January 15, 2013
Today we have cause to celebrate. I am breaking the months-long chess drought at this blog. You see, the future game of the year was just played in the big chess tournament at Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands, and I could not live with myself if I did not share it with you.
Playing white is Levon…
January 11, 2013
As part of their ongoing campaign to botch as many personnel decisions as possible, the Obama administration recently announced that the Reverend Louie Giglio, of Atlanta, would deliver the benediction at the forthcoming inaugural. They rescinded the invitation, however, when an anti-gay sermon…
January 10, 2013
The annual Joint Mathematics Meetings are taking place in San Diego this week. For the first time in more than a decade, they are taking place without me. Well, if I can't actually go this year, I might as well write about it. I have a guest post up over at the Oxford University Press blog doing…
January 9, 2013
In this post, from last year, I mentioned that I regard Victor Hugo's Les Miserables as the finest novel ever written. I also think the musical version actually captures the spirit of the novel pretty well, far better than any of the non-musical film adaptations that have appeared over the years…
January 8, 2013
Yesterday's mail brought the new issue of “Prayer News,” the newsletter of Creation Ministries International. (What can I say? I'm on several creationist mailing lists. At least it arrived along with the new issue of Free Inquiry to dilute the effect.) The lead article is called “Why Don't They…
January 7, 2013
I am happy to report that my back is now completely healed up from its recent travails, and I can now sit in perfect comfort for arbitrarily long periods of time. So let's see if we can wake up this sleepy little blog...
My friend Dave Pruett, recently retired from a long and successful career…
December 21, 2012
Go have a look at this post over at HuffPo. It's called “Science and Faith: Reconciling After the Divorce,” by Dave Pruett. To judge from that title, you might surmise that's it's not exactly my cup of tea, and you'd be right. The catch, though, is that Dave is a very good friend of mine, having…
December 20, 2012
This is encouraging:
The Orleans Parish School Board, which controls the curriculum and policies for six schools in New Orleans, voted Tuesday to ban the teaching of creationism as science and a “revisionist” history course touted in Texas.
Although none of these six New Orleans schools currently…
December 19, 2012
I don't have anything in particular to say in response to the massacre in Newtown, CT. The usual folks are making the usual arguments, of course. Many are suggesting that teachers and principals should be packing heat. Unless you're going to make combat training part of teacher certification,…
December 18, 2012
Jerry Coyne has an interesting post up reporting on an e-mail he received from Paul Nelson. Nelson is a prominent young-Earth creationist, though he also circulates freely among the ID folks. Nelson, annoyed by Coyne's emphasis on the importance of natural selection in evolution, sent Coyne an e-…
December 10, 2012
I am happy to report that my back is doing much better now. Not quite good as new yet, but rapidly getting there.
In this previous post I mentioned that spending a lot of time flat on your back does allow you to get a lot of reading done. Lately I've been having a go at Bleak House, by Charles…
November 29, 2012
Back in February, paleontologist Robert Asher wrote this essay for HuffPo. The essay was called, “Why I am an Accommodationist,” and it defended the compatibility of science and religion. As regular readers of this blog are aware, I don't much care for that view. So I wrote this reply. After a…
November 28, 2012
The current issue of e-Skeptic features three book reviews I recently wrote, discussing books related to the evolution of evolution. The three books were Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution, by Rebecca Stott; Darwin the Writer, by George Levine; and American Genesis: The Evolution…
November 25, 2012
One benefit of spending a lot of time lying down waiting patiently for your back to feel better is that you get a lot of reading done. I just polished off the novel Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1920. (Short review: Enjoyable, but not as good as Elmer Gantry.) Anyway, the main…
November 20, 2012
Sorry 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…
October 31, 2012
The Reports of the National Center for Science Education has just posted a new review of my book Among the Creationists. The reviewer is Taner Edis, professor of physics at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri. Since Edis's own books on science and religion, The Ghost in the Machine…
October 30, 2012
I recently heard a pollster remark, “When you give conservatives bad polling data, they want to kill you. When you give liberals bad polling data, they want to kill themselves.”
That attitude has been well on display recently in the right-wing freak out over Nate Silver's website. Silver…
October 29, 2012
Here's Mitt Romney, from one of the Republican primary debates (moderated by John King of CNN):
KING: You've been a chief executive of a state. I was just in Joplin, Missouri. I've been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with whether it's the tornadoes, the…
October 23, 2012
So, I saw Paranormal Activity 4 on Monday night. Short review: Pretty disappointing, but I'll still go to Paranormal Activity 5 on opening night.
I am happy to report, however, that my skills as a political prognosticator took a big hit from the debate. You see, one reason I was especially…
October 21, 2012
You've probably noticed that I haven't been blogging much lately. That's partly because this is an especially busy time of the semester. Try grading a thousand midterm exam problems in a few days and see how many brain cells you have left over for blogging. Mostly, though, it's my general…
October 3, 2012
Here's a charming story:
A math professor at Michigan State University allegedly stripped naked, ran naked through his classroom and screamed “There is no f*cking God!” before police apprehended him, according to several reports.
The professor's name has not yet been released, but online, students…
October 1, 2012
I am slowly working on an article for Skeptical Inquirer about the ways in which religious apologists use mathematical arguments in their rhetoric. Among these arguments are the familiar creationist claims about probability and information theory, but there is also a family of arguments based on…
September 25, 2012
Update: Well, it seems I got Onioned on this one. That is, I mistook a satirical article for one that was meant as serious reporting. I have left this post up simply because I think the essay mentioned here is actually pretty funny. And while the specifics were made up, I suspect the sentiments…
September 20, 2012
I had originally intended to devote this post to discussing some of the minutiae in Massimo Pigliucci's essay. In light of some of the comments on the previous post, however, I've decided it would be more useful to speak generally about why I get so annoyed when charges of scientism are casually…
September 19, 2012
Massimo Pigliucci is going on about scientism again. His target -- surprise! -- is Lawrence Krauss, specifically this exchange between Krauss and philosopher Julian Baggini, published in The Guardian.
When I first became aware of “scientism,” a while back, it was invariably a charge leveled by…
September 17, 2012
These are hard times to be a supporter of Israel. Bibi Netanyahu is a lunatic who is now actively trying to mess with the American election. You see, President Obama, early in his term, politely suggested that if Israel seriously wants to make peace with its neighbors they might want to consider…
September 13, 2012
I have a guest post up over at the blog of Oxford University Press, discussing a few amusing tidbits from set theory. The post was inspired by this earlier post, in which I mentioned the bizarre criticism of set theory served up by a publisher of Christian home schooling materials.
In my new…
September 11, 2012
If I told you that evolution was in crisis, what would you think I meant? You would probably think I meant that the theory was on its way out. You would think that new discoveries had shown the untenability of evolution, and that biologists were in despair over their lack of a central organizing…
September 10, 2012
Over at Uncommon Descent, there's a bit of a kerfuffle going on about the second law of thermodynamics. Salvador Cordova got the ball rolling back in July with this barn-burner of a post excoriating his fellow ID proponent Granville Sewell for making bad thermodynamical arguments:
ID proponents…
September 10, 2012
OMG! Did you see the game between U. S. first board Hikaru Nakamura and Russia's first board (and former World Champion) Vladimir Kramnik at the big Chess Olympiad last week? No? It saw one of the rarest and coolest moves in chess. In the following position, it is Nakamura, playing white, to…
