It seems like everyone's losing their minds about Islam these days. On the one hand there are many on the left who will accuse you of bigotry or Islamophobia if you criticize anything at all about Islam. Apparently we're not allowed to notice that there are fifty-some Muslim countries in the world, but you're hard-pressed to find a single one that is respectful of the rights of women or religious minorities. In fact, it seems like most of them are just despotic tyrannies with little respect for liberal values at all. In Bangladesh, for example, it has become fashionable to execute atheist…
Having taken the last two weeks off, Sunday Chess Problem now makes a triumphant return! This week I have chosen a wonderful direct mate problem by Valentin Rudenko, composed in 1983. It deservedly won First Prize in its tourney. White is to play and mate in four: This problem showcases a maneuver I have not previously featured in Sunday Chess Problem: the switchback. This refers to a situation in which, in the course of a problem, a piece leaves a square and then later returns to it by retracing the same route. (When the piece returns to its original square by a different route it is…
Let us continue with our discussion of Winston Ewert's defense of the concept of “specified complexity.” In Part One we saw that Ewert's defense was actually rather tepid. He mostly gave away the game by writing: It is true that specified complexity does not in any way help establish that the probability of complex life is low under natural selection. You must have another way of showing that, for example Michael Behe's irreducible complexity, Doug Axe's work on proteins, or Stephen Meyer's work on the Cambrian explosion. However, all these methods only seek to show that various biological…
Here's a brainteaser for you. I'm interested to know what you all think of it: A group of smokers had twenty-five cigarette butts in an ashtray. Each butt still contained a small amount of usable tobacco. The smokers knew that any five butts contained enough tobacco to make one new cigarette. How many new cigarettes could they make with the available butts? For various reasons, I'm especially interested to know if you find the wording to be vague in any important way.
Over at the Discovery Institute's blog, Winston Ewert has a post up explaining, one more time, what specified complexity is. Since I am given a mention near the end, perhaps it's worth a look. For those not steeped in ID rhetoric, “specified complexity” is a term coined by William Dembski. It is an attribute that a given event or object may or may not possess. “Complexity” just means “low probability,” while “specified” indicates the event or object conforms to an independently describable pattern. Where specified complexity is found, it is claimed, design is in some way implicated in the…
The title says it all. Go have a look and let me know what you think. Problem of the eek will make a triumphant return in January. See you then!
I'm currently working out of my New Jersey office, which is to say that I'm visiting my family for Thanksgiving. But if you're looking for a little light reading, try this short post by Andy Borowitz at The New Yorker: Many Americans are tired of explaining things to idiots, particularly when the things in question are so painfully obvious, a new poll indicates. According to the poll, conducted by the University of Minnesota's Opinion Research Institute, while millions have been vexed for some time by their failure to explain incredibly basic information to dolts, that frustration has now…
Colleges and universities have been in the news lately. This has been for a variety of reasons, some good, some silly, some bad. Hanging it over it all, however, is something that's bothering me. We'll come to that shortly. Let's start with the good. Threats and “fighting words” are not protected speech. Shouting the N word at a group of black students is plainly a threat, so I have no problem taking measures against it. This is what was going on at the University of Missouri. There were frequent, threatening racist incidents with nothing being done about them. So congratulations to…
Sunday Chess Problem is taking the week off. But in other sporting news, Holly Holm defeated Ronda Rousey in their big fight on Saturday. I've been a casual MAA fan for a while, and I like Ronda Rousey, so I actually bought the Pay-Per-View to watch the fight. Now, the thing about fighters is that they seem unbeatable right up until someone beats them. Chuck Liddell was untouchable for several years, then Quinton Jackson knocked him out. Anderson Silva was embarrassing everyone he faced, until he got too cocky against Chris Weidman. Then Weidman won the rematch too. Now it's Rousey's…
I've started reading Michael Ruse's book Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know, published by Oxford University Press earlier this year. Ruse is a philosopher at Florida State University, but he has turned himself into something of a crackpot over the last ten years. He's edited two books with ID proponent Bill Dembski, has picked foolish fights with his colleagues, and has engaged in laughably over-the-top rhetoric towards the New Atheists. Most memorably, he once said in an interview: “And this is why I think the New Atheists are a disaster, a danger to the wellbeing of America comparable…
My new issue of Chess Life showed up in the mail, and it included coverage of the Sinquefield Cup from this summer. (Chess Life has a long lead time). Anyway, in the game between Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura, Nakamura played the Queen's Gambit Declined as black. He was very lucky to draw the game. Nakamura is better known for playing very aggressive openings like the King's Indian and Dutch; the cramped maneuvering of the QGD is less well-fitted to his style. Commenting on the game, Gary Kasparov recommended that Nakamura stop playing the QGD. He said, “At least if you lose with…
The eight Problem Of the Week has now been posted, along with a solution to last week's problem. Enjoy!
Yes, granted, it's actually Monday. But it was only a technical glitch that kept me from posting this yesterday, so it still counts as Sunday Chess Problem! We're going to stick with endgame studies for this week. This one was composed by a fellow named Seletsky in 1933. It's white to play and win: That's a lot of firepower on an open board! At first blush it seems that white's only advantage is his passed pawn on d7. But that little fellow is firmly under control. It turns out, though, that white has a mating attack. He will have to sacrifice his pawn, bishop, and queen to bring home…
Since I didn't have any grading this time, and since Republicans are harder to listen to than Democrats (and remember, I used to spend hours at a time listening to Creationists), I couldn't bring myself to watch the entirety of the recent Republican debate. I kept flipping back and forth between it and game two of the World Series (which, as a Mets fan, was also hard to watch.) But I saw enough of it to form a few impressions. The first is that the CNBC folks absolutely disgraced themselves. They all need to go home and resign. I actually briefly cheered Ted Cruz, for heaven's sake, when…
If you spend any time talking to ID folks, you know that they are very touchy about being called creationists. As they see it, the creationists have been so incompetent in making their case, and so extreme in their religious views, that they discredit the cause of anti-evolutionism every time they open their mouths. For this reason, they are endlessly differentiating themselves from the creationists. The script is always the same: Whereas creationists discuss science through the lens of their religious beliefs, ID folks are just honestly trying to come to the conclusions best justified by…
The latest Problem of the Week has now been posted. This one (and next week's as well) involve calculus. Fun!
I have something a little different for you this week. Normally I show you composed positions in my Sunday Chess Problem posts. But this week I'd like to show you two shocking moves that occurred in actual games. The first comes from another of Aviv Friedman's videos. He did not mention the players in the following position, but he did mention that it is black to move: Probably the first thing you notice is that black has sacrificed an exchange. He certainly has compensation in the form of more active pieces and white's exposed king, but there does not seem to be any immediate…
I'm heading off to Minnesota for the weekend. Bemidji, Minnesota, to be exact. I'm giving one of the invited talks at the big MAA Section Meeting they're having at Bemidji State University. Should be fun! Looks like I'm picking the right weekend to get out of town. It's going to be a zoo around here!
After taking last week off, Problem of the Week makes a triumphant return. Problem Six has now been posted. Enjoy!
I've gotten very cynical about political debates. They've become asinine reality TV shows, with preening moderators asking silly gotcha questions to people who just pivot to their talking points at every opportunity. But I did have a big pile of grading to get through last night and having the debate on in the background seemed like a reasonable idea. I'm glad I did. I found it riveting. Click here for the transcript. There are two big contrasts between the Democrats and the Republicans. The first thing that struck me is that all five Democratic candidates are extraordinarily competent…