Recursivity

A Fossil Meteorite

2012-01-27T11:03:00.004-05:00

The Tucker Tower Nature Center in Lake Murray State Park, Oklahoma is a fascinating and weird place.

Built (with state funds!) as a summer retreat for corrupt Oklahoma governor William H. Murray, it now houses exhibits about local fauna in an eccentric 4-story building.

The most interesting object is the main mass of the Lake Murray meteorite, found in Carter County in 1933, weathering out of Lower Cretaceous strata. It is believed to be a meteorite that fell about 110 million years ago and then was incorporated into the sandstone that formed around it. I visited the museum in January 2007.

In Memory of Sheng Yu (1950-2012)

2012-01-24T12:38:00.006-05:00

(photo courtesy Manfred Kudlek)

Yesterday I heard the sad news that Sheng Yu, a Chinese-Canadian computer scientist, and a good friend and colleague, died this weekend in London, Ontario.

I first met Sheng Yu shortly after I arrived in Waterloo as an associate professor in 1990, but I can't remember the circumstances. At the time he was working actively with the late Derick Wood (for whom Sheng gave a memorial talk just last year), who taught at Waterloo at the time, so it probably was through Derick.

We wrote a paper together on regular languages with polynomial densities. Later, Sheng asked me an interesting problem about whether it is possible to find a sparse language L such that L² = Σ^*. I found one example, and Andrew Granville found another. In 1994, we all wrote a paper with Per Enflo, who had found yet another example. Our last joint paper was in 2001, joint with Mike Domaratzki, on covers of formal languages. Although we did not work actively together in the last ten years, we often spoke on the phone.

Sheng got his master's degree in computer science from Waterloo in 1982, under John Beatty, and his Ph. D. in 1986 under Karel Culik II. Then he taught for several years at Kent State before taking a position at the University of Western Ontario.

Sheng's work on state complexity is well-known in our community. His influential 1994 paper with Zhuang and Salomaa is his most-cited non-survey paper (with Google scholar giving 156 citations), and re-introduced state complexity as a research topic to the theoretical computer science community. (It turns out that many of the results in that paper were already discovered by the Soviet computer scientist Maslov in 1970, but Maslov's results were either not known or quickly forgotten in the West.) Since then, state complexity became an active area of research, with dozens of papers published.

When I first met Sheng, I thought his only interests were about automata. I quickly found out I was wrong. He was incredibly broad, publishing papers on object-oriented programming, parallel processing, parallel programming, and teaching a wide variety of courses at UWO, including computer architecture, programming languages, and of course, automata theory.

Sheng Yu also had influence in other ways. He was one of the people responsible for the CIAA conference series, and served on the program committee of dozens of conferences. He also was one of the people responsible for the Grail system, which is widely used to carry out experiments with automata. He supervised dozens of graduate students.

Sheng told me a little bit about his life in China. He got his Ph. D. older than many of his contemporaries because his life was disrupted by the Cultural Revolution. He still had family in China, which he kept in close contact with.

~~About 5 years ago~~ In 2000, Sheng had a heart attack while playing tennis at UWO. Luckily, he was very near the university hospital, and immediately went there, and the good care he received saved his life. He told me that his family had a history of heart disease and that he had high cholesterol, which he tried to control through diet.

I will miss him as a colleague and friend.

Yet Another Creationist Letter

2012-01-21T04:04:00.004-05:00

Yet another creationist letter to the editor in my local paper, the Waterloo Region Record.

There are some really terrific stupid lines in this one:

However, I have never heard an evolutionist give an adequate explanation of how life itself began. There is the big bang theory, but it ignores the fact that such an explosion would destroy any kind of life as we know it.

and

The theory of evolution seems to propound that given sufficient time -- millions and even billions of years -- all things are possible, even though the chances of DNA and cell changes to produce current results are infinitely small.

Great stuff - typical for our local newspaper.

My White House Petition

2012-01-20T13:40:00.002-05:00

Please, publicize and vote up my

White House petition

to improve US government services for the estimated 4 million Americans who live abroad.

Currently we face an array of annoying obstacles, such as US government websites with webforms that only allow US addresses, or agencies with 1-800 phone numbers that cannot be called from outside the US.

Cultural Topology?

2012-01-19T18:37:00.003-05:00

Maybe somebody can wade through this article entitled "Cultural Topology" by Brent Blackwell, professor of English at Ball State, and tell me if it is a joke or intended to be serious.

With lines like "A kind of patchwork space, topologic analysis can combine incongruent, even contradictory axiomatics by bounding them within a single topologic field", I am tempted to think it is an elaborate hoax. But who knows? The stupidity that lurks in some academic departments can be stupefying.

This link was sent to me in 2006 by the late Norman Levitt, but I didn't take a look until now.

Jessica Ahlquist - American Hero

2012-01-15T15:03:00.004-05:00

Watch the video and tell me you aren't impressed with the quiet confidence and intelligence displayed by Jessica Ahlquist, victorious plaintiff in the Cranston, RI school prayer banner case.

Now contrast it with the threats and vituperation of Christians who wanted a different outcome.

Everybody's favorite moron neurosurgeon actually called Jessica a "pubescent brownshirt" and said she was worse than Nazi Youth. It's hard to imagine anything more vile.

The comparison between Ahlquist and her detractors illustrates the utter depravity induced by religion.

Priest: It's Fun to Annoy Secularists

2012-01-15T06:21:00.008-05:00

In the National Post, we have yet another example of a theist who thinks that actions that annoy secularists have some intrinsic virtue.

Father Raymond J. de Souza says, "I cheer for Tebow in part because his success annoys grumpy people who think Christians should require special permission to participate in public life."

Father de Souza seems to have no qualms violating the Catholic 8th commandment, since of course there is no one who thinks "Christians should require special permission" to do anything at all compared to non-Christians. And it's hardly grumpy to think that Tebow's repeated ostentatious public display of faith is a little over the top. After all, doesn't Matthew 6:6 say something relevant? Or is pointing that out considered "grumpy"? Of course, if Tebow were a Jew or a Muslim, I bet Father de Souza would have something else to say.

Father de Souza says nothing at all about Tebow's support of Focus on the Family. I guess supporting anti-gay bigots is the Christian thing to do.

De Souza's pleasure in annoying secularists is hardly unique to him; it's a commonplace among conservative Christians. Annoy an atheist, annoy a liberal, annoy a gay person: these are all examples of virtuous conduct to be extolled. That's what Jesus would say. I reckon he would, I dunno.

Addendum: Father de Souza's website here. No surprise - he doesn't allow comments ~~or post his e-mail address~~.

Another Failure to Master Percentages

2012-01-04T09:11:00.003-05:00

Here we have Mother Jones's Tim Murphy, who presumably is an adult capable of filing taxes, claiming that

"Romney ultimately squeaked past Santorum by eight votes on Tuesday day night, in what was by far the closest margin in the history of the Iowa caucuses—30,015 to 30,007, good for a .000065 percent advantage."

Should columnists have to take a refresher course in grade school mathematics before their editors allow them to embarrass their magazines like that?

(There were 122,255 total votes. A margin of 8 votes is .0065%, not .000065%. Murphy forgot to multiply by 100.)

Our Local Hawk

2012-01-04T07:56:00.002-05:00

A hawk (probably a Red-Tailed Hawk, Buteo jamaicensis) has taken up residence on our street. Yesterday he (she?) attracted a bit of attention, with the neighborhood kids coming by to take photos. This is just one block from the Kitchener bus station!

The Most Boring Atheist

2012-01-02T10:28:00.001-05:00

I used to read Free Inquiry, but I was never really crazy about it. Sometimes it published dreck, like an article by philosopher Mario Bunge (Spring 1997) that made the following laughably unsupported claims:
-"there is no algorithm to design algorithms"
- "Only a living brain ... can invent radically new ideas"
- "the Internet will never displace refereed academic journals and books".
(The last one seems preposterous today, but was ridiculous even 14 years ago.) Furthermore, it refused to publish a letter taking issue with those claims.

But the main problem with Free Inquiry was that it was boring.

So I gave up reading it, but I always wondered why it was so bad. After all, its sister publication, Skeptical Inquirer, was often entertaining and lively. But I think I've finally figured it out: R. Joseph Hoffman was Associate Editor of Free Inquiry from 2003 to 2009.

Yes, the same R. Joseph Hoffman who loves to write mindless pieces like these two. Hoffman has got to be one of the most unimaginative, boring writers I have ever encountered.

Hoffman has devoted his life to the study of religion, so it's no surprise that he reacts badly when people point out that gods offer no worthwhile answer to any interesting question. I imagine somebody who devoted their life to studying horse-drawn carriages must have felt the same way when the automobile came along: "Horse-drawn carriages are a big idea. Automobiles are unappealing, and so are their advocates. Only 1% of the population drive cars, so the death of automobiles is just a matter of time."

Another motivation seems to be envy. All those atheists he despises (Harris, Dawkins, Coyne, Myers, Rosenhouse) are popular; they're the ones getting the media attention and invitations to speak. No surprise; they're good and entertaining writers, and they have something novel to say. And, irony of ironies, Myers has now been added to Free Inquiry as a columnist. Poor Hoffman: it must be the final indignity. (Hey, maybe it's time to subscribe to Free Inquiry again.)

But don't bother pointing out any of this on Hoffman's blog. He's not a big fan of publishing critical comments.

Local Pastor Tells Whopper About School Prayer

2011-12-31T11:16:00.004-05:00

According to the Canadian Press, local pastor Mark Koehler's telling fibbies about school prayer in Ontario.

He is quoted as saying, "We’ve taken prayer out of school. We can’t say certain greetings at Christmas time."

Really? Students are prevented from praying in Ontario schools? That's news to me.

Pastor Koehler is legally prevented from saying "certain greetings"? I wonder what law that is.

The truth is that prayer has not been taken out of school. Rather, in Zylberberg v. Sudbury Board, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that a sectarian prayer offered by school administrators violated the Charter. This doesn't mean students can't pray on their own.

And of course, there's nothing preventing Koehler from saying "Merry Christmas" to anyone he wants.

Pastor Koehler should read his own Bible - I seem to remember the 9th commandment had something relevant.

The Creationists' Big Lie

2011-12-26T05:26:00.005-05:00

This recent post by Cornelius Hunter exemplifies, in one sentence, the special combination of arrogance and ignorance that creationists possess:

Random events are simply not likely to create profoundly complex, intricate, detailed designs.

Even if one is able to come up with a rigorous scientific definition of terms like "profoundly complex", "intricate", and "detailed", this is a remarkably arrogant claim. How does Hunter know this to be true?

The answer is, he doesn't; he just believes it because his religion demands it. And it isn't true: we have abundant evidence from the field of artificial life that the claim is false.

To look at just a single example, take the work of Karl Sims. He has shown that virtual creatures can evolve intricate and novel locomotion strategies by a process of mutation and natural selection. This 1994 video shows some of the behaviors that evolved.

There's a good reason why none of the principal ID creationists (Dembski, Behe, Berlinski, Hunter, Luskin, etc.) address the challenges to their claims posed by artificial life: the rebuttal is so devastating that they can find nothing to say.

Another Fake Magnet Man Scams AP

2011-12-23T10:44:00.002-05:00

What is wrong with the Associated Press?

Just a few months ago, they were scammed by a Serb family who claimed their child was magnetic.

Now they're back again with pictures of Etibar Elchiyev, a Georgian man who claims "his body acts as a magnet".

Sad to say, my local paper, the Waterloo Region Record, fell for this scam again, publishing the AP photo in their December 15 2011 issue.

Greatest Triple Play of All Time?

2011-12-23T02:09:00.002-05:00

Hey, the runners can't be blamed too much if they didn't realize this ball was caught.

"The Little Christmases" by Louise Lee Outlaw

2011-12-22T14:11:00.003-05:00

Here's a poem by my mother entitled "The Little Christmases". It appeared originally in The Lutheran, Vol. 9 No. 24 (December 15 1971), pp. 6-7.

Christmas is least of all
The wreath on the door
The lights on the tree
And the block on the calendar
Marked 25.

Christmas is the day
A week after Christmas
When the tinsel lies in sad sparkles
All over the house
And the tree droops, forsaken,
And the ornaments are once again just things
To put away --
And a little boy comes to you and says:
"I'll help, Mom."

Christmas is the day in February
When the snow closes your house
From the world and your boy-man goes forth to shovel
And the phone rings and the aged neighbor says:
"Just want to tell you about your son:
He shoveled my walk, he wouldn't take a cent,
I offered, but he wouldn't take a cent."

Christmas is the day in spring
When your husband comes through the kitchen door
And says, "You look like a little girl,"
And hands you the first crocus
To put in a jelly glass on the table.

Christmas is the wedding anniversary
When everything goes wrong.
The child is sick; the dress, the special dress
Stays drooping in the closet, and the dance
Is never danced, nor the wine drunk,
And in between thermometer and doctor calls,
The two friends come, bearing a flower pot
With three geraniums
Dug from their garden.
"Everybody's got to have an anniversary,"
The two friends say.

Christmas is the summer night with the band on the pier
And Sigmund Romberg's bright blare in your ears,
And far below, the dark waves' orchestration,
And your husband turns to you and says,
"Next year we'll have a boy in college."
And you look at each other
In wonder and sadness
The salt on your cheeks
Is from the leaping ocean spray.
If ocean spray can be so warm.

Christmas is the private time
On any night of the year
When grief strikes, loss invades,
Hurt shatters, and the heart,
Groping for solace,
Stumbles on the memory of a smile
Smiled years ago,
Or the echo of a gentle voice,
Or a kindness that dropped upon you,
Sudden as a star ...
All the little Christmases come back to you,
And reaffirm the blessedness of life.

Christmas is least of all
The wreath on the door
The lights on the tree,
And the block on the calendar
Marked 25.

Or anything that ever could be wrapped.

My Review of Le Fanu's "Why Us?"

2011-12-22T13:59:00.002-05:00

Here's my review of the atrociously bad book, Why Us?, by James Le Fanu. It appeared in Reports of the National Center for Science Education, 31 (6) (2011).

You Can Lead a Creationist to Knowledge...

2011-12-15T05:14:00.005-05:00

...but you can't make him think, as this post at Uncommon Descent makes clear.

It doesn't matter if bad creationist arguments are debunked, because they just keep bringing up the same bad arguments over and over again, as if no one ever explained why they are bad.

Here we have lawyer Barry Arrington (not a mathematician or biologist, as far as I can see) explaining Dembski's concept of design detection and making exactly the same bogus claims we debunked long ago.

Problem #1: the notion of "specification" is incoherent. Arrington says “ten straight flushes in a row" is a legitimate specification because "This pattern is not post hoc". OK, how about "100 straight flushes in a row, except one is not". Is that legit? Why or why not? How about "50 out of 100 deals are straight flushes"? Is that legit? Why or why not? How about "one straight flush, then a straight, then a flush, then 3 consecutive 4 of a kind, then two more straight flushes"? Why or why not? We explain the problem in detail in our paper.

Bottom line: there is a good way to decide about the reasonableness of a "specification" -- namely, Kolmogorov complexity -- but it is not anywhere near as simple as "valid" or "invalid" or "independent" or "not independent". When you use Kolmogorov complexity as your basis for deciding about specifications, then you get the theory of Kirchherr, Li and Vitanyi, not Dembski's theory.

Problem #2: Even if you can make the notion of "specification" reasonable, we showed that Dembski's claim about the "law of conservation of information" is bogus. The result is that his conclusions about design don't follow.

Problem #3: The proper way to do probability, the way that everyone else except creationists does it, is to pre-specify a region and then see if your observation matches that region. If you do so, and the probability of hitting the region out of the whole space is very very very small, then the proper conclusion is not "design"; it is simply that you estimated the probabilities wrong. It could well have occurred because a person arranged it that way, but it could also be because you didn't know about some non-human process that could result in the same observation. In our paper we illustrate this with some examples.

That's what makes creationism different from legit science: creationists just pretend that criticism doesn't exist and recycle the same bad arguments over and over.

More Quality Reporting at Uncommon Descent

2011-12-11T12:40:00.006-05:00

Sneery O'Leary, the World's Worst Journalist™, spends most of her blog space attacking scientists and reporters more talented than she is.

But would a New York Times reporter be so foolish as to confuse Massimo Pigliucci with Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini?

Probably not. But Sneery is.

Screenshot, for when it gets dumped down the ever-growing Uncommon Descent memory hole:

Funny Word Order in a Poster Advertising a Study on Word Order

2011-12-11T08:50:00.007-05:00

I like linguistics, although I don't know much about about it. (Much of what I know comes from reading Language Log, which should be on your blogroll.)

A few weeks ago I was at McMaster University, and I saw this poster advertising for participants in a study about word order:

Mastering the correct word order in English often seems one of the hardest tasks for German and French speakers. French mathematicians, for example, often write things like "We study here the case x > 2" instead of "Here we study the case x > 2".

The funny thing is the bizarre word order in the sign itself! Maybe it was deliberate, but I still found it amusing.

In case you can't read the text, here it is:

We are seeking German language speakers from Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein or Germany for a linguistic study on the relation between word order and articles currently living in the Hamilton area...

I had to read it three or four times before I realized they were seeking German language speakers currently living in the Hamilton area.

Friday Moose Blogging

2011-12-09T11:45:00.001-05:00

Enjoy!

The Ellsberg Paradox

2011-12-07T10:29:00.007-05:00

Yesterday, at Waterloo Ignorance Day, one speaker mentioned the Ellsberg paradox, which I hadn't heard of before. Believe it or not, it is named for Daniel Ellsberg, who would later become famous for releasing the Pentagon Papers.

Here it is: you have an urn with 90 well-mixed balls. There are R red balls, Y yellow balls, and B black balls. You know only the following information: R = 30, and Y+B = 60. You now get to choose between

Gamble A: win $100 if you draw a red ball vs.
Gamble B: win $100 if you draw a black ball.

You are also given a choice between

Gamble C: win $100 if you draw a red or yellow ball.
Gamble D: win $100 if you draw a black or yellow ball.

Which choices do you prefer? A over B or B over A? And C over D or D over C?

A Discovery Institute Flack Responds

2011-12-06T20:26:00.005-05:00

Oh, look! The Discovery Institute flack Jonathan McLatchie has responded with a barely literate screed.

In addition to his charming mangling of English grammar and the spelling of my name, he asks, "Does Shallit really think that we haven't heard of processes such as genetic drift and endosymbiosis?"

Well, I bet McLatchie has, since he seems to have studied some biology. But I wasn't talking about McLatchie, as is clear from my text. Johnson, when the video was shot back in 1993, apparently didn't know a damn thing about drift - and that was the issue I was addressing. McLatchie tries to switch attention from Johnson in 1993 to all ID advocates today. Nice try at misdirection, Jonathan!

McLatchie goes on to claim, "I'm sure Phillip Johnson is aptly aware of the various kinds of selective process: balancing selection, stabilizing selection, disruptive selection, directional selection to name just a few."

Then why did Johnson lie and claim selection could not produce change? And why did he claim natural selection acted to preserve neutral mutations? No, it's clear Johnson was just being pig-ignorant. And McLatchie thinks it's just peachy. Why any Christians would want to be associated with such dishonesty is beyond me. But as we all know, it's just fine to lie for Jeebus.

Ten Ways to Know When to Change Your Airplane Seat

2011-12-05T06:02:00.003-05:00

You've just reached cruising altitude, and the passenger in the seat next to you turns to you and says something. What lines should tip you off that your seatmate is a mindless zombie with whom rational discussion is pointless? Here are a few that tell you to move to a different seat immediately, but feel free to nominate your own.

1. "Classical philosophers for several millennia have pointed out that that existence of nature itself presupposes Someone who is uncaused existence. The evidence for an Uncaused Cause is massive-- you can fill a library with the arguments in its favor."

2. "Universals are immaterial-- truth, beauty, goodness, love".

3. "The abortion industry is big business."

4. "Frauds like climate scientists can't operate under cover anymore."

5. "[Jesus' birth] is the most beautiful and astonishing story ever told, even more beautiful and astonishing because it is true."

6. "We all worship something... Atheists no less than Christians."

7. "The Screwtape Letters is a literary masterpiece"

8. "After 200 years of Malthusian pseudoscience, when are overpopulation morons going to admit they're wrong?"

9. "contraceptive culture is promiscuous and inculcates a disrespect for the sanctity of life"

10. "There's been no warming in a decade, and they lied about it."

And extra points if you can figure out who said all ten of the things above.

This Video Should Be Shown to all Biology Students

2011-12-03T08:38:00.009-05:00

I think this 1993 interview with creationist law professor Phillip Johnson should be shown to every biology student at every American university.

After the biology students stopped laughing and shaking their heads at the sheer pig-ignorance and numerous blatant lies smugly spouted by Johnson, they'll have a much better understanding of the Religious Right's assault on science, and be better prepared to rebut their local creationists.

The most significant misunderstanding Johnson repeatedly exhibits is that he thinks modern evolutionary biology is synonymous with his understanding of the meaning of the term "Darwinism": all biological change is due to mutation and natural selection. The fact that other mechanisms, such as genetic drift and endosymbiosis, are now an essential part of the picture, seems to have escaped him completely. Ignorance or dishonesty? I'm not sure; maybe it's a mixture of both.

So how many other misunderstandings, misrepresentations, and lies can you identify? Here are just a few I saw:

"Well, if I'm out of my element, then Charles Darwin must have also been out of his element, because his training was in medicine and theology, although he was in fact a very good scientist, self-taught, a gentleman amateur like others of his time. Charles Lyell, the father of modern geology, was a lawyer."

Very deceptive. Science as an institution at the time of Darwin and Lyell was quite different from modern science. It is extremely hard (although not impossible) for an amateur, untrained in science, to make a significant contribution to science today.

As for Lyell, it is quite misleading to just say that he was a lawyer and not also mention that at Oxford, Lyell attended lectures by Buckland; at Edinburgh, by Jameson; and he was a colleague of Mantell. Lyell gave up law, travelled extensively and did geological research on the ground in many locations, publishing his papers in scientific journals. If Phillip Johnson ever did any geological research on the ground, and published papers on his research in geology journals, he might be accorded some respect. As it is, he's just a laughingstock.

"There aren't really any specialists in evolution; it's a generalists' country."

This is simply false. Any evolutionary biologist is a specialist in evolution. There are, ferchrissakes, many annual conferences on evolution.

If Johnson's point is that evolution, as a scientific theory, depends on different fields such as paleontology and genetics, then this is no different from any other scientific theory that has multiple underpinnings, such as climatology.

"[I'm] explaining to them [evolutionary biologists] what they overlooked. That in fact, their books are not convincing because they're assuming at the beginning of the inquiry the point that they claimed to have demonstrated at the end, and so there's a thinking flaw. So instead of responding to that, naturally they say, "Oh, why don't you shut up? And leave us alone, so we can continue to get away with this."

This is just the usual Christian martydrom lie. No scientists has said anything remotely like the quote Johnson gives. Biologists have laughed at Johnson's ignorance, that is true. But scientists have also written detailed rebuttals of Johnson's bogus claims. Also, the implication that biologists know they are being deceptive is an outrageous slander. But that's not the only slander Johnson casually tosses off.

"The sophisticated people in the universities know that this is founded on philosophy. But because it's their philosophy, you see, they think that's fine. And because they have contempt for the public, they think that it's alright to mislead the public through you know, propaganda, because the public doesn't really deserve to know the truth, because they're not intellectuals like we are, so we can say anything we want to them. That is a widespread attitude..."

Considering that Johnson was a co-founder of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, a group dedicated to nothing other than misleading the public about evolution, this is pretty rich.

[on the term "creationist"] "So that what the scientific establishment tends to do is to say, that well first place we'll put everybody in that group into a very narrow box and then we'll dispose of them by ridicule. And then having got rid of all our enemies by that set of language tricks and propaganda mechanisms, we'll say the only thing left is us, so everybody is supposed to believe the way we do. That's what they call the scientific method these days, and it's just a very reprehensible kind of propaganda."

For me, "creationist" doesn't just mean "believer in Noah's ark". It means any person, like Johnson, who repeats long-discredited arguments (paucity of the fossil record; "finches are just finches", etc.) about evolution as if they were never rebutted. As for ridicule, if you make ridiculous arguments, expect to get ridiculed. That's the way science works.

"We do know of one natural process - natural selection - which is excellent at preventing fundamental change, because it eliminates the mutants - the overwhelming majority of mutants, practically all ones which are either of no benefit at all to the organism or actually harmful - will be eliminated in the end by natural selection."

Johnson seems completely confused here. One kind of natural selection, stabilizing selection, does indeed act against extreme changes. But to imply that this is all that natural selection can do is either extremely ignorant or extremely deceptive; there is, for example, directional selection that is very good at producing change. And, of course, I hardly need point out that natural selection does not act to remove neutral mutations, as Johnson claims.

"Some creatures become extinct, some species become extinct, and others come into existence somehow -- no one knows how."

Another lie. Maybe Johnson doesn't know how speciation occurs, but biologists do. All Johnson has to do is pick up a biology textbook or, for example, Coyne and Orr's book, Speciation (admittedly not yet published when the video was made). Mechanisms of speciation include geographic isolation, founder effects, sexual selection, polyploidy, hybridization, and others. We may not know all the causes of speciation yet, and scientists argue about the relative importance of the mechanisms I've mentioned. But to say "no one knows how" is a gross misstatement.

"The fossil record hasn't gotten any better, in the intervening century and a third... [since 1859]"

Another blatant lie. Archaeopteryx was discovered in 1861. Since then, we have thousands and thousands more discoveries that add significantly to our understanding of evolutionary history: Diplodocus, Maiasaura, Paranthropus, Australopithecus, Ardipithecus, Pakicetus, just to name a few.

These examples, chosen just from the first 22 minutes of the video, give the flavor of the ignorance and misrepresentation offered up by Johnson. This video would make a great educational experience and expose the dishonest anti-intellectualism at the heart of creationism.

No, Virginia, Intelligent Design Isn't Dead

2011-11-30T16:47:00.007-05:00

I recently received this query from a young girl:

Dear Recursivity:

Some bloggers, like Jason Rosenhouse and Jerry Coyne, have said that intelligent design is dead. Papa says, "If you read it on Recursivity, it's so." Please tell me the truth; is ID really dead?

(signed) Virginia O'Hanlon, 115 W. 95th St., New York

and here is my reply:

Virginia, those little bloggers are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the Christian god and his inordinate fondess for beetles.

Yes, Virginia, intelligent design still lives. It flourishes as certainly as fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no creationists. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias! There would be no childlike faith then, and everyone would have to read biology textbooks and learn what the theory of evolution actually says. Bill Dembski and Michael Behe and Phil Johsnon would be out of jobs. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which religion fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in an Intelligent Designer! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to try to find traces of the Intelligent Designer, but even if they did not see Him, what would that prove? Nobody sees the Designer, but that is no sign that there is no Designer. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see, like David Berlinski's mathematical achievements or Denyse O'Leary's command of the English language. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only religion and intelligent design, not science, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding, except maybe Howard Ahmanson's checkbook -- if you know what I mean.

No Intelligent Designer! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, we will continue to smear scientists and destroy public education. As long as there are credulous Christians and Muslims looking for something, anything, to prop up their faith, intelligent design will live. As long as there are Religious Right warriors like Bruce Chapman able to dole out the big bucks to third-rate law school graduates like Casey Luskin, intelligent design will live. As long as there are ignorant sociologists hoping to cash in like Steve Fuller, ID will live. As long as faux journalists like Denyse O'Leary need you to buy their books, ID will live.

Don't believe everything you read, Virgie baby. Intelligent design's still around.

I Used to Live in New Hampshire

2011-11-30T06:20:00.002-05:00

... and I liked it there.

But take a look at this and you will see the utter insanity of the New Hampshire Republican party.

A New Self-Published Creationist Book?

2011-11-29T08:16:00.006-05:00

Oh, lookie!

Our local creationists at the University of Guelph, Kirk Durston and David Chiu, have teamed up with wacky David Abel and Donald Johnson on a book!

(Kirk Durston is the creationist who thinks that his god magically calms angry bulls, and David Chiu is the guy who stuck in an irrelevant citation to Dembski's work in a paper having nothing to do with Dembski, and told me he did it as a "courtesy".)

Judging from this excerpt, it's not likely that real scientists will take it seriously, with laughably bogus claims such as
- "Fifteen years ago, it started to be realized that `junk DNA' was a misnomer."
- "All known errors during replication result in a decrease of both Shannon and functional information"

I wondered who would publish this drivel. It's a place called "Longview Press". Never heard of it? I hadn't either. But this page suggests that it's just David Abel's private little enterprise. Wow, what a surprise.

It's in keeping with the intelligent design vanity journal, Bio-Complexity, which seems to have a hard time finding papers to publish (7 in 2 years). But hey! It has no problem publishing papers by people who are on the editorial team. And look: David Abel is there, too.

And they wonder why we call it pseudoscience.

Addendum 1: even the University of Guelph library, where Durston and Chiu are based, doesn't have the book in its collection.

Addendum 2: Thanks to Bayesian Bouffant for pointing out the self-congratulatory description of the book on Amazon. I especially love this part: "Change in the FSC of proteins as they evolve can be measured in “Fits”— Functional bits. The ability to quantify changes in biofunctionality during evolutionary transition represents one of the most important advances in biological research in recent decades. See especially, Durston, K.K.; Chiu, D.K.; Abel, D.L.; Trevors, J.T. 2007, Measuring the functional sequence complexity of proteins, Theor Biol Med Model, 4, 47".

Well, if it's "one of the most important advances in biological research in recent decades", then it's amazing how few citations there are to this groundbreaking paper. ISI Web of Science lists exactly 4 citations, 3 of which are self-citations by Abel and Trevors. Wow, that is sure important and groundbreaking.

He's Definitely in Favor of Romney for President

2011-11-29T05:47:00.002-05:00

Politicians of all stripes are generally spineless opportunists, but Mitt Romney has got to be an extreme example of the genre.

See the video.

Waterloo Ignorance Day

2011-11-24T10:07:00.003-05:00

This looks like a lot of fun (details in the poster here).

That's the difference between science and religion. Scientists are happy to admit when they don't know something, and they view it as a challenge to learn more, while religionists like to "revel in the mystery" and just sit there.

Encomiums for Incompetence: The Case of Phillip Johnson

2011-11-19T03:50:00.010-05:00

It's been 20 years since the publication of that exemplar of religiously-motivated incompetence, Darwin on Trial, by lawyer Phillip Johnson, and the creationists are salivating over the anniversary.

Johnson, who had no training or expertise in biology, but did have a recent conversion to Christianity following a divorce, penned a book that was widely panned. And with good reason: Johnson had nothing new to say, preferring to trot out the old creationist canards such as gaps in the fossil record, natural selection is a tautology, and many others.

Johnson's book had basically no effect whatsoever on the scientific debate about evolution. To see this, one only need look at Web of Science (previously called Science Citation Index). I searched for references to Darwin on Trial and found exactly 6 citations. Three were reviews of the book in La Recherche, Nature, and Zygon. Two were articles in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Theology Today. Finally, there was a citation in the book Does God Belong in Public Schools?

To illustrate the contrast, I also searched for Dawkins' The Selfish Gene on Web of Science, and found 3,954 citations in dozens of fields: ethology, biology, genetics, engineering, modeling, computer science, and economics, just to name a few.

Google Scholar provides another example of the disparity. Darwin on Trial gets 393 citations, while The Selfish Gene gets 12,727 citations. Looking at the citations themselves is also quite revealing: Darwin on Trial is cited primarily as a negative example (in books such as Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism) and there are only 12 citations in the primary biological literature, largely negative -- such as this article by Forrest and Gross.

So Johnson's book had little impact. But if you think that's going to stop creationists from hagiography, you're wrong. Tom Bethell, a reliably blathering buffoon, has emerged to produce this encomium (no comments allowed, of course). The single funniest line: "Phil Johnson was a highly skilled and tactful electronic correspondent".

Yes, I remember very well when Johnson visited the Usenet newsgroup talk.origins. He, a recent convert to evangelical Christianity (oh! the irony!), liked to say things such as "My purpose is not to insult anyone, however, but to free minds. Many of you have been indoctrinated not to question assumptions that are based on ideology rather than evidence. You can be free of that indoctrination if you wish to be." He also claimed, "It is my practice always to respond to well-informed and intelligent criticism", but when well-informed and intelligent commenters pointed out that Johnson's doubts about whale evolution were ill-founded, they were surprised to find that Johnson never responded to them at all.

Ultimately, it turned out to be a pretty brief visit: Johnson's ignorance of biology was quickly exposed, and he left in a huff. So much for his "skilled and tactful" e-correspondence.

So, creationists, enjoy your 20-year anniversary of more religiously-inspired foolishness masquerading as scholarship. Anyone who's willing to dig into the record can see how pathetic it is.

More Books

2011-11-18T07:04:00.003-05:00

How could I have forgotten these?

21. John Sayles, The Anarchists' Convention

22. J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories

23. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

24. Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career

25. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography

26. Glenn T. Seaborg and Evans G. Valens, Elements of the Universe

27. E. L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

28. Richard D. Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs

29. Martin Gardner, In the Name of Science

30. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel

31. J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: a Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three
American Families

32. Larry McMurtry, All My Friends are Going to be Strangers

Books

2011-11-17T09:55:00.005-05:00

My wife and I own a lot of books - I once estimated something like 10,000. We have so many that some of them are in boxes in the attic, boxes in the basement, and in rented storage. So I was interested to read this article in the Financial Times where some famous authors are interviewed about their book collections. There are also some nice photos of their libraries.

Those interviewed were also asked to list their top 10 books. I've read hardly any of the books listed in that article, but it did prompt me to make my own top list. These are books that had the most influence on me in various ways. They are not listed in any particular order, and I've probably forgotten a lot of important ones.

1. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich-Maria Remarque

2. Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

3. The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien

4. An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers, G. H. Hardy and E. M. Wright

5. The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

6. A Handbook of Integer Sequences, N. J. A. Sloane

7. The Art of Computer Programming, Donald Knuth

8. Recreations in the Theory of Numbers, Albert H. Beiler

9. Men of Mathematics, E. T. Bell

10. The Happy Hollisters and the Haunted House Mystery, Jerry West (Andrew E. Svenson)

11. The Caves of Fear, John Blaine

12. Mathematics, David Bergamini

13. Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis

14. The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury

15. The Basketball Diaries, Jim Carroll

16. Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger

17. APL\360 User's Guide, K. E. Iverson and A. D. Falkoff

18. Basic Programming, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz

19. Getting Even, Woody Allen

20. A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn

Small Minds are Easily Amused

2011-11-12T05:16:00.004-05:00

Over at Uncommon Descent we learn the most amazing things about mathematics:

Take the last two digits of the year in which you were born and the age you will be this year and the result will add up to 111.

It works for everyone this year.

Shshsh! Don't tell Denyse about people born in 2001. It might upset her world view.

I don't know which is more pathetic, the Toronto Star for printing this drivel, or Denyse O'Leary, for thinking it was interesting. Or maybe me, for thinking it is worth pointing out the mistake.

Friday Moose Blogging

2011-11-11T05:09:00.004-05:00

From reader "MiKo", here is some great footage of a moose being induced to leave a swimming pool.

It probably would have been easier just to announce that moose swim was over, and that wolf swim was next.

"Pathological Liar" Horowitz Reflects on His Own Mortality

2011-11-07T02:39:00.006-05:00

Let's see: start with a guy who claims that left-wing intellectuals are responsible for the death of culture because they are intellectually dishonest.

Let him be the book reviewer for a book written by a fierce right-wing partisan described over and over again as a "pathological liar" (and with good reason).

Have the reviewer say not a single word about the well-documented dishonesty of the author of the book he is reviewing. And, for good measure, have the reviewer make ill-considered remarks about neuroscientists, claiming that their goal is to "empty life of its mystery".

Result: pompous drivel applauded by my favorite faux journalist.

But it is funny!

Friday Moose Blogging

2011-11-04T05:01:00.001-04:00

For your entertainment, here are some Quebecois enjoying their time with a moose:

We never get to enjoy this where I live.

Creationists Get it Wrong Again

2011-10-08T08:04:00.003-04:00

Since Uncommon Descent became, for all practical purposes, Sneery O'Leary's personal blog, it's become an amusing fountain of stupidity. The only question is, which particular bit of idiocy is worth remarking about?

Well, this one is. Sneery approvingly quotes the following excerpt from David P. Goldman's book, How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying Too):

Richard Dawkins and other self-styled New Atheists postulate that humankind evolved a genetic predisposition to altruism. This assertion is something of a flying spaghetti monster. Among all American ethnic groups, Jews share the most consistent gene pool – as studies have established beyond question – the result of two thousand years of marrying within the same community. Yet secular Jews show the least altruism – at least in the form of willingness to raise children – of any group of Americans, while religious Jews show one of the highest degrees of altruism by the same measure. A religious explanation of altruism, not a genetic one, fits the facts.

This one is just too funny! Goldman, whose education was in music theory and German (!), is so far out of his depth he's gasping for air. "Altruism" - as it is understood by biologists - is about individuals acting to increase the fitness of others at the cost of decreased fitness for themselves. It was developed by Hamilton and Maynard Smith, not Dawkins (although Dawkins has popularized it.) For closely related organisms, as in parents and their biological children, altruism is explained by the theory of kin selection, and has nothing to do with belonging to a "consistent gene pool". Whether you're Jewish or not, the chance that a particular allele is inherited from your father is 50%.

Relatedness is important in the biological theory of altruism not because two individuals might share many genes (Goldman's "consistent gene pools"); it is important because the degree of relatedness controls the probability that two such individuals share a specific gene with altruistic effects. Furthermore, once such a gene arises, it will be fixed in the populations with high probability, so that nearly members of the population will possess it. These misunderstandings of the theory are so pervasive that there are articles devoted to correcting them.

It's clear that Goldman has never read Alexander's Darwinism and Human Affairs -- one of the deepest and most important works in philosophy ever written. (Or, if he has read it, he's misunderstood it thoroughly.)

Furthermore, no one is saying that culture can't influence altruism as it is practiced in humans. I don't doubt that the cultural practices of religions can affect altruism, but the effects can be both positive and negative. Frequently this manifests itself as altruism to others who share your particular sect's beliefs, and hostility to those who don't (as this famous Emo Phillips joke illustrates). Teasing out the separate genetic and cultural effects of such a complex phenomenon in humans is likely to be difficult.

The biological theory of altruism has been tested (not "postulated"), and it even has been tested in artificial life settings. It has passed these tests. Pretending, as Goldman does, that it does not "fit the facts" is just a delusion.

But then what would you expect from Goldman, whose past is less than savory? And what else would you expect from Sneery O'Leary?

Spider

2011-09-25T13:50:00.003-04:00

Found this one in my basement. Can anyone identify the species? It's about 4 cm tall.

Silly Monarchists

2011-09-24T14:57:00.004-04:00

Here's an opinion piece by monarchist Jeffrey Tighe in the National Post.

If this is the kind of reasoning the monarchists are proud of, then the republicans have already won.

Tighe invents a straw man, claiming that republicans believe "all world cultures are of equal value in Canada, except the “British” one". Actually, I think the British are admirable in many ways -- I just find the idea of an unelected head of state, chosen solely by heredity, to be childish and archaic.

He ends with "There’s room for all who wish to enter its walls, but living here requires a commitment to Queen and country". I guess I'm not welcome then.

Clever Serbs Scam Gullible AP Reporter

2011-09-19T05:30:00.004-04:00

Jovana Gec, an AP reporter, was scammed by a Serb family near Belgrade into believing that two children have "magnetic" properties that allow silverware to stick to their bodies.

The accompanying photos do not show a single piece of silverware attached to the body in a position parallel to the ground.

There are two possible explanations. The first, which I doubt, is that the children have swallowed powerful NdFeB (neodymium) magnets.

The second is more prosaic, but much more likely. The "sticky" items are simply being balanced on the kids' bodies, aided by a bit of sweat. Here is a video of a similar claim by another Serb family that looks completely unimpressive. It was debunked by Benjamin Radford back in February, but apparently Ms. Gec was too lazy to do a web search.

And - no surprise - my local paper, the Waterloo Region Record decided to run this article in a prominent position on page F10. That's par for the course for the Record.

Recursivity's Bad Journalism award of the month goes to Ms. Gec and her credulous editors at the AP, with honorable mention to the Record for reprinting it.

Friday Moose Blogging

2011-09-09T09:51:00.001-04:00

We haven't had a moose post here for quite a while, but this story definitely makes up for that.

Robots as Companions

2011-09-08T12:21:00.004-04:00

Here's an interview with Sherry Turkle, originally released back in April, but replayed yesterday.

For me, here was the most interesting exchange:

Nora Young: "So if we imagine a future where we have robotic companions, the way we now have Roomba vacuum cleaners and Furbies, what's the problem with transferring our idea of companionship to things that aren't actually alive, what's at risk of us losing?"

Sherry Turkle: "Well, these are companions that don't understand the meaning of our experiences, so it forces us to confront what is the meaning of a companion. It's like saying, 'I'm having a conversation with a robot.' Well, you have to say to yourself, 'You've forgotten the meaning of a human conversation, if you think a conversation is something you can have with a robot.'"

Now, I understand that an interview like this is necessarily shallow, and I haven't read Turkle's latest book on the subject. But still, this interview seems to suggest a real misunderstanding on Turkle's part.

Yes, when we interact with technology that mimics living creatures, we run the risk of having an overly-optimistic mental model about how much the technology "understands" us. That's the lesson of ELIZA. But in terms of "companionship", many of our companions fail to understand us, in exactly the same way.

When you tell your troubles to your dog, how much do you think your dog understands? A little bit, obviously -- a dog can pick up on your mood and react appropriately. But it seems unlikely a dog will "understand" the details that your best friend just died of AIDS, or that your latest book got a bad review, or that your spouse just walked out on you. Nevertheless, a dog can be a great companion. Why is a living dog a legitimate companion, and a robot dog not?

Even when we interact with other people, they will often listen and express sympathy (and we will happily receive their sympathy and feel comforted by it) without really understanding. As children, we had our crises that were beyond our parents' understanding. And now, as a parent, my children have emotional lives that are largely hidden from me. Yet we can comfort each other, and be good companions, without the deep understanding that Turkle seems to think is required.

Turkle seems to have a mental model of "understanding" that is too black-and-white. Just as, in the famous words of McCarthy and Dennett, a thermostat can be said to have "beliefs", so too can animals and robots have "understanding" of our experiences and needs. Here, by "understanding", I mean that animals, young children, and robots have limited models of us that suffice to provide the appropriate responses to comfort us. A dog can come and lick your face or curl up with you. A child can come sit in your lap. A robot can commiserate by asking what's wrong, or saying it's sorry to hear about our troubles, or even make the right facial expression.

I think it's foolish to obsess about what such a robot "understands". For, after all, we can do the same thing with dogs and young children. How much do they "really" understand of our troubles? Less than an adult human, probably, but the experience is not necessarily worthless despite this lack of understanding.

When Chuck paints a face on a volleyball and makes it his companion in the movie Cast Away, nobody stands up and says, "You idiot! That's just a ball with a dumb face on it." We don't say that, because we understand what loneliness is like and the value of companionship. When Wilson falls overboard later in the movie, we understand why Chuck is so devastated.

I know the value of human conversation, but I still think you can have a conversation with a robot. As I said, I admit there's a danger in overestimating how much a robot understands about us. But children who have grown up with technology have a better understanding of the limitations than those adults who were fooled by ELIZA decades ago. They're not going to be fooled in the same way. Already, as Turkle points out, they've constructed a new category for things like Furby, which is "alive enough". And furthermore, the technology will improve, so that future robots will have better and better models of what humans are like. As they do so, they will become better companions, and questions about whether they "really" understand will simply seem ... quaint.

A Stupid and Violent Antisemite

2011-09-08T10:06:00.004-04:00

While playing chess at FICS, I received the following message:

HUNriderrr tells you: if u r a jew--so i guess-- then tell your disgusting israel government NOT TO DEAL with turkey..ok???...othherwise we w will #$%& all jews in world (punctuation marks in original)

Well, I'm not Jewish. But even if I were, why would the the Israeli government necessarily be "mine"? And even if I were Israeli, why would the proper response to the Turkish flotilla raid be a threat to "#$%& all jews in world"?

The confused mind of the antisemite is sometimes hard to fathom.

P. S. He lost the game.

9/11 Deniers Ride Again

2011-09-05T14:27:00.004-04:00

There's good news and bad news on the 9/11 denier front.

The good news is that Jonathan Kay has a new book, Among the Truthers, containing a perceptive analysis of the commonalities among 9/11 "Truthers", Obama "birthers", and other fringe conspiracists.

The bad news is that the 9/11 deniers are soon to host yet another laughable truther meeting, which they pompously call the Toronto Hearings, September 8-11, at Ryerson. Here's an article in the Canadian Press that mentions it.

Many of the usual Canadian 9/11 crowd will be there, including Michael Keefer, Graeme MacQueen, and Adnan Zuberi.

I hope some of our local skeptics can attend and report on it.

A Fountain of Stupidity

2011-08-21T13:04:00.008-04:00

There's a certain kind of columnist who, whenever some deplorable event occurs (such as the recent riots in Britain), doesn't hesitate to use it to rail opportunistically against some perceived moral failing. Reliable scapegoats to blame include liberals, immigrants, and atheists. And the morons who read these columnists eat it up.

Michael Coren is that sort of columnist.

He offers "six ways to prevent a repeat of London, Vancouver, Toronto scene". But his "six ways" are mostly vague appeals to religious morality, with no specifics.

Let's look at each of Coren's solutions in turn:

1. "Reduce the role of the state and, as a balance, increase the role of the family."

Right, because in the days when the state played little role in supporting health and the poor, there were never, ever, any riots in Britain? The Economist dismantles that claim. England has a long history of violent youth; the Economist traces it back to at least 1751.

Coren says, "parents are not informed by law if their underage daughters tell doctors or teachers they are sexually active, but they are left to face the consequences when teenage pregnancy or STDs occur." But ironically, he supports a church that declares birth control to be a sin. No disconnect there, no sirree.

2. "State-supported education and health care may, arguably, serve a purpose, but state-supported welfare and social services have become so all-embracing that individual self-reliance has evaporated. The balance is important here. Neither the fanatical libertarian nor the obsessive socialist model works."

I'd agree with the last line, but not the first. Where's the evidence? The last time I looked, European social democracies such as Sweden and Norway were prospering (in terms of objective measures, e.g., healthy life expectancy, longevity, child mortality, and homicide), while more libertarian countries such as the US do not do as well. And European social democracies lead the world in scientific papers per capita; no sign that social democracy has sapped "self-reliance" there.

3. Stop the war on religion. Whatever your view of faith and God, the massive decline of religious observance and community in Britain has removed one of the glues that held the country together.

This is just an insane fantasy. There is no "war on religion", metaphorically or otherwise. God-soaked commentators like Coren are just so used to not being questioned about their beliefs that they mistake demands for evidence, or questions raised about their beliefs and their consequences, as a "war". In reality, it's just that religion is increasingly being subjected to the same standards as other truth claims about the world. Religion has been exempt from these standards for far too long. If, for example, Coren supports the Catholic Church's ban on condom use and thinks that this ban is a boon to people in developing countries, let him make that case without appealing to sectarian dogma.

I don't deny that religion can hold people together. But it can just as easily drive them apart. There are many reasons why immigrants came to North America, but the religiously tolerant climate of their home country wasn't one of them. Coren doesn't present any evidence that the "war on religion" led to the riots, and as the Economist article shows, similar violent events have occurred in England for at least 250 years.

4. Control immigration, so it is based on the cultural and social needs and unity of the host population as well as on compassion and economic growth.

And what do you think immigration is based on now? Go read this page from Citizenship and Immigration Canada to see the kinds of professions that Canada is looking for. Surely physicians, nurses, social workers, and psychologists contribute to the "cultural and social needs" of the country.

5. Liberate the police from the whims of political correctness and government fashion.

Right. If only the police had been able to taser those damn rioters, that would have taught them a lesson. After all, it's not like the police had anything at all to do with the immediate cause of the riots.

6. Do not romanticize the worst of lower-class antics on TV and in cinema and music. Entertainment once presented a world worthy of aspiration, now it glorifies the mud and muck.

This is exactly the same argument that the small-minded made 60 years ago against classics like Caldwell's Tobacco Road. Coren is no better.

Boors like Coren don't have any interest in thinking deeply about the causes of mob violence and how to remedy them. They're just interested in blaming the usual suspects from some assumed position of moral superiority. From their mouths, a fountain of stupidity spews forth.

Challenge: Identify this "Design Theorist"

2011-08-19T19:11:00.003-04:00

Without using a search engine, see if you can identify this "design theorist" from quotes from his 1992 book:

"The product of the total number of these identified relationships would thus give an `overall probability' for assessing if what we are seeing ... favors a design --- or merely chance."
"What is the probability for this being merely a random situation?"
"Some critic will immediately leap up and shout, `But, that's assuming a strictly random process.... [subject] is not a random process..."
"Which gives less than one chance in a hundred million that this unique relationship ... is random!"
"If we are looking at multiple levels of connection and association, Occam's Razor would tell us to choose the simplest model for it -- which here appears to be that we are looking at Design!"
"What are the odds against that randomly occurring?"
"The product of the two preceding probabilities ... leads to an overall probability of less than one chance in 70 trillion that this ... is the result of merely random forces!"
"...is direct support for the Intelligence Hypothesis..."
"...the overall probability is overwhelming-- That what we are observing ... [is] ... designed."
"We are seeing `the products of Design' ... and all that that implies."

Hint: It is someone with the same kind of credentials and respect as our other beloved "design theorists".

Sucking Up to Royalty Again

2011-08-17T14:30:00.002-04:00

Peter MacKay, Canada's Defence Minister, is renaming Canada's air force and navy.

They will now revert to their pre-1968 names, the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Canadian Navy.

Licking the boots of royalty is, regrettably, still popular in Canada. Many Canadians still prefer to be subjects of the ruler of a foreign country instead of standing up on their own feet.

You can express your opinion about this silly move.

Those Creationists are Just so Darn Cute When They Try To Do Math, Part II

2011-08-06T20:13:00.004-04:00

Here's your favorite ignoramus "reporter", Sneery O'Leary, trying to understand the mathematics of infinite sequences:

...Series terminate, according to their nature.

For example, the number 1 is the terminus of the natural numbers. It just is. There is no natural number below 1.* If you do not like that, you do not like reality.

Some series terminate because they depend on a higher or larger series at a certain point, one that governs them...

*0 is a placeholder, signifying: No number occupies this position.

Hopeless confusion in all measures here.

Sneery
- confuses sequences with series
- doesn't understand that the "natural numbers" often (but not always) are considered to contain the integer 0 (it's just a convention, and not one that is universally followed)
- thinks that 0 is not a number
- confuses the sequence of natural numbers with decimal representation of numbers
- thinks sequences always terminate
- etc.

But remember - her blog is the reliable source for news, destined to replace the New York Times!

Sometimes Raymond Tallis Sounds Just Like a Creationist

2011-08-03T03:22:00.005-04:00

Here.

Here are three points of concordance:

- use of dismissive and propagandistic terms, such as "Darwinitis", "neuromania", and "neuromaniac"
- insisting that the position he is arguing against constitutes "orthodoxy", as if it were a religious doctrine
- dismissing "materialism" and ignoring the lack of evidence for immaterial objects

Of course, I don't think he's actually a creationist. But I do wonder why he adopts their tactics.

Maybe he should have chosen another dismissive term in place of "Darwinitis", because it already has a definition:

a complaint that afflicts those of a literary bent and strong attachments to pre-scientific culture, who find in the theory of evolution a disturbing and mysterious challenge to their values (Anthony West)

Come to think of it, that sounds like a reasonably good description of Tallis (replace "evolution" with "evolutionary & neural explanation of consciousness")

Matthew Taylor probably wasn't the best choice for an opponent to Tallis. I imagine that Daniel Dennett (whose last name was comically mispronounced by Tallis) would have him for breakfast.

Both speakers agree that human beings are the only ones who "think about thinking". I wonder how they know this with such certainty? For example, how do they know that dolphins do not think about thinking?

Those Creationists are Just so Darn Cute When They Try To Do Math

2011-08-01T17:52:00.003-04:00

From Eric Holloway, we learn:

Interestingly, Kolmogrov complexity is uncomputable in the general case due to the halting problem. This means that in general no algorithm can generate orderliness more often than is statistically expected to show up by chance. Hence, if some entity is capable of generating orderliness more often than statistically predicted, it must be capabable, at least to some extent, of solving the halting problem.

From the moronic misspellings of "Kolmogorov" and "capable" to the moronic misunderstanding of algorithms, what they can generate, and the halting problem, this is just too funny for words.

But remember, Uncommon Descent is destined to replace the New York Times as the respected source for news!

Bethell the Buffoon Rides Again

2011-07-22T02:16:00.006-04:00

I previously wrote about Tom Bethell, the blathering buffoon and faux journalist who never met an anti-evolutionary argument that was too stupid for him to parrot.

Now he's back again in the New Oxford Review. It's not surprising at all that the forum he chose is a self-described "orthodox Catholic magazine". What other magazine would publish this drivel? (Well, maybe National Review.) It takes a lot of chutzpah to call evolution "dogma" and then later publish in a rag that boasts its "unswerving loyalty to her Pope and Magisterium".

Bethell doesn't give any indication that he interviewed anyone except ID hacks for his screed. That's journalism? No. A real journalist interviews people who don't agree with his preconceptions. And the text shows it. How many misrepresentations, selective quotations, and misunderstandings can you find? No creationist chestnut is too stupid to repeat. He even drags out the corpse of the Colin Patterson quote! (It was debunked long ago.)

But the single funniest line is the claim that "Doug Axe and his assistants at the Biologic Institute may end up surpassing the Darwinists in pure research". Not bloody likely, especially if Axe continues to publish in an ID vanity journal where he is the Managing Editor.

Naturally, ID's other faux journalist, Denyse O'Leary is fully on board with Bethell. The funniest thing about O'Leary is that she calls herself the "UD News team", and suffers from recurring fantasies that her blog is going to replace the New York Times.

All the Ricochet Videos

2011-07-12T15:43:00.005-04:00

Someone asked me for the links to all the Ricochet videos featuring Claire Berlinski attending the "secret" Italian conference on political correctness, the unappreciated genius of her father, David Berlinski, and other extremely important scientific topics. That's not so easy, because the Ricochet site is really hard to navigate. But here they are, to the best of my ability to produce them.

Great Expectations Under the Tuscan Sun, June 11

This Morning's Panel: Political Correctness, June 13

Mike Denton and the Coming Post-Mechanistic Era in Biology, June 14

Why Are Young American Scientists Too Afraid to Appear in This Video?, June 14

Why Haven't Our Great Expectations of the Sciences Been Met?, June 14

Your Questions Answered, or at Least Asked, June 15

Great Expectations: Two Memories,
June 16

Free Markets, A Lunar Eclipse, the Engines of Innovation, and Intelligent Design, June 16

From Popper to Gödel: Your Questions Answered, June 16

The most interesting new discovery for me was this: "The point of the conference was to ask: What if we've been looking at these problems in too limited a way? What if in fact, the so-called materialist hypothesis has already achieved most of what it can achieve? What if the most interesting ideas in science are precisely the ones no one wants to talk about, because they might lead to spooky metaphysical conclusions?

One presentation suggested a path from a new program for inquiry in biology toward interesting results in biotechnology. The ultra-secretive people--I may now reveal--were investors, mainly in the high-tech industry, who are at the end of their tether with orthodoxy about the ideas they are and aren't allowed to think about. They're asking themselves, "If we look at these problems in a different way, might we invent something new, something from which we can make a lot of money?" Yes, you read that right: a lot of money. Capitalism, engine of human progress, strikes again."

Of course, this is utter bilge. On the one hand, there's absolutely no reason to think that believing in imaginary sky fairies is going to help you build better hardware or software. On the other, there's no one in high-tech industries who says "you're not allowed to talk about this idea" because it brings in "spooky metaphysical conclusions". That's just some bizarre wacko fantasy.

There's only one man I know who combines these kinds of bizarre obsessions and is interested in investing: George Gilder. How much do you want to bet that Gilder was behind this foolishness?

See me at Polaris 2011 in Toronto - July 16

2011-07-11T08:33:00.002-04:00

I'll be speaking at the Canadian science fiction & fantasy convention Polaris in Toronto on Saturday, July 16, and you're invited to attend.

My talk is at 1 PM and is entitled "Misinformation Theory: How Creationists Abuse Mathematics" and is described here. It's part of the skeptical track sponsored by the Centre For Inquiry and its Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism. Three others, including Larry Moran of Sandwalk, will also speak.

I Explain Academia to Thomas Cudworth

2011-07-10T13:05:00.007-04:00

Over at Uncommon Descent, Thomas Cudworth asks why prominent evolutionary scientists did not attend the Evolution 2011 conference in Norman, Oklahoma this summer.

Actually, to say "asks" is far too generous. He's doesn't seem at all interested in the answer; he's clearly intent on denigrating evolution's defenders by implying their absence indicates something is rotten with their scientific credentials.

This is just a Swift Boat-style attack: if the record of your own side is completely deficient, attack the other side's. Sadly for Mr. Cudworth, it is the scientific credentials of prominent ID proponents that are not exactly stellar. For example, in this post I examined the citation record of William Dembski, and in this one, I examined the scientific output of David Berlinski. Mr. Cudworth might equally want to ask, why has William Dembski not presented his work at an AMS meeting? Why does his work receive so few citations?

Nevertheless, since he seems so completely unfamiliar with how academia works, I will try to answer Mr. Cudworth's question as if it were genuine.

First, scientists are typically funded by a variety of funding agencies, which help to pay the cost of you and your students to attend a conference. Once you add up airfare, conference registration fees (often $300-$600 or more), transportation to and from the airport and to and from the conference site, and hotel, attending a conference can easily cost $2000 -- more if the conference is on another continent. Eventually, it becomes more important for your students to go to conferences than for you to go - you don't really need to advance your career very much, and it's better that your students get some visibility. So, given limited financial resources, you might choose to send them instead.

Second, conferences take up time, and many of us teach 9 months of the year or more, meaning that it is not so easy to simply pick up and shovel off to a conference while teaching. Scientists who engage in field work (like some paleontologists) might spend most of their free time in the field collecting, or in the lab, preparing and analyzing specimens.

The bottom line is that, for reasons of time and funding, the typical academic scientist might attend only one or two conferences a year. Of course, there are jet-setters that attend 5 or 10 or 20 conferences a year, and some people (for example, those at small teaching colleges who get little funding) might attend no conferences at all.

Now, given that many of us have to choose the one or two conferences in a year we want to go to, we have to choose carefully. Do we really want to attend a huge conference like Evolution 2011, with a thousand or more attendees, covering a wide area that might have only a small intersection with our competence? Or should we attend a small workshop with 30 or 40 participants that is tightly focussed on our current interests? In my field, I might want to attend (just to name a few) STOC, FOCS, STACS, ICALP, DLT, DCFS, MFCS, LATA, SIAMDM, SODA, CIAA, WORDS, and CanaDAM. Clearly this is impractical. I have to choose.

So why would someone like Kevin Padian choose to go to Evolution 2011 instead of another conference in his area, vertebrate paleontology? Answer: there's no obvious reason he would. I have no idea what meetings Padian goes to, but I'm sure he has the same kinds of constraints I do.

And, as you get older, you slow down. When I was younger, attending a conference was more fun. Now that jet lag impacts my sleeping, and my health isn't always perfect, attending a conference can sometimes be a chore. I don't know for sure how old Paul R. Gross is, but I think he was born in 1928, which would make him about 82. Heck, at age 82, I sure hope I'll still be alive and attending conferences, but I don't know for sure. In any event, I'm happy to put Prof. Gross's scientific record up against Behe, Jonathan Wells, and other ID advocates. Richard Dawkins, at age 70, is no spring chicken either.

My thesis adviser once told me that he only attends conferences where he is presenting a paper. That might be yet another reason why someone might not attend a conference: he or she has submitted his papers to conferences more tightly focussed on his area of interest. Robert Pennock seems to be more of a philosopher and cognitive scientist; he might choose to attend conferences like the "Midwest Cognitive Science Meeting" instead.

The bottom line is that it is extraordinarily foolish to attempt to infer something about someone's scientific competence by their non-attendance at a single professional conference; only someone unfamiliar with academic science would attempt to do so.

But let's not fool ourselves. Cudworth is not interested in the answer. He just wants to score rhetorical points. When he says, "In most scientific areas, non-experts don’t pretend to stand in for experts" and asks, "how many of the self-appointed defenders of Darwinian evolution have demonstrated competence, proved by research and publication, in the field of evolutionary biology?", he might just want consider the competence of his own side. Why are lawyers Phillip Johnson and Casey Luskin, and philosophers Stephen Meyer and David Berlinski, and journalists David Warren, Tom Bethell, and David Klinghoffer, and mathematician William Dembski, such loud and ignorant voices against evolution, when they are not biologists? Indeed, my impression is that the vast majority of creationists and ID supporters are not biologists. Certainly this is true for people like Denyse O'Leary, Angus Menuge, Robert Coons, Henry Morris, Walter Bradley, Richard Milton, just to name a few.

Mr. Cudworth, there's a giant mote in your own eye.

Addendum: Cudworth responds by digging himself into an even deeper hole.

Amazing: it's not just that these guys are ignorant and arrogant - they're proudly so.

More Silliness from Claire Berlinski

2011-07-10T07:07:00.013-04:00

I spent a little more time digging into the treasure trove of dreck that is Claire Berlinski's video oeuvre.

Ms. Berlinski, it seems, was present at a by-invitation only conference in Italy entitled "Great Expectations". It's hard to find anything about this conference online because, you see, it was "secret". But it's not hard to figure out the agenda. After all, the people present seem to have been

- Paul Nelson, creationist and remarkably unproductive philosopher for whom Paul Nelson Day was named. Watch Nelson squirm, evade, and do everything possible except answer the question of how old he thinks the earth is!

- Robert Marks, intelligent design proponent and writer of some remarkably silly papers about evolutionary algorithms

- David Berlinski, father of Ms. Berlinski, author of some remarkably bad popular books about mathematics, and contributor to such eminent scientific journals as Commentary. You can see Berlinski in all his superciliousness here. (Yet more superciliousness: David Berlinski on Gödel; David Berlinski on Popper.)

Berlinski claims we should be more open intellectually and some ideas are off limits to discussion. As usual, he's wrong. We just laugh at his ideas, and those of Nelson, because they are so incoherent. Even his daughter doesn't seem to buy it!

- Moshe Averick, creationist rabbi and sucker who apparently fell hook, line, and sinker for the scam that is "specified complexity", despite it having been debunked long ago

- Stephen Meyer, creationist, philosopher, and author of a a bad book containing misunderstandings of information theory. You can see his
videos here: Part 1A, Part 1B, Part 2, Part 2B, Part 3, and Part 4. It's funny to hear Meyer claiming that he "works on the origin of life". I wonder what experiments he has done and what labs he does them in. You can also hear Meyer extolling his creationist journal, Bio-Complexity, which has thus far published a grand total of 4 articles and one "critical review" -- every single one of which has at least one author listed on the editorial team page. It's a creationist circle jerk!

Meyer is allowed to repeat his bogus claim that "Whenever we find information, and we trace it back to its source ... we always come to an intelligence, to a mind, not a material process." Ms. Berlinski doesn't question him at all on this, despite the fact that it is evidently false.

- Richard von Sternberg, professional creationist martyr and co-author with Meyer of a drecky article filled with misunderstandings and misrepresentations.

- Michael Denton, author of a wildly wrong book, filled with misunderstandings about basic biology. Video here.

- perhaps Jonathan Wells. I can't be absolutely sure, but Meyer in this interview refers to cancer, and Wells is well-known for his wacky ID cancer theory. Of course, "journalist" Berlinski doesn't ask many hard questions. In the one hard question she does ask, about what are the best arguments against ID, Meyer can't even bring himself to mention the name of the person responsible.

You can watch Ms. Berlinski's "interviews" with Marks and Averick here (at a site where you have to pay them money to leave comments). You'd think with some of Marks' work on the record as being deficient, a journalist would have some hard questions to ask. But no, a giggling Ms. Berlinski lets Marks maunder on, making bogus claims like "All biological models of evolution which have been implemented in computer code only work because the information has been front-loaded into the program and the evolutionary process in itself creates no information" without asking any tough questions at all. (Marks, by the way, seems to think that Shannon coined the word "bit", when it fact it was Tukey.)

Reading the comments at that page is a real hoot, too. We have one commenter who "grew up with Information Theory from its early days", yet makes the false claims that (1) "there is still vigorous debate about which algorithms produce a truly random number; (2) "Whether you can determine the stopping point of a Turing machine is unsettled"; (3) "Many of these problems are essentially involved with extending Godel's Theorem beyond the realm of integers"; (4) "you have to consider what in Computation Theory is termed np-complete or in Penrose's term, non-computable". He also adds, helpfully, "I hope this sheds some light". Indeed it does, but not the kind of light he thinks.

It's just so funny to hear the people in Berlinski's interviews talk about how "orthodoxy" is "stifling" discussion when at least three of the attendees are members of conservative religious denominations that claim for themselves the right to determine truth for everyone else. Project much?

One thread that runs through many of Berlinski's interviews can be summarized as follows: "Waah! We're not taken seriously!" I'm not at all impressed with this. If you want to be taken seriously, don't hold "secret" conferences and make dark implications about being suppressed. If you want to be taken seriously, do some serious science; don't post videos with fart noises making fun of court decisions you don't like. If you want to be taken seriously, respond to critics in a professional way; don't depend on igorant attack-dog lawyers as your surrogates. If you want to be taken seriously, don't use credential inflation on your supporters and denigrate the actual scientific achievements of your detractors. You want some respect? Then earn it.

In Which I Explain Things to Claire Berlinski and Paul Nelson

2011-07-09T10:32:00.004-04:00

Claire Berlinski, right-wing "journalist" and daughter of the nonentity David Berlinski, thinks something is strange because real scientists don't want to appear in her home video with creationist Paul Nelson.

Since you seem rather dense, I will try to explain it to you, Claire. It's because creationists and anti-evolutionists have a history of making phony and dishonest videos, and because real scientists have better things to do than to appear in your propaganda film. It's because your undergraduate degree in history and doctorate in international relations don't even remotely prepare you to understand the scientific issues you claim to be interested in. And having creationist philosopher Paul Nelson there probably didn't help things, either.

Claire, Claire... you'd do much better if, instead of trying to "expose" evolution, you actually read some evolutionary biology textbooks. Futuyma is a good start.

Shorter Robert George: I'm Only a Bigot Because Philosophy Demands It!

2011-07-08T13:27:00.004-04:00

The shame of Princeton University, Robert P. George, is at it again.

What's really funny about George and other "natural law" advocates is they never, ever discover that "natural law" is in violation with beliefs they already hold. No, somehow, miraculously, "natural law" demands that their prejudices be true!

Of course, George can't say this out loud, so he's required to surround it with academic bafflegab like "sexual intercourse (the behavioral component of reproduction) consummates and actualizes marriage as a one-flesh union of sexually complementary spouses naturally ordered to the good of procreation". And he makes ridiculous, over-the-top claims like "New York has abolished marriage as a matter of civil law and replaced it with a counterfeit that New Yorkers’ children and grandchildren will be taught to accept and approve as if it were the real thing." And he makes bogus claims, as when he states, "It is to give up on the truth that children need both a father and mother, and benefit from the security of their love for each other." (For the truth, go here.) In my field, if you said stuff like this, with so little to back it up, and expected to be taken seriously, people would just laugh at you. But in philosophy, or politics, or constitutional interpretation, or whatever field George thinks he is master of, it's considered to be important work. Go figure.

The really sad thing about George's claims about gay marriage is that you can transform many of the claims, mutatis mutandis, to similar claims about interracial marriage. And George's bigotry against gays will seem as quaint and baseless in 20 years as proscriptions against interracial marriage do today.

No Wonder Michael Egnor is So Confused about Biology

2011-07-03T09:23:00.003-04:00

He thinks dolphins are fish and embryos and fetuses are babies.

How did he ever graduate from medical school?

Avoiding Sum Cubes

2011-06-27T20:33:00.001-04:00

One of the most interesting and challenging open problems in combinatorics on words is to decide whether there exists an infinite word over a finite subset of N, the non-negative integers, with the property that it contains no two consecutive blocks of the same length and the same sum (a "sum square").

For example, 01231301020103102310313231301020131013230 is a word of length 41 with this property, but if you append any one of {0,1,2,3} to it, it no longer does. Appending 0 gives the sum square 00; appending 1 gives the sum square (3231301020)(1310132301); appending 2 gives the sum square (103132313010)(201310132302); appending 3 gives the sum square (132)(303). So this word cannot be extended to an infinite word avoiding sum squares; the longest such is of length 50. Of course, there could be an infinite word avoiding sum squares over some other subset of N; no one currently knows.

This problem was originally stated by Pirillo and Varricchio in 1994, and independently by Halbeisen and Hungerbühler in 2000.

Today we posted a preprint in the arxiv that solves a related unsolved problem. Instead of avoiding sum squares, we show that we can avoid sum cubes: three consecutive blocks of the same length and same sum.

The construction is actually quite simple: the infinite word in question is the fixed point of the morphism
0 → 03
1 → 43
3 → 1
4 → 01,
and can be obtained by repeatedly applying this morphism starting with 0. Here are the first 50 terms:
03143011034343031011011031430343430343430314301103 .
I found this morphism several years ago.

However, proving that this word has the desired property is not simple. The proof was recently achieved by Luke Schaeffer, using ideas of James Currie at the University of Winnipeg and Julien Cassaigne at the Institute de Mathématiques at Luminy in France.

More Lousy Reporting from the Record

2011-06-25T20:45:00.003-04:00

Yet another crappy article in my local paper, the Waterloo Region Record. This time it's about the Waterloo Region school board's decision to end the practice of distributing Gideon bibles in school.

From the headline ("Bible ban in schools ignores its influence") to the content, the article is misleading and inaccurate. Nothing was "banned" by the Board's decision. Students are free to bring bibles to school, and bibles aren't being removed from libraries. The only thing that was changed by the decision is that an explicitly evangelical organization will no longer be allowed special dispensation from a public school board to distribute its sacred text to a captive audience of 5th graders, a right granted to no other organization and no other religion.

The author's article, Liz Monteiro, didn't interview a single person in favor of the decision. False claims by Cindy Watson, the school board trustee who voted in favor of continuing the practice of distributing bibles, that it is "not proselytizing", were allowed to go unchallenged. David Seljak, who is usually sensible, is quoted as saying "To eliminate the study of religion from our curriculum is an exercise on mythmaking that borders on propaganda." Only problem? Nothing about "eliminat[ing] the study of religion" was at issue in the School Board's vote.

Andrew Mills, a youth pastor, is allowed to make the remarkable claim that "It's a false dichotomy to think faith is opposed to learning." Well, let's go to Wilmot Centre Missionary Church and see how many books on evolutionary biology (not creationist books) are in their library. Of course faith is opposed to learning. By its very definition, faith leads to beliefs that cannot be questioned and cannot be swayed by evidence.

All in all, more lousy reporting from the Record.

More Egnorance

2011-06-24T09:30:00.003-04:00

Just as I suspected, Egnor's blog provides even more hilarity.

Here he claims:

'Separation of church and state' is not in the Constitution and is not Constitutional Law.

Well, the words "separation of church and state" are not in the US Constitution, but neither are the words "right to a fair trial". Yet I doubt Egnor would make the same claim about the right to a fair trial.

It is a clear falsehood to imply that the concept of separation of church and state is not in the Constitution. Of course it is - right there in the First Amendment - and no reputable lawyer claims otherwise. It is just plain weird how someone can proclaim his religion with such pride, and yet violate its tenets so casually.

I really wonder why becoming unhinged about evolution means you also become unhinged about global warming, separation of church and state, etc.

Waterloo Region School Board Ends Gideon Distribution

2011-06-24T09:05:00.003-04:00

For years, the Gideons have distributed bibles to grade 5 students in local schools here in Waterloo. No other religious group was afforded this access, a practice which is clearly discriminatory.

Back in November, the issue came up in the Waterloo Region School Board, and the board then voted to continue the practice.

Kudos to Ted Martin and Kathleen Woodcock, who were the only members of the School Board sensible enough to vote no.

But then - horror of horrors - it was suggested that groups other than Christians be allowed to distribute their religious propaganda, too.

Suddenly the Board had a change of heart, and voted 8-3 to end the practice.

Here are the members who voted to continue it:

* Cindy Watson
* Harold Paisley
* Colin Harrington

Shame on them.

Mary is the Ideal Christian?

2011-06-24T08:02:00.004-04:00

Oh, look: the brilliant brain surgeon Michael Egnor has a blog, which is called (I kid you not), "Egnorance".

This is destined to be an endless fountain of unintended amusement.

Already we have the renowned Dr. Egnor claiming that Mary is "the original Christian disciple, and a model and a mother for all of us".

Let's see: Mary

* had affair with some guy not her husband
* got pregnant by him
* lied about it
* convinces gullible husband that it was actually some god who raped her

Yes, I'd say that she certainly is a good role model for theists.

T-Shirt Idea

2011-06-23T05:45:00.008-04:00

Wikipedia says, "To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion." ThinkGeek even sells a t-shirt with that slogan on it.

But I think a much better version of this would be:

"To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion - 1".

Based on this, I submitted the following idea to ThinkGeek:

Who knows, maybe they'll make it into a t-shirt.

Yet Another Boring Attack on Materialism

2011-06-22T10:27:00.003-04:00

Here.

Kastrup's observation is trite and unoriginal.

Darwin himself remarked, "The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"

And, of course, we know from extensive research that our perceptions are often wrong, and wrong in predictable ways.

But none of this provides the "profound contradiction" Kastrup thinks he has discovered. Yes, there are problems in perception and cognition, but the map between the real world and our mental model can't be wildly wrong. If it were, organisms with a better model would have outcompeted us. And the scientific method itself provides self-checking through replicability and peer review.

The bottom line: our own perceptions, and those of the instruments we devise, are all we have. So we use them, and in doing so, we try to be on our guard for mistakes in reason and perception caused by our own biology.

Doug Groothuis endorses Bachmann

2011-06-14T12:25:00.004-04:00

Let's see: she's

- a pathological liar
- dumber than a bag of nails
- a nasty bigot

Despite those wonderful qualities, Michele Bachmann is still the ideal Presidential candidate in the opinion of Doug Groothuis.

(He doesn't allow any comments on that post - no wonder.)

Phillies Games, Old and New

2011-06-06T16:59:00.007-04:00

We attended two games in Pittsburgh this past weekend. Pittsburgh is 5 hours away from where I live, but it's still the closest National League city to us. Since son #2 is a big Phillies fan, it's a reasonable choice.

We weren't alone. I'd guess that, conservatively, about a third of the people attending the games were Phillies fans. Red shirts were everywhere.

When I was a kid, nobody wore t-shirts or jerseys with the names of their favorite players. Now everybody does. And when I was a kid, everybody bought and waved pennants with the name of the team on them. Now nobody does.

I still remember my first game really clearly. It was on July 9 1967 at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia. We got there early, sitting in our great front-row seats that cost only $3.25 each. During "pepper" before the game, a ball bounced near the little railing, and my father reached down and picked it up! I had my first real official major league baseball, and I never got another ball again since then.

Back in '67 the Phillies had some good players (Johnny Callison, Richie Allen, Cookie Rojas, Jim Bunning) but overall they were pretty mediocre. But on July 9, against the Cardinals, they produced practically the best first game a ten-year-old could see. In the 8th inning, Richie Allen hit one of the longest home runs ever at Connie Mack Stadium to tie the game. And then, in the bottom of the 10th, Tony Gonzalez pinch-hit the winning home run. Perfect!

But back to 2011. PNC Park is a really nice place to watch a game. Even the cheap seats were pretty good, and there is a spectacular view of the Pittsburgh skyline in the outfield.

We got there early for both games. On Friday we hung out in left field and watched batting practice. Ryan Madson, who has a bit of a reputation for being a jerk, confirmed it for us when he deliberately teased fans by pretending to throw them a ball, and then throwing it on the grass instead and laughing.

I'm glad to say that not all the players are like that. On Sunday we got there early to watch batting practice, and hung out by the right field line. There were a lot of pitchers shagging fly balls, including J. C. Romero, Kyle Kendrick, José Contreras, Danys Báez, and Cliff Lee. Danys Báez came over and tossed son #2 a ball, and then later J. C. Romero signed it.

But then Romero did something really classy: there was another kid with a Cliff Lee jersey that he wanted Lee to sign, but Lee was standing about 60 feet away. So Romero took the jersey over to Lee, had Lee sign it, and then returned it to the kid. Now there's a player who knows how to treat fans.

The Phillies lost the first game, but won the second. We got to see Chase Utley make a terrific play in the 7th to save the game, and a great double play by Wilson Valdez. We also got to see Halladay slide at home to score a run, something he apparently hasn't done since high school.

All in all, a fun time in Pittsburgh. Son #2 thanks J. C. Romero!

The Information - by James Gleick

2011-05-24T20:05:00.003-04:00

I'm currently reading The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick (famed for being the author of Chaos). It's not bad at all; in fact, it's pretty good. For the moment, I'll be content to make the following observation:

My colleagues Ming Li and Bin Ma (Ming is the author of An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications) get a nice mention on page 320, as does Charlie Bennett's theory of logical depth.

Intelligent design advocates will gnash their teeth to see that their hated Richard Dawkins gets ten full pages, and his book The Selfish Gene is described as "brilliant and transformative" -- which, of course, it was.

They'll also be surprised to see that their own "Isaac Newton of information theory" doesn't get a single mention. Not a word.

This all goes to show that Gleick actually knows something about the subject and is not fooled by the bleatings of the religious.

My Talk for the Wilf Conference

2011-05-23T07:16:00.004-04:00

Laurier (the other university in Waterloo, Ontario) is hosting a conference this May 26-29 in honor of Herb Wilf's 80th birthday. Wilf (b. June 13 1931) is a very influential mathematician, known for his work on combinatorics and combinatorial algorithms. He also founded the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics.

Of course, it's better in person, but if you can't make my talk at 10:40 AM on May 27 2011 in Room N 1001, Faculty of Science Building, WLU, then you can see the slides here.

I DIdn't Buy This in the Video Store

2011-05-08T06:59:00.002-04:00

Because at the price of $9.97, it was about $20 more than it's worth.

I love the part about learning about the Grand Canyon from creationist geologists who are "the scientists who know it best".

What's next, a video where you can learn information theory from Bill Dembski? Or journalism from Denyse O'Leary?

Catenaries on "Car Talk"

2011-05-06T08:41:00.002-04:00

Here's a puzzle from the radio show, Car Talk, with the misspelling corrected:

"There are two telephone poles. Each one is 100-feet tall. They are parallel and an unknown distance apart.

"We're going to attach a 150-foot rope from the very top of one of the poles to the top of the other. This rope will, of course, droop down somewhat. That drooping rope is called a catenary, from the Latin word for chain.

"The question is: What must be the distance between the two poles, so that the lowest point of the catenary is 25-feet above the ground?"

I confess, I worked out the equation for a catenary to try to answer this, but that's a waste of time if you think about the problem a little.

The answer, if you need it, is here.

Craig: If God Kills Kids, It's OK

2011-04-30T08:33:00.004-04:00

Fundamentalists say the darndest things!

But they're not always pretty. Here we have the truly appalling spectacle of William Lane Craig justifying genocide. It's OK, he says, if God does it.

And - believe it or not - Craig is actually a respected Christian philosopher. Doesn't it make you wonder about what one would have to do to lose respect?

Craig is fond of syllogisms, so here's one just for him:

1. All sane beings agree that genocide is wrong.

2. The Christian god thinks genocide is just peachy.

3. Therefore...

Can Irrational Numbers be Represented in a Computer?

2011-04-28T09:24:00.005-04:00

I often see the following claim, or variants of it:

"In a computer (as we understand computers, at least), irrational numbers can't be fully accurately represented."

This one happens to be from Bradley Monton, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design, Broadview Press, 2009, p. 128, but Monton isn't alone.

This is a common misunderstanding that, I think, has two bases. First, for people without much mathematical training, a real number is inextricably linked with its base-10 (or perhaps base-2) representation. For them, the number π is 3.141592653 ..., as opposed to being defined by an integral or infinite series. Second, people without computational training often don't understand that some infinite objects -- including some base-10 or base-2 representations of irrational real numbers -- are routinely represented as finite objects in computers.

Let's take √2 as an example. Although it is irrational, symbolic algebra systems such as Maple and Mathematica routinely represent √2 "exactly" and allow manipulations with it. For example, if you type

> x := sqrt(2);
> x^2;

into Maple, it will happily return the "exact" answer 2. And, similarly, other arithmetic operations involving √2 will give the "exact" answers:

> expand((123+45*sqrt(2))^3);

3355317 + 2224665 √2;

Similarly, we can manipulate other famous irrational numbers such as e, π, etc, and often get "exact" results. The point is that many of the irrational numbers that people actually care about need not be stored in terms of their base-10 or base-2 representation.

But even if we insist that yes, they must be stored in this way, there can still be finite representations. For example, consider the base-10 number defined by having a "1" in the i'th digit if i is a perfect square (like 1,4,9,16, etc.), and 0 otherwise. Now it is easy to see that this number is irrational. But we can still store it in a finite way (for example, as a function that returns the i'th digit on input i), and do at least some simple manipulations on this representation. For numbers whose base-k representation is encoded by a finite automaton, for example, we can do addition, even if the carries come from "infinitely far" to the right. (This is not trivial.)

In fact, any algebraic number, and many others, can be stored as a finite program that on input i returns the i'th digit. In some cases we can even do this by a very simple recurrence. For example, Graham and Pollak, in a 1970 paper, gave a simple explicit recursion to compute the i'th bit of √2 .

The misguided claim I started with can be fixed. If instead we say, "The base-2 representation of most irrational real numbers is not compressible to a finite representation, so the entire base-2 representation of most irrational real numbers cannot be stored in a finite computer", we would be correct. Here "most" means "all but a set of measure zero". But this is not particularly interesting, since for actual computation we are rarely interested in "most" irrational numbers -- we are interested in the computable ones.

Review of Monton's "Seeking God in Science"

2011-04-28T05:55:00.014-04:00

Bradley Monton is a philosophy professor at UC Boulder and a self-proclaimed atheist. He's written a little book (147 pages for the main text, not counting the preface, endnotes, index, etc.) entitled Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design, which I finally had a chance to read. It consists of four chapters:

What is intelligent design, and why might an atheist believe in it?
Why it is legitimate to treat intelligent design as science
Some somewhat plausible intelligent design arguments
Should intelligent design be taught in school?

I'm afraid this book is not very good. Monton comes off as rather naive (displaying little understanding of the abundant and documented dishonesty in the ID movement) and ignorant of science, the history of intelligent design creationism, and its role in the creationism-evolution wars.

The first chapter of the book is devoted to one of my least favorite philosophical games: trying to create a definition for a concept that covers all possible cases, by starting with a definition and iteratively refining it. He spends 25 pages (pages 16-40) playing this game with the concept of "intelligent design" itself, in a tedious and unenlightening way (for example, he even addresses the possibility that God is biologically related to humans!) and here is what he comes up with (italics in original):

"The theory of intelligent design holds that certain global features of the universe provide evidence for the existence of an intelligent cause, or that certain biologically innate features of living things provide evidence for the doctrine that the features are the result of the intentional actions of an intelligent cause which is not biologically related to the living things, and provide evidence against the doctrine that the features are the result of an undirected process such as natural selection."

Now I don't particularly like this game (although it has a long history -- philosophers have enjoyed applying it to "chair", for example), because for almost any definition proposed it is easy to come up with some outlandish counterexample. Still, as a mathematician, I enjoy and admire precision, so perhaps it's not a game completely without value. But after reading his definition I could only mutter, All that work! - and he still has an imprecise and unusable mess.

Unusable, since key terms like "intelligent cause" and "undirected process" are not defined or made rigorous. Could it be, as other commentators have already observed, that when we try to define "intelligent cause" we discover that natural selection itself could be considered intelligent by our criteria? Could it be that intelligence is a continuous measure, not a discrete quality, so that speaking of an "intelligent cause" is essentially meaningless unless the amount of intelligence is quantified?

Mess, because by calling intelligent design a "theory", Monton begs the question.

Imprecise, because this definition doesn't cover much of what the intelligent design advocates themselves discuss. For example, in Dembski's book No Free Lunch, he spends a good 10 pages discussing the case of Nicholas Caputo, an election official accused of rigging elections. Dembski implies that his intelligent design methodology can help resolve the case of whether Caputo cheated. But this case has nothing to do with a "global feature" of the universe or a "biologically innate" feature of living things.

Monton seems rather naive about the intelligent design movement. For example, on page 12, he claims, "As a matter of public policy, the Discovery Institute opposes any effort to require the teaching of intelligent design by school districts or state boards of education." But this claim could only be made by someone who doesn't understand (a) that the Discovery Institute has a long history of dissembling and (b) that intelligent design, as practiced by its leading proponents (Behe, Dembski, Meyer) is largely a negative program of casting doubt on the theory of evolution, or examining its supposed deficiencies. Therefore, Discovery Institute programs like "Teach the Controversy" and "Critical Analysis of Evolution" are, in fact, just covers for getting intelligent design into the classroom. This is abundantly clear to most people who have studied the intelligent design movement in any depth.

Part of the book is devoted to analyzing the views of pro-science philosophers, such as Taner Edis, Massimo Pigliucci, and Robert Pennock. Needless to say, Monton thinks they have it wrong in many ways; they are "sloppy" and "confused". But much of his criticism seems misplaced. For example, he gives the following advice to Barbara Forrest: she "focuses too much on attacking the proponents of intelligent design for the supposed cultural beliefs they have, instead of attacking the arguments for intelligent design that the proponents of intelligent design give". But Forrest has never said that intelligent design advocates are wrong because of their cultural beliefs; rather, she has fearlessly and tirelessly explored the goals and strategies of intelligent designers, as well as the sociological and political connections between intelligent design creationism and the religious right. Monton is apparently unconcerned with these details, and that's his right. But then his criticism amounts to "I don't share your interests", and that's rather pathetic.

Monton is a fan of Laudan, citing the following passage approvingly: "If we would stand up and be counted on the side of reason, we ought to drop terms like "pseudo-science" and "unscientific" from our vocabulary; they are just hollow phrases which do only emotive work for us." I strongly disagree. As I mentioned already, almost any definition or classification is subject to exceptions, but it's still useful to be able to say something is a chair or not a chair, even if we cannot always agree about the boundaries. Science, as a social process, has a number of characteristics, and it is perfectly legitimate and useful to point out that creationism and its modern variant, intelligent design, fail to share many of these characteristics.

There are signs that although he thinks intelligent design merits a book-length treatment, Monton hasn't really grappled with the issues. For example, on page 17, he cites a beehive as an example of a feature of the universe that "indisputably exist[s] as a result of an intelligent cause" and then, in a footnote, says that "It was surprising to me that some readers objected to this line of thought, saying that ... bees ... aren't intelligent." Well, I'd guess that this surprise comes largely from the fact that Monton hasn't really thought deeply about what intelligence is. We now know a lot about algorithms and naturally-occurring tools to perform computational processes, but Monton doesn't seem to know anything about it. But then he has some real misconceptions about mathematics and computing, claiming that computers can't represent irrational numbers. (I've addressed this misconception here.)

Several times in the book, Monton refers to the Newtonian account of physics and argues it has been "refuted". On page 50, he uses it to argue that false scientific theories can still count as science (so if intelligent design has been refuted, it could still be considered science). On page 152, he uses it to argue that false scientific theories are routinely taught in high school science (so intelligent design, even if false, could still be caught). But this black-white classification of theories as either "false" or "not false" doesn't even come close to capturing the status of Newtonian physics. Yes, it doesn't give the right answers for particles moving at high velocity, for example. But I can't think of a single scientific theory that unfailingly predicts the outcome of every single experiment. It is more correct, I think, to view theories and equations as our models of reality and to have a good idea of their shortcomings and applicability. No one uses special relativity to solve simple problems in kinematics; they use Newton and they don't apologize for it. If we classify theories purely as "true" or "false" then we lose the nuance that some "false" theories are pretty damn good and others are worthless.

Chapter 3 summarizes some of the arguments of intelligent design advocates, such as alleged "fine-tuning", the origin of the universe, the origin of life, irreducible complexity, and the simulation argument. There is not really much analysis that is new here, but I found his discussion of the simulation argument the most interesting part of the book.

Chapter 4 addresses the question of whether intelligent design should be taught in school. By "taught in school", Monton means "taught in public high-school science classes" (although he takes two whole pages to explain this - an example of how clunky the writing is). One of the objections Monton addresses is "we wouldn't be teaching a real controversy", and he answers this by citing Michael Behe as an example of a real scientist who disagrees with the scientific consensus. Ergo, there is a real controversy. But if Monton's definition of "real controversy" is "one scientist disagrees" or even "a handful of scientists disagree", then there is a "real controversy" about relativity, heliocentrism, and the germ theory of disease. Indeed, it would be hard to come up with a scientific theory for which there is no controversy in Monton's sense. Monton's position is absurd. There are controversies, and then there are controversies; it's not a black-and-white term. The "controversy" over evolution is exactly like that over relativity: a very small number of experts in the field, and a larger number of cranks, disagree with current consensus. That doesn't mean their objections merit coverage in science class. I'm not opposed to teaching controversies, but let's teach some real ones.

Finally, I'd say that the book, and Monton himself, seems curiously disengaged from the extensive mainstream criticism of intelligent design. To give one illustration, he doesn't cite much of the literature arguing against the claims of intelligent design advocates. Nowhere will you find any mention of, for example, the fine article of Pallen and Matzke (published in 2006 in Nature Reviews Microbiology) -- although other articles of Matzke are cited -- or the article of Wilkins and Elsberry (published in 2001 in Biology and Philosophy). He lists two conferences where he's presented his work, and both of them were hosted by the "Society of Christian Philosophers". Four people are listed as endorsers on the back of his book, and three of them are non-biologist critics of evolution (Berlinski, Dembski, Groothuis). And Monton has a blog, but he doesn't allow any comments on it. I can't help but think Monton's book would have been much better if he had made more attempts to be engaged with those who disagree with him.

More Muddled Thinking about the Brain

2011-04-27T07:30:00.003-04:00

If you can stand it, read this article by Raymond Tallis, entitled "What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves".

There are a lot of confident assertions, all presented without any real evidence:

"It is unlikely that the gap between neuroscientific stories of human behavior and the standard humanistic or common-sense narratives will be closed"
"But there is nothing in the activity of the visual cortex, consisting of nerve impulses that are no more than material events in a material object, which could make that activity be about the things that you see."
"neural activity is not about anything and so can be neither correct nor mistaken"
"A consistent materialism should not allow for the possibility of memory, of the sense of the past"

And Tallis seems to have no understanding of what "information" is.

But most of the article seems to be gobbledygook. If Tallis were to try to come up with a rigorous definition of words like "about", he might make some progress. By his argument, it makes no sense to count tree rings to determine a tree's age, since tree rings are not "about" the age of the tree.

As Arthur C. Clarke noted, "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong."

Psychic Fail

2011-04-24T10:05:00.003-04:00

A photo from New Orleans.

If I were a real psychic, I wouldn't pay for "24 hr. surveillance", as the sign at the left indicates. Instead, I'd just send security guards around at the time I knew people were about to break in.

Neil Postman - Perpetually Clueless

2011-04-24T09:37:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I attended a baseball game in Buffalo, NY: the Bisons versus the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs. There was, as usual, a big video scoreboard in centerfield.

So this clueless quote from Neil Postman, recently posted on Doug Groothuis's blog, is appropriate:

"Media may now be serving as a surrogate for reality, and a preferred one at that. At stadiums throughout the country, huge TV screens have been installed so that spectators can experience the game through TV because TV is better than being there, even when you are there."

Postman has got to be one of the most overrated media commentators ever.

As I commented to my young son, in many ways, watching baseball at a stadium is a much better experience today than it was when I attended my first game in 1967.

It's not that "TV is better than being there" or that it is "a surrogate for reality", as Postman claims - whatever that means.

It's that a big screen offers more information than the scoreboard of 1967: you get the batter's average and other statistics; you get a reminder of what happened earlier in the game when that batter was up; and you get instant replays of interesting plays you might not have fully appreciated or understood the first time around.

Postman never really understood media; his observations are generally self-important, trite, and ignorant.

"Be it Ever So Humble" - a short story by Louise Shallit

2011-04-24T08:44:00.003-04:00

Here's a short story entitled "Be it Ever So Humble" that appeared in Story magazine, Vol. 27, No. 115 (September-October 1945) by my mother, Louise Lee Outlaw. I think this may have been the first short story she published in a national magazine, although she had been writing for newspapers since 1938. Although it doesn't display her at the height of her powers, there are some very nice lines.

As an interesting footnote, another story in the same issue was written by Joseph Heller, who, of course, later became famous as the author of Catch-22.

The True Crocker Story

2011-04-15T11:53:00.005-04:00

Over at Uncommon Descent, we have more playing the victim, this time about creationist Carolyn Crocker, and probably written by the World's Worst Journalist™.

For the true story about Crocker, go here.

Having Crocker as the "executive director of a think tank on integrity in science" is kind of like having Newt Gingrich as executive director of a think tank on integrity in marriage.

Religion at the Science Fair

2011-04-07T09:39:00.004-04:00

I judged my first science fair yesterday.

There were some good projects, but most of them were a bit disappointing. The main problem was the lack of originality: most were testing hypotheses that were either obviously true or uninteresting. Good original hypotheses are hard to come by, but still...

One student from a local Christian school added evangelical Christian content to her poster and report. The project concerned determining which solvent was the best to remove stains from various materials. At the end, the student thoughtfully reminded everyone that humanity is also "stained" and that the only stain remover was Jesus.

I feel very sorry for this student, who has clearly been relentlessly indoctrinated by her teachers -- and probably instructed to add this kind of unscientific postscript to her display.

William Lane Craig Does Mathematics

2011-03-31T08:42:00.004-04:00

In his debate with Lawrence Krauss last night (audio here), William Lane Craig says,

"But mathematicians recognize that the existence of an actually infinite number of things leads to self-contradictions. For example, what is infinity minus infinity? Mathematically, you get self-contradictory answers."

It's hard to know what Craig really means here, because it is so confused. Mathematicians routinely study "an actually infinite number of things", such as the natural numbers, the real numbers, and the complex numbers. No contradictions are involved.

But maybe Craig is talking about an actual infinity of things in nature. Then he shouldn't be talking about mathematicians, but physicists. Even here, physicists do discuss an actual physical infinity - without contradictions - such as Malament-Hogarth spacetime. Examples like Hilbert's hotel, that are often proffered as insoluble paradoxes, only show that infinity needs to be treated with care and may result in scenarios that seem counter-intuitive. But so does relativity.

Infinity minus infinity is not "self-contradictory", any more than 1/0 is "self-contradictory". Lane seems not to understand that not all functions are everywhere defined. The subtraction function, for example, can be defined on most pairs of the extended reals, but not defined on (∞, ∞). What's so hard to understand about that?

Addendum As I listen to more of the debate, it seems Craig retreats a bit from his claim about mathematics. He still seems to think that an actual infinite number of objects in the universe creates "contradictions", but he doesn't say explicitly what those contradictions are.

Nobody - Even Creationists - Seems to Know How To Calculate Dembski's "CSI"

2011-03-23T16:24:00.003-04:00

Back in 2001, when I was on sabbatical in Tucson, Arizona, I decided to spend some time trying to understand Dembski's "complex specified information" (CSI) to see if there was anything to it. The result was my long paper with Elsberry, where we concluded that CSI was a hopeless, incoherent mess that didn't have the properties Dembski claimed. A shorter version of the paper has recently appeared in Synthese.

Now, over on Uncommon Descent, there is an amusing thread which demonstrates our conclusion. Nobody, not even the creationists, can seemingly agree on the most simple assertions about CSI. That's because it's a hopeless, incoherent mess.

No Smoking Fail

2011-03-15T21:21:00.004-04:00

This wins my award for the "No Smoking Sign Least Likely to Convince Anyone Not to Smoke". Spotted in the Surrogate's Court Building, 4th Floor, at 31 Chambers Street, NYC. At the time someone was happily smoking in one of the stalls.

Graffiti Limbo

2011-03-15T15:49:00.002-04:00

This is just a small portion of an amazing collection of graffiti, spotted in an American city. For points, identify

the city,

the subway from which you can see it, and

the name of the location.

Conway, Diaconis, Rivest I've Heard Of - But Who's That Fourth Guy?

2011-03-07T09:37:00.003-05:00

In this reminiscence about the late Martin Gardner, Donald Knuth points out that Gardner had correspondence with some young mathematicians who later became famous: John Conway, Persi Diaconis, Ron Rivest, and some fourth guy no one's ever heard of.

Well, it's nice to be mentioned in that famous company.

This is What a Hypocritical, Lying Weasel Looks Like

2011-03-05T04:00:00.004-05:00

Take a good look.

Famous Astronomer with Moose

2011-02-28T11:39:00.001-05:00

OK, it's not as good as Alan Turing with a moose, but still...

Tycho Brahe with his moose.

"Any" Considered Harmful

2011-02-25T09:04:00.003-05:00

Edsger Dijkstra wrote a famous letter in the Communications of the ACM that appeared under the heading "Go To Statement Considered Harmful".

I'd like to make a case against the use of "any" in mathematical discourse.

The problem with "any" is that it can mean both "for all" and "there exists", and it's not always clear what is meant. "It's true for any x" probably means "for all x". But "The theorem is true for S if any element of S is a square" probably means "it's true if S contains at least one square".

I was just attending a meeting at Dagstuhl in Germany where one speaker said something like "If L is regular, then u is equivalent to v if and only if for any state q of the minimal DFA for L we have δ(q,u) = δ(q,v)". Now if you know the theorem, the meaning is clear. But if you don't, you might be left wondering, does he mean "u is equivalent to v if there exists some state q such that δ(q,u) = δ(q,v)" or "u is equivalent to v if for all states q we have δ(q,u) = δ(q,v)"?

Because of this ambiguity, I think we should avoid the use of "any" in mathematical discourse. We can replace it by "all x" or by "some x", according to what we mean.

Who's with me?

More Mary Poplin Nuttiness

2011-02-18T12:58:00.002-05:00

I forgot to mention one more nutty claim by Mary Poplin at Waterloo: "John the Baptist recognized Jesus while he [John] was in the womb" -- and this is proof that the Jews of the 1st century had advanced medical knowledge because "only recently did scientists figure out that babies could hear and react to stimuli in the womb". She mentioned this as the way that Christianity would be useful for medical science.

No claim, it seems, is too deranged for Prof. Poplin - provided Christianity says it is so.

Waterloo's "Watson" Connection

2011-02-16T08:43:00.002-05:00

Here's Waterloo's own Jesse Hoey and Robin Cohen being interviewed about "Watson".

'Watson' on Jeopardy

2011-02-15T05:27:00.006-05:00

Well, the first episode of 'Watson' on Jeopardy was shown last night. I didn't see it live, but luckily it's available on Youtube, at least for a little while.

It's a great achievement. Question-answering systems are a hot topic now - my colleague Ming Li, for example, has created such a system, based on word associations it finds on the Internet. But Watson is much better than anything I've seen before. A system like Watson will be extremely useful for researchers and libraries. Instead of having to staff general inquiry telephone lines with a person, libraries can use a system like Watson to answer questions of patrons. And, of course, there will be applications like medical diagnoses and computer tech support, too.

I predict, however, that the reaction to Watson will be largely hostile, especially from Mysterian philosophers (like Chalmers), strong AI skeptics (like the Dreyfus brothers), and hardcore conservative theists firmly committed to the special status of humans (like David Gelernter). We'll also hear naysaying from jealous engineers (like this letter from Llewellyn C. Wall, who earns my nomination for Jerk of the Week).

Despite its impressive performance, we're going to hear lots of claims that Watson "doesn't really think". Critics will point gleefully to Watson stumbling on an answer, replying "finis" when the correct response was "terminus" or "terminal" -- as if humans never make a mistake on Jeopardy. We're going to hear columnists stating "But Watson can't smell a rose or compose a poem" - as if that is a cogent criticism of a system designed to answer questions.

I predict none of these naysayers will deal with the real issue: in what essential way does Watson really differ from the way people think? People make associations, too, and answer questions based on sometimes tenuous connections. Vague assertions like "Watson doesn't really think" or "Watson has no mental model of the world" or "Watson is just playing word games" aren't going to cut it, unless critics can come up with a really rigorous formulation of their argument.

Watson is just another nail in the coffin of Strong AI deniers like Dreyfus - even if they don't realize it yet.

Addendum: Ah, I see the moronic critiques are already dribbling in: from Gordon Haff we get typical boilerplate: "Watson is in no real sense thinking and the use of the term "understanding" in the context of Watson should be taken as anthropomorphism rather than a literal description." But without a formal definition of what means to "think" in a "real sense", Haff's claim is just so much chin music.

Mary Poplin Round 2

2011-02-14T12:25:00.004-05:00

Mary Poplin, this year's Pascal lecturer at the University of Waterloo, returned for a second lecture, entitled "Is Anything Sacred?: A Conversation With Students". Like the first one, the second was poorly attended -- I'd estimate there were no more than about 15 people in the room, including some of the organizers.

Just as in the first lecture, she repeated her claims that Christianity is "under attack" at universities, and that Christians are unfairly excluded, censored, marginalized, etc.: "At the University every idea is engaged, but not Christianity" - a claim that would surprise the students enrolled in dozens of Waterloo courses with titles like History of Christianity, God and Philosphy, Jesus: Life and Legacy. Heck, if there's anything wrong with the way Christianity is treated at the University of Waterloo, it's that it's treated too seriously. There's also some sort of breathtaking irony involved in talking about how Christianity is "censored" while giving 3 invited 1-hour lectures with the sponsorship of a committee that sees its mandate as "challenging the university to a search for truth through personal faith and intellectual inquiry which focus on Jesus Christ." Why the heck is a public university sponsoring a lecture series that is clearly evangelical in nature?

She repeated her assertion that Christianity offers a useful standpoint from which to examine issues of the University, but she never really gave a single example how this could work. In response to a friendly question from someone on the committee who invited her, she could not come up with an example of how Christianity would be a useful perspective in physics, engineering, or mathematics. She did give a rather rambling and incoherent account of her work with teachers (work that, by the way, I fully support and think there should be more of) whose moral seemed to be that whatever religion you were, you came up with the same answers -- which seemed to completely undermine her point.

Personally, I reject her entire thesis. To the extent that Christianity is marginalized and excluded in academia, I see nothing wrong with it. Lots of bad ideas are rejected and marginalized: the idea that Zeus creates lightning, the idea that people have past lives, the idea that homeopathy is effective. In fact, the whole point of an intellectual enterprise like the university is that students need to be taught the intellectual tools they need to understand why some ideas are supported and others are not. Many Christian claims are rejected and marginalized because they have either been thoroughly refuted or because people have finally recognized that they do not represent serious knowledge claims. I wouldn't want a student citing the Bible on a biology exam as support for some supposedly scientific view.

Basically, Poplin wants her religious claims validated without doing the hard work she needs to do to convince others. She wants an intellectual free pass. And she wants this free pass solely on the basis of the fact that lots of people are Christians. She told me this on Thursday night, after the lecture, when she said that a good reason for treating the claims of Christianity seriously is that "a third of the world believes them". Well, worldwide there are lots of animists, too, but that doesn't mean we have to take their claims seriously.

Other things we heard about: before she became a Christian, Poplin was "not a nice person" and "slept with other people's husbands". She tried a succession of spiritual beliefs before settling on Christianity. She had encounters with "demonic spirits". I found her tale quite familiar: many people without a firm ethical compass drift from one religion to another, hoping to find something they lack internally.

We also learned that Poplin is a firm believer in the reality of miracle healing. She should read William Nolen's book Healing: a Doctor in Search of a Miracle. Nolen, a Christian, spent years looking for a legitimate example of faith healing. He found hucksters and fraud, but no actual examples.

Speaking of being "not a nice person", Poplin asserted that Christian students would be afraid to speak to me. (Ironically, in the audience was a former student of mine, a really bright guy who I never knew was religious. He had come to me for advice about graduate school just a few months earlier.) If so, that's bad. I never inquire about the religious beliefs of students and I try to treat all students fairly. But it never seemed to occur to her that, as an outspoken Christian, atheist students might be afraid to speak to her.

Altogether, this talk was even worse than the preceding one, if that's possible. Poplin rambled, failed to make any coherent point, and proved to be a sloppy thinker on the issues she spoke about. A waste of time. Let's hope the Pascal lecture series brings someone next year who might really have something to say - perhaps Ken Miller.

Harris v. Wolpe

2011-02-14T06:50:00.004-05:00

This is an oldie, but a goodie: Sam Harris versus David Wolpe:

I think Harris definitely gets the best of Wolpe, although Wolpe's no slouch. There are so many good lines by Harris it's hard to list them all. For example, "We need to cease to reward people for pretending to know things they do not know. And the only area of discourse where we do this is on the subject of God."

What interests me more, though, is Wolpe's utter confusion when it comes to understanding neuroscience (at 44:50):

"The reason that our minds can do something more than just operate on instinct is because we operate all the time with things that are not physical, right: ideas, words... I can say something and change the physiology of your brain. Now how is that unless there's something more to your brain than physiology?"

This is remarkably dim. Ideas and words are not physical? An idea is a certain pattern of our neurophysiology. Spoken words are vibrations of the air. The patterns thus formed are interpreted by the nerves in the ear and are transmitted to the brain as electrical signals. Calling these things "not physical" betrays an ignorant, pre-scientific view of the world.

I wonder where Wolpe thinks ideas reside, if not in the brains of humans and other animals? In some magical ethereal realm?

I can say something and change the physiology of my computer. Heck, if my toaster is hooked up to some voice recognition, I can say something and change the physiology of a piece of bread. How does that imply that there's "something more" to a piece of bread?

Rock Lobster - Performed by Old Computers & Robots

2011-02-13T17:32:00.001-05:00

I remember seeing the B-52's give a free concert in Sproul Plaza back around 1980. But I think I like this version better.

The Pascal Lecture: Another Year, Another Embarrassment

2011-02-11T09:51:00.010-05:00

It's time again for that excruciating annual exercise at my university called the "Pascal Lectures".

Inaugurated in 1978, the purpose is to "bring to the University of Waterloo outstanding individuals of international repute who have distinguished themselves in both an area of scholarly endeavor and an area of Christian thought or life. These individuals discourse with the university community on some aspect of its own world, its theories, its research, its leadership role in our society, challenging the university to a search for truth through personal faith and intellectual enquiry which focus on Jesus Christ."

From its very first speaker - Malcolm Muggeridge - this series has been an embarrassment. Muggeridge, you may recall, was the credulous journalist responsible for the Mother Teresa cult - and even claimed that the light used in the filming of a BBC documentary Mother Teresa's orphanage was miraculous: "In the processed film, the part taken inside was bathed in a particularly beautiful soft light, whereas the part taken outside was rather dim and confused.... I myself am absolutely convinced that the technically unaccountable light is, in fact, the Kindly Light [Cardinal] Newman refers to in his well-known exquisite hymn. ...[The love in the home is] luminous, like the haloes artists have seen and made visible around the heads of saints. I find it not at all surprising that the luminosity should register on a photographic film. ...I am personally persuaded that Ken recorded the first authentic photographic miracle."

But the cinematographer had something different to say: "And when we got back several weeks later, a month or two later, we are sitting in the rushes theatre at Ealing Studios and eventually up came the shots of the House of the Dying. And it was surprising. You could see every detail. And I said, 'That's amazing. That's extraordinary.' And I was going to on to say, three cheers for Kodak. I didn't get a chance to say that though, because Malcolm, sitting in the front row, spun round and said: 'It's divine light. It's Mother Teresa. You'll find that it's divine light, old boy.' And three or four days later I was being phoned by journalists who were saying things like: 'We hear you've just come back from India with Malcolm Muggeridge and you were the witness of a miracle.'"

To give you some idea of Muggeridge's intellectual acuity, here's a quote from What I Believe (Crossroad Publishing Co., 1984): "Nor, as far as I am concerned, is there any recompense in the so-called achievements of science. It is true that in my lifetime more progress has been made in unravelling the composition and the mechanism of the material universe than previously in the whole of recorded history. This does not at all excite my mind, or even my curiosity. The atom has been split; the universe has been discovered, and will soon be explored. Neither achievement has any bearing on what alone interests me -- which is why life exists, and what is the significance, if any, of my minute and so transitory part in it."

And in the first Pascal lecture, Muggeridge had this to say, in answer to a question: "I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has. I think I spoke to you before about this age as one of the most credulous in history, and I would include evolution as an example."

Isn't there something perversely fascinating about a man who can dismiss one of the best-supported scientific theories -- evolution -- while railing about credulity AND also jumping to the conclusion that good photographic film is a Christian miracle?

This drivel is what the Pascal committee apparently thinks is a good example of "challenging the university to a search for truth".

Not every Pascal lecture was as bad as Muggeridge. Howard J. Van Till, who spoke in 1999, was a physics professor from Calvin College, and is one of the few evangelicals I know who can approach evolution with something resembling intellectual honesty. And - no surprise - he was investigated by his own university for heresy simply for being honest. And Donald Knuth, a personal hero of mine, spoke in 2000.

In 2007, MIT computer scientist Rosalind Picard spoke. She's infamous as one of the signers of the Discovery Institute's A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism letter -- despite having, as far as I can tell, no advanced biological training. This didn't prevent her from using her professional affiliation at MIT to sign. I once asked her if she thought this was ethical, but she didn't reply.

This year's speaker was Mary Poplin, a professor at the Claremont Graduate School. I knew what to expect, since I had already watched one of her videos. I got exactly what I expected. Speaking in a nearly empty hall that could hold over 700 people but probably held about 50, she provided

* a phony quote in support of Christianity
* slurs directed towards atheists and Christopher Hitchens
* vague complaints that Christianity is "suppressed" or "censored"
* crackpot claims that the Bible holds important medical knowledge
* a conversion story based on emotions and dreams rather than any evidence

The quote story is rather interesting. Jürgen Habermas is an elderly German philosopher who Poplin quoted as follows: "Christianity, and nothing else is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [to Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

This quotation is phony, but is very popular among Christians.

Its origins have been carefully traced by Thomas Gregersen, who writes:

But this is a misquotation! The reference is an interview with Jürgen Habermas that Eduardo Mendieta made in 1999. It is published in English with the title "A Conversation About God and the World" in Habermas's book "Time of Transitions" (Polity Press, 2006).

What Habermas actually says in this interview is:

"Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an auonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct heir of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk (p. 150f)."

The misquote rewrites Habermas's statement and changes its meaning:
(1) Habermas talks about the historical origin of egalitarian universalism - not the foundation of human rights today.
(2) Habermas mentions both Judaism and Christianity - not only Christianity.
(3) Habermas says that there is no alternative to this legacy ("Erbe" in German) - not that we have no alternative to Christianity.

In the question-and-answer-session after the talk, I informed Poplin of the phony quote and asked her to withdraw it. In response, she claimed that Habermas had been asked about the quote at a lecture and did not deny it! So she knew the quote was dubious, she knew there was no actual original source confirming the phony quote, but she proffered it anyway with no disclaimers. In my opinion, this constitutes serious scholarly misconduct.

Later, I discussed the quote again with Poplin. She admitted she had no source for the quote, but she insisted it was legitimate because it accurately reflected Habermas' ideas, even if it was not his actual words. She again referred to this video, claiming that Habermas was asked about the quote and did not deny it. Watch the video, and see if it supports Poplin's interpretation. I don't think it does.

Here are some other aspects of Poplin's talk, with brief commentary:

- She claimed that "arch-atheist" Hitchens was practically the only author taking issue with Mother Teresa's career. This is simply untrue; authors such as Michael Parenti, Aroup Chatterjee, and others have criticized Agnes Bojaxhiu.

- Like many Christians, she seemed really disturbed that university students sometimes have sex with each other, and she claimed this was due to the loss of "ability to have a moral conversation" about anything. (I don't have any idea what she's talking about: questions of ethics routinely come up even in our computer science curriculum.)

- She dismissed the Christian pastor who wanted to burn a Koran as unrepresentative of North American Christianity

- She claimed "advocates of secularism try to keep orthodox Christianity a secret". Not so - I'd like it to be exposed in all its silliness.

- Secularism has "diminished the Academy"

- the University is hostile to "God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit". Yes, but in exactly the same way it is hostile to any claim presented without evidence, such as Bigfoot, UFO's, and homeopathy.

- She approvingly quoted C. S. Lewis, from Mere Christianity, claiming "If Christianity is true then it ought to follow (a) That any Christian will be nicer than the same person would be if he were not a Christian. (b) That any man who becomes a Christian will be nicer than he was before." (I wonder what a non-Christian David Bahati might be like.)

- And, in a stunning display of hypocrisy, she both praised the Roman Catholic church for helping the poor and sick in the 15th century, and dismissed its role in genocide in the New World and its role in the Crusades as complaints by ignorant critics.

Overall, this was probably the shallowest, most anti-intellectual Pascal lecture I've attended.

World's Dumbest Scammer?

2011-02-08T19:24:00.002-05:00

This is the word-salad recently received from a spammer-scammer:

Anti-Terrorist and Monitory Crime Division.
Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Daniel McMullen (Special Agent in Charge)

Attn: Beneficiary,

This is to officially inform you that it has come to our notice and we have thoroughly investigated with the help of our Intelligence Monitoring Network System that you are having an illegal Transaction with Impostors. We the Federal Bureau Of Investigation want you to stop further communication with any Impostors claiming to be official. During our Investigation, we noticed that the reason why you have not received your payment is because you have not fulfilled your Financial Obligation given to you in respect of your Contract/Inheritance Payment. Therefore, we have contacted the Federal Ministry of Finance Nigeria on your behalf and they have brought a solution to your problem by coordinating your payment in total $5,900,000.00(Five Million Nine Hundred Thousand Dollars).

Since the Federal Bureau of Investigation is involved in this transaction, you have to be rest assured for this is 100% risk free it is our duty to protect you. We the Federal Bureau Of Investigation want you to contact the ATM CARD CENTER via email for their requirements to proceed and procure your Approval Slip on your behalf which will cost you $150 and note that your Approval Slip which contains details of the agent who will process your transaction.

CONTACT INFORMATION
NAME: Mr. kelvin Williams
Address: 18 Koffi Crescent Apapa Lagos Nigeria
EMAIL: kelvinwilliams205@gmail.com

Do contact Mr. kelvin Williams of the ATM CARD CENTER with your details, and you full information So your files would be updated after which he will send the payment information which you'll use in making payment of $150 via Western Union Money Transfer or Money Gram Transfer for the procurement of your Approval Slip after which the delivery of your ATM CARD will be effected to your designated home address without any further delay. We order you get back to this office after you have contacted the ATM SWIFT CARD CENTER and we do await your response so we can move on with our Investigation and make sure your ATM SWIFT CARD gets to you.

Thanks and hope to read from you soon.

Daniel McMullen
Special Agent in Charge
Criminal Division
FBI Los Angeles
Suite 1700, FOB
$15000 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, California

Man, this guy needs to take a course in English composition.

Fibonacci Quarterly Goes Electronic

2011-02-07T18:03:00.003-05:00

The Fibonacci Quarterly has gone electronic! And they've put all their articles before 2006 online for free.

When I was a teenager, this was one of my favorite journals - because, unlike most math journals, I could actually understand most of the articles in it. My parents thought it was weird, but they were very understanding, and even got me a subscription.

I remember one of the articles that blew my mind was Aho and Sloane's Some Doubly Exponential Sequences. The authors found beautiful analyses of some nonlinear recurrences, including one of my favorites:

y₁ = 5; y_n+1 = (y_n - 2)².

The first few values are y₂ = 9; y₃ = 49; y₄ = 2209; and it is not hard to prove that y_n = L_2ⁿ + 2, where L_i is the i'th Lucas number.

It's still a good and worthwhile journal, even if it doesn't usually get much praise from the kind of people who publish in Inventiones. It struggles from time to time with quality issues, and I really dislike the typesetting, but there's often something interesting in it.

So, congrats to the Fibonacci Quarterly for taking this step. If only they'd put in a search function for titles and authors...

Yet Another Christian Fake Quote

2011-01-30T04:58:00.004-05:00

From recent e-mail from a fundamentalist:

"Cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ."
-James Madison, America's Providential History, p. 93.

Now, anyone who knows anything about Madison should be very suspicious of this quote. Madison was not a traditional Christian, and said things like "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize, every expanded prospect." (letter by Madison to William Bradford, April 1, 1774).

Second, as Chris Rodda has shown, America's Providential History is thoroughly unreliable when it comes to quotations.

Third, this quotation is attributed in Popular Science, February 1887, to John Witherspoon, the president of Princeton University, not Madison. I haven't found it in Witherspoon's writings, but it sounds much more like Witherspoon than Madison. Confusingly, it has also been attributed to Jonathan Dickinson, another of Princeton's presidents. It sounds consistent with him, too.

So I am calling bogus on this quote. Not surprisingly, it is found on many Christian websites, with attributions to Madison. We see here a good example of the fundamentalist devotion to truth.

So Much Stupidity, So Little Time

2011-01-29T05:50:00.005-05:00

I wish I had a little more time to discuss all the stoopid that's been in the news lately! But I don't, so here's a few links:

What to do if you're a glorified librarian who can't get his book on Alfred Russel Wallace published with a real publisher? Why, get the Discovery Institute's own vanity press to publish it for you! (It helps if you have friends claim the story has been "embarrassing Darwinians ... for almost a century and a half".)

What to do if you're a moron hockey coach? Why, refuse to play one of your players because he's Jewish.

What to do if you're a faux science journalist who spends most of her time denying evolution? Why, incoherently praise a creationist book and wonder why "so few career Darwinists have brayed against it." (Hint: real biologists have better things to do with their time than to read every vanity press book that comes along.)

What to do if you're a religious crackpot? Why, file a lawsuit claiming that evolution is a religion and so can't be legally taught in US schools.

What to do if you're a math professor who gets in a fight with a colleague? Why, go piss on his door, of course! I always thought there was something odd about algebraic geometers.

What to do if you're a Discovery Institute flunkey who can't answer our criticisms of intelligent design? Why, simply object that we didn't mention articles that appeared after our publication.

What to do if you're a philosopher who doesn't know a damn thing about mathematics? Why, publish a piece in the Times Higher Education claiming"But there is only an infinity of mathematical objects, not a super-infinite (transfinite) totality.

So how has it happened that for a hundred years, the mathematical establishment has swallowed the idea of transfinite sets? Georg Cantor produced an argument that seemed to point to transfinite immensities, but that was before we realised that mathematics was incompletable. In effect Cantor's argument showed that the set of real numbers was incompletable. It did not (could not) show that there were more mathematical objects than an ordinary infinity...

Once installed, blind faith ensured that the transfinite would continue to thrill and amaze generations of students - in spite of the inconvenient fact of its mathematical impossibility."

Yup, he really seems to be claiming that the real numbers are a "mathematical impossibility". That's ok with me, I never liked real analysis very much anyway.

So much stoopid, so little time!

Now, as a relief from all that stoopid, look at this: the earth (and moon - wait for it) from 31 million miles away:

Ahh, now that's a relief.

Net Neutrality = Fairness Doctrine?

2011-01-16T10:34:00.005-05:00

Here is a commentary with equal parts smugness, lies, and ignorance, delivered by Andrew Klavan:

It's truly fascinating how moronic it is, and how un-self-aware. One minute he's saying that liberals are evil because they call the far-right "fascist" or "worse than Hitler"; the next minute he's displaying the term "net neutrality" written in pseudo-cyrillic script, with the clear implication that somehow it is Communist.

He also makes the claim that bailing out banks and big corporations is a "radical attempt to destroy our free-market system". I wonder what a real attempt to destroy it would look like?

There are good arguments both for and against net neutrality (and the Fairness Doctrine, for that matter). But they're not even remotely related. One is about a national public resource with very limited access and bandwidth, controlled largely by corporate interests. The other is about a global network and peer-to-peer communication with near-universal access in North America, and essentially unlimited bandwidth. There's simply no way that net neutrality could "force conservatives to shut up online as well".

Klavan claims "leftism has failed everywhere". Yet in the European social democracies, such as Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, people live longer, healthier lives, and they have less crime. Furthermore, "leftist" policies like the minimum wage and Medicare haven't failed -- they have become standard practice in democracies.

I wonder if Klavan is more or less stupid than his audience? Is he a moron, or actively dishonest?