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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…
gregladen | October 5, 2014We really only know things work when we test them to the limit and see what it takes to make them fail, or nearly fail. All those air planes and space ships and regular shops and nice cars that usually don't fail have a pedigree of prototypes or prototypes of parts that were pushed until they broke. Chickens fired into running Boeing 757 engines with a special Chicken Cannon. Crash dummies driving vehicles into specially built walls. Rocket engines exploding on test ranges. But many systems are never tested that way, and really can't be. We build the systems and convince those who need…
gregladen | October 4, 2014The Ubuntu 14.10 Release October 23, 2014
Ubuntu 14.10 will be released shortly and I know you are chomping at the bit and want to know all about it.
There is some important news, for some, and there is some exciting news for others, and there is some boring news, and frankly, some bad news.
Before diving into the shallow pool of Ubuntu 14.10 (shallow in a good way) I want to go over some other ground first. I want to address this question:
"I have installed Linux and I don't like the default desktop. How do I change that without ruining stuff?"
If you are a long time Linux user you know…
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,…
gregladen | October 2, 2014According to popular literature (some fiction, some not) and movies, Ebola can cause havoc, infecting thousands of people, killing over half of them, and threatening an entire nation if it were to become airborne. Turns out that's not true. Ebola can do all those things without becoming airborne. In several nations.
The confusion caused by this misconception is further enhanced in a more subtle way. Since the Hollywood version of Ebola (or some other similar disease) indicates that it is dangerous because it becomes airborne, we see constant claims today on the Internet that Ebola must be…
gregladen | October 2, 2014First, let’s look at the situation in West Africa, because that is way more important than anything going on in the US right now. The WHO has said two things about this. First, if there is not a full intervention, there may be hundreds of thousands or even millions of cases of Ebola several months from now (cumulatively). Second, with full intervention they can stop this epidemic.
What is full intervention? They say that full intervention is the development and manufacture of an effective vaccine, and the deployment of that vaccine to a very large percentage of the affected population.…
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…
gregladen | September 30, 2014I'm not going to talk about Mark Steyn, other than to say that if you know who Rush Limbaugh is, Mark Steyn is a bit to the right and a tad more obnoxious, but not as smart.
You can find out more by clicking here, using the Climate Change Science Search Engine.
I'm also not going to say much about Judith Curry except that, unlike Steyn, she was a regular scientist who did climate science. Over time the material she has written, both in peer reviewed journals and on her blog, has become increasingly aligned with those who are highly skeptical that global warming is real. She has a theory…
jdupuis | September 30, 2014This is one scary book. Never mind The Exorcist or Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's The Strain trilogy, this is the real thing. And that's because unlike those authors' fevered dreams of gods and devils and vampires and plagues, the nightmare that all of our governments are spying on is really real.
And we can thank Edward Snowden for uncovering and releasing information about the extent of the spying and Glenn Greenwald (and others) for spreading the word far and wide.
Glenn Greenwald's book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State is the story of…
tsmith | September 23, 2014Have a new article up at Slate. Nine months into the worst-ever Ebola outbreak, here's where we stand.
gregladen | September 21, 2014I am going to try to keep all the climate science ice bucket challenges here as they occur. At present there are quite a few individuals who have not yet answered the challenge. I'm sure they will. Some of them, in the Northern Hemisphere, may be waiting for it to get colder so the act becomes more meaningful.
Anyway, here's what we've got now. If I'm missing someone, please add a link in the comments!
It all started with Andy Lee Robinson "Arctic Sea Ice Death Spiral" challenge...
Andy donates to the Dark Snow Project and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, challenges David Rose,…
gregladen | September 20, 2014Climate change may be the existential threat, but underlying this is, of course, population size. And this is a problem that never seems to go away. There are of course two ways, broadly speaking, to limit population growth aside from draconian policies governing reproduction (such as China's One Child policy). One is sometimes called the demographic transition. This is when a combination of factors including so-called modernization which may involve increase quality of health care in combination with increased social equality lead to lower birth rates. The other is when things go badly…
jdupuis | September 19, 2014Is jazz satire possible? Can it possibly be funny or even relevant?
This question is more immediate and pressing that you would normally imagine in the wake of serial controversies in the jazz world.
It all began at the end of July when The New Yorker posted a article in their humour column by Django Gold purporting to be the thoughts of jazz legend Sonny Rollins where he basically says jazz is a waste of time and they his whole life has been in vein. The jazz world exploded as it was not immediately obvious that it was satire. If it had been in The Onion people might have realized it…
jdupuis | September 19, 2014Yes, I cook. Yes, I use recipe blogs. Yes, I might alter the recipes I see based on what I have on hand or what various personal and familial preferences come into play.
In fact, I love recipe blogs, I really really do. Simply Recipes is probably my favourite.
The reality, of course, is that a lot of what you see in the comment sections of those recipe posts is just plain crazy. Sometimes it seems like people want to take a chocolate cake recipe and twist it into meatloaf via making a pina colada. Now there's nothing wrong with chocolate cake, meatloaf (in fact, I'd love to find a good…
gregladen | September 18, 2014The Polar Vortex hurt. We who lived in it, through it, with it, are like farm animals that got zapped by the electric fence a couple of times ... notice all that long grass growing by the fence. Stay away. It hurt! So we are worried that this will happen again.
It is a reasonable worry, from a scientific point of view. The Polar Vortex visitation last winter was the result of changes to trade winds and jet streams that has characterized our weather for the last few years. One of the big questions on my mind is this: Are wavy jet streams and corresponding changes in the distribution of…
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…
jrosenhouse | September 14, 2014The title pretty much says it all. I have a new teaser for you, along with some discussion of palindromes that you might enjoy. The solution to last week's problem has been posted as well. Let me know what you think!