jrosenhouse | January 2, 2009Over at The New Republic, Jonathan Chait states a central truth regarding the situation in Gaza. He was replying to this standard bit of lazy moral relativism from Ezra Klein:
The point is simple: You can argue, as Israel is arguing, that their air strikes are a response to Hamas's missiles. But to the Palestinians, Hamas's missiles were a response to the blockade (under international law, a blockade is indeed an act of war). Israel, of course, would argue that the blockade was a response to Hamas's past attacks. And Hamas would argue that past attacks were a response to Israel's unceasing…
jrosenhouse | December 22, 2008Here's your quiz for the day. Who wrote this?
There is no theistic God who exists to take care of you or me. There is no God who stands ready to set aside the laws by which this universe operates to come to our aid in time of need. There are no everlasting arms underneath us to catch us when we fall.
Or this?
When people question this theistic God in the light of the constant pain and trauma found in the normal course of human life, the pious rhetoric of theism's defenders becomes almost incoherent. One hears hysterical talk about free will, about how God allows us to bring pain upon…
jrosenhouse | December 21, 2008As you have probably noticed, I haven't been blogging lately. This is because ever since the semester ended I've been gradually slogging through all of the annoying little work-related tasks that have been put on the back-burner for the last six weeks or so. And since many of these tasks entail many hours spent in front of the computer, I haven't been in the mood to spend still more time in that position by blogging.
I have, however, found time to get some reading done, so how about I start unloading some book reviews? We shall begin with light fare. I just finished reading an amusing…
jrosenhouse | December 9, 2008I've been a bit derelict in my blog reading lately, so I overlooked this post by Wesley Elsberry. His subject is a comment left by William Dembski at his (Dembski's) blog, in response to this post.
Dembski, it seems, now admits that he has been wasting everyone's time for quite a while.
Dembski's comment comes in a series of numbered points. Here's the first:
(1) I've pretty much dispensed with the EF. It suggests that chance, necessity, and design are mutually exclusive. They are not. Straight CSI is clearer as a criterion for design detection.
For those not fluent in crankspeak, EF…
jrosenhouse | December 8, 2008Here's the latest:
More than 500 people from throughout Western Washington turned out Sunday at the Capitol steps to protest a sign a group of atheists erected as part of the holiday display inside the building.
The protest -- organized late last week by a Federal Way man who said he was offended by the sign installed by Wisconsin's Freedom From Religion Foundation -- drew Christian pastors, at least one state legislator and a handful of counter-protesters.
The rally was accompanied by a wide array of religious expression, including some religious banners, one or two anti-religious banners…
jrosenhouse | December 7, 2008As a companion piece to my post a few days ago regarding Christiane Amanpour's remarks about blogging, have a look at Andrew Sullivan's latest column for The Times Online. Lot's of interesting statistics:
Between March and September the 500 biggest newspapers in America reported an average circulation decline of 4.6%. In six months. That's close to a 10% decline per year. No newspapers showed any but fractional gains. It is therefore a near-certainty that many towns and cities in America will no longer have a newspaper after the down-turn. And that may apply not just to small names but to…
jrosenhouse | December 5, 2008As I write this, Bill O'Reilly has devoted a major chunk of his show to how “out of control” the situation in Washington is. He dug up some troll of a preacher to declare that Christmas is the most sacred of Christian holidays (which is absurd). And he's lambasting Governor Gregoire for her fecklessness.
The occasion for this is that the big sign was stolen today.
An anti-religion placard posted alongside Christmas displays drew a thief, a preacher, a part-time elf and a security detail to the state Capitol on Friday, as a weeklong uproar over religious speech hit a bizarre peak.
It all…
jrosenhouse | December 4, 2008CNN foreign affairs correspondent Christiane Amanpour offers a few thoughts on the merits, or lack thereof, of blogging:
Sometimes it is incredibly useful, for instance, in closed societies such as Burma. Some of the images, some of the stories that have come out have been by the Internet and by citizen journalists. And that has been indispensable in terms of knowing what is going on when journalists like myself and others cannot get visas to get in there and cannot operate. ... In that regard I think the bloggers or the citizen journalists are very brave and very useful.
I think that in the…
jrosenhouse | December 3, 2008The Freedom From Religion Foundation has won the right to post an anti-religion display next to a Christmas tree and a naticity scene in the Capitol rotunda in Washington State:
An atheist group has unveiled an anti-religion placard in the state Capitol, joining a Christian Nativity scene and “holiday tree” on display during December.
The atheists' sign was installed Monday by Washington members of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a national group based in Madison, Wis.
With a nod to the winter solstice - the year's shortest day occurring in late December - the placard reads: “At this…
jrosenhouse | December 2, 2008My main intellectual activity today was to rotate curves around various axes, and then explain how to find the volumes of the solids that resulted. Doesn't put me in the mood for heavy, thought-provoking blogging. But I did recently come across this interesting bit of movie news. Why am I not optimistic?
For more than 100 years, Sherlock Holmes has been the world's foremost detective mind; a profound genius capable of unlocking even the most intricate mysteries. So how would he unravel this minor puzzle: A man known for his brain is about to showcase his brawn?
How do we know? Elementary…
jrosenhouse | November 21, 2008I will be visiting the 'rents in my New Jersey office tomorrow, and I will be there through the Thanksgiving holiday. EvolutionBlog will make a triumphant return in December. See you then!
jrosenhouse | November 19, 2008This is cool. From Wired:
When the Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was announced at the international supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, on Monday, IBM had barely managed to cling to the top spot, fending off a challenge from Cray. But both competitors broke petaflop speeds, performing 1.105 and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second, the first two computers to do so.
These computers aren't just faster than those they pushed further down the list, they will enable a new class of science that wasn't possible before. As recently described in Wired…
jrosenhouse | November 18, 2008Have you ever seen George Will do his schtick on some chat show or other and then start wondering if maybe he's just making stuff up? Wonder no more!
On This Week this past Sunday Will was on with New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman. The following exchange took place:
GEORGE WILL: Sam, one of the ways we turned a depression into the Great Depression that didn't end until the Japanese fleet appeared off Hawaii was that there were no rules and investors went on strike because the government was completely improvising. Net investment was negative through almost all of…
jrosenhouse | November 18, 2008As part of my daily diet of news sites and blog reading I keep an eye on various creationist websites. This is done partly as opposition research. It's always good to know what the crazy people are getting excited about. But it is also because they frequently link to interesting articles I might have overlooked otherwise.
Over at Uncommon Descent, Denyse O'Leary helpfully linked to this article by Carl Zimmer from the November 10 issue of The New York Times. The article discusses recent developments in genetics, and how hey are changing long-held notions of what a gene is. It's…
jrosenhouse | November 14, 2008Remember that big apologetics conference in North Carolina to which I made jeering reference a while back? Well, I didn't go.
Happily, Timothy Yedder did, and to judge from his account it doesn't sound like I missed anything:
We arrived to a scene of total chaos, scores of people trying to park and find their way into the monstrosity that is the church. We waited in a 'line' which was actually just a room full of people facing all directions, and we registered. We were given a wristband (the thought of anyone trying to sneak into this thing made me laugh openly), a bag full of glossy…
jrosenhouse | November 13, 2008This is an exciting time for chessplayers. First the big Anand-Kramnik match, which certianly exceeded expectations. Possibly a Kamsky-Topalov match later this month. And now the big olympiad in Dresden, Germany. The U.S. is represented by a strong team consisting of Onischuk, Shulman, Nakamura, Kamsky, and Akobian. A serious medal threat. And, indeed, today we won our first round match against Iceland.
Ramesh Balasubramanian (who beat me in the first round of the World Open two years ago. Grrrrr) has some interesting thoughts on the subject. Also check out Mig Greengard here.
jrosenhouse | November 13, 2008As I am sure you are aware, there are still three Senate elections that have yet to be resolved. The Democrats need all three of them to get to the magic sixty. On November 4 I would have considered that very unlikely indeed. But now I'm not so sure.
The big one, from my perspective, is the Franken-Coleman race in Minnesota. Not only is Coleman the emptiest of Republican empty suits, but Franken is an impressive fellow just on his merits. The twittering, halfwit, gossip-mongering, know-nothing, cable-news pundit set have largely dismissed Franken as just a comedian. This should be…
jrosenhouse | November 12, 2008Christopher Hitchens can be infuriating, but he certainly has a way with words. I laughed out loud while reading the first paragraph of his new column for Slate:
Yes, yes, yes. I, too, took pleasure in standing in line and in exchanging pleasantries and greetings with the amazingly courteous staff at my polling station and the many citizens of my delightfully diverse Washington neighborhood. I, too, am still wearing my lapel sticker, with the jaunty words “I Voted.” And I found it pretty easy to cast a vote that told the Republican Party, for which I recommended a vote last time, not to try…
jrosenhouse | November 12, 2008Ever wonder if anyone responds to those spam marketing e-mails? Wonder no more:
The researchers used two of the most popular ploys currently used by spammers - firstly offering a fake pharmacy site and, secondly, offering a herbal Viagra-style remedy to boost libido.
“After 26 days, and almost 350 million email messages, only 28 sales resulted,” says the research paper.
Yet even with this apparently abysmal response rate of less than 0.00001 per cent, the researchers still estimate that the controllers of a network the size of Storm are still bringing in about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or $3.…
jrosenhouse | November 11, 2008Discover Magazine has an interesting article up discussing a perennial favorite: the fine-tuning of the universe for life. I got a bit nervous when I saw the title:
Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: the Multiverse Theory
That makes it sound like scientists devised the multiverse idea strictly as a desperation move to counter all that annoying God-talk. In reality physicists have been seriously discussing the idea of a multiverse for decades, and quite a lot of work in physics is pointing in that direction. The multiverse does seem to follow naturally both from recent work…