jrosenhouse | January 19, 2007I'd like to put together a comprehensive list of math bloggers. By this I mean either anyone who regularly blogs about mathematics, or professional mathematicians who blog (on any subject). The only two that I that I read regularly are Good Math, Bad Math and Polymathematics, but I have no doubt there are many others out there. I suspect there's a lot of good math stuff being posted that I'm missing. So if you know of any good ones, perhaps you could let me know about them in the comments. Thanks!
jrosenhouse | January 19, 2007Larry Moran has weighed in on the question, raised in yesterday's post, about whether it is fair to criticize Richard Dawkins for lacking the theological and philosophical chops to discuss the topics raised in The God Delusion. I especially like his closing paragraph:
The onus is on believers to convince us non-believers to adopt their faith. I'm not convinced, and I think my opinion about the existence of God is just as valid as that of C.S. Lewis, Ted Haggard, or Francis Collins. Instead of whining about whether Dawkins has mastered the subtlety of the Eucharist or the relationship of the…
jrosenhouse | January 19, 2007In the comments to yesterday's post Josh Rosenau has left a lengthy response to my criticisms. I have now left an equally length reply to that response. Just wanted to let you know it was there, in case you are interested.
jrosenhouse | January 18, 2007Since I have the sad task of criticizing my fellow science bloggers today, we may as well have a look at this post, from John Lynch.
He is responding to this post from P. Z. Myers, which discussed this review of The God Delusion written by Steven Weinberg.
Lynch takes issue with the following statement from Weinberg, quoted approvingly by Myers:
I find it disturbing that Thomas Nagel in the New Republic dismisses Dawkins as an “amateur philosopher”, while Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books sneers at Dawkins for his lack of theological training. Are we to conclude that opinions on…
jrosenhouse | January 18, 2007My SciBling Josh Rosenau had a different reaction to the exchange between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan. Sadly, he gets most of the important points wrong.
Rosenau writes:
As for “the myth that a person must believe things on insufficient evidence...,” I'd merely note that this ought to lead us to a state of profound agnosticism. There can be no natural evidence for God (philosophy of science and theology generally agree on this point), and neither could there be natural evidence against the supernatural. Insisting that others acknowledge the fundamental importance of one's own answer to…
jrosenhouse | January 18, 2007Beliefnet is hosting a blogalogue between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan. Harris is defending the entirely sensible view that religious faith, especially in its monotheistic form, is a lot of twaddle, while Sullivan takes the view that reasonable religious faith is not an oxymoron. Here are a few excerpts. Harris first:
Where I think we disagree is on the nature of faith itself. I think that faith is, in principle, in conflict with reason (and, therefore, that religion is necessarily in conflict with science), while you do not. Perhaps I should acknowledge at the outset that people use…
jrosenhouse | January 17, 2007Bashing religion is fun and all, but occasionally a religious public figure does manage to say something sensible. Here's one example, as reported by Keith Olbermann on Monday:
Number one, Rich Cizik, the vice president representing the National Association of Evangelicals, after a meeting with a science group, the faithful and the scientists issuing a joint statement insisting, “We must fight global warming immediately.” Quoting Mr. Cizik, “Whether God created the earth in a millisecond or whether it evolved over billions of years, the issue we agree on is that it needs to be cared for…
jrosenhouse | January 17, 2007Christianity Today has posted this interview with Francis Collins. Collins' goal is to persuade us that evolution and Christianity are compatible. Let's see if he's right:
How does evolution fit with your Christian faith?
[Evolution] may seem to us like a slow, inefficient, and even random process, but to God--who's not limited by space or time--it all came together in the blink of an eye. And for us who have been given the gift of intelligence and the ability to appreciate the wonders of the natural world that he created, to have now learned about this evolutionary creative process is a…
jrosenhouse | January 16, 2007Just when I thought I had seen every wrinkle on the Monty Hall problem, Raymond Smullyan has to go come up with another one. Here's an excerpt, from his book The Riddle of Scheherazade and Other Amazing Puzzles:
“And now,” said Scheherazade, “I have a paradox for you. There are three boxes labeled A, B, and C. One and only one of the three boxes contains a gold coin; the other two are empty. I will prove to you that regardless of which of the three boxes you pick, the probability that it contains the gold coin is one in two.”
“That's ridiculous!” said the king. “Since there are three…
jrosenhouse | January 16, 2007Chris over at Mixing Memory has this post about cognitive factors that can make it difficult for children to learn about evolution. This is from his conclusion:
So that's my contribution. I've presented three factors that make the job of biology teachers more difficult when they're trying to teach evolution, either to children or adults.
Intuitive theism, in which our intuitions lead us to make design inferences about complex kinds or under conditions of uncertainty; intuitions that can be reinforced culturally to an extent that it may be almost impossible to overcome them by the time we…
jrosenhouse | January 16, 2007The New York Times offers this brief, but useful summary of some of the evidence for human-caused glboal warming. Since it now seems incontrovertible that the planet is, indeed, warming up, the right-wing line has shifted to a rejection of humanity's role in the trend. I suspect as more data comes in, this line will prove untenable as well:
In the panel's last report, issued in 2001, and in more recent studies reviewed for the coming report, various trends provide clues that human activity, rather than natural phenomena, probably caused most of the recent warming. A number of trends have…
jrosenhouse | December 29, 2006Next week I'll be travelling to New Orleans to participate in the big Joint Mathematics Meetings. The “Joint” refers to the fact that it is cosponsored by the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America (no Life of Brian jokes please.)
As you can see, on Saturday the 6th I will be delivering a scintillating, edge-of-your-seat, rhetorical masterpiece of a talk entitled “Cheeger Constants of Certain Arithmetic Hyperbolic Three-Manifolds.” Yes, that's what I spend my time on when I'm not doing this blog.
Alas, the preparations for the conference will occupy me for…
jrosenhouse | December 29, 2006Update: December 30, 2006: Somehow it slipped past me that P.Z. Myers had already shredded the Hitchens piece. Sorry about that. By all means have a look at his eloquent demolition as well.
Here's Peter Hitchens weighing in on the evolution/ID dispute, writing for The Mail on Sunday, which I gather is a British newspaper:
The large response to the item about 'Intelligent Design' only underlines the need for a proper debate about this interesting intellectual development, here in Britain. This might start with a bit more fairness and open-mindedness. I was, because I am not a scientist,…
jrosenhouse | December 29, 2006Raymond Smullyan is name that is probably familiar to a lot of readers of this blog. In addition to being a mathematician and philosopher, he is known for being a master of using brainteasers and other puzzles to illuminate sometimes deep ideas in logic, especially Godel's theorems. He is perhaps best known for his knight/knave puzzles. Those are the ones where knights always tell the truth and knaves always lie. Remember those?
Anyway, I've recently been browsing through his book 5000 BC and other Philosophical Fantasies. In one section he has a series of short vignettes containing…
jrosenhouse | December 29, 2006One of my projects for the winter break has been to read some of the Iraq War books that keep showing up in the local Barnes and Noble. First up: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post.
The book makes for strange reading. On the one hand it is very hard to put down. The story it tells is gripping and it is written with considerable skill. On the other hand it is difficult to take for more than a few pages at a time. The story it tells is one of unrelenting arrogance and incompetence on the part both of the…
jrosenhouse | December 28, 2006The response to Tuesday's post, currently at 97 comments, has been very interesting. Since some of the commenters appear to be growing restless, I will put off until tomorrow my epic Iraq war post (based on my having recently waded through all 482 pages of Thomas Ricks' subtly titled book Fiasco) and talk about probability instead.
Here's the puzzle, in case you missed it the first time:
A shopkeeper says she has two new baby beagles to show you, but she doesn't know whether they're both male, both female, or one of each. You tell her that you want only a male, and she telephones the fellow…
jrosenhouse | December 28, 2006And speaking of internal Seed business, take a moment to go say hi to the newest member of the great SB combine: Developing Intelligence. As Bruce Willis once said, “Welcome to the party, pal!”
jrosenhouse | December 28, 2006Reminiscent of Mrs. McCave, who had twenty-three sons and named them all Dave, it seems that The Seed Mothership is having trouble making distinctions among her progeny. This is EvolutionBlog, folks. evolgen offers a different flavor of delectable bloggy goodness.
Apparently this is not the first time this particular confusion has happened:
Why, it seems like just last week that we were kvetching about the ad nominum attacks upon our character -- or, at least, the spelling of our blog's name. The people who add an extra "V" (turning evolgen into evolvgen) are lightweights compared to…
jrosenhouse | December 27, 2006The New Republic's Jonathan Chait doesn't like Delaware:
Last night I drove home from northern New Jersey to Washington and it went smoothly enough except that, as customarily happens on such journeys, we hit a wall of traffic halfway through. What was the cause of it? Delaware. Yes, Delaware, that sinkhole of inequity and greed. Delaware, that backward, corrupt parasite state. Delaware, the great underappreciated scandal of modern American life.
Those of us who do not live in Delaware are robbed blind by those who do in numerous ways. Probably the most consequential of those is its lax…
jrosenhouse | December 27, 2006Have a look at at this interesting article, from The New Yorker, about the boom in Bible publishing:
The familiar observation that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time obscures a more startling fact: the Bible is the best-selling book of the year, every year. Calculating how many Bibles are sold in the United States is a virtually impossible task, but a conservative estimate is that in 2005 Americans purchased some twenty-five million Bibles--twice as many as the most recent Harry Potter book. The amount spent annually on Bibles has been put at more than half a billion dollars.
In…