jrosenhouse | December 10, 2012I am happy to report that my back is doing much better now. Not quite good as new yet, but rapidly getting there.
In this previous post I mentioned that spending a lot of time flat on your back does allow you to get a lot of reading done. Lately I've been having a go at Bleak House, by Charles Dickens of course, first serialized in 1852 and 1853. The upside of a Dickens novel is that he wrote truly beautiful sentences. The downside is that he was never in much of a hurry to move the story along. But that's just perfect for my present situation, since I haven't been doing much “moving…
jrosenhouse | November 29, 2012Back in February, paleontologist Robert Asher wrote this essay for HuffPo. The essay was called, “Why I am an Accommodationist,” and it defended the compatibility of science and religion. As regular readers of this blog are aware, I don't much care for that view. So I wrote this reply. After a long break, Asher has now replied to my reply, over at The Panda's Thumb. I thank him for taking the time to have to done so. However, I am not moved by his remarks to revise anything I said in my original post. So let's go one more round, and have a look at what he has to say.
After a brief…
jrosenhouse | November 28, 2012The current issue of e-Skeptic features three book reviews I recently wrote, discussing books related to the evolution of evolution. The three books were Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution, by Rebecca Stott; Darwin the Writer, by George Levine; and American Genesis: The Evolution Controversies from Scopes to Creation Science, by Jeffrey Moran. I liked all three! Properly juxtaposed, they tell a complete story, from the early history of evolutionary thought, often carried out in secret for fear of retaliation from religious authorities, as documented by Stott's book, through…
jrosenhouse | November 25, 2012One benefit of spending a lot of time lying down waiting patiently for your back to feel better is that you get a lot of reading done. I just polished off the novel Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1920. (Short review: Enjoyable, but not as good as Elmer Gantry.) Anyway, the main story follows Carol Kennicott, a city-girl who finds herself living in the small town of Gopher Prairie, MN, after marrying the town's doctor. She finds it hard to adjust to the insularity of her new home.
The following paragraph jumped out at me as being pretty timeless. Carol is at a family…
jrosenhouse | November 20, 2012Sorry for the longer than usual blog hiatus. Get your violins ready, but I am currently suffering through one of my periodical bouts of lower back pain, which makes it very painful to sit up for more than a few minutes at a time. The last two weeks or so have been spent remaining vertical just long enough to teach my classes and hold office hours, before dragging myself home and chewing on pain killers. Blogging was one of the first things to go.
I was diagnosed with degenerate disc disease a little more than a year ago, but I've had back problems going back to 2000. The first such attack…
jrosenhouse | October 31, 2012The Reports of the National Center for Science Education has just posted a new review of my book Among the Creationists. The reviewer is Taner Edis, professor of physics at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri. Since Edis's own books on science and religion, The Ghost in the Machine and Science and Nonbelief are among my favorites on this subject, his opinion means a lot to me. So, did he like the book?
Jason Rosenhouse, who teaches mathematics at James Madison University, might at first
seem an unlikely person to be interested in the creationism/evolution wars. Creationism isa…
jrosenhouse | October 30, 2012I recently heard a pollster remark, “When you give conservatives bad polling data, they want to kill you. When you give liberals bad polling data, they want to kill themselves.”
That attitude has been well on display recently in the right-wing freak out over Nate Silver's website. Silver currently gives Obama a 72.9 percent chance of winning the electoral college on election day. There is nothing mysterious in how he arrives at that conclusion. He's simply noticed that Obama has a lead in enough states to put him over 270. It's not complicated.
But that's too complicated for right-…
jrosenhouse | October 29, 2012Here's Mitt Romney, from one of the Republican primary debates (moderated by John King of CNN):
KING: You've been a chief executive of a state. I was just in Joplin, Missouri. I've been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with whether it's the tornadoes, the flooding, and worse. FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we're learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role. How do you deal with something like that?
ROMNEY: Absolutely.…
jrosenhouse | October 23, 2012So, I saw Paranormal Activity 4 on Monday night. Short review: Pretty disappointing, but I'll still go to Paranormal Activity 5 on opening night.
I am happy to report, however, that my skills as a political prognosticator took a big hit from the debate. You see, one reason I was especially unenthusiastic about watching the debate in real time was that I was certain it would be a disaster for Obama. I figured Romney would just fire off the standard Republican talking points. You know the litany. Obama's weakness led to Benghazi and Syria. He threw Israel under the bus. China and…
jrosenhouse | October 21, 2012You've probably noticed that I haven't been blogging much lately. That's partly because this is an especially busy time of the semester. Try grading a thousand midterm exam problems in a few days and see how many brain cells you have left over for blogging. Mostly, though, it's my general unhappiness with the way the Presidential election is going.
I think it's pretty likely that Romney is going to win. For the moment Obama is still maintaining his firewall in Ohio, but the polls have tightened there considerably. Meanwhile, Florida seems to be solidly red at this point, and the polls in…
jrosenhouse | October 3, 2012Here's a charming story:
A math professor at Michigan State University allegedly stripped naked, ran naked through his classroom and screamed “There is no f*cking God!” before police apprehended him, according to several reports.
The professor's name has not yet been released, but online, students said he was “eccentric,” and that they “could probably have seen this coming.”
A Redditor shared a grainy cell phone picture of the man in a hallway at the university as authorities restrained him.
Another user, TheCookieKing shared more details:
Background story: I was in Calc 1 at Michigan State…
jrosenhouse | October 1, 2012I am slowly working on an article for Skeptical Inquirer about the ways in which religious apologists use mathematical arguments in their rhetoric. Among these arguments are the familiar creationist claims about probability and information theory, but there is also a family of arguments based on the effectiveness of mathematics itself. The basic argument is that mathematics is so useful for describing the world solely because God, in his benevolence, designed the world to be describable in that way. They will often cite Eugene Wigner's 1960 article “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of…
jrosenhouse | September 25, 2012Update: Well, it seems I got Onioned on this one. That is, I mistook a satirical article for one that was meant as serious reporting. I have left this post up simply because I think the essay mentioned here is actually pretty funny. And while the specifics were made up, I suspect the sentiments expressed there in are correct!
From Politico:
Paul Ryan has gone rogue. He is unleashed, unchained, off the hook.
“I hate to say this, but if Ryan wants to run for national office again, he’ll probably have to wash the stench of Romney off of him,” Craig Robinson, a former political director of…
jrosenhouse | September 20, 2012I had originally intended to devote this post to discussing some of the minutiae in Massimo Pigliucci's essay. In light of some of the comments on the previous post, however, I've decided it would be more useful to speak generally about why I get so annoyed when charges of scientism are casually thrown around.
I actually agree with some of Pigliucci's specific criticism's of Krauss. For example, in his exchange with Julian Baggini, Krauss said this:
Ultimately, I think our understanding of neurobiology and evolutionary biology and psychology will reduce our understanding of morality to…
jrosenhouse | September 19, 2012Massimo Pigliucci is going on about scientism again. His target -- surprise! -- is Lawrence Krauss, specifically this exchange between Krauss and philosopher Julian Baggini, published in The Guardian.
When I first became aware of “scientism,” a while back, it was invariably a charge leveled by religious people at scientists. To be accused of scientism was to be accused of being insufficiently respectful of religion. More specifically, it was to be accused of not acknowledging religious “ways of knowing,” as legitimate. Since I don't think religious ways of knowing should be accorded any…
jrosenhouse | September 17, 2012These are hard times to be a supporter of Israel. Bibi Netanyahu is a lunatic who is now actively trying to mess with the American election. You see, President Obama, early in his term, politely suggested that if Israel seriously wants to make peace with its neighbors they might want to consider not expanding settlements in the West Bank. For this transgression, Netanyahu, and his lackeys on the American Right, have decided that Obama is morbidly anti-Israel. Their relentless vitriol has convinced some of the dimmer segments of the American Jewish population that they should vote for…
jrosenhouse | September 13, 2012I have a guest post up over at the blog of Oxford University Press, discussing a few amusing tidbits from set theory. The post was inspired by this earlier post, in which I mentioned the bizarre criticism of set theory served up by a publisher of Christian home schooling materials.
In my new post I discuss Russell's paradox, another classic paradox whose name I do not know. and finish with a set-theory-based “proof” that all counting numbers are interesting. (More precisely, I show that the set of boring counting numbers is empty.) Enjoy!
jrosenhouse | September 11, 2012If I told you that evolution was in crisis, what would you think I meant? You would probably think I meant that the theory was on its way out. You would think that new discoveries had shown the untenability of evolution, and that biologists were in despair over their lack of a central organizing principle. You would think that maybe those creationists and ID folks weren't as crazy as you had been told. If you're an old hand at this you might even recall Michael Denton's 1986 book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, which proved so inspirational to ID folks in the years before Philip Johnson…
jrosenhouse | September 10, 2012Over at Uncommon Descent, there's a bit of a kerfuffle going on about the second law of thermodynamics. Salvador Cordova got the ball rolling back in July with this barn-burner of a post excoriating his fellow ID proponent Granville Sewell for making bad thermodynamical arguments:
ID proponents and creationists should not use the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics to support ID. Appropriate for Independence Day in the USA is my declaration of independence and disavowal of 2nd Law arguments in support of ID and creation theory. Any student of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics will likely find…
jrosenhouse | September 10, 2012OMG! Did you see the game between U. S. first board Hikaru Nakamura and Russia's first board (and former World Champion) Vladimir Kramnik at the big Chess Olympiad last week? No? It saw one of the rarest and coolest moves in chess. In the following position, it is Nakamura, playing white, to move:
Let me remind you that when a pawn makes it all the way to the other side of the board, it can become either a queen, rook, bishop or knight. This is called pawn promotion. In nearly all situations you are going to promote to a queen, since that is the most powerful piece. When a person…