jrosenhouse | September 4, 2012Going through withdrawal now that the London games are over? Well, you can console yourself with the thought that the Chess Olympiad is going strong, in Istanbul, Turkey. The United States has a very strong team, with top twenty players Hikaru Nakamura and Gata Kamsky taking care of business on the first two boards. The following position arose in the Round Seven match-up between the United States and host country Turkey. The Americans won the match with a decisive 3.5-.5 win, dramatically improving their medal chances. They were helped by Nakamura's win on Board One against Turkish…
jrosenhouse | September 3, 2012I'm currently reading Scott Aikin's and Robert Talisse's book Reasonable Atheism: A Moral Case for Respectful Disbelief. I'm finding it a strange experience. I agree with most of their substantive points, but I always find it off-putting when writers start boasting of their own civility and respectfulness.
I had to smile, though, when I came to this:
We take the Ontological Argument as the litmus test for intellectual seriousness, both for atheists and religious believers alike. Anyone who takes the question of God's existence seriously must grapple with this fascinating argument.…
jrosenhouse | August 30, 2012I have a new post up over at HuffPo. I discuss, and find wanting, the argument made by Daniel Sarewitz in this op-ed from Nature. Here's a taste:
Sarewitz' argument backfires in that it calls our attention to the key difference between science and religion. It is sometimes said that religion answers questions about meaning and purpose, but this is not accurate. The correct formulation is that religion makes assertions about meaning and purpose. Sorely lacking is any reliable method for establishing the correctness of those assertions. Science's contribution to these conversations is a set…
jrosenhouse | August 29, 2012As you know, I recently wrote a book describing my experiences in attending creationist conferences. Over a period of several years I attended one such event after another, often spending many hours a day listening to vicious, ignorant nonsense.
I mention this to establish my high tolerance for right-wing stupidity. Why, then, do I find it impossible to watch the Republican convention?
Happily, Paul Krugman has summed it all up perfectly:
The GOP campaign is based on five main themes, three negative and two positive.
Negative:
The claim that Obama denigrated businessmen, saying that they…
jrosenhouse | August 27, 2012Well, it looks like I have my next book project lined up! This one's a bit of a departure for me, since I will be an editor this time as opposed to an author. I will be editing a tribute volume to Raymond Smullyan, to be published by Dover Publications probably sometime next year.
I've mentioned Smullyan a few times in this blog. He's probably best known for his many books of logic puzzles. He did not invent the genre of puzzles about liars and truthtellers, but he certainly elevated it to a high art. He is also well-known for using puzzles as a device for communicating deep ideas in…
jrosenhouse | August 26, 2012Yoram Hazony, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says He does! I suppose that's good news for someone like me, but the basis for Hazony's argument strikes me as a bit dubious. Here's the opening:
Today's debates over the place of religion in modern life often showcase the claim that belief in God stifles reason and science. As Richard Dawkins writes in his best-seller “The God Delusion,” religious belief “discourages questioning by its very nature.” In “The End of Faith,” his own New Atheist manifesto, Sam Harris writes that religion represents “a vanishing point beyond which rational…
jrosenhouse | August 23, 2012Jerry Coyne directs our attention to a harrowing, but important, article from The New York Times Magazine. It is a profile of Jerry DeWitt, a former Pentecostal preacher who discovered, after more than twenty-five years in the biz, that he no longer believed any of the things he was preaching. Here's the opening:
Late one night in early May 2011, a preacher named Jerry DeWitt was lying in bed in DeRidder, La., when his phone rang. He picked it up and heard an anguished, familiar voice. It was Natosha Davis, a friend and parishioner in a church where DeWitt had preached for more than five…
jrosenhouse | August 22, 2012I am at a loss for good blog fodder today, so how about an amusing chess-themed puzzle I recently came across? It's a simple question: What is it that the queen cannot do that a king, rook, bishop, knight or pawn can all do? Good luck!
Come to think of it, here's another puzzle I've always liked. Nothing to do with chess this time. Imagine that you are in a pitch black room. No light at all. You are seated at a table. On the table is a standard deck of fifty-two cards, stacked neatly and squared away. Forty-two of the cards are face-down, while ten are face-up. Of course, since the…
jrosenhouse | August 21, 2012During my recent trip to New York I found some time to visit the American Museum of Natural History. I wanted to see their spider exhibit, you see.
Of course, step one was finding the place. Seventy-eighth and Central Park West, as I recall. Ah, this looks right:
The exhibit itself was a bit smaller than I had expected. I went through it in forty-five minutes, and that was after reading every sign and watching every video. The place was also overrun with screaming, squealing little kids, so that marred things a bit for me as well. But it was still fascinating and I'm glad I went.…
jrosenhouse | August 21, 2012Mathematician Tanya Khovanova has just posted a review of the Big Sudoku Book. She writes:
I received the book Taking Sudoku Seriously by by Jason Rosenhouse and Laura Taalman for review and put it aside to collect some dust. You see, I have solved too many Sudokus in my life. The idea of solving another one made me barf. Besides, I thought I knew all there is to know about the mathematics of Sudoku.
One day out of politeness or guilt I opened the book — and couldn’t stop reading.
The book is written for people who like Sudoku, but hate math. This is so strange. Sudoku is math. People who…
jrosenhouse | August 20, 2012A while back I did a post criticizing the idea that theistic evolution is a form of intelligent design. My argument was that theistic evolutionists accept modern evolutionary science as essentially correct, but also believe that it is not the whole story. This is relevantly different from those who say that modern science is rotten to the core. In the political arena theistic evolutionists are on the right side of issues in science education, whereas the ID folks are on the wrong side. For those reasons, it is simply unfair to equate the two. Or so I argued, at any rate.
I stand by that…
jrosenhouse | August 20, 2012Let's get the week started off right:
Moss Bluff Elementary School in Louisiana is looking to streamline lunch payments by implementing a palm vein scanner program, but some parents aren't pleased.
A letter to parents this week informed them of the new scanner that will allow the school's nearly 1,000 students to move through the lunch line faster and with fewer payment mistakes -- an issue that had arisen in the past, KPLC-TV reports.
While the letter notes that parents can opt their children out of the program, parent Mamie Sonnier told KPLC-TV that she was angry and disappointed by the…
jrosenhouse | August 17, 2012Massimo Pigliucci has a post up that is partly about the issue of realism vs. anti-realism in the philosophy of science. He describes the issue as follows:
To put it very briefly, a realist is someone who thinks that scientific theories aim at describing the world as it is (of course, within the limits of human epistemic access to reality), while an anti-realist is someone who takes scientific theories to aim at empirical adequacy, not truth. So, for instance, for a realist there truly are electrons out there, while for an anti-realist “electrons” are a convenient theoretical construct to…
jrosenhouse | August 16, 2012My cat, Emily, tends to get a bit sulky when I leave her for long periods of time. So when I returned home from New York the other day, having been gone for a week, I was not surprised when she did not greet me at the door. Par for the course, I thought. She'll appear on her own in five to ten minutes.
When fifteen minutes went by and she still had not appeared I decided to go hunting. My first pass around the house was unsuccessful. Emily was not in any of her usual hiding places. Then I heard meowing. It was weird since it sounded like it was coming from directly underneath the floor…
jrosenhouse | August 16, 2012The Big Monty Hall Book is now more than three years old, but new reviews still appear occasionally. The latest one comes from the magazine Significance, published by the Royal Statistical Society. The reviewer is Tom Fanshawe, a statistician at Lancaster University in England. Alas, the review is not freely available online, so permit me some excerpts:
[The Monty Hall problem] will be familiar to most people who have studied probability, and, given a modicum of probability theory, it is not a difficult problem. Does it really warrant a whole book?
It is a credit to Jason Rosenhouse that…
jrosenhouse | August 16, 2012An amusing tidbit, from HuffPo:
The U.S. population has reached a nerdy and delightful milestone.
Shortly after 2:29 p.m. on Tuesday, August 14, 2012, the U.S. population was exactly 314,159,265, or pi (π) times 100 million, the U.S. Census Bureau reports. The U.S. Census Bureau's Population Clock projects the real-time size of the U.S. population based on monthly population estimates.
jrosenhouse | August 15, 2012One thing I have learned from more than a decade of teaching mathematics is that it is very easy to bamboozle people with numbers and equations. I do it all the time in my calculus classes, and that is when I am bending over backward to be as clear as I possibly can.
Creationists are especially unscrupulous about exploiting this fact about mathematics. At one creationist conference I attended, the speaker went on for close to an hour spouting the sheerest nonsense about information theory and probability. He received a standing ovation for his troubles. Another time, in a small,…
jrosenhouse | August 14, 2012Remember that scene in Die Hard, where Bruce Willis drops a huge pile of explosives down an elevator shaft, blowing up the lobby of the building and killing a few terrorists, but also shattering the building's huge glass windows? You might recall that right after he does that the officious deputy police chief says to him, angrily, “I got a hundred people down here and they're all covered in glass!” And Bruce Willis replies, “Glass? Who gives a sh*t about glass?”
I was reminded of that scene upon reading this article, by Tom Bartlett, in the current issue of The Chronicle Review. Here's…
jrosenhouse | August 13, 2012During my time in New York, I had lunch with some friends from England. We were discussing evolution and creationism, and religious fundamentalism more generally. Somewhere along the line I mentioned that creationists routinely use mathematical arguments in their writing, and one of my friends replied that he had heard that some fundamentalists even have a problem with set theory.
I stared at him. I thought I was up on the latest in pseudomathematics, but this one was entirely new to me. But with a few taps on his phone he showed me what he was talking about. He was referring to this…
jrosenhouse | August 9, 2012I'm on the road, again. I've been in New York City since Tuesday, and I am currently sitting in my tiny room at a Comfort Inn near Central Park on 71st Street. Alas, I've been sworn to secrecy regarding the purpose of my trip (ooooooh), but suffice it to say that after this afternoon the business part will end and the pleasure will begin. I'll be back n Virginia on Sunday.
It was nice, during my morning internet round-up, to come across this encouraging article from HuffPo:
Rocked in recent years by sex-abuse scandals and crises in leadership, the Catholic Church in the Republic of…