jrosenhouse | December 26, 2007If I say that X has probability p, what does that mean? What sort of thing is X, and what does the number p represent?
Philosophers have spilled a lot of ink on this question, with no clear answer emerging. Instead there are a handful of major schools of thought on the issue. Each school captures an important aspect of what we mean when we talk about probability, but none seems to provide a comprehensive account.
One possibility is the so-called classical interpretation. It is classical because it shows up in the earliest formal treatments of probability, for example in the work of…
jrosenhouse | December 18, 2007Meanwhile, the big Monty Hall book is slowly coming together. It seems like every day I discover new technical articles on the subject. Recently I thought to search through the PubMed database, looking for any articles that might have eluded the various other searches I have done. Most of the articles that came up were ones I already had in my file, but there were a few others that were new to me. I quickly rounded them up.
Then I noticed an article entitled, “Eye Movement Responses of Heroin Addicts and Controls During Word and Object Recognition,” published in the journal…
jrosenhouse | December 18, 2007Along the same line, here we have Georgetown theologian John Haught discoursing on matters theological. I see that P. Z. Myers has already given Haught a proper reaming, but perhaps there is a bit more to say.
Haught is a pro-evolution theologian. He did a very good deed in testifying on behalf of evolution at the big Dover trial. He's written a number of books about science and religion, two of which, God After Darwin and Is Nature Enough?, I have read. I can say with perfect sincerity, though it gives me no joy to do so, that it is people like Haught far more than the fundamentalists…
jrosenhouse | December 18, 2007Meanwhile, former Archbishop of York John Hapgood weighs in on four recent books about religion and atheism. The first: The New Atheists by Tina Beattie. Sadly, I am familiar neither with the book nor the author.
Hapgood's essay is the usual gibberish from the high-minded wing of the Christian community. Here's his opening:
The so-called new atheism turns out to be little more than a step backwards to the old-fashioned atheism, which used to make great play with the idea of an unbridgeable gulf between religion and science. Supporting this claim was, and to some extent still is, a…
jrosenhouse | December 18, 2007All sorts of items in the news about science, religion and politics. As a warm-up, here's Christopher Hitchens stating it plain about the odius denizens of the religious right:
Isn't it amazing how self-pitying and self-aggrandizing the religious freaks in this country are? It's not enough that they can make straight-faced professions of "faith" at election times and impose their language on everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to the currency. It's not enough that they can claim tax exemption and even subsidy for anything "faith-based." It's that when they are even slightly criticized…
jrosenhouse | December 13, 2007Chris Matthews, from last night's Hardball. His guest was talk radio host Racheal Maddow.
MADDOW: Well, it's two sides of the same coin, as far as I can tell. And the real substantive story here is that almost all of the Republican candidates have argued against the separation of church and state, have argued for it to be less, have argued that it's been overdone, that there ought to be more religion in the public sphere and that candidates' religion ought not to be just seen as a private matter, which is what Kennedy argued in 1960.
Once you cross that line, one you say that religion…
jrosenhouse | December 12, 2007Well, I've been grading exams for about ten minutes, and I'm already depressed. (One of my students seems to think that one fourth is an integer. Get the idea?) So how about another post?
Here's Keith Olbermann from last nights' edition of Countdown proving once again why he is the only one worth watching on cable news:
Tonight's winner, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, responding to the two shooting nightmares in Colorado Sunday by e-mailing this to his group, quote, “it is hard not to draw a line between the hostility that is being fomented in our culture from some in the…
jrosenhouse | December 12, 2007Here is an interesting variation on the Monty Hall problem. For now I will simply present it cold, without indicating the context of where I saw it. Feel free to leave your proposed solutions in the comments. Everything from vague intuitions to hard-core Bayesian analysis is welcome.
Adam and Barney are contestants on a game show hosted by Monty Hall. Each player knows that the other one exists. They are confronted with three identical doors. One of the doors conceals a car, while the other two conceal goats. Both players select one of the doors, but neither player knows which door…
jrosenhouse | December 7, 2007Meanwhile, here's Chris Matthews in full tantrum after the Republican candidates were asked if they accepted Biblical literalism in the big You Tube debate:
MATTHEWS: Governor, I think you, like a lot of conservatives, believe in the original purpose of the Constitution as written. It's our sort of secular bible. It says there should be no religious test ever required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States. Why are you Republican candidates submitting to religious vetting about your belief in the literal nature of the Bible? Why put up with those kind…
jrosenhouse | December 7, 2007There were a few bright spots in the way the media reacted to Romney's disgusting speech. Keith Olbermann offered these characteristically wise words:
In a milestone speech in 1960, the national candidate for the Democratic Party, John F. Kennedy, told this nation why his Catholicism would not interfere with his responsibility as president, explaining he believed religion was a private matter, that separation of church and state should be absolute, that his presidential decisions should be made without any regard to any outside religious pressure. Tonight in our third story on the…
jrosenhouse | December 7, 2007Mitt Romney gave his big religion speech yesterday. It is a standard piece of anti-atheist propaganda. America is a relgious nation, those darn secularists are trying to take God out of the public square, I'm as crazy religious as all those evangelicals I'm pandering to even though they regard my church as a cult, blah blah blah. Here are a few choice nuggets:
Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.
It…
jrosenhouse | December 3, 2007The subject of biblical literalism came up at last week's Republican / You Tube debate:
Joseph: I am Joseph. I am from Dallas, Texas, and how you answer this question will tell us everything we need to know about you. Do you believe every word of this book? Specifically, this book that I am holding in my hand, do you believe this book?
In case you were wondering, the book in question was the Bible. Here's what happened next:
Cooper: I think we've got a question. Mayor Giuliani?
Huckabee: Do I need to help you out, Mayor, on this one?
(Laughter) (Applause)
Giuliani: Wait a second, you're…
jrosenhouse | December 3, 2007In other news, philosopher Mary Midgley offers some thoughts on the proper way to respond to ID. The title: A Plague on Both Their Houses.
You can probably guess what's coming, especially if you're aware of Midgley's history with Richard Dawkins (more on that later). If you're expecting Midgley to decry equally people like Dawkins who liken evolution to atheism and religious fundamentalists who promote creationism and ID, then you would be right.
Which is already a bad sign. Even if you sincerely believe that evolution and religion are compatible and that people like Dawkins are guilty of…
jrosenhouse | December 3, 2007Remember Guillermo Gonzalez? He was the astronomer from Iowa State University who was denied tenure earlier this year. The reason for the tenure deinal? Depends who you ask.
Gonzalez, you see, is a rising young star in the ID movement. He coauthored a singularly bad book entitled The Privileged Planet, in which he argued not simply that the Earth was designed, but designed specifically with the idea of human scientific investigation in mind. A truly idiotic idea, which explains why the book was published by Regnery (among their other authors: Ann Coulter and Jonathan Wells. Get the idea…
jrosenhouse | December 2, 2007If you followed the link in the last post and need to be reminded what a real journal looks like, you might want to have a look at the first issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach. I've only read the article titles so far, but they look pretty interesting. And since the editors are Niles Eldredge (of punctuated equilibrium fame) and his son Gregory Eldredge, I'm optimistic that it will be worth reading. Go have a look!
jrosenhouse | December 2, 2007Every once in a while the ID folks get into their heads to set-up an actual academic journal. You know, a place where they can lay out all that cutting-edge research kept out of the real journals by dogmatic Darwinian stormtroopers.
These journals invariably founder on their inability to find any scientists willing to write for them. Remember Proceedings in Complexity, Information and Design? It's been moribund since November 2005. Or how about Origins and Design? That one went belly-up around the turn of the century.
The latest representative of the genre is Anti-Matters. It bills…
jrosenhouse | December 2, 2007From the Louisville Courier-Journal:
There is a great educational injustice being inflicted upon thousands of children in this country, a large percentage of whom come from the Kentucky, Ohio and, Indiana areas. The source of this injustice is a sophisticated Christian ministry that uses the hook of dinosaurs, the guarantee of an afterlife, and the horrors of hell to convince children and their families to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. The tax-exempt ministry, Answers in Genesis, and its new $28 million creation museum in Boone County has become the de facto source of…
jrosenhouse | November 28, 2007I have in front of me an anthology of bridge (as in the card game) essays entitled For Experts Only, edited by Pamela and Matthew Granovetter. Essay number six was written by Phil Martin, and is entitled “The Monty Hall Trap.” Sounds interesting, but I am most definitely not an expert at bridge. In fact, I know nothing about the game beyond the basic rules. So I was hoping there was someone out there who could explain to me what Martin has in mind. Below the fold I have transcribed a lengthy excerpt from the article, starting at the beginning. All italics are in the original.
“Behind…
jrosenhouse | November 26, 2007I am pleased to report that Jim's comment in the big Creation Museum post is the 10,000th comment left at this blog since the jump to ScienceBlogs. As always, many thanks to all the folks who have stopped by to offer their thoughts!
jrosenhouse | November 25, 2007Meanwhile, the Cincinnati newspaper The Enquirer brings us this delightful story about what a smashing success the Creation Museum has been:
Inside, visitors will walk through the Garden of Eden, see dinosaur bones, and watch the solar system unfold as “evidence of God's creativity.”
All of it supporting the idea that God created Earth in six days, that the planet is just 6,000 years old and those dinosaurs traveled on Noah's Ark to survive the Great Flood that created the Grand Canyon.
In the six months since the museum opened, more than 265,000 people have toured the facility built by…