20 Questions for Donald Knuth

Here is an interesting and good* interview with Donald Knuth, in which he is asked twenty questions and he responds. This is to celebrate the electronic version of The Art of Computer Programming.

* Here I am using the Alf van der Poorten definition of "good". A "good" interview is one in which I am mentioned.

Do Not Approach the Goose

It's springtime here in Canada. Do not approach the goose.

Death is Not Final?

That was the subject of a recent debate between Eben Alexander and Raymond Moody, on the one hand (arguing the affirmative), and Sean Carroll and Steven Novella on the other hand (arguing the negative).

The good guys -- Carroll and Novella -- won handily here. Alexander came off like a charlatan and Moody like a new age babbler. Carroll and Novella came off like the serious scientists they are.

Moody -- described as a philosopher! -- babbled about a "higher dimension" and "higher domain of existence". He believes there are "new ways of thinking" and "new logical principles" that will let us understand the afterlife -- but of course, he doesn't say what these new ways and principles are! And he apparently also believes in ghosts, not just an afterlife. Then again, Alexander believes in "telepathy, precognition, remote viewing, out-of-body experiences, past-life memories in children" as well as "lower spiritual realms".

Alexander egregiously misrepresented the views of Carl Sagan at 1:26:30. He claimed "a very renowned skeptic and scientist, Carl Sagan, admitted that, past-life memories in children, the evidence for that is overwhelming" and justified this with an appeal to The Demon-Haunted World, p. 302. Well, here is what Sagan wrote on that page:

As you can see, Sagan describes the evidence as "at least some, although still dubious, experimental support". That is a very far cry from "overwhelming".

I really have to wonder, however, about the organizers of this debate. Why are they giving Eben Alexander's goofy claims any attention at all, considering that very very serious questions have been raised in Esquire about the truthfulness of his account? It certainly undermines their credibility. And I wonder why neither Carroll nor Novella explicitly brought up the Esquire article at all. Perhaps it was a tactical decision on their part.

Doug Groothuis on Transvestism

I have a not-so-secret sinful pleasure, which is reading Doug Groothuis's blog. The stupidity and lack of self-awareness of this "Ph. D." rarely fail to amuse. Here's his latest piece, which is about his displeasure on seeing a transvestite on TV.

Groothuis is disgusted by it, and finds it a "sinful sickness" that is "a sure sign of cultural decay, bone rot, disintegration and dissipation". But nowhere in his little rant does he explain why it drives him nutty.

Transvestism occurred and occurs in many different cultures; the idea that it is a "sure sign of cultural decay" doesn't seem supported by the historical record. It doesn't appeal to me, but then again, neither do tattoos, or heavy metal, or Christian fundamentalism. All in all, it seems pretty harmless -- certainly more benign than the dangerous nonsense that Groothuis routinely espouses.

I think Groothuis should examine his own feelings more closely. Why, precisely, is he so disgusted by the sight of a drag queen?

The Pierce Expansion Problem

I just posted one of my oldest open math problems to Math Overflow. Let's see if anyone can come up with a new idea for attacking this problem, which I thought of back in 1978, and only a little progress has been made in 36 years.

Just What Russia Needs

The Templeton Foundation, not content with its corrupting influence on American science, is branching out to encourage more theology in Russia.

What wonderful news! If there's anything that Russia needs now, it's more theology. I wonder what we can look forward to. Perhaps a "natural law" justification for putting gays in prison, or for the takeover of Crimea.

Moose and Drones

Any story about moose and drones deserves our attention. From reader D. S. comes this story about Alaska's decision to outlaw moose hunting with drones. That is, the hunting of moose, not moose doing the hunting. Moose actually doing the hunting, with drones, is still legal.

Yet Another Insane Conference Solicitation

Needless to say, I don't work on "polymer and composite materials".

Dear Shallit, J.,
This is Ms. Yin pan from 2014 Global Conference on Polymer and Composite Materials (PCM 2014) which will be held in Ningbo, China on May 27~29.

Considering your research titled On NFAs where all states are final, initial, or both may be relevant to our conference, We cordially invite you to present your new research at our conference. Accepted papers will be published in IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) which is an open access journal indexed by CPCI (Conference Proceedings Citation Index), Scopus, Compendex and Inspec. Authors also have the option to publish papers in special issues organised by PCM2014 in SCI (Thomson Reuters ISI) indexed journals .

Keynote speech titles:
Mechanical and Tribological Aspects of Nanocomposite Coatings
Investigation of Controlled Migration of Anti-fog Additives in Thin Polyolefin Products
Injection of "Liquid Wood": Samples Microstructure and Properties
Some High Coordination Compounds of Lanthanides (III) Derived From Schiff Bases Derived From 4-aminoantipyrine and Their Application.
New Polymer Materials for the Potential of Optical, Electronic and Green Energy Applications.
Highly Efficient Polymer Solar Cells.

We are also calling for reviewers
Reviewer's papers can be published without publication fee in Open Access journals 'Progress in Nanotechnology and Nanomaterials' or 'Advances in Materials Science and Applications'.

Reviewer Benefits:
Free to visit the 2014 China (Ningbo) International Engineering Plastics and Modified Plastics Industry Exhibition
Free to tour around Ningbo after the conference
Enjoy a discount for your conference registration fee
Be a potential candidate of Technical Program Committee for the next PCM conference
If you want to join us as a reviewer, please send us your CV.

Best regards
Ms. Yin Pan
PCM 2014 Organizing Committee
Website: http://www.cpcmconf.org
Email: pcm2014@cpcmconf.org

Scott Vanstone (1947-2014)

Here is a good tribute to the life and career of my late colleague Scott Vanstone, written by my colleagues at the University of Waterloo.

Scott and I only wrote one paper together, on the analysis of a gcd algorithm, back in 1998.

A New Crazy Invitation from Bogus Conference

Dear Shallit, J.,

This is Ms. Linda from the 3rd International Conference on Civil Engineering and Urban Planning (CEUP 2014), which will be held in Wuhan, China, June 20-22.

Considering your research paper titled On Lazy Representations and Sturmian Graphs maybe relevant to our conference. We cordially hope you to share your new research on our conference. There will be a tour around Wuhan after the conference.

If you are interested to be a reviewer of our conference, please send us your CV. Reviwers can publish their papers without publication fee in one Open Access journal Journal of Civil Engineering and Science .

Papers submitted to our conference are more welcomed.

Best regards
Ms. Linda Li
Conference Assistant of CEUP 2014
Website: www.ceupconf.org
Email: ceup2014@ceupconf.org

Why the morons running this conference think that my paper is relevant to "Civil Engineering and Urban Planning" is beyond me.

Margaret Wente Thinks University Professors Should Teach More

It's pretty funny that Margaret Wente thinks that some university professors are overpaid lazy slobs with cushy jobs, and they need to teach more and stop wasting their time on all that useless original research.

Ms. Wente, who has a well-documented history of plagiarizing other people's work, is not exactly a voice of moral authority when it comes to laziness and originality. In a just world, Ms. Wente would no longer have a job as a columnist, let alone a job at Canada's most prestigious newspaper.

I wonder if the real reason behind Ms. Wente's dislike of university professors is that it was a courageous university professor, Carol Wainio, who was largely responsible for exposing Ms. Wente's shoddy journalism.

P.S. Margaret "It's Easier to Repeat Myself Than Come Up With Something New" Wente made the same points back in 2009.

Mathematics and Beer

MG: If you pour root beer in a square glass, does it turn into beer?

JOS: Not if it's your fourth root beer.

Creationist Delusions of Persecution

The creationist website, Uncommon Descent, looks more and more like a parody.

A nontrivial fraction of their postings are currently devoted to imagined persecution of their nutty beliefs. Take this one, for example, where faux journalist Denyse O'Leary discusses the recent discovery of a large virus.

Denyse, as usual, is a bit late to the party. The usual science outlets reported on this three days before Denyse, and other giant viruses have been around for at least ten years. Denyse doesn't do any actual journalism; she just riffs off the work of real journalists.

Denyse uses it as an opportunity to create an imaginary persecution scenario, suggesting that evolutionary biologists would say "None of these creationists should be allowed to hold a job in science". Nobody's said anything even remotely like this; the work was done by non-creationist biologists, was published in a prestigious place to great fanfare, and the discovery merited an article in Nature.

Neither does the giant virus discovery invalidate common descent as a useful theory. (In exactly the same way, relativity doesn't invalidate the usefulness of classical mechanics.) The real state of affairs with regard to common descent is now known, and has been known for a while, to be more complicated than initially thought, with complications arising from horizontal transfer, among other mechanisms. Any honest reporter realizes this.

It's creationists, not evolutionary biologists, who treat Darwin like some sort of demigod that had to be right about everything. The rest of us have known for a long time that Darwin was wrong about many things. When was the last time you heard someone speaking about gemmules as particles of inheritance?

Nobody in the evolutionary biology camp says "believe them and shut up"; Denyse seems to think that biologists are like the Catholic Church. This is just a bizarre creationist persecution fantasy. As for "tenured prof[s]", O'Leary's favorite target, just who exactly do you think discovered the giant virus? Hint: it wasn't Denyse, Steven Meyer, or any other of her non-tenured creationist friends.

You can't make up this kind of stupidity.

Bogus Editors for Bogus Journals?

I've been looking some more at the journals published by CS Canada, the inexplicably-named group that runs the "Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture" and the "Canadian Research and Development Centre of Sciences and Cultures".

I contacted a professor listed as a "deputy editor" of

• Studies in Sociology of Science
• Management Science and Engineering
• Canadian Social Science

and editor of Studies in Literature and Language. She told me that she has "no editorial responsibilities for any of those journals" and remarked, "How strange!".

It's not strange at all; this is typical behavior for bogus journals. I notice that the editor-in-chief of the journals listed above are "Prof. William Kent", "Shawn Barnes", and "Alvin Linden". No legit institutional affiliation is given for any of them and I have not been able to find anything about them online. Do they even exist? I doubt it very much.

Another Dubious Journal Solicitation

Reader J. B. passes on the following solicitation from the dubious Progress in Applied Mathematics:

Dear Dr. B., J.

I read your article of "[title redacted]". And I know that you are an expert in this area.

I am Anthea L. Stock, the editor of Progress in Applied Mathematics (PAM) which is a peer-reviewed, open access journal, published by Canadian Research & Development Center of Sciences and Cultures. It is a journal focuses on the fields of Mathematics, geometry, mathematical physics, statistics, mathematical biology, dynamical systems, financial mathematics, optimization, algorithms, numeric analysis, symbolic computation, mathematical model, statistical software, topology, computer, operational research, Riemannian geometry, differential manifold, math software.

Many respected abstracting/indexing services covered our journals like:

AMICUS of Canada; ProQuest; Gale; EBSCO Publishing; DOAJ; Ulrich’s; PKP Open Archives Harvester; Open Access; Open J-gate; Ulrich's Periodicals Directory; CNKI; Google Scholar

We are calling for submission of papers for the coming issue of January 2014. Please send the manuscript to: pam@cscanada.net. Or you could find the journal’s profile and submit manuscripts online at: http://www.cscanada.net/index.php/pam/author/submit/1.

If you have any questions, please contact with us at: pam@cscanada.org; pam@cscanada.net

It is appreciated if you could share this information with your colleagues and associates. Thank you.

We are recruiting reviewers for the journal. Please find further details at: http://cscanada.net/index.php/pam

Best regards,

Anthea L. Stock| Editor
Progress in Applied Mathematics
ISSN 1925-251X [Print]; ISSN 1925-2528 [Online]
Canadian Research & Development Center of Sciences and Cultures
Address: 758, 77e AV, Laval, Quebec, H7V 4A8, Canada
Http://www.cscanada.org; Http://www.cscanada.net
E-mail: pam@cscanada.org; pam@cscanada.net; caooc@hotmail.com

All the warning signals for this journal are there: preposterously wide coverage; ungrammatical solicitation; sponsorship by the clunky-named "Canadian Research & Development Center of Sciences and Cultures" (which itself has a ungrammatical description and is apparently based in some apartment building), etc.

When Moose Attack

There's nothing better than an annoyed moose. Beware!

What to Do With a Photographer that Doesn't Understand Evolution? Why, Publish Him, of Course!

I'm always amused by the creationist site, Uncommon Descent. They employ all the usual creationist tactics, including the elevation of nonentities to the status of experts, and all the usual crackpot tactics, like attacking the most celebrated theories and scientists.

Here is a good example, where we are treated to the vapid analysis of one Laszlo Bencze. Bencze seems to think that evolution should be "laden with intimidating mathematical formulas and at least as difficult to master as Newton’s Mechanics or Einsteins [sic] Relativity", but it is not. And therefore it's wrong. Or something.

Who is Laszlo Bencze? As far as I can see, the guy's just some wedding photographer who lives in Sacramento. No evidence that I can see that he's ever studied science at an advanced level, let alone biology or evolution or mathematics.

Anyway, Bencze is wrong. If you learn more about evolution than you can find in creationist cartoon books, you know right away that the mathematics of evolution is well-studied and taught in biology classes at nearly every university. For example, there's Haldane's celebrated calculation of the probability of fixation of a new beneficial allele A in a large population; it's about 2s, where s is the selective advantage of A. How much do you want to bet that Bencze doesn't know this classic result from 1927 (!), let alone be able to derive it? Can he state and prove the Hardy-Weinberg theorem? It's not that hard! Does he know the basics of coalescent theory? Very, very doubtful.

Yup, Bencze's just another in a parade of ignorant anti-evolution blowhards. That's why it's so funny to see him promoted by the intelligent designoids as an expert with a point of view worth publishing.

Twin-Prime Problem and Goldbach Conjecture Solved?

I was tipped off about this by a reporter at our local newspaper: a local man, James P. Moore, is apparently claiming a solution to the twin-prime problem and the Goldbach conjecture. I haven't read his work. However, the manner in which the claim is being made raises real questions about its correctness.

Moore is apparently not a mathematician by training. Here it is stated that he has a systems design engineering degree from Waterloo.

According to MathSciNet, the database that attempts to review every mathematical publication of interest, Moore has not published any mathematical papers, at least under the names "James P. Moore" or "J. P. Moore". The chances that an amateur without previous mathematical publications could solve these important and famous problems are, for all practical purposes, zero. (Prior to his celebrated recent success on the twin-prime problem, Yitang Zhang, a professional mathematician, had two published papers in good journals.)

Instead of placing his claimed solution on the arxiv, or publishing it in a journal -- as would be customary in such a case -- Moore is selling his solutions online in three different books for $27.05 each. One book is entitled either "The Proof of the Primes" or "The Proof of Primes", a title that doesn't make much sense mathematically.

Moore apparently is working with a public-relations firm to get the news out about his work. You can listen to an interview with him here; it is one of the most painful interviews I have ever heard, largely because the interviewer seems to have no comprehension at all about what the solution might consist of -- she keeps referring inexplicably to DNA -- and seeks to fill the time by repeating the same information over and over.

Moore gave a talk yesterday at the University of Waterloo, but I didn't attend. It wasn't sponsored by the Pure Mathematics department, though. As far as I can see, his public-relations firm hired the room. Again, that's not a good sign.

Here his PR firm suggests that his solution consists of "developing a formula capable of generating every prime number progressively and perfectly". This would not be of much interest, since such formulas are already known. The page also claims that such a method would "create stronger security systems". This is a common misunderstanding; encryption systems such as RSA, while they use prime numbers, would essentially be unaffected by faster ways to generate them. RSA's security would be affected by faster ways to factor products of two or more primes, which is a very different and essentially unrelated problem.

If amateurs think they have solved a famous problem, probably the best route to fame and fortune is to post the paper to a preprint archive. If you can't get an endorser for the arxiv, there's always vixra. Believe me, if your solution is correct, or even close to correct, you'll be acclaimed rather quickly. Hiring public-relations firms and selling your solution in books pretty much guarantees you will be ignored.

Addendum: here Mr. Moore claims, about the primes, that "there is no equation to define them". This is certainly false. They can be defined by a number of different equations; for example, see the talk by my colleague Eric Rowland here.

Another addendum, February 23 2014: Someone showed me a copy of Moore's claimed "proof" of Goldbach's conjecture. Needless to say, it is not correct, and introduces no new ideas at all.

Poor Conrad Black

Poor Conrad Black!

Let us all weep for this disgraced Canadian hero, who has received "many good wishes" and claims "for the first time, at any stage of this long and relentless persecution, I have not received a single negative message."

(Should you wish to disabuse Mr. Black of the notion that everyone stands behind him, negative messages can be sent to cbletters@gmail.com.)

Mr. Black says that "Honours do not make a man, any more than the withdrawal of honours unmakes one." But being convicted of mail fraud and obstruction of justice certainly unmake a man. Then again, that same man has a history of dishonest behavior, starting with selling stolen exam papers when he was a student at Upper Canada College.

Mr. Black boasts of supporting letters written by Henry Kissinger. If one wants to rehabilitate one's reputation, I can think of no one better than Kissinger, whose sterling reputation has never been besmirched. Just like Mr. Black's.

I Get Email

Just the latest of many crackpot e-mail messages I get:

I came across your uwaterloo page and had read the write-up blatantly attacking creationist research.
 
What YOU fail to see, is that you promote the Smithsonian, a religious institution. You might want to check
the Jesuit IHS logo against that of the Smithsonian. And you might want to check the fact that natural science comes from religion.
The pure ignorance of your position is already noted as you cannot provide one shred of evidence for either evolution, big bang, dark matter or the heliocentric universe
and yet stand by science as the be-all and end-all. Where were you when the earth was created and man put upon it? Where is your research in understanding everything
you reference within the sciences is actually mathematical models, a knowledge fantasy and does not subscribe to even the definition of true science....yet more or less falls
within the realm of an oxymoron, science-fiction. I am not sure you even understand what science is. It's also quite funny that you subscribe to mysticism that has been created by priests, such as evolutionary science. Professing yourself to be wise, you have become a fool. 

This guy was not honest enough to sign his real name. Big surprise.