9/11 "Truthers" Meet their Waterloo - The Ron Craig Talk

The UW 9/11 Research Group, which previously sponsored two presentations by truthers, has finally gotten around to hearing the other side.

Ron Craig, a professor at Ryerson University with extensive training and experience in explosives, gave a talk Friday night in the Arts Lecture Hall at the University of Waterloo. Here's a brief summary:

He started by asking, "How many people here believe the WTC buildings were brought down by explosives?" Sadly, about half the people in the audience of approximately 100 raised their hands.

He then showed clips of the WTC buildings collapsing, some eyewitness testimony, and excerpts of last year's appalling presentations by A. K. Dewdney and Graeme MacQueen. He then asked rhetorically, "After seeing all this, how could you not believe the towers were brought down by explosives?"

Briefly, his answer was "expectation bias": investigators reach a premature conclusion without examining all the relevant data.

9/11 "Truthers" start with a presupposition, then look for data to support it. By contrast, real fire investigators start with documents such as NFPA 921, which outlines a scientific basis for investigating these incidents.

Craig pointed out that the WTC buildings used an innovative design for lightweight construction. They were the first super-high buildings to use this kind of construction, without heavy girders. The buildings weighed only 1/2 of what a conventional building would have weighed.

When demolition experts want to bring down a building, he said, they drill into columns and place the explosives. But no cement columns were used in the WTC. Furthermore, maintenance at the buildings reports that core beams above the 84th floor were inaccessible.

He then examined one claimed scenario for controlled demolition: in this scenario, explosives were placed on every floor. He then estimated how much explosive would be needed in this scenario, and came up with 1300 pounds of TNT-equivalent per floor, for a total of 143,000 pounds. Clearly this would be infeasible to set up without someone noticing.

Furthermore, such a large amount of explosive would have blown out windows in other buildings for blocks around. But this did not occur. In an explosive detonation, the typical inury is from flying glass, but there is no evidence that this occurred, nor evidence of other kinds of projectile injuries.

Explosives create heat of as much as 7000 degrees. Thermal injuries will be accompanied by primary blast injuries caused by pressure when the shockwave progesses through the body (e.g., middle ear injuries). "Blast lung" can occur at 50 to 150 psi. But not a single person in NY exhibited any symptoms of PBI.

Claims that thermite was used is undermined by the fact that no barium nitrate was found in the debris. He estimated that 61,000 pounds of thermite would have been needed. Again, it would have been impossible to set this up without someone noticing. Claims that sulfur was a signature of thermite/thermate are silly, because both the elevator shafts and stairwells were constructed with drywall, which is gypsum (calcium sulfate with 18% sulfur content).

Claims that molten steel was still flowing 21 days after the attacks are implausible. He showed one slide that supposedly depicted white-hot metal being observed by workers; it was actually just a worklight, as a video showed.

There is no good evidence that there were pools of molten steel. Many metals were at WTC, and low-temperature alloys could easily have formed. NFPA 921 says "if this occurs it is not an indication that accelerants were used or were present in the fire."

He then addressed the claim that "no other steel frame building has ever collapsed because of fire". He addressed other fires, such as this one at Delft. During the fire there was a partial collapse with "squibs" visible just as in the WTC.

He compared the WTC fire to other fires, such as the one in Madrid and One Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia. Both of these buildings had designs quite different from WTC.

Overall, I'd rate this part of the presentation as an A-. I think his points were very effective, although he could have also referenced the 1967 McCormick Center fire in Chicago, and he could have pointed to the lack of seismic evidence for explosions.

After the talk, there were some questions from the audience. One questioner asked him if he considered the "geo-political context" for 9/11. To his credit, Craig said that this was not his area of expertise; he is a fire and explosives expert, and his job is to look at the hard evidence, not speculations about motives.

Another questioner suggested that the Towers were brought down by some high-tech explosive invented by the government but unknown to everyone else. Craig found this suggestion (and a similar suggestion that "lasers" were used) ridiculous, saying that he regularly attends explosives conferences and such a thing could not be kept secret from experts.

Another questioner brought up the collapse of WTC 7. Craig said that he did not know for sure the cause of the collapse of that building, because not enough evidence was gathered yet. He said that he expects we will eventually know, because there is a strong motivation by architects, engineers, and insurance companies to understand the reasons behind the collapse, and many people are working on it.

I'd rate the question-answering portion as B+. Sometimes he simply reiterated previous points, instead of attempting to address the question from another angle, but overall he was generally effective.

Overall, I thought Ron Craig did a good job of demolishing the bizarre and unsupported claims by truthers that explosives brought down the World Trade Center buildings. Regrettably, it is unlikely to have much impact on truthers, who typically hold their beliefs with a religious fervor.

The Mother of All Rejection Letters

The Humanist Association of Canada Spring 1992 Newsletter contained the following item. Perhaps it is apocryphal, but it's funny even if not true.

"For writers only -- Every writer has received rejection slips; too many of them for most. The "Financial Times" has quoted the "mother of all rejection slips", translated from a Chinese economic journal. It goes like this:

We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity."

A Conference I Won't Be Attending

Here is some conference spam I recently received:


Re: INVITATION for oral presentation at ICCE-17th Hawaii, USA

Upon review of your expertise in composite and nanotechnology of materials or physics/chemistry of materials/devices, and metals and concrete research, it gives me pleasure to invite you to orally present a paper at the coming 17th Annual International Conference on Composites or Nano Engineering, ICCE-17, July 26-31, 2009 in Hawaii, USA.. This is a truly “international” conference held in the USA, where the majority of the participants are from outside USA. The topic is broad to include almost all science and engineering, due to the emphasis of interdisciplinary research in nanotechnology.

The ICCE-17 Hawaii Call for Papers has received overwhelming responses of over 600 abstracts. The emphasis of the conference is to

(1) to learn the state of the art in hot topics where funding exists, such as Biomedical and Nano research on multifunctional materials and structures,

(2) provide a forum of exchange of ideas between Chemists, Physicists, Biologists, Engineers, mathematicians and mechanicians, to promote interdisciplinary approach to Nano/Biomedical/ Composites Technology,

(3) encourage participants to conduct interdisciplinary joint research and write joint research proposals

The venue hotel rate is being negotiated (prices falling due to recession), and the venue hotel and the island will be announced soon. The conference web is,

www.uno.edu/~engr/composite

These ICCE-17 detailed abstracts will be reviewed and appear as short papers in World Journal of Engineering, upon payment of registration fee and attendance of ICCE-17. Further, “all” full length version of these short papers, with paper title change, will be reviewed and published in WJOE or in Composites B journal. Thus, all participants will have two journal papers as a benefit of coming to ICCE-17 Hawaii. Due to budgetary constraints, we are unable to offer financial assistance.

Looking forward to seeing you in Hawaii.

Yours sincerely,

David Hui, Ph.D.,
Chairman ICCE-17 Hawaii, USA
Professor of Mechanical Engineering Univ of New Orleans
Editor-in-Chief, Composites Part B:
Doctor Honoris Causa (Italy, Nov. 2008, Vietnam, Dec. 2006, Ukraine, Nov. 2004)
dhui@uno.edu


This invitation has many signs of bogosity:

1. It was sent to an old address I set up 15 years ago for a conference and have not used since, a clear sign the author has used some spam service.

2. It falsely claims that I have been invited because of my "expertise in composite and nanotechnology of materials or physics/chemistry of materials/devices, and metals and concrete research", all fields that I have never done any research in. Also note the wide variety of unrelated topics listed as the theme of the conference -- this is quite unusual for a legitimate conference.

3. It has random grammatical errors and punctuation inconsistencies, such as capitalizing "Chemists" but not capitalizing "mathematicians", and putting "all" in quotes.

4. The author lists his honorary doctorates.

Sorry, I won't be going to this conference.

The Whininess Quotient

The Whininess Quotient (or WQ) of a class of students is defined to be the dimensionless quantity

(number of questions asked about how marks are assigned)
---------------------------------------------------------
(number of questions asked about content of the course)

The WQ can be classified as follows:

WQ < 1/2: Your class really cares about the material! Congratulations!

1/2 ≤ WQ < 2: Caution: whiners are beginning to dominate the conversation.

2 ≤ WQ < &infin: It's going to be a long semester.

WQ = ∞: Time to look for another university.

TeXgefühl

German has several words for which there is no English equivalent, and so we've adopted them into our language. Of these, perhaps the most famous is Schadenfreude (literally, something like "harm-joy"), which means "pleasure taken at the misfortune of others".

Another good one is Ohrworm. Literally "ear worm", it refers to a catchy song that you just can't get out of your head.

My colleague Jean-Paul Allouche introduced me to another some time ago: Sprachgefühl. Literally, "language feeling", this word refers to a native speaker's intuitive understanding of the subtleties of his own language. When a French speaker says, "We now prove this by recurrence on n", Jean-Paul looks at me and mouths the word "Sprachgefühl", because he knows that the speaker should have said induction, not recurrence. Similarly, French speakers often say couple instead of pair, and speak about notations instead of notation. (Notation is usually a mass noun in English and hence rarely appears in the plural in mathematics and computer science research -- unless the paper is written by a non-native speaker!) French speakers also often say something like "We denote by |x| the length of the word x", when a native speaker would probably say something like "We let |x| denote the length of the word x".

Based on this, I've coined a new word: TeXgefühl. This means "the intuitive understanding of what is proper usage in the mathematical typesetting language TeX". (There is also the related word, LateXgefühl.) Neither word appears in a Google search, so I really do appear to be the first to say them online.

Both TeX and LaTeX have some subtleties which beginners find difficult to master. These include constructs that improve the appearance of the manuscript, like knowing to put "\ " after any lower-case letter followed by a period that does not end a sentence, as in "Dr.\ Smith"; if you don't do this, tex inserts too much space between "Dr." and "Smith". Another example of TeXgefühl is knowing to use the proper kind of dots in a mathematical expression -- you should write "x_1,   x_2,   \ldots,   x_n" but "x_1   x_2   \cdots   x_n". The subtleties also include knowing that both TeX and LaTeX have reasonably good algorithms for deciding on spacing, so that manuscripts should not be littered everywhere with "\noindent" and \bigskip", and that there is no need to put "\par" or "\\" at the end of every paragraph.

If you have LaTeXgefühl, you know not to hard-code references to theorems, lemmas, etc.. Instead, you use labels inside theorem environments to store the name of the theorem, and then you refer to to the theorem by saying something like Theorem~\ref{thm1}. (The twiddle after "Theorem" is another example of TeXGefühl.)

Those with TeXgefühl know that single-letter functions are always in the italic font, using something like $f(x)$, but that multi-letter functions, such as sin and cos, are nearly always in the roman font, and should be specified using the built-in expressions \sin and \cos. (For some reason, many people also forget this for \gcd.) They know that left-quotes in TeX are different from right-quotes, so that you should write ``quoted expression'' instead of "quoted expression". And they know that page ranges should be specified with two hyphens, like "237--246".

It's hard to attain Sprachgefühl in a foreign language - I will probably never get there in French or German. But with a little work, nearly everyone can attain it in TeX.

Religion Makes Smart People Stupid

The physicist Stephen Weinberg once famously remarked, "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil---that takes religion."

But religion's effects are not limited to making good people do evil; it can also make smart people act stupid.

David Gelernter is an example. He teaches computer science at Yale, and apparently once made some important contributions to parallel programming. Lately, however, he seems to spend most of his time writing essays and books; he's a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

But he's also obsessed with religion. In 1997, he falsely claimed, in an opinion piece in the New York Times, that "the Supreme Court outlawed prayer and Bible reading in the public schools" and refused to issue a correction. (Rather, in Engel v. Vitale, the Court ruled 8-1 that government-sponsored prayer violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Nothing the court said prevents students from praying silently on their own, or reading the Bible during study breaks.) In his anti-AI book The Muse in the Machine, he spends 25 pages on Old Testament commentary. Gelernter once recommended that atheist students, unconstitutionally forced to recite "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, should simply "keep quiet".

And his obsession with religion makes him say some extremely stupid things. Here's an example: the Templeton Foundation, that den of insipid God-talk, recently asked 12 people, "Does the Universe have a purpose?" Here is Gelernter's response:

Consider this question: Do the Earth and mankind have a purpose? If so, then the universe does too, ipso facto.

Here Gelernter commits one of the classic logical fallacies: the fallacy of composition. In the fallacy of composition, one takes a property of a part of a system and extrapolates that property to the system as a whole. For example, "This cup is made of molecules. Molecules are too light to weigh on a kitchen scale. Therefore, this cup is too light to weigh on a kitchen scale."

As if sensing the silliness of his claim, Gelernter justifies his reasoning with ipso facto. He should have said, caveat emptor.

Could the Universe fail to have a purpose, even if the Earth and mankind do? Of course. Consider a pile of trash that has been assembled by the wind. Inside the pile is a torn page from Gelernter's Ph. D. thesis. Does the page have a purpose? Surely. Does the pile of trash itself have a purpose? No. Gelernter, by the fallacy of composition, would have to insist that the pile does, indeed, have a purpose.

Religion makes smart people stupid.

Gelernter goes on to extol the paradise that Judaism and Christianity have wrought: Humans desire goodness; but until the Judeo-Christian revelation this desire was, at least for Western humanity, vague and unformed.

This claim is incoherent at its root because there wasn't even a notion of "Western humanity" until 400 CE, well after the "Judeo-Christian revelation". What we think of as Western civilization is grounded just as much in Hellenistic philosophy and the Enlightenment as it is in Judaism and Christianity.

Religion makes smart people stupid.

Next, Gelernter goes on to display his deep understanding of biology: When we seek goodness and sanctity, we defy nature. The basic rule of Judeo-Christian ethics is, the strong must support the weak. The basic rule of nature is, the strong live and the weak die.

No, that's not the basic rule of nature. Strength, per se, may not gain you an evolutionary advantage; there are many more earthworms than there are bears. And nature is filled with examples of cooperation, which somehow magically arises without the need for "Judeo-Christian ethics". Gelernter should read some of the work of primatologist Frans de Waal, whose work conclusively shows that the virtues of sympathy, empathy, and cooperation exist in the animal world. Gelernter's "basic rule of nature" is a product of his own imagining, not the way the world works.

Religion makes smart people stupid.

But all of Gelernter's factual errors shouldn't distract from the essential inanity of his vision of the Universe: that our goal should be "goodness". I am reminded of a famous cartoon of Charles Schulz: Linus claims that "We are here to help others"; and Lucy responds "What are the others here for?"

A cosmic Purpose that we are here to be good, and nothing more, fails to capture some really essential things about our humanity: our desire to know and learn, to achieve more than others, to go where others haven't. If "goodness" is our sole Purpose, count me out. And even if "goodness" is our sole Purpose, religion has been remarkably unable to achieve it. Whether it is the 19 Muslim hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or Yigal Amir, who justified his assassination of Yitzhak Rabin on religious grounds, or Eric Rudolph, who bombed and killed people because of his Christian faith, religion is more often the problem than the solution.

Religion makes smart people - like David Gelernter - stupid.

Logical Fallacies and Creationists

I've noticed that many creationists seem to be susceptible to logical fallacies. Let's look at two examples:

The fallacy of division is to attribute to individual parts something that is characteristic of a whole. For example, water is wet, so individual atoms of water must be wet, too.

A particularly nice example of this fallacy was recently posted by someone named "Gizmo" commenting on a ridiculous article by British columnist Christopher Booker:


A good illustration of the existence of God is provided by all these wonderful arguments & counter-arguments!

If only people could see that cells & DNA cannot hold an idea or opinion, and cannot have a debate.

We are far more than just flesh & blood!


Gizmo's "reasoning" seems to be

1. People hold ideas and opinions.

2. Suppose that people consist solely of "cells & DNA".

3. Then "cells & DNA" hold ideas and opinions (by the fallacy of division).

4. But "cells & DNA" cannot hold ideas or opinions.

5. Therefore there must exist something in people besides "cells & DNA".

Another logical fallacy popular among creationists is the continuum fallacy. In this fallacy, the writer tries to get a contradiction by positing the absurdity of obtaining a property incrementally. It is sometimes called the fallacy of the heap, because it is illustrated by the following: one grain of sand doesn't form a heap. If a pile of sand is not a heap, then adding a single grain can't make it a heap. Therefore two grains of sand don't form heap, and neither do three, four, etc.

Here is a nice example from the writing of ID's intellectual leader, William Dembski:


Out pop purpose, intelligence, and design from a process that started with no purpose, intelligence, or design. This is magic.


What Dembski fails to grasp is that "purpose", "intelligence", and "design" are not necessarily black-and-white properties. People can be said to be intelligent, but why not chimps? Why not their common ancestor? Why not the ancestor of that creature? Etc. Intelligence is a continuum, and there is no reason to believe it cannot arise slowly through evolution.

Britain Imposes Ridiculous Controls on Visiting Artists and Academics

From the Manifesto Club comes this petition to repeal the UK's recent imposition of ridiculous controls on artists and academics visiting Britain.

25 Random Things About Me

1. When I was about ten years old, I shook the hand of Hubert Humphrey at a political rally in Philadelphia. Immediately afterwards, the crowd pushed me against the platform and I was almost crushed to death.

2. I have some metal screws in my left knee, which were put in after I tore my anterior cruciate ligament playing ultimate frisbee.

3. I have one extremely odd talent: I can usually tell, just by looking at the fonts contained in a single page of a published mathematics paper, what journal the paper appeared in, and I can often estimate the year the paper appeared.

4. I almost died at a Bruce Springsteen concert in Oakland, California in the early 1980's from an asthma attack brought on by people smoking cigarettes.

5. My favorite number is 43.

6. One of my favorite songwriters is someone few people have ever heard of: Michael Peter Smith. He wrote The Dutchman, among other songs. (He is not to be confused with the insipid Christian songwriter Michael W. Smith.)

7. I really dislike jazz, mostly because I don't understand it. Nearly all jazz just sounds like random noise to me.

8. At my first talk at a mathematics conference, Paul Erdős was in the audience. He promptly fell asleep, and I felt very disappointed. Later, I was delighted to receive a request from him for a reprint.

9. I was almost shot in Chicago when I was about seven years old. My father had taken me on a business trip, and we were walking down Michigan Avenue when a man ran past me and knocked me down. When I got up, I turned around and looked into the barrel of a gun, held by a policeman who was chasing a bank robber -- the man who had knocked me down. My father pushed me up against the wall of the building and covered me with his body so I wouldn't get shot. The policeman ran past and captured the bank robber without a shot. We walked past as the robber was sprawled on the sidewalk with a bag of money spread out beside him.

10. The longest race I ever ran was the "20 km de Paris", which I ran in 1982. I finished in about two hours.

11. I broke the middle finger of my right hand playing 16-inch softball -- which is played without a mitt - in Chicago, Illinois in 1984 or so. When I caught the ball that broke my finger, I didn't feel any pain, although I did notice that my finger was bent at a funny angle. It wasn't until I tried to move it back to its normal position that it began to hurt. When I went to the emergency room, the doctor took one look at my finger and said, "Been playing 16-inch softball?" The world's expert on the mallet-finger injury lives in Chicago, where he operates daily on people with this injury. When I had my surgery, I asked the doctor if I would be able to play piano afterwards. He said, "Can you play the piano now?". I guess he had heard the joke before. I had to teach for several weeks with my middle finger in a cast, which delighted my students no end.

12. I speak with a strong Philadelphia accent. I was once walking down the street in Chicago and a car approached me, slowed down, and the driver rolled down the window and asked for directions. I said no more than about ten words, something along the lines of "You go down to the next corner, turn right, and look for the sign" -- at which point the driver said to me, "Oh, you're from Philadelphia!" I said, "Yes, how did you know?" He said, "Well, I'm a linguist."

13. One of my best friends from high school was killed in a fall while studying ayurvedic medicine in India. He would have been a great doctor. I still miss him.

14. My favorite dessert is banana cream pie.

15. I once spent the night in Penn Station in New York City, waiting for the first train from New York back to Philadelphia. There were many strange people there. One man looked at me and went "mmmmm". Then he said it again, a little louder. When I turned to look at him, he shouted "MMMMM!" at me at the top of his lungs.

16. My middle name is "Outlaw".

17. My favorite living mathematician is H. W. Lenstra, Jr. .

18. My last name means "governor" in Hebrew, but I'm not Jewish.

19. My favorite programming language is APL, and I still use it frequently.

20. I think being a university professor is one of the best jobs in the world. But not everyone would enjoy it.

21. I have taken some very long bike rides, including Paris to Bordeaux and Vienna to Warsaw.

22. Two of my favorite movies are The Great Escape and Local Hero.

23. My grandfather, a Russian immigrant, sold "notions" out of a basket on the streets of Philadelphia. He knew very few words of English, and whenever anyone asked him if he had something particular for sale (needle, thread, etc.), he would say "Look in basket!" Once a woman ran up to him and asked frantically, "Have you seen my child?" He replied, "Look in basket!"

24. My favorite animal is the moose.

25. My favorite French singers are Renaud and Georges Brassens.

Google.ca Celebrates Darwin, Google.com? Not So Much

My kids pointed out to me that this morning Google.ca has this logo in honor of Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, but Google.com doesn't. Strange.

Addendum: UK Google and French Google both have the Darwin logo.

Ten Reasons Why Darwin's Birthday is Better than Christmas

Charles Darwin's 200th birthday is today, and 2009 is also the 150th anniversary of the publication of his most famous work, The Origin of Species. In honor of this event, I've put together the following list of reasons why Darwin's birthday is better than Christmas:

10. There's no pressure to buy anyone a gift on Darwin's birthday.

9. Nobody puts a tacky copy of The Mount in Shrewsbury on their front lawn on Darwin's birthday.

8. Understanding evolution doesn't make you feel morally superior to everyone else.

7. Nobody sings "The Little Drummer Boy" on Darwin's birthday.

6. Darwin wasn't conceived by deity rape.

5. Nobody thinks Darwin was right about everything.

4. Supermarkets stay open on Darwin's birthday.

3. You can actually learn something by reading Darwin's writings.

2. The Pope stays quiet on Darwin's birthday.

And the number one reason why Darwin's birthday is better than Christmas:

1. Charles Darwin actually existed and was born on February 12, 1809.

Calgary Bishop is Very Confused

It seems that Calgary bishop Fred Henry is rather confused about the point of the atheist bus ad campaign.

Henry is quoted as saying, "I don't know what the norms Calgary Transit uses to accept advertising, but if the benchmark is that it should be non-offensive, I'm offended."

Well, tough luck. If some narrow-minded religionist can't stand to hear that other people believe differently, that's no reason to censor the ads. The goal of the ads is not to offend believers, but to tell non-believers that they're not alone. But for some overly-sensitive theists, even the idea that someone believes differently is something they can't handle.

Then again, this kind of behavior is typical for Henry, who in the past has claimed that homosexuality "undermine[s] the foundations of the family, the basis of society"; yet has hired Catholic priests who are convicted sex offenders.

Dishonoring Darwin

When it comes to inane and credulous reporting about religion, my local newspaper, the Waterloo Region Record, is unsurpassed. Reporter Mirko Petricevic has never met a religion he doesn't like. His "reporting" consists mostly of taking dictation from believers, without ever challenging them.

This Saturday the Record published a full-page article about the Canadian chapter of "Creation Ministries International", formerly known as Answers in Genesis. Petricevic gives these anti-science crackpots a full page of free publicity, while not asking them a single hard question.

Reading the article, you wouldn't really understand how overwhelming the weight of evidence against the creationist case is. Petricevic gives the scientific point of view short shrift, mentioning only that "Scientists generally believe the world we know formed about 4.5 billion years ago" and "Many scientists accept that dinosaurs lived about 60 million to 225 million years ago and that humans emerged in Africa between 120,000 and 200,000 years ago". Many scientists? How about saying forthrightly that the scientific consensus is supported by the vast, overwhelming majority of paleontologists and anthropologists?

Defenders of science get only four column inches out of 36, and the defense is rather tepid. As if underlining the reporter's bias, the article closes with two pointers to creationist web sites, but not a single pointer to any website countering creationist claims.

With the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth coming up, I'm fully prepared to see additional shoddy journalism from the Record.

Addendum: Compare Petricevic's article with this article in the Toronto Star. Neither article is very good, but at least the Star article talks about what scientists actually believe, as opposed to what creationists believe.

The Day the Music Died

Fifty years ago today, rock pioneers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper (J. P. Richardson), on their way to a concert in Moorhead, Minnesota, were killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa.

I was only one and a half at the time. In 1971, however, Don McLean recorded the engimatic "American Pie", one of the longest songs ever to become a radio hit, and I spent a lot of time trying to decipher the lyrics. It was a real challenge for a teenager with little knowledge of rock music and no Internet to look things up. Eventually I figured out that the song was referring to the death of Buddy Holly:

I can't remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died...


I went down to the sacred store
Where I'd heard the music years before,
But the man there said the music wouldn't play...

"American Pie" also had references to many other figures from rock music, including The Byrds, The Rolling Stones, and John Lennon. This 1993 column from The Straight Dope discusses some of them. "American Pie" led me to learn to play many Don McLean songs on the guitar, including "Castles in the Air", "Vincent", and "Empty Chairs".

In 1978, the amazing Gary Busey starred in "The Buddy Holly Story", a superb re-telling of Buddy Holly's life and music. It ranks as one of my all-time favorite movies.

On the way back from our sabbatical in Tucson in 2002, we stopped in the Buddy Holly museum in Lubbock, Texas -- a must-see destination for any fan of early rock. It contains Buddy Holly's guitars, his school report cards, and has a giant pair of his famous glasses out in front.



Tonight I'm going to put on some Buddy Holly and Don McLean and remember these great musicians, and how they changed my life.

ProfScam - Accurate or Not?

About twenty years ago, when I started teaching at Dartmouth College, a book called ProfScam appeared. Written by a journalist (and now conservative talk show host), Charles J. Sykes, and published by that fountain of evangelical foolishness, Regnery Gateway, ProfScam claimed that American university education was in a terrible state, and professors were the ones to blame.

ProfScam was passed around with astonishment at Dartmouth. Sykes described professors the likes of which we had never seen. Professors, in Sykes' view, were interested in publishing "trivial and inane research in obscure journals that nobody reads". Actually, in my field, publishing trivial results would quickly earn you a reputation for doing so, with the result that no one is likely to read what you write in the future. You won't get tenure, and you won't get promoted.

Professors, Sykes says, "communicate in impenetrable jargon, often to mask the fact that they have nothing to say". Difficult concepts in mathematics and computer science are not always easy to understand, even for experts. The "impenetrable jargon" is usually the result of striving for precision: taking an imprecise, intuitive notion of something (say "information") and trying to make it rigorous. Again, people who have nothing to say won't impress their peers.

Professors, Sykes claims, "are not only indifferent to good teaching, but actively hostile to it". Again, not in my department, where teaching is an essential component of getting tenure, and where good teaching earns you a higher annual evaluation and a commendation in department meetings.

But the main thing that I remember about ProfScam was Sykes' claim about how little time professors spend in their jobs. He claimed that the average professor works only 8-16 hours per week. Again, this didn't agree with my experience at all.

So, this past week, I decided to keep track of the number of hours I worked and what I did. Here is a summary, with times in hours and minutes.

Teaching: 6:22 (includes time walking to class from my office, setting up computer, and talking to students afterwards)

Lecture Preparation: 9:17

Preparing solutions to course assignments: 4:45

Miscellaneous course work: 2:15 (includes meeting with TA's, getting key for projector)

Office hours: 2:00

Departmental meeting: 1:00

Writing recommendation letters for students and faculty: 0:46

Answering e-mail: 6:10

Research paper preparation: 4:00

Research: 1:05

Errata for book: 0:16

Refereeing papers for journals: 2:15

Editing work for two journals: 2:33

Answering questions about the course online and in my office: 1:50

Meeting with graduate students: 2:25

Help another faculty member with grad admission: 0:20


Total time: 47:19


During a non-teaching term, I would have a very different schedule, as much of the time devoted to teaching and talking with students above would be replaced by research time.

Keep in mind that we are paid for 35 hours of work. I'm not complaining - I love my job and am happy to put in the extra hours. But I do object to being labeled as lazy by people like Sykes, who appears to have no idea what professors actually do with their time.

Blowhard of the Month: Freeman Dyson

Most of my nominees for Blowhard of the Month are talentless, pretentious hacks. For example, David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen has won the award twice.

This month, with some reservations, I'm going to nominate a man with serious accomplishments. Unfortunately, serious accomplishments in one field don't prevent you from being a blowhard in others.

Freeman Dyson is a well-known mathematician and physicist. Number theorists know him from his earliest papers on continued fractions and Diophantine approximation, but then he got seduced by theoretical physics and most of his subsequent work was in that field.

In his later years (Dyson is now 85), though, Dyson's output has become increasingly cranky. He's commented favorably about intelligent design; yet when I questioned him via e-mail, he admitted that he had not read any of the work of Michael Behe and William Dembski, the ID movement's most prominent advocates.

Despite having no training in climatology, Dyson has sneered at the consensus of climate scientists about global warming. (The hallmark of the blowhard is to spout off in areas outside his competence.) Actual climate scientists, such as Michael Tobis, begged to disagree. Dyson used a review a review of two books on global warming, to cast doubt on the seriousness of the problem, and accused climate scientists of being contemptuous of those who disagree. Dyson's maunderings were taken apart by the actual climate scientists at RealClimate. An essay in Dyson's book, A Many-Colored Glass, also attacked the global warming consensus; his critique was dismantled by a post at Climate Progress, which didn't hesitate to call Dyson a crackpot.

Dyson even wrote a friendly foreword to Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer's credulous woo-fest, Extraordinary Knowing.

All this is in the past, so why should Dyson get a Blowhard nomination this month? It's because of an article that recently appeared in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Here is an excerpt:

"The mathematicians discovered the central mystery of computability, the conjecture represented by the statement P is not equal to NP. The conjecture asserts that there exist mathematical problems which can be quickly solved in individual cases but cannot be solved by a quick algorithm applicable to all cases. The most famous example of such a problem is the traveling salesman problem, which is to find the shortest route for a salesman visiting a set of cities, knowing the distance between each pair. All the experts believe that the conjecture is true, and that the traveling salesman problem is an example of a problem that is P but not NP. But nobody has even a glimmer of an idea how to prove it."

This is not even close to correct. The distinction in P versus NP has nothing to do with being a problem being "quickly solved in individual cases", but rather, that the answer can easily be verified once a small amount of extra information is provided. As stated, Dyson's example of the traveling salesman problem is not even in NP, since he states it in the form of finding the shortest tour, as opposed to checking the existence of a tour of length less than a given bound. (If I give you a traveling salesman tour, nobody currently knows how to check in polynomial time that it is the shortest one.) And finally, he blows the punchline. The decision version of traveling salesman is known to be in NP, but most people believe it is not in P. Dyson got it backwards.

The mark of the blowhard is not simply to comment on areas outside his competence, but to do so publicly, with the weight of his reputation behind him, while not doing the appropriate background reading and refusing to seek the opinions of actual experts in the field before publishing. In doing so, the blowhard frequently makes mistakes that would be embarrassing even for those equipped with an undergraduate's knowledge of the area. Freeman Dyson is the Blowhard of the Month.

Added January 13 2009: Prof. Dyson has very kindly responded to my e-mail, and concedes his description was wrong and that he was speaking outside his area of expertise.

How Come This Never Happens to Me?

According to this article in the Spokesman-Review, Tony Mantese got an unexpected visitor to his house in Spokane, Washington yesterday.

It was a baby moose that crashed through his basement window.

Despite the fact that we have "Moose Welcome" signs all over our house, we never get this lucky.

How Not to Communicate Mathematics

My colleague David Goss, who is the Editor-in-Chief of one of my favorite journals, the Journal of Number Theory, has started a new and unusual feature: video abstracts for accepted papers.

In a recent message to the NMBRTHRY mailing list, he suggests the following video as a "terrific example of what is possible with this technology". The video is of the renowned number theorist, Alain Connes, discussing his paper, Fun With F₁.



Although I think the use of video abstracts is a clever idea that could be quite useful, I'm afraid I have to differ with David about this particular video. I think the video exhibits many of the problems inherent in trying to communicate advanced mathematics:

1. Assuming too much. What percentage of viewers will even know what A₁, A₂, B₂, and G₂ are? My guess is that, even among number theorists, only a small percentage will know what is being referred to here.

2. Not explaining enough. In the video, Prof. Connes talks about his paper, but never says explicitly what F₁ actually is. (He says it is the field with characteristic 1, but of course there is no such field; we are meant to understand that it is not an actual field, but some sort of degenerate analogue of finite fields.)

3. Not giving any examples. It's often hard to grasp abstract mathematics without a simple example that one can manipulate.

Finally, it doesn't help that Prof. Connes has a very strong French accent that makes much of the video difficult to understand. (He also breaks into French in several sentences, seemingly without noticing.)

Alain Connes, a Fields medallist, is a much better mathematician than I am, but I don't think this video will be at all useful for the vast majority of mathematicians who view it.

A New Blog for Skeptics and Humanists

I am glad to see that the Center for Inquiry has started a new blog, Free Thinking. With contributors such as Derek Araujo, D. J. Grothe, and Joe Nickell, it should prove to be a lively addition to the blogosphere.

Test Your Knowledge of Information Theory

Creationists think information theory poses a serious challenge to modern evolutionary biology -- but that only goes to show that creationists are as ignorant of information theory as they are of biology.

Whenever a creationist brings up this argument, insist that they answer the following five questions. All five questions are based on the Kolmogorov interpretation of information theory. I like this version of information theory because (a) it does not depend on any hypothesized probability distribution (a frequent refuge of scoundrels) (b) the answers about how information can change when a string is changed are unambiguous and agreed upon by all mathematicians, allowing less wiggle room to weasel out of the inevitable conclusions, and (c) it applies to discrete strings of symbols and hence corresponds well with DNA.

All five questions are completely elementary, and I ask these questions in an introduction to the theory of Kolmogorov information for undergraduates at Waterloo. My undergraduates can nearly always answer these questions correctly, but creationists usually cannot.

Q1: Can information be created by gene duplication or polyploidy? More specifically, if x is a string of symbols, is it possible for xx to contain more information than x?

Q2: Can information be created by point mutations? More specifically, if xay is a string of symbols, is it possible that xby contains significantly more information? Here a, b are distinct symbols, and x, y are strings.

Q3: Can information be created by deletion? More specifically, if xyz is a string of symbols, is it possible that xz contains signficantly more information?

Q4: Can information be created by random rearrangement? More specifically, if x is a string of symbols, is it possible that some permutation of x contains significantly more information?

Q5. Can information be created by recombination? More specifically, let x and y be strings of the same length, and let s(x, y) be any single string obtained by "shuffling" x and y together. Here I do not mean what is sometimes called "perfect shuffle", but rather a possibly imperfect shuffle where x and y both appear left-to-right in s(x, y) , but not necessarily contiguously. For example, a perfect shuffle of 0000 and 1111 gives 01010101, and one possible non-perfect shuffle of 0000 and 1111 is 01101100. Can an imperfect shuffle of two strings have more information than the sum of the information in each string?

The answer to each question is "yes". In fact, for questions Q2-Q5, I can even prove that the given transformation can arbitrarily increase the amount of information in the string, in the sense that there exist strings for which the given transformation increases the complexity by an arbitrarily large multiplicative factor. I won't give the proofs here, because that's part of the challenge: ask your creationist to provide a proof for each of Q1-Q5.

Now I asserted that creationists usually cannot answer these questions correctly, and here is some proof.

Q1. In his book No Free Lunch, William Dembski claimed (p. 129) that "there is no more information in two copies of Shakespeare's Hamlet than in a single copy. This is of course patently obvious, and any formal account of information had better agree." Too bad for him that Kolmogorov complexity is a formal account of information theory, and it does not agree.

Q2. Lee Spetner and the odious Ken Ham are fond of claiming that mutations cannot increase information. And this creationist web page flatly claims that "No mutation has yet been found that increased the genetic information." All of them are wrong in the Kolmogorov model of information.

Q4. R. L. Wysong, in his book The Creation-Evolution Controversy, claimed (p. 109) that "random rearrangements in DNA would result in loss of DNA information". Wrong in the Kolmogorov model.

So, the next time you hear these bogus claims, point them to my challenge, and let the weaselling begin!

My Genetic Journey

For my birthday, I got a kit from National Geographic's Genographic Project. For $99, you can submit a cheek swab and have the DNA of either your maternal or paternal lines analyzed. (Women will have to settle for just the maternal line.)

I had my paternal line done this year; next year, maybe I'll have the maternal line done.

The results are in, and they're not a surprise. I'm a member of Haplogroup E3b1, which, the project says, " is most heavily represented in Mediterranean populations. Approximately 10 percent of the men in Spain belong to this haplogroup, as do 12 percent of the men in northern Italy, and 13 percent of the men in central and southern Italy. Roughly 20 percent of the men in Sicily belong to this group. In the Balkans and Greece, between 20 to 30 percent of the men belong to E3b, as do nearly 75 percent of the men in North Africa. The haplogroup is rarely found in India or East Asia. Around 10 percent of all European men trace their descent to this line. For example, in Ireland, 3 to 4 percent of the men belong; in England, 4 to 5 percent; Hungary, 7 percent; and Poland, 8 to 9 percent. Nearly 25 percent of Jewish men belong to this haplogroup."

Here's how my ancestors are believed to have moved around from about 60,000 years ago to about 20,000 years ago.



Of course, since this data reflects only my father's father's father's .... father, it doesn't tell me about most of my ancestors. But it's still oddly moving to contemplate.

Sadly, some Native Americans are opposed to the Genographic Project, because learning about their ancestry "can clash with long-held beliefs".

Why We Never Lied to Our Kids About Santa

There are many things to dislike about Christmas: the bloated newspaper ads, the second-rate music repeated endlessly in shopping malls, the inane evangelical bleating that "Jesus is the reason for the season", and the pressure to conform lest you be labeled a Scrooge, or, even worse, a Grinch.

Of course, there are things to like about Christmas, too. Everybody enjoys giving presents, and some even like receiving them. A break from work is always appreciated -- even if, like me, you just use it to catch up on work left undone -- and a house that smells of roast turkey is one worth coming home to.

But there's one Christmas tradition that my wife and I have never shared: deceiving our kids about the real nature of Santa.

You know -- Santa Claus, Jolly St. Nick -- the man in the red suit who delivers the presents, as immortalized in the classic poem by Clement Clark Moore. (Shhh - don't tell the kids that Moore, a dour, humourless man who owned slaves and opposed abolition, probably stole the poem and its authorship from Henry Livingston.)

Ever year, Christmas offers adults the opportunity to participate in an absurd fraud against your own children: to pretend that Santa Claus is real, that he spookily monitors their behavior, that Santa won't bring them presents if they misbehave, and that he somehow manages to invade a billion houses in one night, aided by eight (or is it nine?) aviating ungulates.

I can already hear the howls of outrage. "It's a harmless fantasy," some will say. But it's not that harmless. Someday your Santa lie will be discovered. If you lied to them about Santa Claus, kids will wonder, what else did you lie to them about?

"It's only a little lie," others will say. But it's not so little. Once you lie about Santa's existence, you have to lie another time when your kids see Santa in two different stores. You have to lie once again when the kids leave Santa cookies before going to bed, and in the morning they're gone. It starts small, but it soon becomes an elaborate deception. We refused to play along.

I have nothing against fantasy stories. As a child, I loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy and read it over and over again. But it's important to know the difference between reality and fantasy. I never believed that Tolkien's Middle Earth was real, and my parents didn't lie to me that it was.

My wife and I never lied to our kids about Santa Claus. We treated him as a mythical figure, just like the the Easter Bunny and the Great Pumpkin.

Our kids don't seem to have been permanently harmed by our choice. Both like reading and telling stories, and they enjoy fantasy and role-playing games. The Narnia books are some of their favorites. They've even been known to wear Santa hats and play Christmas carols on their violins.

"You deprived them of a magical experience," some will say. I don't think so. Our kids know there is magic in the world, because they've looked through a microscope at a cell, and they've looked through a telescope at the rings of Saturn. They know that the tilt of the Earth's axis is the real reason for the season, but they also know the magic of their parents' love.

So no, Virginia -- Santa Claus isn't real. But there's nothing phony about human imagination, fantasy, the telling of tales, the complexity of our universe, the desire for a better world to live in, and our ability to achieve that world if we work hard enough and care about others. We told our kids the truth about those things, too.

How to Handle Obama's Choice of Rick Warren to Give Inauguration Invocation

President-elect Obama has chosen Rick Warren, that clueless hypocrite and gay marriage opponent to deliver the invocation at his inauguration.

Well, I'm one Obama voter who thinks there shouldn't be a religious invocation at all. But if there is going to be one, I don't want a creep like Warren to be the one to deliver it.

Now, there's simply no way that Obama's going to go back on this choice. Once invited, the man stays invited.

But we can still express our displeasure.

So here's my solution: if you're going to the inauguration (and more than a million people may go), when Warren gets up to the podium, boo.

That's right, boo.

Boo loudly and lustfully. Boo more than once. Boo for more than just a few seconds. Drown out Warren's first sentence in a chorus of boos.

Boo Warren because you think he's an anti-gay bigot. Boo him again because he's prejudiced against atheists. Boo him once more because his book is a piece of crap.

At the inauguration, let Warren and Obama know what you think of this appalling choice.

They're So Predictable

When you read a theist's denunciation of atheism, one thing is certain: you are not likely to find any original criticisms. Instead you'll find the usual nonsense:

• Atheists are "dogmatic" and their criticisms are "shrill".
  
• Deep down, atheists really believe in a god.
  
• Atheists have mental problems.
  
• Atheists are hateful.
  
• Atheists have no moral code.
  

etc., etc. For more along these lines, see my account of Tim Kenyon's talk last January.

Now look at this silly opinion piece by Dow Marmur, a "rabbi emeritus" at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto. How many of the atheism myths can you find?

The wonder is that the Toronto Star found this drivel suitable for publication. At least the letters published in response, including one from Larry Moran, uniformly disagree with the good rabbi emeritus.

Hat tip: Ed Barsalou.

Blowhard of the Month: Joseph Epstein

Academia is one of the few places in American society where accepted truths get questioned. Ronald Reagan was a great president? The general public may think so, but historians definitely don't. Religion is a positive force in American society, and believers are more moral than non-believers? Sociologists might beg to differ.

Conservatives, however, like accepted truths -- and the older the truth, the better. This produces a certain kind of academic who yearns for an earlier time and, secretly or not-so-secretly, despises his students. Such a man (and it is nearly always a man) has little or no understanding of any discipline outside his own, and labels his colleagues as "sour" or "depressed" or "overpaid". He is almost always to be found in an English or philosophy department, and distrusts science because its achievements are beyond him and its practitioners are too excited by the joy of learning and discovery to be encapsulated by his thesis.

Allan Bloom was that kind of academic. In his screed, The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom claimed that what American universities really needed was a healthy dose of the Great Books. Reading Plato, Bloom said, would cure the University's ills, while modern science was not to be trusted.

And here's another: Joseph Epstein. In this egregious 2005 piece from the Weekly Standard, he calls university teaching a "racket", describes university working conditions as "complete freedom", and claims academics work "fewer than six months a year". His colleagues are "obviously disappointed, depressed, and generally demoralized". They are "dour". He wonders why no one has done a study on academic unhappiness. Well, someone has.

For example, in 1999 Melanie E. Ward-Warmedinger and Peter J. Sloane studied job satisfaction among Scottish academics. They concluded that "levels of overall job satisfaction among academics are high, though not with pay and promotion". By the standards of the study, 41.5% of respondents found their jobs highly satisfying, while only 5.9% reported being highly dissatisfied.

A 1997 study by Lacy and Sheehan, published in Higher Education in 1997, found that about 60% of academics in Sweden and the US were satisfied with their jobs. Job satisfaction was lower in the UK, Australia, and some other countries.

A 2007 NORC report found that teachers were among the most satisfied of all professions, with 69.2% "very satisfied", compared with 47% for all workers (but the survey report seems to have lumped together all teachers with college and university professors).

Yale Law School surveyed its graduates from 1996 to 2000 and found that academics were the most satisfied of all its graduates, with 75% reporting that they are "very satisfied". (By contrast, only 24% of those working at private law firms said they were "very satisfied".)

Finding these sources took me about half an hour. Why couldn't Epstein find them? Because he is not interested in the truth; he is, in the words of William James, only interested in rearranging his own prejudices. And prejudices abound: when discussing a black female English professor he met at Denison University, he feels it necessary to condescend parenthetically that she was "very nice, by the way".

Epstein's conception of academia seems entirely limited to English. He shows no awareness of the existence of other departments. He maunders on about "feminism, Marxism, and queer theory", but says nothing at all about quantum cryptography or string theory. Joe: there's an exciting world out there in other academic departments; maybe you should make an effort to learn what's going on.

When he says that aging professors "discover the students aren't sufficiently appreciative; the books don't get written; the teaching begins to feel repetitive", he's not describing anything in my experience. My students are absolutely terrific, and I don't waste time thinking about whether I am unappreciated. My books do get written, and so do those of my colleagues. While some teaching is repetitive, it is easy to enliven it by covering new topics. And when he labels academics as jealous of the success of others ("Meanwhile, people who got lots of B's in school seem to be driving around in Mercedes, buying million-dollar apartments, enjoying freedom and prosperity in a manner that strikes the former good students, now professors, as not only unseemly but of a kind a just society surely would never permit.") it gives you some idea of what Epstein himself thinks is valuable.

All this is typical blowhard fodder. But wait, there's more.

In his most recent piece in the Weekly Standard, Epstein criticizes Obama's administration because (wait for it) it has too many people who attended schools like Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, and Yale. Epstein dismisses such people because they "[work] hard in high school and [pile] up lots of activities, and [score] high on [their] SAT's". He seems to have no conception that good students might do well because they actually enjoy learning.

Epstein justifies his criticism by saying that "some of the worst people in the United States have gone to the Harvard or Yale Law Schools: Mr. and Mrs. Eliot Spitzer, Mr. and Mrs. William Clinton, and countless -others [sic]". Whatever you think of Hillary and Bill Clinton, labelling them as "the worst people in the United States" is ridiculous rhetorical excess. (If he gets to mention the Clintons as examples of bad people who attended elite schools, then I get to mention George W. Bush, Pat Robertson, and Phyllis Schlafly. I think I win.) As for Mrs. Spitzer -- that is, Silda Alice Wall Spitzer -- it's not clear why Epstein despises her. Was it her founding of Project Cicero, which works to improve classroom libraries? Or her founding of Children for Children?

Epstein clearly doesn't believe in government by educated, knowledgeable people who attended good schools. What we need, he says, is someone who attended a second-rate religious school like Eureka College: Ronald Reagan. Reagan, Epstein tells us, was one of the two greatest presidents of the 20th century. Reagan, that most conventional of small-minded men, is, in Epstein's view, "without the least trace of conformity or hostage to received opinion or conventional wisdom." I guess that explains why Reagan believed that evolution is a "theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science and is not yet believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was believed. But if it was going to be taught in the schools, then I think that also the biblical theory of creation, which is not a theory but the biblical story of creation, should also be taught." Yup, it sure looks like a Eureka College education made Reagan challenge conventional wisdom there. If this passes for intellectual conservative commentary, it is yet more proof that intellectual conservatism is dead.

Or maybe, what we need is government by second-rate hacks who achieve their positions by being born to achieving fathers. You know, like George Bush and Epstein's employer, William Kristol?

Maybe Epstein thinks academics are "sour" and "unhappy" because he is, I don't know. Maybe Epstein is unhappy because his fellow academics don't put up with the kind of fact-free claptrap he displayed in these two articles, I don't know. But I do know that Joseph Epstein is December's Blowhard of the Month.

Postscript: It might be objected that I addressed job satisfaction, not happiness. So I went to the NORC survey website and, based on the interface at sda.berkeley.edu, I tabulated the happiness of "teachers, college and university" for the years 1972-2006. The cumulative results are: 37.95% report being "very happy"; 54.8% report being "pretty happy", and only 7.3% report being "not too happy". By contrast, for all professions the results are 34.1% report being "very happy", 54.6% report being "pretty happy", and 11.25% report being "not too happy". I conclude that academics are, on the whole, slightly happier than the average person.

Great Guitar Performance

Here's a YouTube video of a terrific guitar performance. José Antonio López plays an arrangement of Fernando Bustamante's guitar solo piece, "Misionera". This piece has it all: dramatic changes in dynamics, some flamenco strumming, sul ponticello, sul tasto, tremolo, and virtuoso runs. Just the thing to warm you up on a cold fall day here in Canada.

I Didn't Get Elected President

The one really surprising fact about the US presidential election is how few people voted for me.

After all, I have international experience, having lived in Canada since 1990. And I know more about economics than John McCain, and more about geography than Sarah Palin. Why not me?

I've been training for the job since 1963. In the photo, that's me in the White House cabinet room, waiting for the rest of the cabinet to assemble for our meeting. I was only 5 at the time, but they still gave me the seat of honor.

[My father knew Myer Feldman, the deputy special counsel to President Kennedy, because they both grew up in Philadelphia, so we got a special tour of the White House on May 11, 1963. Kennedy was away in Massachusetts meeting with the Prime Minister of Canada, so we didn't get to meet him.]

Computer Moose

My younger son had some English homework where he was supposed to find all the errors in the given sentence. I see one error, but what's wrong with the moose?

My Head Cavorts on Dutch TV

Ionica Smeets of the website Wiskundemeisjes (Math Girls) has written to let me know that a Dutch TV program has featured my paper on optimal coin denominations. Probably only of interest if you are fluent in Dutch, or enjoy seeing my head being animated and doing strange things.

Local 9/11 Crackpots at it Again!

Not satisfied with their truly ignoble performance the last time around, our local 9/11 crackpots are holding another event this Thursday:



The misnamed "9/11 Truth" movement seems to be dying out almost everywhere, except in Canada, where it has a very strong strain of US-hatred to draw on. In the US, it seems the crackpots have moved on to "Obama is a Muslim Manchurian candidate, the secret love child of Malcolm X, who will become a dictator, take away everyone's rights, and turn the US into a socialist paradise."

As John Ray points out, "Today, the 9/11 conspiracy movement is a shell of what it once was. The website masquerading as an academic journal, Journal of 9/11 Studies, has dropped from a high of six articles in its August 2006 issue to one in March and its two most recent editions (it's supposed to be updated monthly) were simply skipped over, evidently for lack of a single article."

In case you can't read the poster, you can see a better version here. Global Outlook, the group sponsoring the Waterloo event, is also hosting a lecture series at the University of Toronto that looks just chock-full of all sorts of woo, including a bizarre focus on "natural medicine" and "out-of-place artifacts".

Blowhard of the Month: Wayne Eyre

There is no subject like evolution to bring out the blowhards, and Wayne Eyre is just the latest. Writing in the National Post, Eyre praises David Berlinski's latest screed, The Devil's Delusion.

Berlinski, as you probably know, is the poseur who somehow managed to get his anti-evolutionary blather published in venues such as Commentary. He was also recenty caught inventing bogus claims about John von Neumann's attitude towards evolution. A reliable source? I don't think so.

Nevertheless, Blowhard of the Month Eyre accepts Berlinski's claims about evolution at face value. If Berlinski says that the theory of evolution "makes little sense", Eyre believes it must be so. Somehow, Berlinski -- a man with no biological training -- knows more than actual biologists. Differential reproductive success coupled with a mechanism for genotypic/phenotypic change means evolution is inevitable. Any beginning biology student understands this. What about it is so difficult for Eyre?

If Berlinski says the theory of evolution "is supported by little evidence", it must be so. Never mind the painstaking case assembled by Darwin that convinced biologists a hundred years ago. Never mind the mounds and mounds of evidence assembled since then -- if Eyre has ever cracked open a biology textbook or Endler's Natural Selection in the Wild, I would be amazed. No: philosophy Ph. D. David Berlinski has said it, and so it must be true.

Eyre even resorts to the favorite ploy of the blowhard: if all the experts say I am wrong, that is proof I am right.

The fact that the National Post would publish this idea-free dreck is yet more proof that intellectual conservatism is dead.

Crackpots Advance Yet Another Obama Smear

This election has shown without a doubt that the American Right is totally bereft of any sensible ideas. So far they've produced:

• Obama is a terrorist
  
  
• Obama is not really an American citizen
  
  
• Michelle Obama refers to white people as "whitey"
  
  
• Obama is a communist mole
  
  

and many other similar claims that are jaw-dropping in their utter insanity. One McCain supporter even refused to give Halloween candy to the children of parents who supported Obama.

But this is one of the craziest yet. Now the claim is that Obama is secretly using hypnosis techniques to deceive the public. And what's the evidence? It's that Obama uses the hackneyed phrase, "As I stand here before you" in his speeches. Well, then I guess that McCain supporter Joe Lieberman must be using the same technique. After all, it was pioneered by baseball great Brooks Robinson, who apparently developed it to hypnotize pitchers.

It used to be that Republicans had some legitimate criticisms of the Dems. Now all they have is insanity.

Three Bloggers

On the left, yours truly. In the center, T. Ryan Gregory of Genomicron. On the right, the world's most famous science blogger, P. Z. Myers of Pharyngula. We were all in Guelph for P. Z.'s talk sponsored by CFI and the University of Guelph Skeptics.

The talk was well-attended, as P. Z. and his daughter discussed a variety of different subjects, including science education, the upcoming election, and strategies for fighting the foolishness of creationism and intelligent design.

The highlight for me, however, had to be the fellow who during question period insisted that there had to be something outside scientific inquiry, and gave as his prime example (and no, I am not making this up) the 2004 World Series victory by the Boston Red Sox. He claimed that the Sox's improbable finish, including victory during a total lunar eclipse, was proof of supernatural intervention. The majority of the audience laughed, because I suspect they know what I know: that the 2008 World Series Victory by the Phillies is the ultimate, unquestionable proof of a deity.

Poem Banned from British Exam Syllabus

From the Manifesto Club comes this news of a poem removed by the AQA (the awarding body for A-level exams and GCSE's) from the GCSE (General certificate of secondary education) syllabus in Great Britain.

The poem is entitled "Education for Leisure" and was written by the award-winning poet, Carol Ann Duffy. It can be found here.

Syllabi change all the time, but this case is special, since the decision to remove it was spurred by an exam invigilator, Pat Schofield, who apparently felt the poem glorified knife crime. She is quoted as saying, "I think it is absolutely horrendous - what sort of message is that to give to kids who are reading it as part of their GCSE syllabus?"

What's next, banning The Charge of the Light Brigade because it glorifies suicidal military exploits?

The AQA itself responded with these weasel words: "The decision to withdraw the poem was not taken lightly and only after due consideration of the issues involved. We believe the decision underlines the often difficult balance that exists between encouraging and facilitating young people to think critically about difficult but important topics and the need to do this in a way which is sensitive to social issues and public concern."

It looks like Carol Ann Duffy got the last laugh, however. She's written a response entitled Mrs. Schofield's GCSE. How fitting that Schofield, like Bowdler, will pass into the language as a synonym for small-minded censorship.

Mrs Schofield's GCSE

Carol Ann Duffy

You must prepare your bosom for his knife,

said Portia to Antonio in which

of Shakespeare's Comedies? Who killed his wife,

insane with jealousy? And which Scots witch

knew Something wicked this way comes? Who said

Is this a dagger which I see? Which Tragedy?

Whose blade was drawn which led to Tybalt's death?

To whom did dying Caesar say Et tu? And why?

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark - do you

know what this means? Explain how poetry

pursues the human like the smitten moon

above the weeping, laughing earth; how we

make prayers of it. Nothing will come of nothing:

speak again. Said by which King? You may begin.

McCain Mangles English Again

I wrote about this before. John McCain mangles English almost as much as George Bush. On two occasions he's used the nonexistent word "epitat" instead of "epithet", and now a report from the Boston Globe has him saying "predicate" instead of "precedent".

Guitarist Tony McManus in Elora

One of the nicest things about having a blog is meeting interesting people online, and then in real life. (Of course, you also meet some unpleasant loonies, but that's fodder for another post.)

Last May Recursivity got some fan mail from Tony McManus, a guitarist who lives in nearby Elora, Ontario. Actually, calling him a "guitarist" is somewhat of an understatement; he has been called "the best Celtic guitarist in the world". Tony studied ring theory under Peter Vámos at the University of Exeter before giving up mathematics for music.

Tony was kind enough to leave tickets for me and my family to attend his concert in Elora, and last night we all went. Tony's music was phenomenal, combining an intense virtuosity with a percussive style that left the audience breathless. He predominantly played Celtic tunes, but there was quite a lot of variety (including a Bulgarian piece and two pieces played on a special guitar, designed by a Toronto guitar maker, that sounds like a sitar). The variety of sounds he can get from a guitar made me really envious. In between tunes, Tony told us a lot of great stories about drunk Celtic musicians. We all had a terrific time.

Tony was accompanied by Rolly Brown, a fingerpicker now living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, near where I grew up. In addition to guitar, Rolly is an acupuncturist, a Tai Chi instructor, and he raises Australian dogs. Rolly played some Reverend Gary Davis, Steve Mann, and he closed with a take-off on Julie Gold's "From a Distance" (made famous by Nanci Griffith) written by Jay Mankita in 1992: "From a Dog's Stance". The audience was in stitches.

If you ever get a chance to see Tony McManus or Rolly Brown, take it! Tony gives concerts and workshops all across the world. I guarantee you'll have a great time.

Best Newspaper Headline

Here is my nomination for the best newspaper headline of the year:

Early birds enjoy undead, ducks.

My Favorite Living Mathematician

Ionica Smeets, of the Dutch website Wiskundemeisjes (Math girls), recently asked me to name my favorite living mathematician. Her version of my answer, and some additional text, can be found (in Dutch) here.

Smeets also kindly allowed me to post my response here.

1. Who is your favorite still living mathematician?

I have many favorites, and it's hard to choose: Alf van der Poorten, Carl Pomerance, Michel Mendès France, Donald Knuth, Adi Shamir, Manuel Blum, just to name a few. But if you force me to choose, I think I would have to say that my favorite is the Dutch mathematician Hendrik W. Lenstra, Jr.

2. Why do you admire him/her?

I admire the beauty of his results and his talent for exposition. To list just two of his famous results:

- the Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovász algorithm for lattice basis reduction, which led to a fast algorithm for factoring polynomials with integer coefficients, and has also given us new ways to attack cryptosystems

- the Lenstra elliptic curve factoring algorithm, which allows us to efficiently find small factors of very large numbers

3. What is special about his/her work?

First, Hendrik Lenstra has a really deep understanding of algebra, so intimate that he can see almost instantly how to solve problems that would take others hours or days.

Second, his exposition is always precise. Unlike some other top-flight mathematicians, who are often a little too casual in their proofs, Hendrik doesn't feel it is beneath his dignity to provide details. When you read one of his papers, you get the feeling that every sentence has been chosen with economy and clarity in mind.

Third, Lenstra has a wide variety of interests, and doesn't hesitate to think seriously about things that others might dismiss as 'recreational'. I point in particular to his work on the mathematics of the Dutch artist M. C. Escher and his delightful paper on profinite Fibonacci numbers.

4. Have you ever worked together?

Yes, we wrote one paper together, "Continued fractions and linear recurrences", which appeared in the journal Mathematics of Computation in 1993. To explain what we did, I have to remind your readers about the two subjects of the title.

Every real number has an essentially unique expansion as a continued fraction, that is, an expression of the form x = a+1/(b+1/(c+ ....)), where all the terms, except possibly the first, are positive integers. For example, π = 3+1/(7+1/(15+ 1/(1 + ...))). When you truncate a continued fraction after n terms, you get better and better rational approximations to the original number. For example, one term of the continued fraction for π gives 3, two terms gives 22/7, three terms gives 333/106, four terms gives 355/113, etc. These fractions are called the convergents and are usually written as p_n / q_n .

Another thing your readers probably know about is linear recurrences. A simple example of a linear recurrence is the recurrence that gives the Fibonacci numbers: each term of the Fibonacci sequence is the sum of the two previous. When we generalize this to "each term is a linear combination of a fixed number of previous terms", we get the sequences defined by linear recurrences with constant coefficients.

In our paper we combined these two ideas, and asked, "When are the sequences p_n and q_n linear recurrences?" The answer is not unexpected: this situation can occur if and only if the original number is the root of a quadratic equation, such as the square root of 2, or the golden ratio. However, the proof was unexpectedly hard, and we had to rely on a very deep theorem, the Hadamard quotient theorem of Alf van der Poorten. Later, Andrew Granville found a simpler argument that avoided the need for this difficult theorem.

5. What kind of person is he/she?

Hendrik Lenstra is very much a picture of the traditional European intellectual: always impeccably dressed in a suit and tie, knowledgeable in many fields, and not afraid to show it, sometimes at the expense of those who know less. (I remember once him laughing at me because I did not know whether the root of a word was Latin or Greek.) But he is also extremely kind. Once, when I was hospitalized in the Netherlands following a talk in Leiden, he came to visit me each day in the hospital, bringing me excellent things to read, including The Assault by Dutch author Harry Mulisch.

Hendrik exhibits a playful sense of humor and appreciates a good pun. It was he who once told me about the longest "square" in English: hotshots, which can be written as (hots)² . (The longest squares I know in Dutch are tenten and kerker .) I also remember him quipping that "Shakespeare's plays weren't written by Shakespeare, but by another man with the same name." (It gets more profound the more you think about it!)

Hendrik is a collector of unusual and antiquarian books. He has a fondness for the Greek poet Homer. Knowing my interest in the crank mathematical literature, he once gave me a copy of the crackpot work The Life-Romance of an Algebraist by George Winslow Pierce, a book I still treasure in my personal collection.


6. Is there a nice story you know about him/her?

One of my nicest memories of time spent with Hendrik was our trip to watch the annular solar eclipse visible from southern Ontario on May 10, 1994. An annular eclipse occurs when the Moon comes between the Sun and the Earth, but is farther away than normal, so that all but a tiny outer ring of the Sun is covered. The sky took on a very unusual appearance, and you could see images of the sun in the diffraction patterns made by the leaves on the trees.

Hendrik wrote a paper called "Mathematics and misunderstanding" which I have not been able to read, since it has appeared only in Dutch. But a reviewer of the paper summed up the argument as follows: "It is the author's contention that the true motivation for doing mathematical research is insight into one's own lack of understanding. The hallmark of the true researcher is his or her ability to recognize, in a seemingly wholly satisfactory theory, points which on closer inspection appear to be not fully understood and hence need further clarification."

Hendrik does not like saying in a paper that something "must be true". He once wrote to me as follows:

"I am not as dogmatic about this as X, who used to ask me when I was a student: if something MUST be true, then IS it true? I think the answer is yes, but X apparently had a supernatural fear that if you FORCE something it may become recalcitrant and misbehave."

For some other quotes of Hendrik Lenstra, see here.

I Won't Be Attending Graduation at the University of Alberta Any Time Soon

...and here's why.

A publicly-funded university shouldn't be instructing its students to do something "for the glory of God".

You can write the President of the University of Alberta, Indira V. Samarasekera, to express your displeasure with her university's actions.

City Puzzle

What country's current capital city has a name that can be cyclically shifted some number of letters to get the name of its former capital?

My New Book is Out!

My new book, A Second Course in Formal Languages and Automata Theory, is out!



Here's a web page that tells you a little more about the book. And, if you absolutely have to have your own copy, you can buy it at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.