jrosenhouse | April 26, 2008When I was in elementary school I was taught that if you have a noun that ends in `s', and you want to make that noun possessive, you do it by placing an apostrophe at the end of the word and that is all. Thus, in referring to the theorem proved by Thomas Bayes, you would write Bayes' theorm. In referring to the book wirtten by Richard Dawkins, you would write Dawkins' book.
Lately, though, several people have told me that this is not correct. Apparently we are now supposed to place an `apostrophe s' at the end of all nouns, regardless of whether or not the word already ends in `s'.…
jrosenhouse | April 26, 2008A common response to the books by Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris involved castigating them for the shallowness of their understanding of religion. In their incessant focus on fundamentalism and more extreme forms of religious belief, they proved themselves unwilling to consider seriously the nuance and subtlety of mainstream religious thought, it was argued.
P.Z. Myers brilliantly satirized this argument, referring to it as The Courtier's Reply. I was moved to think about it once more in light of this exchange of editorials in the British newspaper The Guardian. Representing sunshine and…
jrosenhouse | April 22, 2008I went to see Expelled yesterday. I am happy to report it was a private screening. Had the theater to myself. Last time that happened was when I saw Snakes on a Plane (a far more scientifically accurate film, by the way).
Granted, it was a Monday night. Indeed, when I go to see movies I nearly always do so on Mondays or Tuesdays specifically to avoid the crowds. The fact remains that for a new release I can typically count on about a dozen people watching the film with me. And let's not forget that I am living in a town that is -- how shall I put this? -- somewhat right of center…
jrosenhouse | April 20, 2008Well, I finished the first draft of the big Monty Hall book this past week. Still need to make some diagrams, and there's probably a fair amount of rewriting in my future, but the “words from nothing” phase is now over. Yay!
If anyone would care to give me some feedback, here is the first chapter. And also the bibliography for the book, to make the citations work out properly. I'm already aware of a number of typos, but don't hesitate to point them out anyway. I'm more interested in what people think of the tone and the style. Or anything else it occurs to you to comment on.
jrosenhouse | April 14, 2008Here's Slate's Melinda Henneberger commenting on small-town political attitudes:
When I went back there, and visited similar small towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, one thing I heard over and over--from registered Democrats!--was that their national party leaders were elitists who couldn't seem to relate to their struggles. Again and again, they brought up Kerry's windsurfing and polyglot wife and Hollywood friends and brand spanking new hunting attire as proof positive of the kind of elitism that was turning them into Republicans. Perhaps worst of all in their eyes was his…
jrosenhouse | April 14, 2008Meanwhile, the release date for Ben Stein's antievolution propaganda piece Expelled draws nigh. If you've been following any of the press coverage you are probably aware that one of the main charges in the film is that Darwinism in some way led to the Nazis and the holocaust.
In that light, it is worth noting that one of the “scientists” appearing in the film to cast aspersions on evolution spends his free time saying things like this:
By their own will, [Jews] prefer to live a separate life, in apartheid from the surrounding communities. They form their own communes (kahals), they…
jrosenhouse | April 14, 2008William Dembski's lead blogflak DaveScot has stepped in it even more badly than usual. Commenting on Richard Dawkins' recent appearance on Bill Maher's show the other night, he writes:
I watched Dawkins on the Bill Maher show last night. Among other interesting things he said was when it comes to belief in gods if you were to rate his belief on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being most belief and 10 being least he puts himself at a 6. Then he compares belief in gods with belief in fairies and pink unicorns. So I guess he's conflicted about those too. Bill Maher then ridiculed religion in…
jrosenhouse | April 9, 2008Not because it's false, mind you. There is no reasonable definition of science that includes Intelligent Design and Creationism, and it is perfectly legitimate to point that out. In certain contexts, like when you are arguing that it is unconstitutional to teach ID in public high school science classes, it is even an important and relevant point.
But it is not the main reason serious scientists want nothing to do with the notion and it should not be the first thing you say when debating the subject. Case in point, consider how the usually excellent Steven Novella opens this post about ID…
jrosenhouse | April 8, 2008Monty Hall strikes again!
Today's New York Times has this article, by John Tierney, about the latest wrinkle in the Monty Hall problem. According to M. Keith Chen, an economist at Yale University, the results of certain psychological studies are called into question by a sytematic error in their methodology. And the error, it seems, is rather similar to the one found in the classic wrong solution to the MHP:
The Monty Hall Problem has struck again, and this time it's not merely embarrassing mathematicians. If the calculations of a Yale economist are correct, there's a sneaky logical…
jrosenhouse | April 2, 2008I can't quite believe I'm saying this, but I actually enjoyed David Berlinski's talk yesterday in Washington D.C.
Berlinski might be familiar to you as the author of a number of boneheaded articles in Commentary magazine over the last ten years. He has decided to jump on the anti-Dawkins bandwagon with his new book The Devil's Delsuion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions. The publisher is Crown Forum. Among their other authors: Ann Coulter and Michael Medved. Get the idea?
Speaking as someone who thinks Dawkins et al get it right far more often than they get it wrong, I was not…
jrosenhouse | March 31, 2008Nicholas Kristof has a good column in today's New York Times. Here's a taste:
From Singapore to Japan, politicians pretend to be smarter and better- educated than they actually are, because intellect is an asset at the polls. In the United States, almost alone among developed countries, politicians pretend to be less worldly and erudite than they are (Bill Clinton was masterful at hiding a brilliant mind behind folksy Arkansas sayings about pigs).
Alas, when a politician has the double disadvantage of obvious intelligence and an elite education and then on top of that tries to educate the…
jrosenhouse | March 28, 2008Christianity Today has now published a review of Michael Behe's book The Edge of Evolution. You might dimly recall this book, since it was briefly big news among the ID folks upon its publication last year. It disappeared pretty quickly on account of it being not only wrong scientifically, but dreadfully boring to boot.
CT got Stephen Webb, a professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College, to write the review. Bad idea. Unlike Behe's first book Darwin's Black Box, whose major errors could be ferreted out by anyone capable of a bit of logical thinking, the present volume really…
jrosenhouse | March 28, 2008The big Monty Hall book is rapidly coming together. I may even have the first draft done in the next few weeks. It's certainly been a lot more work than I expected when I began. Originally I envisioned a straight math book, where each chapter would present a different variation of the problem followed by a discussion of the sorts of mathematics needed to solve it. To a large extent it is still that, but I was a bit taken aback by the sheer quantity of academic literature that has been produced on the subject. My bibliography is likely to contain more than a hundred items. A discussion…
jrosenhouse | March 28, 2008If you are not already familiar with Oxford's series of Very Short Introductions, I recommend having a look. I've read about two dozen of them to this point and have found them to be consistently excellent.
I've just finished reading the volume on Quantum Theory, written by John Polkinghorne. I especially liked his concluding two paragraphs, where in the space of a few sentences he says all that is important in dealing with the woo-meisters who use the subject for their own New Agey ends:
It seems appropriate to close this chapter with an intellectual health warning. Quantum theory is…
jrosenhouse | March 25, 2008The Olympics are coming, and with them a new opportunity for the holier than thou amongst us to urge boycotts in the service of political agendas. Anne Applebaum of Slate gets the party started with this essay. She doesn't actually call for a boycott, but she seems awfully sympathetic to those who are calling for one:
No wonder, then, that everyone who hates or fears China, whether in Burma, Darfur, Tibet, or Beijing, is calling for a boycott. And the Chinese government and the IOC are terrified that they will succeed. No one involved in the preparations for this year's Olympics really…
jrosenhouse | March 25, 2008Have you been following this? P. Z. Myers got recognized at a screening of Expelled and was thrown out. Richard Dawkins, who was with Myers, did not get recognized and was allowed in. Hilarious! I think most people would agree with Dawkins' take:
The blogs are ringing with ridicule. Mark Mathis, duplicitous producer of the much hyped film Expelled, shot himself in the foot so spectacularly that the phrase might have been invented for him. Goals don't come more own than this. How is it possible that a man who makes his living from partisan propaganda could hand so stunning a propaganda…
jrosenhouse | March 23, 2008I suspect that everyone reading this has heard the story of what happened when P.Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins tried to attend a screening of Expelled in Minneapolis last week. Short version: P.Z. got recognized and was not allowed in. Dawkins was not recognized and was allowed in. If you've been living in a cave for the last week you can check out P.Z.'s post here. Then scroll through the remainder of his recent posts to hear about the fallout.
There are many aspects of this worth discussing, but here I am interested in only one. Matt Nisbet, you see, is once more beating his favorite…
jrosenhouse | March 14, 2008Chris over at Mixing Memory argues, both in this post and in the subsequent comments, that he is. I think that claim is deeply silly and trivializes the term fundamentalist. I've been mixing it up with Chris and some of his readers in the comments to his post. Having spilled so many words on the issue, I figured I might as well get a blog post of my own out of it. So go have a look and let me know what you think!
jrosenhouse | March 12, 2008The New York Times is reporting that Michael Heller, a Roman Catholic Priest and cosmologist from Poland, has won the 2008 Templeton Prize. The Christian Science Monitor offers some further details here.
In case you are unfamiliar with it, the Templeton Prize is a 1.6 million dollar (!!) prize given out to those attempting to reconcile science with religion. Typically it goes to people with genuine scientific credentials who are nonetheless willing to utter comforting bromides about how science and religion are two sides of the same coin.
I'm not familiar with Heller's work, and short…
jrosenhouse | March 12, 2008This paper (PDF format) by British philosopher Simon Blackburn is getting some attention in the blogosphere. Let's have a look.
Blackburn addresses the question of what it means to respect religion, from the perspective of an atheist. The essay is perfect, by which I mean that it says exactly what I think needs to be said on this issue.
Particularly important is the distinction between different kinds of respect:
`Respect' of course is a tricky term. I may respect your gardening by just letting you get on with it. Or, I may respect it by admiring it and regarding it as a superior way…