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jrosenhouse | January 4, 2014Here's a little brainteaser for you. What do these four fractions have in common?
$latex \dfrac{16}{64} \phantom{xxxx} \dfrac{19}{95} \phantom{xxxx} \dfrac{26}{65} \phantom{xxxx} \dfrac{49}{98}$
As it happens, these are the only four fractions where the top and bottom are both two-digit numbers that have this property. Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments. Good luck!
gregladen | January 4, 2014Utah has gay marriage. Say no more. It's officially over at the highest levels, folks. You can't spend decades legislating and ordering equality from the chambers of congress, statehouses, and the benches of the high courts before, eventually, it becomes part of our culture to assume that the state and society supports equality even if an obnoxiously large minority of citizens does not. Struggle is followed by reluctant acceptance and regulation which is followed by shifting norms. What happens then is interesting: You have to shut up. STFU in fact. If you are really against equal…
jrosenhouse | January 2, 2014Jeffrey Shallit has an interesting post up about The Southern Confederacy Arithmetic, a mathematics textbook published in 1864. Some of its idiosyncratic examples make for amusing reading.
Reading Jeffrey's post reminded me of a textbook I picked up at home-schoolers convention a while back. The book is called Intermediate Logic For Christian and Home Schools, by James Nance. Now, I am happy to report that the logic presented in the book is the same logic you would find in any other textbook. It covers all the standard banalities of basic propositional logic, and does so in an entirely…
jrosenhouse | January 2, 2014Just in case you are still wondering why college professors tend to be politically liberal, the last few days have provided three examples that make my point perfectly.
First up, we have this piece from Bret Stephens, writing at The Wall Street Journal. Stephens's piece is behind a pay-wall, but this essay at HuffPo quotes the most relevant part. Stephens is keen to argue that any notion that income inequality is a serious problem in America is just the product of envious left-wingers. Stephens writes:
Here is a factual error, marred by an analytical error, compounded by a moral error. It…
gregladen | January 2, 2014Word on the street is that Bill Nye is going to debate Ken Hamm at the Creationism "Museum" on February 4th. This is a bad idea for several reasons.
First, Bill Nye is not really an expert on evolution and is actually not that experienced in debates. Being really really pro science and science education isn't enough. When they went in after Osama Bin Laden (my errand distant cousin) they did not send people who are really really against terrorism. They sent in Seal Team Six with a huge amount of support such as Army Rangers and such and even that was risky.
Second, there isn't a debate so…
aardvarchaeology | December 30, 2013Here are the ten boardgames I played more than twice during 2013.
Keltis (2008, travel version, very handy) *
For Sale (1997)
7 Wonders (2010)
Cave Troll (2002) *
Galaxy Trucker (2007) *
King of Tokyo (2011) *
Kingdom Builder (2011) *
Telestrations (2009)
Fluxx (1997) *
Tikal (1999)*
These are mostly short games that you can play repeatedly in one evening. Only Galaxy Trucker, Tikal and maybe Kingdom Builder are longer. All are highly recommended! Except Fluxx, which is just weird. I played it under duress at the Blåhammaren mountain hiker's resort.
I played 74 different boardgames in 2013…
jrosenhouse | December 29, 2013Over at Talking Philosophy, Mike LaBossiere takes up that question. Unfortunately, I think his answer is mostly wrong.
Here's his introduction:
One common conservative talking point is that academics is dominated by professors who are, if not outright communists, at least devout liberals. While there are obviously very conservative universities and conservative professors, this talking point has considerable truth behind it: professors in the United States do tend to be liberal.
Another common conservative talking point is that the academy is hostile to conservative ideas, conservative…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2013I've been blogging for a bit more than eight years now, and today Aard turns seven. Traffic for late 2013 is ~600 daily readers, pretty low compared to the most recent peak at 1000 in early 2012. This is probably because of my lower posting frequency and because the URLs of individual older blog entries changed when ScienceBlogs migrated to WordPress last year. The lower posting frequency, in its turn, is largely due to Facebook, where stuff that might have made short blog entries in 2007 ends up now. Some of the Facebook bits show up here afterwards as Pieces of My Mind.
As to Sb in general…
jrosenhouse | December 28, 2013To this point in our Sunday Chess Problem series, we have considered one endgame study and two “direct mates.” While the diagram positions we have considered may have seemed a bit fanciful, we have not yet fiddled with the basic logic of the game itself. Which is to say that even if the position seems bizarre, we still imagine that white and black are simply playing a normal game of chess.
This week we change that up a bit. This will be our first example of the “selfmate” genre. In selfmate problems, white tries to force black to give checkmate in the stipulated number of moves. Black,…
jrosenhouse | December 28, 2013Here's Spider (the orange one) and Emily from yesterday, having just been loaded into the back of my car.
See how happy they look! They were both expressing their joy with loud, some would say shrieking, meows. That's OK folks, no need to thank me.
As it happens, I also have a very large carrier that could fit both of them comfortably. Part of me was tempted to throw them both in and say, “Time to settle your differences, folks.” I decided against it; too reminiscent of Thunderdome. Two cats enter, one cat leaves.
Of course, we all knew where we were going:
For my local readers,…
jrosenhouse | December 26, 2013Proponents of intelligent design make a large number of arguments regarding the inadequacies of evolution, and the shortcomings of current scientific practice. All of these arguments are wrong.
That, however, is not the end of the problems besetting ID. There is also the fact that there really is no theory of intelligent design. For all their nattering about how ID has the makings of a scientific revolution, they are stuck nonetheless with a “theory” that actually asserts very little. There is ultimately nothing more to their argument than the claim that at some point in natural history,…
gregladen | December 24, 2013How to make pumpkin pie
This makes one pie. You probably want two, so double everything.
PROCEDURE
PREHEAT oven to 425F. Set the rack to above the middle of the oven but not too high up.
Mix dry ingredients in one bowl.
Mix wet ingredients in a different bowl.
Mix the wet and dry ingredients together.
Put a pie crust in a pie shell. Make the edges all fancy looking by using a fork.
Stir the ingredients up one more time and put it in the pie shell.
Place the pie in the center of the rack.
Bake for 15 minutes
Remove pie, shut oven.
Put strips of aluminum foil around the crust to slow…
jrosenhouse | December 21, 2013Our first two entries in this series featured complex play drawn out over a large number of moves. So, for a change of pace this week, let's try something lighter. This problem was composed by E. Pedersen in the early 1940s. White is to move and mate in three:
Remember that white is moving up the board and black is moving down. Vertical files are labeled a--h from left to right, while horizontal ranks are labeled 1--8 from bottom to top. So the white king and queen are on a7 and f2 respectively, while the black king and rook are on a3 and h1 respectively.
White's task appears daunting…
jrosenhouse | December 19, 2013Let's resume our discussion of this article, by William Lane Craig, in which he presents five arguments for belief in God. We found his first two arguments to be inadequate. Do his other three fare any better?
3. God provides the best explanation of objective moral values and duties. Even atheists recognize that some things, for example, the Holocaust, are objectively evil. But if atheism is true, what basis is there for the objectivity of the moral values we affirm? Evolution? Social conditioning? These factors may at best produce in us the subjective feeling that there are objective…
jrosenhouse | December 18, 2013Writing at Salon, Richard Cooper expresses dismay with recent superhero movies. Here's a sample:
I was reminded of this by Jor-El’s speech in “Man of Steel”:
You will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders.
How, though? Those watching him can’t fly, topple buildings or fire heat rays from their eyes. What else does Superman do other than these purely physical feats? The 1978 version of Jor-El warned: “It is forbidden for you to…
jrosenhouse | December 17, 2013Writing in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas famously presented his “five ways” to prove that God exists. He relied largely on extrapolations from observable phenomena in our daily experience to grand claims about the origins of it all. Thus, he argued from the presence of motion in the natural world to an unmoved mover behind it all, or from the contingency of existence in the natural world to the presence of a necessary existent, and so on.
These arguments have received detailed philosophical development over the years, from Aquinas and from many others, but they have not fared well…
gregladen | December 17, 2013Many, many things happened in the area of bird science this year, so this review can not be comprehensive. But I’ve compiled a sampling of this year’s news and events for your edification. I’ve organized them by date (month/day) of the approximate reporting or blogging time of the item of interest, which does not necessarily reflect the actual date of occurrence.
click here to see my review at 10,000 Birds...
jdupuis | December 17, 2013Welcome to the rebooted science interview series here at Confessions of a Science Librarian! The previous incarnation mostly concentrated on people in the broadly definined scholarly communications community, like Mark Patterson of eLife, Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt of PeerJ or author Michael Nielsen.
The series has been lying fairly fallow for the last few years so I thought my more recent involvement with Canadian science policy advocacy presented an interesting opportunity to start over. In particular, my participation in the recent iPolitics science policy series presented itself as a…
jrosenhouse | December 16, 2013When I wrote my post last week about the existence of mathematical objects, I had not yet noticed that Massimo Pigliucci was writing about similar topics. More specifically, he is discussing cosmologist Max Tegmark's idea that ultimate reality just is mathematics. Here's Pigliuccia describing Tegmark's ideas:
The basic idea is that the ultimate structure of reality is, well, a mathematical one. Please understand this well, because it is the crux of the discussion: Tegmark isn’t saying anything as mundane as that the world is best described by mathematics; he is saying that the ultimate…
gregladen | December 16, 2013Usually when I mention The Hobbit I'm talking about the hominid, or something related to the hominid, or a book about the hominid. But here I want to point you to something related to the book by Tolkien and, of more immediate importance, about the science of the Hobbit and things related. You've certainly already read this important book about the Science of Middle Earth. But you may not yet have seen this blog post by my friend Matt Kuchta on the geology of the Lonely Mountain.
Like many of you, I saw The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug last weekend. Like many of you, I've read "The…