Miscellaneous
jrosenhouse | November 20, 2012Sorry for the longer than usual blog hiatus. Get your violins ready, but I am currently suffering through one of my periodical bouts of lower back pain, which makes it very painful to sit up for more than a few minutes at a time. The last two weeks or so have been spent remaining vertical just long enough to teach my classes and hold office hours, before dragging myself home and chewing on pain killers. Blogging was one of the first things to go.
I was diagnosed with degenerate disc disease a little more than a year ago, but I've had back problems going back to 2000. The first such attack…
jrosenhouse | August 16, 2012My cat, Emily, tends to get a bit sulky when I leave her for long periods of time. So when I returned home from New York the other day, having been gone for a week, I was not surprised when she did not greet me at the door. Par for the course, I thought. She'll appear on her own in five to ten minutes.
When fifteen minutes went by and she still had not appeared I decided to go hunting. My first pass around the house was unsuccessful. Emily was not in any of her usual hiding places. Then I heard meowing. It was weird since it sounded like it was coming from directly underneath the floor…
jrosenhouse | August 16, 2012The Big Monty Hall Book is now more than three years old, but new reviews still appear occasionally. The latest one comes from the magazine Significance, published by the Royal Statistical Society. The reviewer is Tom Fanshawe, a statistician at Lancaster University in England. Alas, the review is not freely available online, so permit me some excerpts:
[The Monty Hall problem] will be familiar to most people who have studied probability, and, given a modicum of probability theory, it is not a difficult problem. Does it really warrant a whole book?
It is a credit to Jason Rosenhouse that…
jrosenhouse | August 2, 2012Jerry Coyne has a sourpuss post up about his lack of enthusiasm for the Olympics:
This year, I can’t get energized at all. I watch the highlights on the evening news, but the revelation that Phelps has become the most decorated Olympian of all time leaves me cold. And I never watch the evening’s recaps.
I’m wondering if it’s just me, and I’ve simply lost interest, or whether the games themselves have become tepid and, as they get more “professional”—with fancy training, paid athletes, and the like—they’ve just gotten more boring. Reader opinion is welcome.
Well, I know for a fact that it'…
jrosenhouse | July 25, 2012I'm back in Virginia again, after another successful trip. This time I was mostly in Kentucky, visiting various friends.
It's a shame that nowadays Kentucky is known primarily for bourbon, horse racing and creationism, since it's really a very beautiful state. Among my ports of call was Morehead, KY to visit my friend Robin. She's in the math department at Morehead State University. She showed me around the area, including a stop at this lake, right on campus:
Not bad, but it was just a warm-up for what came next. Robin took me out to Lockegee Rock, in the Daniel Boone National…
jrosenhouse | July 19, 2012It's been fun spending a few days at home in Virginia, but it's time to hit the road again. Tomorrow I will hop into the Jasonmobile and head west. Since I seek out only the choicest tourist destinations, I will be spending time in Loveland, OH; Bowling Green, KY; and Morehead, also KY. Fun! I'll be back next week.
jrosenhouse | July 16, 2012I'm back in Virginia for a few days. I'll be hitting the road once again on Friday, heading west this time to visit friends in Kentucky. In the meantime, here's an interesting photo of the light fixture hanging between the garage doors of my parent's house:
What's that ball-like thing underneath the light? Let's take a closer look:
Yikes! That's a hornet's nest!
Even cooler is that my parents never even noticed it was there. It fell to my five-year-old niece to point it out.
jrosenhouse | July 10, 2012I have now reached the last leg of my travels. I was in Philadelphia for several days last week, and was in upstate New York over the weekend. Currently I'm in New York City.
Last night I attended Monday Night Magic at the Players Theater in Greenwich Village. All of the acts were very enjoyable, but it was a special thrill to get to see Chris Capehart, who is pretty famous among magicians. If you ever have a chance to see him perform I heartily recommend it.
When the show let out I walked around the village a bit. It was jumping with activity. Lots of stuff was still open, and it…
jrosenhouse | July 3, 2012As preparation for your fourth of July barbecue, watch this video about how to cook a hot dog. It's very clever, despite being spoiled somewhat at the end by the application of ketchup to the finished dog. As Dirty Harry once said, nobody but nobody puts ketchup on a hot dog!
jrosenhouse | June 11, 2012Still no word on when the commenting issues will be resolved. Hopefully soon. But I did want to poke my head up long enough to warn you away from seeing Ridley Scott's Alien prequel, Prometheus. Really, really bad. This one's going to be on a lot of ten worst lists at the end of the year.
When I see movies in the theater, I usually stick to action, horror or sci-fi. Which is to say that I see a lot of bad movies. But even so it is pretty rare that I completely hate a movie. No matter how asinine the story or hackneyed the dialogue, I can usually find something to like. Perhaps there's…
jrosenhouse | May 30, 2012I have now done three posts since the migration, but I have not received any comments. Now, the first entry was a chess post, and I'm used to not getting any comments on those. I raised an eyebrow when I got no comments on the House post, surely I'm not the only one around here who enjoyed the show? But when I didn't get any comments on my science/religion post, then I decided something must be wrong. So I tried to post a comment of my own, but it did not allow me to do so. It pretended to allow me; I typed in my comment and my information, and clicked on “Submit Comment,” but then…
jrosenhouse | May 28, 2012As we continue to get caught up on the most important issues of the past week, we really should take note of the final episode of House.
The first episode I ever saw was Season Two, Episode 19, entitled “House vs. God.” The patient of the week was a fifteen-year old faith healer who claims to be in direct communication with God. House thinks that's ridiculous, but it soon appears there might be something to it. The patient seems to know things he could not possibly know. And shortly after the faith healer touches one of Dr. Wilson's cancer patients, her tumor shrinks measurably. Even House…
jrosenhouse | May 4, 2012It is finished. My grading, I mean. Over the last few days I have graded roughly one thousand math problems, some of which were even done correctly. But that's all finished now. Except for graduation tomorrow, the semester is now over! Yay!
So what better way to celebrate than with a little Joss Whedon film festival? For the clueless ones among you, Whedon is responsible for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. (And Firefly, of course.) First up was The Cabin in the Woods, which Whedon co-wrote with Buffy writer Drew Goddard. Brilliant! A masterpiece! If you have any taste for…
jrosenhouse | April 15, 2012I recently attended the Gathering for Gardner conference in Atlanta, held every two years to honor Martin Gardner. Gardner was a prolific writer on a variety of topics, especially mathematics, magic and pseudoscience. Since those just happen to be three major interests of mine, you can imagine how much fun I had! Alas, since we are nearing the end of the semester around here it might be a while before I can do a proper write-up. So in the meantime, enjoy this video from the conference. It opens with the great Raymond Smullyan doing some three-card monte. Smullyan is 93, by the way. The…
jrosenhouse | January 27, 2012Over at Talking Philosophy, Mike LaBossiere offers a defense of teachers's unions. He is a bit too tame for my taste, and he is far too respectful towards anti-union arguments that have far more to do with general hostility to public education than they do with measured criticism, but in the end he arrives at the right place:
In general, it would be rather odd if unions did not cause some problems. If they did not, they would be truly unique. However, it seems more sensible to address these problems rather than simply condemning unions. Given the fervor with which these unions are being…
jrosenhouse | December 22, 2011This is Emily:
She sure does look comfortable, doesn't she? And why shouldn't she be? In a tour de force of inductive reasoning she figured that today would be like the previous 364 consecutive days, at least to the extent that I wouldn't even consider stuffing her into a box and bringing her out to my car.
But she was wrong.
“Why is God angry?” she asked.
I explained that while this sudden intrusion into her happiness may seem incomprehensible form her limited, feline perspective, she should remember that I can see the big picture. I understand, in a way that she cannot, that…
jrosenhouse | December 16, 2011By now I'm sure everyone has heard that Christopher Hitchens has died. I don't have much to add to what everyone else has said, so I'll keep this short. I regard God is Not Great as a masterpiece, and if that had been the only thing he ever wrote, then, as we like to say at Passover, dayenu. Whatever the topic, to read Hitchens, or to hear him speak, was to gain an appreciation for what the English language could me made to do.
Hitchens wasn't always right (his disastrous support for the Iraq war and his cartoonish hatred of the Clintons come immediately to mind), but he was so eloquent…
jrosenhouse | November 30, 2011I think I am now officially old. I think this because I was horrified by this article, from HuffPo:
Movie theaters and entertainment venues have long banned the use of smartphones during performances.
But now one venue just outside Seattle is reversing that etiquette by welcoming cellphone and camera use in the theater, according to The New York Times.
With the newly constructed 2,000 seat theater set to open in 2014, the move is intended to attract younger audiences by cultivating a digital-friendly environment where people can update Facebook and send text messages and tweets throughout…
jrosenhouse | November 14, 2011It's time to hit the road once more. Tomorrow I am off to Newport News, VA, to visit Christopher Newport University. I shall be delivering not one, but two edge of your seat, barn-burners. Tomorrow afternoon I shall be speaking about evolution and creationism, based on my forthcoming book. Then, on Wednesday afternoon, it's back to the Monty Hall problem. Should be fun!
jrosenhouse | November 1, 2011Update 11/2/11, 11:26pm: John Haught has relented, and the video has now been released. You can find it here. Haught has also provided a lengthy explanation of his initial refusal to allow the tape to be released. Jerry has replied.
A few weeks ago, Jerry Coyne and John Haught discussed science/religion compatibility in a forum held at the University of Kentucky. Jerry wrote a brief account of what transpired. It seems that Jerry prepared thoroughly for the debate by reading no less than six of Haught's books and watching all of his presentations on You Tube. Haught, on the other…