jrosenhouse | November 10, 2014After taking last week off, Problem of the Week returns. This week's problem has several possible answers, so even after a solution gets posted you can feel free to look for others. In fact, I'd be curious to know the various approaches people took to solve the problem. Did anyone come up with anything more clever than trial and error?
jrosenhouse | November 9, 2014Babson Task problems are hard work, so we shall resume our consideration of them next week. Instead I have a lovely lightweight problem for you this week, composed by Pal Benko in 1968. Actually, you can have an interesting philosophical discussion about whether this problem was composed or discovered. In the position below, white is to play and mate in three:
The story behind this problem is that Benko challenged Bobby Fischer to solve it in thirty minutes. Fischer accepted the challenge, but was unable to find the solution. When Benko showed him the solution, Fischer then claimed that…
jrosenhouse | November 6, 2014Here's an interesting article from Quanta. It's about efforts by physicists to test the idea of the multiverse:
If modern physics is to be believed, we shouldn’t be here. The meager dose of energy infusing empty space, which at higher levels would rip the cosmos apart, is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times tinier than theory predicts. And the minuscule mass of the Higgs boson, whose relative smallness allows big structures such as galaxies and humans to form, falls roughly 100 quadrillion times short of expectations. Dialing up…
jrosenhouse | November 5, 2014Chris Mooney has an astonishingly weak op-ed in a recent edition of The Washington Post. Desperate to make an argument that liberals deny science just as surely as conservatives do, he seizes on a recent study that shows a large percentage of sociologists are not open to the idea that certain gender differences are the result of evolution, as opposed to cultural factors. We shall come to the specifics of that argument in a moment, but we can save some time by skipping to the end of the essay:
None of this is to say that a few sociologists' views about evolution can be considered…
jrosenhouse | November 5, 2014Here in the math department at James Madison University, we are currently debating certain changes to the major. The problem is that we have distinct groups in pure mathematics, applied mathematics, statistics and math education. We also have students that major in mathematics for very different reasons. Some are training to be teachers, some are planning to go into industry, others are interested in graduate school, still others might be double majoring in something like physics or computer science. All of this diversity makes it difficult, more like impossible, to craft one major that…
jrosenhouse | November 3, 2014It is not just his controversial stance that the Church should dial back its dickishness towards homosexuals that has brought attention to Pope Francis. He has also weighed in on evolution:
Pope Francis on Monday (Oct. 27) waded into the controversial debate over the origins of human life, saying the big bang theory did not contradict the role of a divine creator, but even required it.
The pope was addressing the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which gathered at the Vatican to discuss “Evolving Concepts of Nature.”
“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the…
jrosenhouse | November 3, 2014Brittany Maynard died this weekend. If you are not familiar with her story, she tells it here, in her own words.
On New Year's Day, after months of suffering from debilitating headaches, I learned that I had brain cancer.
I was 29 years old. I'd been married for just over a year. My husband and I were trying for a family.
Our lives devolved into hospital stays, doctor consultations and medical research. Nine days after my initial diagnoses, I had a partial craniotomy and a partial resection of my temporal lobe. Both surgeries were an effort to stop the growth of my tumor.
In April, I…
jrosenhouse | November 2, 2014I'm sure you remember my epic, two-part series, from 2008, about my love for locked-room mysteries: Part One, Part Two. Well then, I'm sure you can imagine my delight at learning of the publication of Otto Penlzer's new anthology The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries.
Penzler has a short essay up over at HuffPo announcing the new book. He writes:
I don't care how old we get -- as long as we retain a sense of wonder, we'll stay young and live a happier life than those too-cool-for-school cynics who have a weary, ho-hum, is-that-all-there-is response to magic shows, fireworks,…
jrosenhouse | November 2, 2014Our diagram position today was composed by Joseph Babson in 1927. The stipulation is selfmate in three:
Recall that in a selfmate, white plays first and forces black to give checkmate. That's right! White is trying to get checkmated, while black is doing everything in his power to avoid giving checkmate (or at least to postpone it beyond the stipulated number of moves). It's a complete inversion of normal chess logic.
Let's get right down to business. The key move is for white to play 1. a8Q!, leading to this position:
Folks, as key moves go, that's pretty appalling. Promoting to a…
jrosenhouse | October 29, 2014Pope Francis has been continuing his campaign of liberalization within the Roman Catholic Church. At the recent synod on the family, reform-minded bishops within the Church, many installed by Francis, proposed language that, while not changing doctrine, would have liberalized the Church's stance toward homosexuals and divorced people. The paragraphs that are getting all the press are these:
Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community: are we capable of welcoming these people, guaranteeing to them a fraternal space in our communities? Often they wish to…
jrosenhouse | October 12, 2014If you're in the mood, go have a look at the new Problem of the Week. It's a Shakespeare-themed alphametic this week, with bonus sonnet! It's a bit more challenging than last week's problem (a solution to which has now been posted at the above link), but still doable if you look at it right. So give it a shot!
Incidentally, just to clarify a point that was raised in the comments to last week's POTW, in working out problems of this sort it is taken for granted that the first digit of a number cannot be 0. So, keep that in mind.
jrosenhouse | October 12, 2014The Spetember 2014 issue of The Problemist showed up in my mailbox this week. That's the official magazine of the British Chess Problem Society, as I'm sure you're aware. It included the problem below. It's one of those delightful compositions that makes you wish you had thought it of it yourself. It was composed by Ladislav Packa in 2012. White to move and mate in three:
White certainly has overwhelming force! The problem is that black is very close to being stalemated. For example, after a waiting move like 1. Bc2, we might have 1. ... hxg5 2. Rxg5,
but white won't get to continue…
jrosenhouse | October 9, 2014Recently I discussed an essay by David Barash that appeared in The New York Times. Barash discussed a talk he gives to his animal behavior class about evolution and religion. More specifically, he explains why, in his view, evolution and religion are just incompatible. I mostly agreed with the substantive points that he made, but disagreed that such a talk was appropriate. Opening your class by attacking the religious beliefs of your students does not seem like good pedagogy to me.
The Times has now published multiple letters to the editors regarding Barash's talk. Incredibly, all of…
jrosenhouse | October 7, 2014I have written before about my admiration for Bill Maher. I think he is generally one of the funniest and most insightful commentators on American culture and politics, and I rarely miss his show on Friday night. Sometimes he goes south, as with his views on vaccination, and sometimes he goes for cheap jokes based on crude stereotypes, but I don't require perfection out of the people I admire.
On last week's show Maher got into it with Ben Affleck on the subject of Islam. Click here to see the video of the segment. Now, as much as I like Maher's show, and as much as I think he does a…
jrosenhouse | October 6, 2014The Supreme Court has refused to hear appeals from five states on the subject of gay marriage. As a result, lower court rulings that struck down gay marriage bans have been allowed to stand, making gay marriage fully legal in those states. Among them is my current home in Virginia. The other four states were Oklahoma, Utah, Wisconsin and Indiana. Of course, this is great news.
I suspect there was a fair amount of political maneuvering underlying the Court's decision not to hear the case. After all, only four justices are needed to “grant cert,” but apparently that was too high a burden…
jrosenhouse | October 6, 2014After taking last week off, Problem of the Week makes a triumphant return. Problem Five is now ready for your consideration.
The main problem for this week, in keeping with the arithmetic theme for this semester, is an especially famous “alphametic” problem. If you like that sort of thing, then you might enjoy perusing this website.
As a bonus problem, however, I also presented a second classic brainteaser. And here it is:
Isn't that weird? Some area seems to have been lost in rearranging the pieces of the first triangle to get the second. This is one of those puzzles that still seems…
jrosenhouse | October 3, 2014My book Among the Creationists contains a chapter called “Why I Love Being Jewish.” Of course, as an atheist, I reject totally all of the underlying theology of Judaism. I have no use for the Torah, which I regard as a nasty and often vile piece of work. Most Jewish ceremonies leave me cold, though I do participate in the odd Passover seder or Hanukkah candle lighting. But for all of that I was raised in a Jewish home, attended Hebrew school, and had a Bar Mitzvah. When people ask me about my religion I always say that I am Jewish. Not because I am trying to hide my atheism, certainly,…
jrosenhouse | October 1, 2014University of Washington biology professor David Barash published this op-ed in The New York Times recently. The title: “God, Darwin and My College Biology Class.” Intriguing! Let's have a look.
EVERY year around this time, with the college year starting, I give my students The Talk. It isn't, as you might expect, about sex, but about evolution and religion, and how they get along. More to the point, how they don't.
I'm a biologist, in fact an evolutionary biologist, although no biologist, and no biology course, can help being “evolutionary.” My animal behavior class, with 200…
jrosenhouse | September 30, 2014My latest book project has been coediting the proceedings of the 2013 MOVES Conference held in New York City, which has turned out to be a lot harder than I anticipated. For the last few weeks it's been all-consuming, and spending so many hours in front of the computer staring at other people's writing has left me with little enthusiasm for producing any of my own.
Happily, the book is now finished (well, modulo the inevitable copy editing and production chaos at any rate), so it's time to do some blogging again. And what better way to get back into the swing of things than to look at an…
jrosenhouse | September 14, 2014This week I want to build on something I discussed near the end of last week's problem. I mentioned that a problem's genre should in some way complement its theme. So, if your problem is a selfmate, it is better if the theme employs logic that is specific to the selfmate genre. If your idea could as easily be expressed in a direct mate, then perhaps you have not chosen the most appropriate way of expressing your idea.
I'd like to illustrate this with two of my own problems. We'll go through the first one quickly. It is a selfmate in three:
This problem was published in the July 1991…