jrosenhouse | December 12, 2006Larry Moran has an excellent review of Francis Collins' silly book The Language of God. You don't really appreciate Ken Miller until you have contemplated the far daffier arguments made by Collins. Moran writes:
The second persuasive argument is the presence in all of us of a God-shaped vacuum. What the heck is that, you might ask? C.S. Lewis supplies the answer. It's the sensation of longing for something greater than ourselves. It's the “joy” you feel when you read a good poem, listen to Beethoven, or view the beauty of nature. The emptiness we are all supposed to feel cries out for an…
jrosenhouse | December 12, 2006Be sure to have a look at Sahotra Sarkar's essay at The American Prospect. He describes the recent shift of emphasis on the ID side away from biology and towards physics instead. Sarkar writes:
Initially largely unnoticed by their critics, creationists began to co-opt the fine-tuning argument when, in their book Rare Earth (2000), paleontologist Peter T. Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee emphasized that complex life is very uncommon in the universe. Though their claims were subsequently subjected to scathing criticism by David Darling in Life Everywhere (2001) as well as other…
jrosenhouse | December 11, 2006The all encompassing Science Blogs Combine has gobbled up two more members. Go say hello to Orli over at Neruontic and to the group over at Integrity of Science. As if I didn't have enough to read!
jrosenhouse | December 11, 2006Chess Life is reporting that David Bronstein has died of unknown cuases at the age of 82.
Bronstein resides on a short list of players, along with Paul Keres and Viktor Korchnoi, who can vie for the title of Greatest Player Never to Win the World Championship. His peak came in the late forties and early fifties, when his tactical brilliance and his advocacy of then offbeat opening like The King's Gambit and The King's Indian Defense propelled him to the upper tier of professional players. With regard to that latter opening, he was truly ahead of his time ; the King's Indian later became a…
jrosenhouse | December 11, 2006From The New York Times:
Holocaust deniers and skeptics from around the world gathered at a government-sponsored conference here today to discuss their theories about whether six million Jews were indeed killed by the Nazis during World War II and whether gas chambers existed.
In a speech opening the two-day conference, Rasoul Mousavi, head of the Iranian Foreign Ministry's Institute for Political and International Studies, which organized the event, said it was an opportunity for scholars to discuss the subject “away from Western taboos and the restriction imposed on them in Europe.”
The…
jrosenhouse | December 11, 2006According to the Site Meter, I've received over 13,000 hits today. I assume that means some large fish in the blog pond has linked to me. So, thanks for the link! Anyone want to fess up?
jrosenhouse | December 8, 2006If you made it through that last post and thought about it for a while, you might think that I pulled a fast one.
At a few places I commented that if x is any element of an arbitrary ring, then we know that x0 = 0.
That is a certainly a familiar fact about the integers. There we think of x times y as representing the number of objects in a rectangular array with x items along the length and y along the width. If either x or y is 0, then your array will contain nothing at all.
But things are less clear when you are working in an arbitrary ring. In this context “multiplication” is merely an…
jrosenhouse | December 8, 2006Some of the commenters to yesterday's post raised some interesting questions on the subject of dividing by zero. So interesting, in fact, that I felt the subject deserved another post.
My SciBling, revere, of Effect Measure: writes the following:
OK, I shouldn't jump in here because I'm an epidemiologist and not a mathematician, but, what the hell. All I can do is be wrong (which I am used to).
Some algebraists do permit division by zero, but only in the case 0/0. Thus, Rotman in Advanced Modern Algebra, Revised Printing, p. 121, has this definition:
Def.: Let a and b be elements of a…
jrosenhouse | December 7, 2006As mentioned in the previous post, the BBC article contains video of Dr. Anderson explaining how his work allows us to evaluate the expression 00. I'll save you the trouble of having to watch it. Here it is:
We define the number N=0/0. The number N stands for nullity, and is the new number Dr. Anderson claims to have discovered/invented. He uses a Greek letter phi to represent it, but an N will be simpler for our purposes.
He now argues:
00 = 0(1-1) = 01 x 0 -1 = (0/1)1 x (0/1)-1.
Anything to the first power is equal to the thing right back again, and anything to the minus…
jrosenhouse | December 7, 2006Mark Chu-Carroll beat me to this BBC story about a computer science professor in England claiming to have resolved a twelve-hundred year old problem. The story begins:
Dr James Anderson, from the University of Reading's computer science department, says his new theorem solves an extremely important problem - the problem of nothing.
“Imagine you're landing on an aeroplane and the automatic pilot's working,” he suggests. “If it divides by zero and the computer stops working - you're in big trouble. If your heart pacemaker divides by zero, you're dead.”
Computers simply cannot divide by zero.…
jrosenhouse | December 6, 2006Remember the ISCID? That's the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design. From their website:
he International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) is a cross-disciplinary professional society that investigates complex systems apart from external programmatic constraints like materialism, naturalism, or reductionism. The society provides a forum for formulating, testing, and disseminating research on complex systems through critique, peer review, and publication. Its aim is to pursue the theoretical development, empirical application, and philosophical…
jrosenhouse | December 5, 2006Vladimir Kramnik lost the sixth game of his match against the computer prgoram Deep Fritz today. He thereby lost the match by a score of 4-2.
The finla game saw the super sharp Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian Defense. This was in stark contrast to the careful positional play of the earlier games. The computer managed to prove, once again, it's general superiority in tactical positions. The machine played the opening in somewhat bizarre fashion, and did not appear to have much advantage out of the opening. But it was able to keep up the pressure, and seized on a few sloppy moves by…
jrosenhouse | December 5, 2006Here's Bill O'Reilly pretending to be outraged by Jim Webb's lack of respect for the presidency (see yesterday's post for the details):
Now that was rude on Webb's part. The president, knowing Webb's anti-war sentiments, went out of his way to engage the senator-elect about his son. That was a nice gesture, was it not?
Webb took the occasion to politic. That was inappropriate, especially at the White House. And then he turned disrespectful.
Now, we've invited Senator-elect Webb on “The Factor” to talk it over, but so far, he has not accepted. But I will say this directly to him: It's fine to…
jrosenhouse | December 5, 2006I'm a big government kind of guy, but this is insane:
The New York City Board of Health voted today to ban artificial trans fats in the city's eateries, establishing more rigorous limits than any other American city on an ingredient considered by doctors and nutritionists to increase the risk of heart disease.
The new requirements will mean that the city's 20,000 food establishments, from high-end bistros to neighborhood delis, will be barred from using most frying oils containing artificial trans fats by July 1, 2007, and will have to eliminate the artificial trans fats from all of their…
jrosenhouse | December 4, 2006I was more than a little surprised when Jim Webb defeated incumbent George Allen in the recent Virginia Senate election. I voted for him happily, but didn't rate his chances very high. My confidence in him has only soared in light of recent events. Here's George Will:
Wednesday's Washington Post reported that at a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress, Webb “tried to avoid President Bush,” refusing to pass through the reception line or have his picture taken with the president. When Bush asked Webb, whose son is a Marine in Iraq, “How's your boy?” Webb replied, “I'd…
jrosenhouse | December 4, 2006Larry Moran has replied to my previous post criticizing his treatment of Ken Miller's views on science and religion. I'll let him have the last word, except for the quick comment that I still think he's misinterpreting Miller's intent. Certainly Miller believes that God is active in the world and might influence events in ways that are undetectable to science. But he manifestly does not say that there is some gap in modern evolutionary theory that must be filled by divine intervention. That is a crucial difference between his views and those of the ID folks.
On the other hand, maybe Moran…
jrosenhouse | December 1, 2006Timothy Noah of Slate has noted the same phenomenon I commented upon in yesterday's post. Namely, that many former war supporters now want to blame the Iraqis for the chaos in their country. Here's Noah nailing Charles Krauthammer:
In the Dec. 1 Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer writes that the Maliki government's failure “is rooted in an Iraqi political culture that makes it as yet impossible for enough of the political leadership to act with a sense of national consciousness.” What's remarkable is that the people now saying things like this are the same ones who, early on, criticized…
jrosenhouse | November 30, 2006Here's Bill O'Reilly expressing the latest bit of wisdom from the American Right:
The problem in Iraq is not American. The problem is the Iraqis themselves. They're not fighting for their freedom in a way that puts the bad keys on the defensive.
There is only so much the USA can do. If the Iraqi people are unwilling to challenge the bad guys, the bad guys will win -- period.
And here's Charles Krauthammer making the same point:
Americans flatter themselves that they are the root of all planetary evil. Nukes in North Korea? Poverty in Bolivia? Sectarian violence in Iraq? Breasts are beaten…
jrosenhouse | November 29, 2006Vladimir Kramnik will receive a lengthy section in any book devoted to history's greatest chess players. He's been a top grandmaster for close to twnety years. He defeated the seemingly invincible Gary Kasparov in a straight-up match. He has successfully defended his title twice, both times coming from behind.
So try to imagine the sting that comes from knowing the following position will forever be placed just below his name:
This is the penultimate position from the second game of Kramnik's ongoing match against the top computer chess-playing program Deep Fritz. The dust has settled…
jrosenhouse | November 29, 2006That last post notwithstanding, I do think Larry Moran deserves criticism for one thing. He has been very unfair to Ken Milller.
For example, in this post Moran writes:
The Neville Chamberlain Atheists object when Behe talks about intelligent design but mum's the word when Ken Miller talks about how God tweaks mutations to get what He wants. Hypocrisy is a strange thing to be proud of.
And in this post we find:
Young Earth Creationsts (YEC's) and Intelligent Design Creationists (IDiots) are anti-science because they propose explanations of the natural world that conflict with science. But…