jrosenhouse | January 18, 2010
After a lengthy trip that involved not just planes and trains, but automobiles as well, I made it back from San Francisco in one piece. Yay! The conference was a big success, both mathematically and socially. Saw lots of old friends, which is, after all, the point of the conference, and also hopefully made some new ones.
As the sign says, this was the 2010 Joint Mathematics Meetings. The “Joint” refers to the joint sponsorship between the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America. No Monty Python jokes, please. Roughly speaking, the AMS deals with the…
jrosenhouse | January 12, 2010Winter term classes started on Monday here at JMU, so I figure this is a good time to get out of dodge! I will be participating in the 2010 Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco. Yay! And while I'm there I expect to take a quick train ride over to Oakland to visit the National Center for Science Education. Double yay!
Should be a fun trip. Regular blogging will resume when I return next week.
jrosenhouse | January 12, 2010A well-deserved honor:
The National Academy of Sciences Council has selected Eugenie C. Scott to receive its most prestigious award, the Public Welfare Medal. Established in 1914, the medal is presented annually to honor extraordinary use of science for the public good. The Council chose Scott for championing the teaching of evolution in the United States and for providing leadership to the National Center for Science Education (NCSE).
Scott, a physical anthropologist by training, became the first executive director of the National Center for Science Education in 1987. Beginning with a loose…
jrosenhouse | January 6, 2010The Huffington Post is not usually the go-to place for intelligent commentary on scientific issues, but sometimes they come through. Go have a look at this essay by Steven Newton, Project Director for the National Center for Science Education.
Science requires conclusions about how nature works to be rooted in evidence-based testing. Sometimes progress is slow. But through a difficult and often frustrating process, we learn more about the world.
Science denialism works differently. Creationists are unmoved by the wealth of fossil, molecular, and anatomical evidence for evolution. Global-…
jrosenhouse | January 5, 2010Of course, the focus of that last post was a development in New York City, which is considerably more civilized than most of the country. In rural Mississippi things do not seem quite so cozy. This is from a reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog:
If you travel down any road, you will see churches popping up everywhere. I've lived here my entire life, and it used to be that each community had one church, usually Baptist, with a place name. Now they have names like Bread of Life, The Living Water, and By Faith; single-word names like Cornerstone, Compass, and Centricity.
They pop up in the…
jrosenhouse | January 5, 2010Here's an encouraging story:
Ken Bronstein was excited to notify us of a great coup: six members of his organization, the New York City Atheists, attended Mayor Bloomberg's annual Interfaith Breakfast this weekend. It's believed to be the first time nonbelievers have been invited, as nonbelievers, to the event.
We asked Bronstein why atheists would even want to attend an Interfaith Breakfast, seeing as they don't, in point of fact, have faith.
“Oh, we have faith,” Bronstein told us. “Just not in God.”
A spokesman from the Mayor's office confirmed that the Mayor had invited the guests as…
jrosenhouse | December 30, 2009My post about science/religion disputes has prompted responses from my SciBlings Bora Zivkovic and Mike Dunford (here and here respectively. Since they are among my favorite bloggers, it pains me to have to disagree with them. Alas, disagree I must.
I will begin with Bora, since I fear he has misunderstood my central point. The starting point of my post was my disagreement with this statement from Thomas Dixon:
Historians have shown that the Galileo affair, remembered by some as a clash between science and religion, was primarily about the enduring political question of who was authorized…
jrosenhouse | December 29, 2009Saw Avatar earlier tonight.
Short review: Wow! What a great movie!
Slightly longer review: OMG! What a freaking awesome movie!!
Longer review, with no spoliers (!!) below the fold.
James Cameron's movies tend to be visually spectacular but short on plot. Titanic coms to mind. The part where the ship actually sinks was pretty cool. The other parts, where paper-thin characters say implausible things to each other, was less so.
Avatar was very much in that mold. Its just that “visually spectacular” really does not do the film justice. It is simply amazing. Strikingly beautiful with…
jrosenhouse | December 28, 2009I saw the new movie Sherlock Holmes over the weekend. Short review: I liked it far more than I expected to, though it is a bit silly in places. Longer review, with a few spoilers, below the fold.
A number of years ago there was an atrocity of a movie called Young Sherlock Holmes. Though it made a few gestures in the direction of the original Conan Doyle stories early in the film, it ultimately came down to young Holmes battling a bunch of Satan worshippers, or some such nonsense.
The opening scene of the present film features Holmes stopping someone named Lord Blackwood from carrying out…
jrosenhouse | December 28, 2009Does anything strike you as odd about the following sentence:
Historians have shown that the Galileo affair, remembered by some as a clash between science and religion, was primarily about the enduring political question of who was authorized to produce and disseminate knowledge.
It comes from Thomas Dixon's book Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press in 2008.
Afficionados of science/religion disputes will recognize in this a standard gambit of the genre. Specifically, the attempt to recast situations that are obviously conflicts between…
jrosenhouse | December 21, 2009Democratic (!!) representative Bart Stupak, apparently concerned that the Senate health care bill is insufficiently misogynistic, might be willing to try to kill health care reform unless the anti-abortion language is strengthened:
Stupak's continued opposition to the Senate plan, despite those conversations and intense pressure from the White House, suggests that reconciling it with the House bill may prove politically challenging.
The Senate language represented "a dramatic shift in federal policy," said Stupak, adding that he remained hopeful that the differences could be resolved in…
jrosenhouse | December 20, 2009For an eloquent statement of what I have been trying to say for the last few days, have a look at this essay by Yale University Political Science Professor Jacob Hacker. Hacker is generally considered the father of the public option. In his view, the Senate health care bill still does more good than harm, and provides a needed platform for future reforms:
As weak as it is in numerous areas, the Senate bill contains three vital reforms. First, it creates a new framework, the "exchange," through which people who lack secure workplace coverage can obtain the same kind of group health…
jrosenhouse | December 19, 2009Gosh, there sure is a lot of snow out there!
Update (1:00 am): Whoo hoo! My street just got plowed. God bless taxes!
jrosenhouse | December 18, 2009As I think I have made clear in my last two posts, I am as annoyed as anyone about the way the health care debate has played out in Congress. But there is one line of complaint that I do not understand. That is the idea that somehow Obama is to blame for the compromises in the bill. He did not “fight hard enough” for a public option, you see.
Here's a typical example:
While many House Democrats have expressed anger with the Senate for the watered-down bill, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) argued that it was really Obama who let centrists take control. “Snowe? Stupak? Lieberman? Who left…
jrosenhouse | December 17, 2009I'm talking about the health care bill, of course.
The people I tend to trust on these sorts of questions, such as Robert Reich and Paul Krugman (here and here respectively) say the bill does more good than harm, and sets us down a path towards further improvements later. They also point out, rightly in my view, that if this moment passes we will not have another shot at serious health care reform for quite some time.
The trouble is that Howard Dean is also pretty convincing when he writes
If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current health-care bill. Any measure that expands…
jrosenhouse | December 15, 2009I have always scoffed at people who say there is only the Republicrat party in this country, but after reading this depressing piece by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone I'm not so sure.
What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his…
jrosenhouse | December 10, 2009Science Magazine has now published a letter to the editor in response to the review, published in early October, of the big Monty Hall book. The letter writer is Simon Levay, of West Hollywood, California. Here it is in full:
In his Book Review “Two doors and a goat” (9 October, p. 231), the answer D. O. Granberg offers to the Monty Hall problem is incorrect. He assumes that the contestant should try to win the car. In reality, a car pollutes the environment and adds nothing to the car the contestant already owns. In contrast, a goat replaces noisy lawnmowers and provides milk, cheese, and…
jrosenhouse | December 8, 2009Sorry for the lack of blogging. It is final exams week around here, which means busy, busy, busy. It certainly has not been for lack of blog fodder. For example, have a look at this post from P.Z. Myers. Essential reading.
So how about another Bertrand Russell quote? Like the last one, this is from his book Religion and Science It is the most perfect statement I know of a view I have expressed imperfectly here on many occasions:
I come now to the last question in our discussion of Cosmic Purpose, namely is what has happened hitherto evidence of the good intentions of the universe?…
jrosenhouse | December 2, 2009I have long been a fan of Bertrand Russell, and I am endlessly fascinated by issues in science and religion, so perhaps it is surprising that I have not read Russell's book Religion and Science. Until now, that is. I have now read the first three chapters and anticipate finishing the book later this week.
Chapter Three deals with evolution, and it is just filled with examples of the elegant and lucid writing that makes Russell so much fun to read even when you are disagreeing with him. I laughed at loud when I read this:
Religion, in our day, has accommodated itself to the doctrine of…
jrosenhouse | November 30, 2009Here's an interesting blog post written by a biochemistry professor at Seattle Pacific University. I call attention to it for two reasons. First, it is a harshly negative, but also highly substantive, review of Stephen Meyer's ID manifesto Signature in the Cell, written from a Christian perspective:
So w/r/t this whole book you've just written, about how the Creator must be inferred to explain the origin of DNA? I very much wish you were right.
But you aren't.
I don't say this because I fear for my job. I have a feeling I could have a very nice job at the Discovery Institute if I pushed…