excellent E Street Cinema to see some films I would not otherwise have had a chance to see (not in a theater, at any rate.) I first discovered this theater when I made a special trip to DC a while back to see Creation, a pretty good biopic about Charles Darwin. Little chance of that…
jrosenhouse | March 3, 2013I finally created a Twitter account, mostly so that I could find out who keeps tweeting about my posts. The little Twitter counter under the title consistently has some pleasingly non-zero number in it, so I thought I should find out what people are saying. Alas, whenever I click on the little number, it just takes me to the home page I just created. But that's not what I wanted! If someone wants to talk gently to me and explain what I am doing wrong, I'll be happy to hear it.
jrosenhouse | March 3, 2013Tomorrow I'll be leaving for sunny Baltimore, Maryland. Tuesday evening I will be speaking at Johns Hopkins about the mathematics of Sudoku. To judge from the advertisement, it looks like it will be quite the party!
Since its spring break around here, on Wednesday I will leave Baltimore to head over to Washington D.C. for a few days. I'll be seeing the National Symphony Orchestra perform on Thursday night, but that's as far as I've gotten plan-wise. See you when I return!
jrosenhouse | March 2, 2013I had two big deadlines this Friday for various projects, and I am happy to report that I made both of them. That means I finally have time to take a breath, and write the post you have all been waiting for. What happened at the U. S. Amateur Team East chess tournament!?
That's right! Over President's weekend I made my annual pilgrimage to Parsippany, NJ, to play in the biggest tournament of the year. With something like 1200 players, it's really just a big chess party. I don't play nearly as much tournament chess as I used to, but I definitely make an effort to come out of retirement…