jrosenhouse | August 2, 2012Jerry Coyne has a sourpuss post up about his lack of enthusiasm for the Olympics:
This year, I can’t get energized at all. I watch the highlights on the evening news, but the revelation that Phelps has become the most decorated Olympian of all time leaves me cold. And I never watch the evening’s recaps.
I’m wondering if it’s just me, and I’ve simply lost interest, or whether the games themselves have become tepid and, as they get more “professional”—with fancy training, paid athletes, and the like—they’ve just gotten more boring. Reader opinion is welcome.
Well, I know for a fact that it'…
jrosenhouse | July 31, 2012In this post over at HuffPo, Rabbi Adam Jacobs serves up one of the standard replies to the problem of evil. After recounting a harrowing story of having to subject his 16 month old son to a difficult medical procedure, he writes:
I have found this story to be helpful for explaining to people the nature of suffering. In truth, our ability to perceive what is happening around us is extremely limited; as Thomas Edison once said, “We do not know one millionth of one percent about anything.” With such limited and flawed faculties, how can we rightly expect to have any more perspective about the…
jrosenhouse | July 30, 2012With all of my recent travels, I feel like most of the last few weeks have been spent either on the road or preparing to go on the road. I will be making another pilgrimage to New York next week, mostly business this time, but some pleasure as well. As a result, a lot of good blog fodder has been falling through the cracks.
So, let's try to get caught up on a few things. The first orders of business are two recent posts from Michael Ruse. In the first, he once more offers his thoughts on the question of human inevitability in evolution. He writes:
The problem is this. If Christianity…
jrosenhouse | July 25, 2012I'm back in Virginia again, after another successful trip. This time I was mostly in Kentucky, visiting various friends.
It's a shame that nowadays Kentucky is known primarily for bourbon, horse racing and creationism, since it's really a very beautiful state. Among my ports of call was Morehead, KY to visit my friend Robin. She's in the math department at Morehead State University. She showed me around the area, including a stop at this lake, right on campus:
Not bad, but it was just a warm-up for what came next. Robin took me out to Lockegee Rock, in the Daniel Boone National…
jrosenhouse | July 20, 2012Here's Texas Republican representative Louie Gohmert explaining the cause of the killings at that Colorado movie theater:
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said Friday that the shootings that took place in an Aurora, Colo. movie theater hours earlier were a result of “ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs” and questioned why nobody else in the theater had a gun to take down the shooter.
During a radio interview on The Heritage Foundation's “Istook Live!” show, Gohmert was asked why he believes such senseless acts of violence take place. Gohmert responded by talking about the weakening of…
jrosenhouse | July 19, 2012It's been fun spending a few days at home in Virginia, but it's time to hit the road again. Tomorrow I will hop into the Jasonmobile and head west. Since I seek out only the choicest tourist destinations, I will be spending time in Loveland, OH; Bowling Green, KY; and Morehead, also KY. Fun! I'll be back next week.
jrosenhouse | July 18, 2012Via Andrew Sullivan, we have this interesting essay, by Jacob Weisberg, discussing why Mitt Romney is struggling to defend his history at Bain Capital. The whole essay is worth reading, but I especially liked this part:
Romney’s Bain career is a story about rising inequality. It’s telling that George Romney, Mitt’s father, made around $200,000 through most of the years he ran American Motors Corporation. Doing work that clearly created jobs, the elder Romney paid an effective tax rate that averaged 37 percent. His son made vastly more running a corporate chop shop in an industry that does…
jrosenhouse | July 18, 2012In the course of a generally favorable review of Among the Creationists over at The Panda's Thumb blog, Matt Young wrote the following:
Nevertheless, he takes a dim view of, for example, an argument that reinterprets original sin as the selfishness that drives evolution. I will not go into detail, but this kind of thinking ultimately leads Rosenhouse to conclude that the creationists are essentially correct and that evolution and Christianity are not compatible. In this sense, he has the same narrow view of religion as the creationists – that it is all or nothing – and he risks alienating…
jrosenhouse | July 17, 2012Another day, another review of of the Big Evolution/Creation Book. This time it's Matt Young over at The Panda's Thumb. His verdict?
Among the Creationists is well written, well formatted, and well organized (though I thought that most of the content of the endnotes should have been incorporated into the text). It has a good list of references and a good index. It is barely 230 pages long, and it is a pleasure to read. May I recommend that anyone with an interest in creationism go straight to your local independent book dealer, buy a copy, and read it through?
Score!
As with yesterday's…
jrosenhouse | July 16, 2012The BECB (that's the The Big Evolution/Creationism Book, for those not up on the local slang) has now been reviewed in the academic journal Evolution and Development. The reviewer is Rudolf Raff, a prominent biologist at Indiana University. The review is available here, though I think you need a subscription to the journal to access the PDF. His verdict?
All in all I enjoyed reading Among the Creationists. It represents a unique attempt of a secular scholar to engage creationist communities on their own home ground and report his experiences. Rosenhouse has provided an immense service…
jrosenhouse | July 16, 2012I'm back in Virginia for a few days. I'll be hitting the road once again on Friday, heading west this time to visit friends in Kentucky. In the meantime, here's an interesting photo of the light fixture hanging between the garage doors of my parent's house:
What's that ball-like thing underneath the light? Let's take a closer look:
Yikes! That's a hornet's nest!
Even cooler is that my parents never even noticed it was there. It fell to my five-year-old niece to point it out.
jrosenhouse | July 10, 2012I have now reached the last leg of my travels. I was in Philadelphia for several days last week, and was in upstate New York over the weekend. Currently I'm in New York City.
Last night I attended Monday Night Magic at the Players Theater in Greenwich Village. All of the acts were very enjoyable, but it was a special thrill to get to see Chris Capehart, who is pretty famous among magicians. If you ever have a chance to see him perform I heartily recommend it.
When the show let out I walked around the village a bit. It was jumping with activity. Lots of stuff was still open, and it…
jrosenhouse | July 3, 2012As preparation for your fourth of July barbecue, watch this video about how to cook a hot dog. It's very clever, despite being spoiled somewhat at the end by the application of ketchup to the finished dog. As Dirty Harry once said, nobody but nobody puts ketchup on a hot dog!
jrosenhouse | July 1, 2012I haven't tried to solve this yet, but considering the headline I feel honor-bound to give it a try. It's a pity it wasn't available in time to include in the Big Sudoku Book, since we have a section discussing how the difficulty of a puzzle is determined.
jrosenhouse | June 28, 2012I've decided it's time to get out of Virginia for two weeks or so. I came up with the most exciting and exotic locales I could think of. I will be visiting central New Jersey, Philadelphia, upstate New York and New York City. Do I know how to travel or what?
It'll be a mix of business and pleasure, but blogging will be very sporadic while I'm gone. Sorry about that.
jrosenhouse | June 24, 2012Among the side effects of all the asinine hand-wringing over the phony problem of “scientism” is that it distracts attention from the real threat facing the humanities. I am referring to the corporate mindset that has come to dominate many aspects of higher education.
That threat is on full display in the current fracas at the University of Virginia, where the Board ousted the popular President, basically because she wasn't moving fast enough to gut the humanities. HuffPo has a useful run-down:
Members of the board, steeped in a culture of corporate jargon and buzzy management theories,…
jrosenhouse | June 21, 2012As a counterpoint to Monday's post about Genesis, consider this essay, by Craig Kanalley. He writes:
I felt I needed a shake-up in my life. And that's what happened. I decided to make a career change, abruptly leaving my job at NBC News, and coming back to where I was happy in a prior phase of my life, The Huffington Post (thanks for allowing me back!).
It was risky. For one thing, you're not supposed to leave a job after just three months. It was a period of transition. And with that transition, I wanted God to be with me.
So, I started reading the Bible. This is something I had tried to…
jrosenhouse | June 20, 2012I'm coming very late to the party on this one, but I wanted to comment on Philip Kitcher's recent article on scientism, published in The New Republic.
A while back I did two posts on scientism (here and here). The first of these posts was titled, “What is Scientism?”, since it's never been entirely clear to me what someone accused of scientism is actually guilty of. Often it just means you are guilty of being dismissive of religious “ways of knowing,” such as direct experience of God or divine revelation. Since I think one ought to be dismissive of such things, I am often keen to defend…
jrosenhouse | June 19, 2012Over at Kevin Drum's blog, there is an interesting exchange between Drum and an unnamed college professor. In a post that was primarily about issues related to paying for a college education, Drum wrote:
The fact is that UCLA provides undergraduates with an education that's just as good as Harvard, and the country might be a better place if we all faced up to that and took Harvard and the rest of our super-elite universities off the pedestal we've placed them on. That pedestal has long since become corrosive and damaging to the public welfare.
Alas, the unnamed professor provides provides…
jrosenhouse | June 18, 2012Update: June 19, 10:56 am: The commenting issues have now been fixed! Yay! So please ignore the first paragraph of the post.
The commenting issues around here remain unresolved. In the past I have been told by the overlords that this was being treated as a high-priority problem. If that is so, then I would hate to see how a low-priority problem is treated. It's also been pointed out to me that if you read the blog through an RSS feed, then you will have to resubscribe to the blog. Of course, if you are reading this post then you have already surmised that something was wrong with the…