jrosenhouse | April 7, 2010Which is to say that the Big Monty Hall Book got a (mostly) favorable review from the London Mathematical Society. The reviewer was David Spiegelhalter, a statistician at the University of Cambridge.
I should admit that I don't generally use the Monty Hall problem with students, as I am not convinced anyone is enlightened by having it explained. But I have had fun teasing people with it, from my girlfriend 35 years ago, to a senior QC at a dinner. However, my first thought was: how can anyone write a whole book on this? Well, Jason Rosenhouse has, and it's surprisingly good.
Why…
jrosenhouse | April 1, 2010Don't see this at very many math conferences:
This is from the Gathering for Gardner, which took place last week in Atlanta. That's Martin Gardner, who wrote the “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American for thirty years. He also wrote prolifically about magic and psuedoscience. Or perhaps I should say “writes” since he is still producing new work at ninety-five.
I was honored to receive an invitation based on Gardner's endorsement of my book. I gave a short talk about the Monty Hall problem on the first day, which seemed to be well-received.
For me the highlight of the…
jrosenhouse | March 31, 2010In the next day or two I will post a detailed account of my experiences at the Gathering for Gardner, which I can honestly say is one of the most enjoyable math conferences I have ever attended. In the meantime, you might enjoy this essay by Burkard Polster and Marty Ross. Polster is a mathematician at Monash University in Australia, and I had the pleasure of meeting him at the conference. His column has nuggets like this:
There may not be much left to argue, but argument continues regardless. For instance, there is the famous Oxford theologian Richard Swinburne. He fell in love with…
jrosenhouse | March 23, 2010I will be leaving for Atlanta, GA tomorrow to participate in the Ninth Gathering for Gardner. That's Martin Gardner, of course. I will be giving a short talk about the Monty Hall problem on Thursday morning, and then it will be three days of math, magic and other cool things. Gardner contributed a jacket endorsement to my Monty Hall book.
The evo/creo book continues to plod along. I have now crossed the 30,000 word mark. It's a bit stressful, one minute I think I have written something pretty good, the next I think it is career-ending crap. Whatever.
Hopefully I"ll get back to semi-…
jrosenhouse | March 17, 2010I am slowly making progress on the big evolution/creation book. I passed the 25,000 word mark yesterday (Whoo hoo!) but my contract calls for 100,000 words (D'oh!). I am nowhere near running out of things to say, but I am such a painfully slow writer that 75,000 more words seems like an awful lot. I am one of those people who writes a sentence, then stares at it for a while, then runs off to play three games of internet chess before deleting it and trying again. Oh well. All you can do is keep chipping away.
Which is my long-winded way of saying that blogging is going to continue to be…
jrosenhouse | March 9, 2010A little point to ponder from Jason Lisle, a young-Earth creationist with Answers in Genesis. This is from his book The Ultimate Proof of Creation:
Laws of logic pose a very serious problem for the evolutionist. Almost all evolutionists know they should be logical, and yet they have no basis for las of logic within their own professed worldview. The problem is particularly embarrassing for the materialistic atheist. A materialistic atheist does not believe in anything beyond the physical universe. In his view, all that exists is matter in motion. But of course laws of logic are not…
jrosenhouse | March 5, 2010From Yahoo News:
To shed light on why humans often fall short of the best strategy with this kind of problem, scientists investigated pigeons, which often perform quite impressively on tasks requiring them to estimate relative probabilities, in some cases eclipsing human performance. Other animals do not always share the same biases as people, and therefore might help provide explanations for our behavior.
Scientists tested six pigeons with an apparatus with three keys. The keys lit up white to show a prize was available. After the birds pecked a key, one of the keys the bird did not choose…
jrosenhouse | March 4, 2010Before leaving behind Denis Lamoureux's book I Love Jesus and I Accept Evolution, there is one lengthy excerpt I would like to present. If I presented only a small portion of this you would think I was taking it out of context. If I paraphrased it you would not believe me. I will simply have to present the whole thing, as a painful illustration of the sheer depths to which special pleading can aspire.
Here is Lamoureux's explanation of why God of love would do his creating through a cruel and wasteful process like evolution. I promise you I am not making this up.
This question needs…
jrosenhouse | March 4, 2010In my recent post on Interpreting Genesis, one of the commenters suggested to me the writing of Denis Lamoureux as a good example of defending a non-literal interpretation of Genesis. A quick visit to Amazon revealed that his big book on this subject, Evolutionary Creation, was over four hundred pages long and was quite expensive. Happily, last year Lamoureux, who is a professor of science and religion at the University of Alberta and holds doctoral degrees in dentistry, theology and biology, published a Cliff's Notes version of his book called I Love Jesus and I Accept Evolution. I…
jrosenhouse | February 24, 2010Browsing through Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth the other day I came across the following sentence: “The slow drifting apart of South America and Africa is now an established fact in the ordinary language sense of `fact', and so is our common ancestry with porcupines and pomegranates.” Elsewhere, in a discussion of human breeding efforts, Dawkins refers to “cows, cabbages and corn.”
I know I have seen this sort of thing many times before. That is, using alliterative organism names to make some point about universal common descent. Here's another example, this time from YEC…
jrosenhouse | February 18, 2010Via Jerry Coyne I came across this essay regarding the interpretation of Genesis. (Click here for Part One of the essay.)
The article is by Kenton Sparks, a professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University. His argument will be entirely familiar to connoisseurs of this issue. The Bible, you see, was never intended to teach us science. Augustine and Calvin understood that if the Bible conflicts with well-established scientific truths, then it is our understanding of scripture that must yield. Modern creationists err in treating Genesis like a science textbook, and would do better to…
jrosenhouse | February 9, 2010Writing in the religious journal First Things University of Delaware physics professor Stephen Barr lays into the ID Movement. Here's the first paragraph:
It is time to take stock: What has the intelligent design movement achieved? As science, nothing. The goal of science is to increase our understanding of the natural world, and there is not a single phenomenon that we understand better today or are likely to understand better in the future through the efforts of ID theorists. If we are to look for ID achievements, then, it must be in the realm of natural theology. And there, I think, the…
jrosenhouse | February 7, 2010I am currently reading the book Believers: A Journey into Evangelical America by Jeffery Sheler, published in 2006. There is a chapter about Wheaton College in Illinois, which is generally considered one of the best, if not the best, evangelical college in the nation. Sheler recounts part of a conversation he had with Dorothy Chappell, dean of natural and social sciences.
“Our students are recognized as among the best,” she said. “That must say something about our program. We don't teach Christian science here. We teach science, period. It's the same science as the University of…
jrosenhouse | February 4, 2010In a couple of recent posts I have mentioned the book Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion edited by Ronald Numbers. Since I have now finished reading it, I figure it is time for a proper review.
Short review: Mixed. As a compendium of interesting facts about the history of science and religion the book works rather well. The myth/reality format, however, is not always successful.
Longer review below the fold.
Galileo Goes to Jail consists of twenty-five short essays, each centered around some “myth” related to science and religion. Some of the myths are of the…
jrosenhouse | February 1, 2010Blogging will continue to be sporadic for a while, sorry about that. But having dragged myself down to Washington D.C. last weekend to see the new movie Creation, I figured I should at least get a blog post out of it.
Short review: Excellent! Completely engrossing, and historically accurate on the important things.
Longer review, and minor spoilers, below the fold.
Creation is a biography of Charles Darwin, focusing specifically on the years leading up to the publication of The Origin of Species. The emphasis is on the death of Darwin's ten-year-old daughter, and the subsequent family…
jrosenhouse | January 22, 2010Here's a quote from the book Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion:
In Augustine's influential view, then, knowledge of the things of this world is not a legitimate end in itself, but as a means to other ends it is indispensable. The classical sciences must accept a subordinate position as the handmaiden of theology and religion -- the temporal serving the eternal. The knowledge contained in classical sciences is not to be loved, but it may legitimately be used. This attitude toward scientific knowledge cam to prevail throughout the Middle Ages and survived well…
jrosenhouse | January 22, 2010Well, this is just great:
The White House Correspondents Association has picked Jay Leno -- also known as this week's most publicly unpopular stand-up comic -- to headline the White House Correspondents Dinner in May.
An NBC rep confirmed the invitation to The TV Column.
To be clear, the association asked Leno weeks ago -- when he was simply the host of a prime-time show that was failing five nights a week. But when he appears at the annual Washington bash -- which over the past few years has become a Hollywood petting zoo -- Leno will be the guy who pushed aside Conan O'Brien to become…
jrosenhouse | January 21, 2010I thought Rachel Maddow had a very smart take on the fallout from the Massachusetts Senate race. I've placed a lengthy excerpt below the fold.
On paper, after Al Franken was finally certified as winning in Minnesota, Democrats had a filibuster-proof, 60-seat majority. On paper, that's what they had. But in reality, those 60 votes included a bunch of senators who really had no interest in voting with the rest of the Democrats on much of anything. Their little unicorn--their little myth of 60 reliable votes led the Democrats to draft policies in a way that they thought maybe could get all…
jrosenhouse | January 20, 2010Just in case you were thinking that religious institutions have not always bathed themselves in glory in their relations with science, here's Ronald Numbers to set you straight:
Historians of science have known for years that White's and Draper's accounts are more propaganda than history. ... Yet the message has rarely escaped the ivory tower. The secular public, if it thinks about such issues at all, knows that organized religion has always opposed scientific progress (witness the attacks on Galileo, Darwin, and Scopes). The religious public knows that science has taken the leading role…
jrosenhouse | January 20, 2010Here's a prominent Democratic congressman commenting on the effect of the Massachusetts Senate race on health care reform:
I have two reactions to the election in Massachusetts. One, I am disappointed. Two, I feel strongly that the Democratic majority in Congress must respect the process and make no effort to bypass the electoral results.
If Martha Coakley had won, I believe we could have worked out a reasonable compromise between the House and Senate healthcare bills. But since Scott Brown has won and the Republicans now have 41 votes in the Senate, that approach is no longer appropriate.
I…