Well, I Guess I Won't Be Visiting Saudi Arabia Anytime Soon

I don't go where I'm not wanted.

Another Non-Biologist Thinks He Can Teach Biologists About Evolution

It really cracks me up how religious people with no biology training think they have some special insight into evolution that the people who actually study biology somehow haven't figured out.

Granville Sewell, William Dembski, Barry Arrington --- the list goes on and on. And here's another name to add to the list: Steve Laufmann. It shouldn't surprise you that this dolt is published by the Discovery Institute, a group whose fundamental purpose is to confuse the public about evolution.

Laufmann, who claims to be an expert in "information systems", but cannot seem to manage to complete his own web page (check out all the "lorem ipsums" under "The Blog"), has absolutely nothing new to say. It's all the usual claims without evidence, like "Random events cannot create complex information, except in two circumstances: (a) there is some predefined notion of a desirable outcome, and (b) any "positive gains" toward that outcome are protected from random degradation through some external mechanism. Both of these special circumstances require intention, which the physical laws cannot offer." Laufmann clearly doesn't know a damn thing about information, since random events are, in fact, essentially the only source of information, and it doesn't require anything like "a predefined notion of a desirable outcome".

Oh, and if you had any doubts that Laufmann's doubts are based in religion, check out this page, where he is described as a "long-time ministry leader".

Lobby of the Philadelphia Record, early 1940's

Here's a postcard showing the lobby of the Philadelphia Record newspaper building. The card seems to be postmarked 1945, which suggests this photo is from the time that my parents worked there as newspaper reporters. (The couple at the right center even looks a little like them!)

The building still stands, at 317 N. Broad Street, where it is now high-end apartments.

It seems like a beautiful lobby. I wish I could have seen it, and I wish there were a much higher resolution version of this photo. (This one appears to be a colorized black-and-white photo.)

You'll Know Them By Their Love ... and By Their Honesty

From Ed Brayton, we see this appalling video of how "loving" Christians yell at a lesbian couple getting a marriage license in Kentucky.

Yup, you'll know them by their love.

And, in related news, Barry Arrington loves to label those who disagree with him as liars, while providing this gem: "The death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of the most reliably documented events in all of human history."

Yup, more reliably documented than the Battle of Waterloo, the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, the assassination of Lincoln, the invasion of Normandy, the sinking of the Titanic, ...

You'll know them by their honesty.

Robert Marks II: Still Refusing to Reply One Year Later

Wow, has it been a year already? A year ago, I wrote to the illustrious Robert Marks II, asking him about a claim he made: "we all agree that a picture of Mount Rushmore with the busts of four US Presidents contains more information than a picture of Mount Fuji".

No reply.

No reply after three months.

Or six months. (Just an auto-reply.)

Isn't this just typical of creationists? Make wild claims and refuse to back them up when challenged.

They Offer Nothing But Lies, Continued

Here we have the amusing spectacle of Denyse O'Leary offering nothing truthful at all, with regard to speciation.

What is a "species" anyway? If you listen to Darwinblather, you’d never think to ask.

Right you are, Denyse! If evolutionary biologists studied speciation, there would be articles and books about it in the scientific literature, written by prominent Darwinists (and even some philosophers!). But of course, there are no such things. (Don't follow those links, Denyse!)

In short, no one knows.

In short, Denyse doesn't know. I can guarantee she never read Coyne's book.

Look, I (O’Leary for News) am not saying speciation doesn’t occur. I guess so, but don’t really care.

What Denyse O'Leary doesn't know could fill several large stadiums.

James Barham, A Very Confused Philosopher

As you know, I'm very skeptical about the ability of most philosophers to say anything interesting (or even true) about science. Here is yet another example of bad philosophy, this time from James Barham.

Really, I wish anyone who wants to prattle on and on about the deficiencies of Darwinism would take, at the very least, undergraduate courses on the theory of computation and artificial intelligence. It would save a lot of electrons being wasted the way Barham does.

It starts badly, with a claim that the "Darwinian consensus" (whatever that means) is "gradual[ly] crumbling" and that the "official explanation" (no kidding -- like a 9/11 truther, he really says that) "of the nature of living things---and therefore of human beings---that we've all been led to believe in for the past 60 or 70 years turns out to be dead wrong in some essential respects."

Yeah, yeah. We've heard that for more than a hundred years; it's what Glenn Morton called the "longest-running falsehood in creationism".

"The machine metaphor was a mistake---organisms are not machines, they are intelligent agents."

This is precisely the kind of silliness that a good course on the theory of computation could avoid. Why does he think that a machine cannot be an "intelligent agent"?

"For one thing, it [Darwinism] meant that all purpose is an illusion, even in ourselves, which is absurd. We know that is not true from the direct evidence of our own experience."

No, the biological theory of evolution does not mean that "all purpose is an illusion". Trouble results from using the vague word "purpose", which means many things to different people. It is not a concept that has a precise scientific definition (what are the units of "purpose"?), although Barham tries to provide one: he says, "Purpose is the idea that something happens, not because it must tout court, according to physical law, but rather because it must conditionally, in order for something else to happen." Well, that's not what most people mean by purpose, but even so, practically any computer program would exhibit purpose under Barham's definition. And nature is filled with objects that can serve as a basis for computation, including DNA and sandpiles. There is simply no logical barrier at all to computing devices arising through natural processes.

There are a few philosophers who have something interesting to say about evolution, but Barham is not one of them.

A Silly Paper in a Silly Journal

The International Journal of Mathematics Research, also known as IJMR, is officially a Silly Journal™. Here's why:

Reason #1: The journal's URL, as provided on some papers they have published, is given incorrectly: it says "http://www.ripublication.com/ijmr.htm", but the correct URL is "http://www.ripublication.com/irph/ijmr.htm". You have to be particularly incompetent to run a journal which cannot publish its own URL correctly.

Reason #2: The journal's listing of their editorial board contains spelling errors, lists at least one editor twice, and contains not a single person in the countries where mathematics research is strongest (e.g., USA, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, UK, Russia, Italy, Australia). Also, no e-mail for any of the editors is given.

Reason #3: Recently they published this paper: Ali Abtan, "A New Theorem for the Prime Counting Function in Number Theory", in Volume 7 (2015). Containing ungrammatical and false claims like "So till now their is no formula for the prime counting function π(x) as you see from the end of 18th century till now" (completely ignoring the work of Meissel, Lehmer, Lagarias, Miller, Odlyzko, and others), this paper is a mess. Understanding why the paper is silly is a bit more involved, so I'll start by explaining one aspect of what makes a paper good.

A general principle about theorems is that they should be (within reason) as general as possible. For example, if you prove that if some property of a specific set S holds, then before publishing it you should think about what more general property S has that makes it possible to get the result. Here's a specific example: recently I saw a reddit post that pointed out that every prime p greater than or equal to 5 can be expressed as p = (24n+1)^½, for some integer n. This is totally uninteresting, but the reason why it's uninteresting is that this property has basically nothing to do with primes at all! Rather, it is trivial fact that every number q that is relatively prime to 6 has the property that q² ≡ 1 (mod 24), a fact that can instantly be verified by computing (6k+1)² and (6k+5)² and observing that k(k+1) is always even. Since every prime greater than or equal to 5 is relatively prime to 6, the result follows immediately. But, I emphasize again, the result is really about numbers relatively prime to 6, not primes. It captures basically nothing interesting about primes at all.

Now, in Abtan's paper, what is the silliness? He states the following formula for the prime-counting function π(x), which is the number of primes ≤ x. (For example, π(10) = 4.)

π(x) = (Σ_2≤p≤x p + Σ_2≤n<x π(n))/X.

Now, as stated, this formula contains two silly features. First, X is undefined; it should be x. (Where were the editors or referees for this paper?!?) Second, the formula is manifestly incorrect when x is not an integer (for example, try x = 2.5). So we shouldn't use x, because among mathematicians, x usually implies a real-valued variable. Let's use N instead.

With these two corrections, the formula becomes correct:

π(N) = (Σ_2≤p≤N p + Σ_2≤n<N π(n))/N for integers N ≥ 1.

Let's overlook the fact that the formula is completely useless for computing prime numbers or π(N), and instead focus on the formula itself. Remember the principle: try to figure out the class of sequences for which such a formula might hold. Well, let's try some interesting but completely unrelated sequence, like the squares. Instead of π(N), we might define sqrt(N), the number of positive integer squares ≤ N. Does a similar formula hold?

Yes! In fact, more or less exactly the same formula holds:

sqrt(N) = (Σ_1≤i²≤N i² + Σ_1≤n<N sqrt(n))/N for integers N ≥ 1.

How can this be? Well, the obvious answer is that Abtan's formula (for which he gave a long and complicated induction proof) has nothing to do with primes at all!

Let us generalize Abtan's formula and give a very, very simple proof of it. (It is often the case that if you generalize a theorem properly, it becomes easier to prove than a specific case might be.)

To generalize it, let S be any set of positive integers. S could be the prime numbers, or the positive square integers, or anything else. Let π_S(n) denote the number of elements of S that are ≤ n. Then we claim that

π_S(N) = (Σ_{1≤s≤N and s ∈ S} s   +   Σ_1≤n<N π_S(n))/N for integers N ≥ 1.

This has an easy proof by diagram! To see it, draw a histogram of the function π_S(n) from n = 1 to N. For example, for the primes and N = 12, this would look like

The total number of red boxes is clearly Σ_1≤n≤N π_S(n).

Now consider the rectangle bounded by the lines x = 0, x = N, y = 0, and y = π_S(N):

The total number of boxes here is clearly Nπ_S(N).

How about the boxes in the rectangle which are not colored in red? Well, the top row is all blank boxes until the first prime hit in this row, which is 11. So there are 10 boxes. In the next row, there are all blanks until the first prime hit, which is 7. So there are 6 boxes. And so forth. So the total number of white boxes is Σ_2≤p≤N (p - 1) (or, more generally, Σ_{1≤s≤N and s ∈ S} (s - 1).) Thus we have proved

Nπ_S(N) = Σ_{1≤s≤N and s ∈ S} (s - 1)   +   Σ_1≤n≤N π_S(n).

This is the nice version of Abtan's formula. To get his formula, just add π_S(N) to the left sum and subtract it from the right, then divide by N, to get

π_S(N) = (Σ_{1≤s≤N and s ∈ S} s   +   Σ_1≤n<N π_S(n))/N.

So we see that Abtan's formula has nothing to do with primes at all, really.

Any competent referee would have seen this immediately. Congratulations, IJMR. You're officially a Silly Journal™.

Old Issues of APL News

I digitized these a long time ago, but I can't find any record that I posted about it! So here are some old issues of APL News, a newsletter about the computer language APL published from 1978 to 1982 by Ken Iverson. I contributed a little to it.

We Escaped from Adventure Room!

For my older son's 21st birthday, four of us went to Adventure Rooms in Kitchener. (There's also one in Niagara Falls.) This is a game for 2 to 7 players where you're locked in a room and have to use the clues present to escape within one hour.

You have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, so I can't say much about it, other than it reminded me a little of one of the very few modern computer games I've played, "Myst". There were lots of red herrings and false paths to follow, more than I would have expected.

If you enjoy problem-solving, you might enjoy this; if you enjoy computer games (I don't, particularly), probably even more. Only about 20% of all teams competing manage to escape. We got out with about 1 minute and 50 seconds to spare. Everybody contributed significantly to the solution; we would not have gotten out if any one of us had not been there, but we also had a bit of luck.

This was a lot of fun, and our team size of four was close to optimal. Fewer, and you just don't have enough bodies to follow all the possible routes. Larger, and the number of people make it hard to coordinate and put together disparate clues.

If I had one suggestion to the owners, it would be to discard the very chintzy little reward you get for solving the puzzle, and replace it with something like a $5 gift card good for one of their alternate adventures.

No Moose in My Bike Lanes

The main problem with living in Kitchener, Ontario, is that this never happens.

Yield for Pedestrians...and Moose!

We're not the only ones using the bike lanes sometimes...

Posted by The Alaska Life on Wednesday, February 12, 2014

"Good Fences" - A Math Puzzle App by Craig Kaplan

My colleague Craig Kaplan (who also designed the cover of one of my books) has released a new app called "Good Fences" on the Apple store. It's a geometric puzzle game based on tiling by shapes. Given a shape, you have to drag copies of it to completely surround it. There are also some variations.

It looks like fun! Give it a try.

Rafee Kamouna Owes Me $500 Today - But Will He Pay?

Rafee Kamouna, who has been claiming for years that he has proved something important about the P versus NP problem, bet me two years ago that his marvelous work would appear in the Journal of the ACM by today.

Needless to say, it hasn't.

By the terms of our bet, I was to pay him $1000 if it appeared, whereas he only has to pay me $500 because it hasn't.

Rafee, I'm prepared to accept my money now. You can contact me for payment instructions.

Chan Lawsuit Illustrates Why Canadian Libel Law Needs Reform

The sight of a Canadian politician suing a Canadian newspaper and a Canadian professor for libel should cause anyone who favors lively debate on current issues to think something is terribly, terribly wrong.

And Michael Chan, MPP for Markham-Unionville and Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and International Trade, isn't the first politician to use libel to try to shut down criticism. Brian Mulroney famously threatened a suit against the Canadian government itself. Unbelievably, he actually got the government to back down and pay him a $2 million settlement.

The US has the right approach here. The bar for public figures like Chan and Mulroney should be set extremely high. Otherwise, we get what we have in Canada: libel chill makes investigative journalists too scared to take on powerful figures.

How Atheists Find Meaning

Read this excellent Buzzfeed article about how various atheists find meaning in their lives without a god.

Then read this this comment by Barry Arrington on the article. Arrington does nothing but sneer, saying the atheists in the article exhibit "gobsmacking stupidity", have a "lack of intellectual honesty" and "[spout] self-contradicting pseudo-profundities".

But he doesn't give a single example of what he thinks is wrong!

On a more personal note, who would you rather have lunch with? Arrington, or the genuine humans depicted in Buzzfeed, full of modesty, joy, sorrow, intellectual curiosity, and love?

J. P. Moreland Thinks He Understands the Brain

I absolutely love this video by J. P. Moreland, a fourth-rate philosopher and ID advocate who teaches at a fifth-rate Bible college (Biola University, which gets its name from "Bible Institute of Los Angeles", the more honest name they used for many years).

I can't think of a better example of the intellectual bankruptcy of the kind of "Christian thought" that gave us both intelligent design and the "evolutionary argument against naturalism". Biola also hosted the conference that resulted in Mere Creation, a volume that included one of the most laughable mathematical articles ever, written by (you guessed it) David Berlinski.

As you watch the video, keep in mind that "Biola holds to the key doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, the idea that the original writings of the Bible were without error with regard to both theological and non-theological matters. As a final guarantee of strict adherence to its theological worldview, the university requires every faculty member, when first hired and again upon application for tenure, to submit their understanding of and complete agreement with each item of the doctrinal and teaching statements to the Talbot School of Theology for evaluation." [wikipedia]

Moreland seems to think that philosophy, and specifically Christian philosophy, holds the key to understanding the mind.

In this short video, how many misunderstandings and silly assertions can you find? Here is a brief list:

1. incoherence and untestability of his definition of "soul": "an immaterial substance that contains consciousness and animates the body"
2. no definition of "consciousness"
3. "consciousness actually resides in the brain" (all those sensory organs we have are, I suppose, completely irrelevant to consciousness)
4. "Darwin admitted when he came up with his theory of evolution that it could not explain the origin of mind" (as if modern evolutionary theory depends on what Darwin thought in the 1800's)
5. "the problem for the atheist is how you can get mind from matter" (as if computers or brains are not made of matter)
6. "if I'm just a body and a brain, then probably at the end of the day drugs ... and things of that sort will be the ultimate tools to help change people" (as if, for example, if you want to reprogram a computer, then offering new data to that computer can have no effect at all on that computer's behavior)
7. "consciousness is immaterial"
8. "if you start with matter from the Big Bang, and all you do is rearrange it according to the laws of chemistry and physics, you're not going to be able to get a conscious rabbit out of that material hat" (as if bodies and brains are not rearrangements of matter and energy)

At the end, Moreland reveals his real agenda. He's not really interested in understanding the brain at all. What he wants is to "generate ideas that will be useful to the spread of the Gospel and the promotion of the kingdom of god". When that's the real goal, it's not surprising at all that the ideas generated are so completely incoherent and uninformed by science.

ID Supporters Interviewed; Count the Misrepresentations

Oh, look, a religious group interviews two ID supporters while claiming to examine the biological theory of evolution. No need, of course, to interview a real biologist.

Here are some brief comments:

1. "evidences": why is it that creationists nearly always use "evidence" in the plural, while almost everyone else considers it a mass noun?
2. McLatchie: "information uniformly traces its source back to an intelligent cause"; "We know in all realms of experience of cause and effect that information uniformly traces its source back to an intelligent cause"; "specified complexity uniformly comes from an intelligent source". McLatchie shows that he is a good little parrot who is able to read Stephen Meyer and regurgitate him practically word-for-word. Don't let the fact that all these claims are lies deter you, Jonathan!
3. Bridges: "We know that the Darwinian mechanism are [sic] not capable of building this type of information and the only known source is something like conscious activity." Another lie. In fact, we know that evolutionary algorithms can produce extremely complicated designs. Creationists always sidestep this objection; you can't even find a reference to Sims in any of the major ID books.
4. McLatchie: "or if you could demonstrate that some mechanism other than intelligent design could explain specified complexity then that again would destroy the design inference. So intelligent design is falsifiable". To the extent that's true, it's been falsified. Of course, "specified complexity" is a charade, as Elsberry and I have shown. But even using the bogus definitions of Dembski, it's easy to generate specified complexity (as we also showed in that paper).
5. McLatchie: "intelligent design predicts that the ratio of functional to non-functional sequences should be astronomically small", "whereas the neo-Darwinian scenario predicts that it should there should be a relative abundance of stable and functional protein folds within combinatorial space". Of course, this is false. Intelligent design doesn't make any such prediction, because the intelligent designer is not constrained. He could make functional sequences abundant or rare, as he chose.
6. Bridges: "if 99% of the relevant data set [i.e., the fossil record] is missing how could a theory dealing with that data set purport to give us a literally true story of the type of organisms that lived in the past and their potential genealogical relationships?". Well, Bridges just shows that he knows nothing about science. 99% of most of the relevant data sets in geology, biology, astrophysics, and other fields are not available for us to study directly; yet we still have accurate theories about orogeny, stellar evolution, and so forth. Heck, 99% of the data about my grandparents' emigration to the US is missing, but I can still give you a literally true story of how they got here.

If the interviewer had really wanted to understand evolution, he could have interviewed Jerry Coyne or Richard Dawkins or dozens of other scientists. But, of course, he doesn't. His goal is to prop up the faithful.

Similarly, you're never going to see Jonathan McLatchie or J. T. Bridges being interviewed by an actual science program. The only way they can get airtime is in religious forums like this. So much for the pretense that ID is actually about science.

Barry Arrington Channels Thomas Lanier Clingman

Thomas Lanier Clingman (1812-1897) was a Christian pro-slavery Senator from North Carolina who today is memorialized in the eponymous Clingman's Dome, the highest point on the Appalachian Trail.

Here are some excerpts from a speech Clingman made on the floor of the Senate, January 18 1860, as reported in the Wilmington Journal, February 2 1860, page 4:

"If the negro were in fact in all other respects like the white man, his blackness would have been of no more consequence than the difference between black and red hair or light and dark eyes. The feeling against him grows out of the fact that he is in all respects different from the white man and inferior...

"...Omnipotence has made a difference between the white man and the negro..."

"When, sir, some twelve years ago I, in discussion, threw out suggestions about the difference of the races, I was denounced as one who attributed injustice to Almighty God in alleging that He had made the negroes inferior..."

"For the inequality of the negro Providence is responsible, as He is for the entire creation which surrounds us. When human laws are in accordance with the system of nature they are wise; but if in oppositien [sic] to it they are productive only of mischief..."

"Hitherto they [the Abolitionists] have enlisted the sympathies and feelings of the North by falsely assuming that the negro and white man have in all respects the same nature. Let the inequality which the Creator has made be recognised, and their systems fall to the ground..."

"But we are asked how we will go about making a revolution or dissolving the Union ? ..."

You can read the whole thing yourself. To summarize: Clingman viewed the equality of black man and white man as absurd; that this inequality was ordained by his god and "the system of nature"; that only "mischief" could result from ignoring this; and that if the North persisted in its absurd views then revolution might be the consequence (although Clingman concluded that this would probably not happen).

Now go read Barry Arrington on gay marriage at the pro-intelligent-design blog. (What Barry's bigotry has to do with intelligent design is, as usual, unclear.) The similarity between Arrington's rhetoric and Clingman's is astonishing. (One difference is that Arrington misrepresents the truth, as when he states "Every time the people have voted on the “right” to same-sex marriage they have rejected it by fairly wide margins." Perhaps Arrington thinks the good inhabitants of Maine are not people. But why should a lawyer be aware of legislative history?)

Some people claim the debate between evolution and intelligent design is about science. It's not. All the science is on the evolution side. The debate arises almost entirely from a medieval, ignorant, and uninformed view of the world that has more in common with 1860's North Carolina than it does with a modern secular democracy.

Amtrak Censoring Atheists?

I took Amtrak from Toronto to New York and back this week. Thankfully, there was some spotty wi-fi coverage offered by the railroad, but there were significant limits. You could not download any file larger than 10 Megs, which put a stop to my plan to listen to some podcasts. But even more surprisingly, I discovered that some atheist videos were not allowed... such as this one.

I checked some other youtube videos of similar size, but these were not blocked (despite what it says here), and furthermore, the error message I got was different from when I tried to download a podcast that was too big. It suggested I should contact Amtrak by e-mail if I thought something was blocked unfairly, so I did that. They promised a response within 24 hours but, not surprisingly, it's been 24 hours and I've received no explanation.

So, what's going on, Amtrak?

Moose Affect Memory

From the CBC comes this interesting story of a man who had a moose encounter and promptly lost his memory.

This is not surprising at all to moose aficionados.