jrosenhouse | November 25, 2007Every so often a mainstream news outlet rediscovers that young-Earth creationists still exist. This leads to bemused, but respectful articles. The most recent example is this article from The New York Times Magazine. It was written by Hanna Rosin.
It's the usual perfunctory effort so typical of this genre. We get paragraphs like this:
Creationist ideas about geology tend to appeal to overly zealous amateurs, but this was a gathering of elites, with an impressive wall of diplomas among them (Harvard, U.C.L.A., the Universities of Virginia, Washington and Rhode Island). They had spent…
jrosenhouse | November 21, 2007Impressive company I'm keeping! Two of my SciBlings have recently received some deeply cool honors.
Over at Stranger Fruit, John Lynch has received the Carnegie/CASE professor of the year award for the state of Arizona. Very nice!
Meanwhile, Jonah Lehrer of The Frontal Cortex has snagged a place on Amazon's ten best science books of the year list for Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Again, very nice.
Congratulations to John and Jonah.
As for everyone else, have a Happy Thanksgiving! Driving tip: If you're travelling from Virginia to New Jersey via I-95 on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving…
jrosenhouse | November 21, 2007From Tuesday's show::
OLBERMANN: Yes, I understand that. You know, one of the other you's in there is Karl Rove that story about him possibly being in charge of the presidential library, the creation museum of presidential libraries then. What does this tell us about the relationship of the truth to now not the administration of George W. Bush but the legacy of George W. Bush? (Emphasis Added)
jrosenhouse | November 21, 2007The wonderfully named online magazine Jewcy, has been hosting a discussion about evolution and ID. Three entries so far:
Neal Pollack gets the ball rolling by suggesting that he wants his children to grow up “utterly intolerant” of creationism. My kind of guy!
Discovery Institute flak David Klinghoffer recites the standard talking points.
Yours truly brings it home with this eloquent missive.
I certainly like where Pollack ends up:
A parent can no longer assume that his children won't encounter anti-evolutionary propaganda. While I'm skeptical about religion, I'm not opposed to faith and…
jrosenhouse | November 15, 2007In the Monty Hall problem, you are confronted with three identical doors, one of which conceals a car while the other two conceal goats. You choose a door at random, number one say, but do not open it. Monty now opens a door he knows to conceal a goat. He then gives you the option of sticking or switching. What should you do to maximize your chances of winning the car.
As we are all by now aware, the correct answer is that you double your chances of winning by switching doors. Most people find this counterintuitive on the grounds that after Monty opens a door, only two, equally likely…
jrosenhouse | November 15, 2007Over at The Christian Century, biologist Joan Roughgarden serves up this review of Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution.
The good news is that Roughgarden is unambigously pro-evolution and anti-ID. She writes:
Behe's position has been criticized scientifically and theologically. The structures thought to be irreducibly complex aren't; precursor structures can be identified whose modification can lead to a flagellum--or any other trait, for that matter. Furthermore, ID advocates don't offer any hypothesis about what happened in the evolutionary past--where, when and how did the designer…
jrosenhouse | November 13, 2007The New York Times is reporting that author Ira Levin has died of apparently natural causes at the age of 78:
Ira Levin, a mild-mannered playwright and novelist who liked nothing better than to give people the creeps -- and who did so repeatedly, with best-selling novels like “Rosemary's Baby,” “The Stepford Wives” and “The Boys From Brazil” -- died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 78.
No specific cause of death had been determined, but Mr. Levin appeared to have died of natural causes, his son Nicholas said yesterday.
Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives are two of my favorite…
jrosenhouse | November 13, 2007George Carlin once asked, “If you're going to have a rain dance, wouldn't you have to have rain dance practice? And what I'm wondering is, does it rain during practice? Because if it doesn't, how do you know if you have it right? And if it does, why bother with the dance in the first place. Need a little water? Call practice!”
The great state of Georgia is facing a drought. Clearly this is God's punishment for our wasteful ways. The solution is obvious: Ask God nicely to knock it off.
Gov. Sonny Perdue wasn't the least bit discouraged Tuesday after his hourlong state Capitol prayer…
jrosenhouse | November 13, 2007Robert Redford's new movie Lions for Lambs is struggling at the box office. It's also been getting largely negative reviews. But since I saw Bill O'Reilly and other right-wing outlets bashing it for its supposed anti-American bias, I felt honor-bound to go see it.
I guess there's no accounting for taste. I loved this movie. I thought it was completely riveting throughout, despite having almost nothing in the way of action. The plot, such as it is, involves three loosely connected stories. In one, Republican senator Tom Cruise is trying to persuade skeptical journalist Meryl Streep that…
jrosenhouse | November 7, 2007You might have noticed that blogging has been a bit erratic lately, and I have fallen off my usual pace of updating every weekday. There's a reason for that! Regular readers of this blog are aware that I have a small obsession with the Monty Hall problem. I managed to convince Oxford University Press that a book on the subject would be a good idea, and now I'm supposed to submit a manuscript to them by New Year's. And since there is a limit to how many hours a day I can spend typing away at a computer, well, you get the idea.
I've also learned something else lately. Writing a book is…
jrosenhouse | November 6, 2007On the subject of national politics, I come from the blind loyalty wing of the Democratic Party. When I look at the sort of things Democrats do when they have power compared to the sorts of things Republicans do, it seems clear to me that the Dems do a far better job of running states and countries. I have no patience for people who think that what is needed is a third party, or who think that voting for Ross Perot or Ralph Nader makes then independent and above the fray. Politics is a dirty business under the best conditions, but to the extent that there is any hope that the government…
jrosenhouse | November 6, 2007Writing in The New York TImes Stanley Fish discusses two new books on the problem of evil.
Since Fish hails from the pompous, pseduo-intellectual school of writing, in which it is considered extremely low-brow to actually make a point with force and clarity, he has little light to shed on the issue. He does manage to take a few swipes at the atheist trinity of Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, however:
What Milton and Paul offer (not as collaborators of course, but as participants in the same tradition) is a solution to the central problem of theodicy - the existence of suffering and evil in a…
jrosenhouse | October 31, 2007Back in June, Brown University biologist Ken Miller published this review of Michael Behe's book The Edge of Evolution in Nature magazine. Considering the venue, Miller quite appropriately focused on Behe's rather dubious scientific arguments and showed that they were entirely incorrect.
Miller has now published a second review (not freely available online), this time in the Catholic magazine Commonweal. The scientific flaws are hardly the only thing wrong with Behe's arguments, it seems. In Miller's view, Behe's arguments have disturbing theological consequences:
A hopeful reader…
jrosenhouse | October 29, 2007At least, that is the conclusion you would inevitably come to if you read Town Hall on a regular basis. The wesbite that boasts of being the first conservative web community seems to have a yen for anti-atheist propaganda.
For example, here's Mike Adams in a column entitled, “Understanding Atheism::
If psychologists were really interested in the fair and balanced treatment of religion they would see the obvious connection between cognitive dissonance theory and atheism. And, of course, they would discuss it in their classes in conjunction with the application of Freudian and Skinnerian…
jrosenhouse | October 29, 2007Former World Chess Champion and current political activist Garry Kasparov appeared on Bill Maher's program the other night. The entire, seven minute interview is worth watching, but I especially liked this part:
MAHER: But if you look at what's going on in Russia, Putin has a very high approval rating. I mean there is something...
KASPAROV: How do you know? (Laughter) Are you seriously, are you relying on the polling results from a police state? I think with the same tight control of media and a pervasive security force, Bush and Cheney could enjoy the same approval rating here.
MAHER:…
jrosenhouse | October 29, 2007This week's New York Times Magazine has this lengthy article suggesting that the evangelical voters are modertaing their views a bit:
So when Fox announced to his flock one Sunday in August last year that it was his final appearance in the pulpit, the news startled evangelical activists from Atlanta to Grand Rapids. Fox told the congregation that he was quitting so he could work full time on "cultural issues." Within days, The Wichita Eagle reported that Fox left under pressure. The board of deacons had told him that his activism was getting in the way of the Gospel. "It just wasn't…
jrosenhouse | October 25, 2007Writing at the Cato Insititue blog, Chris Edwards believes he has found the Ann Coulter of the left:
For those who think that it's just conservatives, such as Ann Coulter, who are mean-spirited, they should check out the new book by Jonathan Chait, a senior editor of the New Republic, entitled The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics.
I managed to get through the introduction and first chapter of Mr. Chait's book. Alas, I could read no more. Here are some of Chait's characterizations of supply-side economists and supply-side economics-…
jrosenhouse | October 24, 2007Another day, another debate between Christopher Hitchens and a defender of the faith. This time it was Dinesh D'Souza. The video of the procedings can be found here.
It was a frustrating debate. Through most of it I felt D'Souza and Hitchens were talking about different things. Hitchens focused primarily on whether the major claims of Christianity are true, and he was his usual funny and trenchant self in doing so. D'Souza addressed very few of Hitchens' points in this regard, and instead focused on why Christianity is a force for good in society. I think Hitchens won in a rout on the…
jrosenhouse | October 24, 2007Columbia University Law Professor Michael Dorf uses the Dumbledore flap as a teachable moment:
These principles may seem obvious enough when considering the relation of a fiction writer's intentions to her text, but they are highly contentious when it comes to legal documents. In the balance of this column, I will explain why James Madison is no more of an authority on the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, than J.K. Rowling is on Dumbledore's sexual orientation.
Interesting! I recommend the remainder of this fairly short essay. Here's the conclusion:
But now we must ask a further…