The Future of Recursivity

Hello, readers! I'm pleased to announce that I've joined freethoughtblogs.com, home of P. Z. Myers and other interesting bloggers.

This doesn't mean that this blog will die. I intend to cross-post things here and there. Comment wherever you like.

More info later, as I learn how to use the new system.

James Tour's First Talk: Nanotechnology and God

The dilemma of the scientist who is also a devout Christian* is clear: on the one hand, in his/her professional life the scientist must explore the natural world and rigorously apply skepticism to his/her conclusions. The scientist is always asking, "Could there be some other explanation I haven't thought of?". On the other hand, the devout Christian is required to accept an incoherent and nonsensical theology, and to renounce other reasonable explanations for the events that supposedly occurred in the New Testament. Skepticism is replaced by faith.

This is one reason, I suspect, that Christians are more common in the physical sciences and less common in fields like anthropology, psychology, and sociology. A really serious anthropologist or sociologist or psychologist who is a believer would be, I suspect, consumed by trying to understand the personality, motives, and characteristics of the Christian god, and that can only be done with some rigor through a scientific study, which the Christian is explicitly forbidden to do by Matthew 4:7, Deuteronomy 6:16, and Luke 4:12. In contrast, the chemist, geologist, or physicist is able to compartmentalize his/her beliefs more successfully. Believing in Jesus is not going to strongly impact your experiments if you are studying the properties of organic compounds or the interactions and decays of baryons.

Compartmentalization is the key word here, and it was very much in evidence in last night's Pascal lecture. To say it was a lecture is somewhat overstating the case. It started with a commercial (for James Tour's lab and its admittedly excellent work in nanotechnology) and it finished with pure Christian evangelism. Given that the title was "Nanotechnology and God", I was expecting a somewhat more polished segue between the two topics (although it was too much to hope that he might have remarked that both topics concern the vanishingly small). There was none. Prof. Tour went in one sentence from a summary of his work on nanotechnology to a story of how he became a Messianic Jew. Along the way he admonished the audience in various ways: to abjure pornography, to pray for personal success, to read the bible every day.

Here are a few of the things that Prof. Tour seems to believe, as I understand it. First, that the "fact of the Resurrection is overwhelming". (I don't think he uses the term "fact" the way I do.) Second, that he obtained his wife because he prayed for one and his god granted his wish. Third, that he was offered money to buy more software (through some supernatural intervention?) because of his virtuous refusal to break the license of software he used on other machines. Fourth, that he prays before every course lecture and scientific talk that his presentation will be wonderful. Fifth, that he prayed for the success of a disliked colleague and this resulted in the success of the colleague and his transfer to another university. Honestly, it was really hard to not laugh at all that.

I find it fascinating that such a scientist -- evidently extremely clever -- can successfully convince himself that there is a supernatural being, the creator of the universe, who is so obsessively concerned in that scientist's success and life that he (the god) arranges things so that departmental money to buy software arises (because of the scientist's virtue) and so that rival colleagues get offers to leave.

I did get a chance to ask a question. After hearing this litany of successes that Prof. Tour had achieved through prayer, I asked him what percentage of things he prays for don't come true. He was unable to provide a figure. This is compartmentalization again. A scientist would, I would think, want to know this important fact. Do certain kinds of prayers work better than others? Does the time of day affect success? Is success actually greater than chance, or does Prof. Tour simply forget about the prayers that don't come true? Does it help if the prayer is said in certain languages? Are prayers for oneself granted more often than prayers for others? What happens when two equally virtuous people pray for opposite outcomes?

Another thing that I was able to establish was that Prof. Tour, despite being a signatory to the Discovery Institute's notorious "Scientific Dissent from Darwinism", has never read a college-level textbook about evolution. In my opinion, this is irresponsible (but not surprising).

In short, although Prof. Tour is a good speaker who clearly has done excellent work, his religious beliefs seem (to me) to be childish and unwarranted. His personal version of prosperity theology is laughable. The event was largely evangelical and not intellectual in nature, and is inappropriate to be sponsored and endorsed by a public university that accepts students of all faiths. It was, in short, another embarrassment.

* I phrase it this way to avoid the ambiguous term "Christian scientist".

The Pascal Lecture, James Tour, and Shallit's Law

Well, once again it's time for that annual embarrassment at the University of Waterloo, the Pascal lecture series.

Our university actually sponsors these lectures, which are designed to "[challenge] the university to a search for truth through personal faith and intellectual inquiry which focus on Jesus Christ." I think it's completely inappropriate for a secular university to evangelize for a particular religion in this manner.

Previous lectures that I've attended and written about include Mary Poplin (also see here and here); the late Charles Rice (also see here and here); and John Lennox (also see here and here and here).

This year the speaker is James Tour, a chemist and signer of the infamous Discovery Institute dissent from Darwinism letter. You can see Tour's own rambling account of his dissatisfaction with evolution here. I hope he's a better speaker than he's a writer.

For more about Tour, see Larry Moran's take here.

I'm going to try to go, but I may be too jet-lagged to do so. In any event, I want to recall a law I have modestly named after myself: Shallit's law. Here it is:

"Whenever a distinguished scientist, physician, or engineer claims that he or she `doesn't understand' evolution, or `encourages skepticism' about evolution or that evolution `skeptics' are poorly treated, some fatuous utterance about Jeebus will soon follow."

You can evaluate the accuracy of Shallit's law by attending Tour's lectures, I suppose.

P. S. The Pascal lecture committee, as well as other dubious sites, like to cite Tour as "one of the 50 most influential scientists in the world" as stated by thebestschools.org. But thebestschools.org is a project of none other than James Barham, the ID-friendly but extremely confused philosopher who testified for the creationists in Kansas. In other words, it is not an unbiased source. In fact, I don't see much evidence that it's anything more than just James Barham sitting in a basement somewhere.

What Scalia Was Truly Like

If you want to get a feel for what the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia was like, you can do no better than to read this long interview from three years ago.

Some highlights: despite being so "brilliant", Scalia was unsure about the pronunciation of the word "ukase" and wasn't familiar with the term "tell" as applied to poker. I am neither a lawyer nor a poker player, but I knew both of these. And I'm not particularly bright.

Scalia also knew nothing about linguistics, if he thought "Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn’t change." That's an extremely naive view of language and meaning. In reality, the meaning of words is fuzzy and smooshed out. And meaning changes all the time. Compare our current understanding of "nubile" with the dictionary definition from a dictionary 50 years ago.

Scalia read the Wall Street Journal and the Moonie-controlled Washington Times, but stopped reading the Washington Post because it was "slanted and often nasty". He didn't read the New York Times at all. Talk about being unaware of your own biases!

Scalia believed that the "Devil" is a real person because it is Catholic dogma (and by implication, because one cannot be a Catholic without accepting all of Catholic dogma). That's exactly the kind of black-and-white extremist viewpoint it takes to be an originalist. He thought this being was occupied in getting people not to believe in the Christian god. And he liked The Screwtape Letters, easily the stupidest of C. S. Lewis's output (and that's saying something). Scalia justified his belief by saying "Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil." Yeah, well, many more intelligent people than I believe in Scientology, Bigfoot, and alien abductions, but that isn't a good argument for them. He also said that the Devil's becoming cleverer was "the explanation for why there’s not demonic possession all over the place. That always puzzled me. What happened to the Devil, you know? He used to be all over the place." The other explanation -- that there is no Devil and demonic possession never happened (it was health conditions misinterpreted by an ignorant and superstitious populace) -- was too obviously correct for him to consider.

Scalia thought that the only two possible choices after his death were "I'll either be sublimely happy or terribly unhappy." The obvious correct choice -- namely that he would simply cease to be -- did not even enter his mind as a possibility.

Scalia thought he was "heroic" by not recusing himself in a case where he clearly should have recused himself.

Reading this interview I could only think: What an asshole! Good riddance.

My Scalia Experience

Now that Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia has died, one can find tributes to him everywhere, even from some liberals. He is being lauded for his intelligence and for being a nice guy in person.

Well, my Scalia experience is different. First, he may have been extremely intelligent, but even intelligent people can have blind spots. For Scalia, one obvious blind spot was the theory of evolution. Not only did he not understand the status of the theory among scientists, as Stephen Gould famously pointed out, but he also recently used the figure "5000 years" as an estimate for the age of humanity, when the actual figure is more like 100,000 to 200,000 years.

And as for being a nice guy, I can only tell about my own experience. Sometime in the late-1980's (I think it was 1987) he came to give a speech at the University of Chicago when I was teaching there. At the end of the talk there was time for questions. I asked a question -- and I don't really remember what it was about -- and Scalia got all huffy. He said something like, "I don't think that's appropriate for me to answer. In fact, it was completely inappropriate for you to ask."

Well, it wasn't. It was something definitely appropriate and about constitutional law, even if I don't quite remember what I asked. What I remember was the contempt he expressed in his words and body language that anyone would dare ask.

So maybe it's true, as some have said, that he was a wonderful guy with a great sense of humor and enormous intelligence. All I can say as an outsider is, not in my experience.

Yet Another Dubious Journal

From a recent e-mail message I received:

Dear Dr. Jeffrey Shallit,

Greetings from Graphy Publications

We kindly invite you to join the editorial board for International Journal of Computer & Software Engineering

The journal aims to provide the most complete and reliable source of information on current developments in the field of computer & software engineering. The emphasis will be on publishing quality articles rapidly and making them freely available to researchers worldwide. The journal will be essential reading for scientists and researchers who wish to keep abreast of the latest developments in the field.

International Journal of computer & software engineering is an international open access journal using online automated Editorial Managing System of Graphy Publications for quality review process. For more details please go through below link.

http://www.graphyonline.com/journal/journal_editorial_board.php?journalid=IJCSE

Hope you accept our invitation and you are requested to send us your recent passport size photo (to be displayed on the Journal’s website), C.V, short biography (150 words) and key words of your research interests for our records.

We are keenly looking forward to receiving your positive response

Yours sincerely,

J. Hemant
Managing Editor
International Journal of Computer & Software Engineering
Graphy Publications

Any journal of "computer & software engineering" that invites me to be on the editorial board, when I don't work in either computer engineering or software engineering, is clearly not to be taken seriously. Other bad signs: random capitalization of invitation letter, failure to end sentences with the proper punctuation, and an editorial board filled with people I've never heard of. Not surprisingly, the publisher, "Graphy Publications", is on Beall's List of Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers.

Reproducibility in Computer Science

There has been a lot of discussion lately about reproducibility in the sciences, especially the social sciences. The result that garnered the most attention was the Nosek study, where the authors tried to reproduce the results of 98 studies published in psychology journals. They found that they were able to reproduce only about 40% of the published results.

Now it's computer science's turn to go under the spotlight. I think this is good, for a number of reasons:

1. In computer science there is a lot of emphasis placed on annual conferences, as opposed to refereed journal articles. Yes, these conferences are usually refereed, but the reports are generally done rather quickly and there is little time for revision. This emphasis has the unfortunate consequence that computer science papers are often written quite hastily, a week or less before the deadline, in order to make it into the "important" conferences of your area.

2. These conferences are typically quite selective and accept only 10% to 30% of all submissions. So there is pressure to hype your results and sometimes to claim a little more than you actually got done. (You can rationalize it by saying you'll get it done by the time the conference presentation rolls around.)

   (In contrast, the big conferences in mathematics are often "take-anything" affairs. At the American Mathematical Society meetings, pretty much anyone can present a paper; they sometimes have a special session for the papers that are whispered to be junk or crackpot stuff. Little prestige is associated with conferences in mathematics; the main thing is to publish in journals, which have a longer time frame suitable for good preparation and reflection.)

3. A lot of research in computer science, especially the "systems" area, seems pretty junky to me. It always amazes me that in some cases you can get a Ph.D. just for writing some code, or, even worse, just modifying a previous graduate student's code.

4. Computer science is one of the areas where reproducibility should (in theory) be the easiest. Usually, no complicated lab setups or multimillion dollar equipment is needed. You don't need to recruit test subjects or pass through ethics reviews. All you have to do is compile something and run it!

5. A lot of computer science research is done using public funds, and as a prerequisite for obtaining those funds, researchers agree to share their code and data with others. That kind of sharing should be routine in all the sciences.

Now my old friend and colleague Christian Collberg (who has one of the coolest web pages I've ever seen) has taken up the cudgel of reproducibility in computer science. In a paper to appear in the March 2016 issue of Communications of the ACM, Collberg and co-authors Todd Proebsting and Alex M. Warren relate their experiences in (1) trying to obtain the code described in papers and then (2) trying to compile and run it. They did not attempt to reproduce the results in papers, just the very basics of compiling and running. They did this for 402 (!) papers from recent issues of major conferences and journals.

The results are pretty sad. Many authors had e-mail addresses that failed (probably because they moved on to other institutions or left academia). Many simply did not reply to the request for code (in some cases Collberg filed freedom of information requests to try to get it). Of those that did reply, their code failed for a number of different reasons, like important files missing. Ultimately, only about a half of all papers had code that passed the very basic tests of compiling and running.

This is going to be a blockbuster result when it comes out next month. For a preview, you can look at a technical report describing their results. And don't forget to look at the appendices, where Collberg describes his ultimately unsuccessful attempt to get code for a system that interested him.

Now it's true that there are many reasons (which Collberg et al. detail) why this state of affairs exist. Many software papers are written by teams, including graduate students that come and go. Sometimes they are not adequately archived, and disk crashes can result in losses. Sometimes the current system has been greatly modified from what's in the paper, and nobody saved the old one. Sometimes systems ran under older operating systems but not the new ones. Sometimes code is "fragile" and not suitable for distribution without a great deal of extra work which the authors don't want to do.

So in their recommendations Collberg et al. don't demand that every such paper provide working code when it is submitted. Instead, they suggest a much more modest goal: that at the time of submission to conferences and journals, authors mention what the state of their code is. More precisely, they advocate that "every article be required to specify the level of reproducibility a reader or reviewer should expect". This information can include a permanent e-mail contact (probably of the senior researcher), a website from which the code can be downloaded (if that is envisioned), the degree to which the code is proprietary, availability of benchmarks, and so forth.

Collberg tells me that as a result of his paper, he is now "the most hated man in computer science". That is not the way it should be. His suggestions are well-thought-out and reasonable. They should be adopted right away.

P. S. Ironically, some folks at Brown are now attempting to reproduce Collberg's study. There are many that take issue with specific evaluations in the paper. I hope this doesn't detract from Collberg's recommendations.

More Silly Philosopher Tricks

Here's a review of four books about science in the New York Times. You already know the review is going to be shallow and uninformed because it is written not by a scientist or even a science writer, but by James Ryerson. Ryerson is more interested in philosophy and law than science; he has an undergraduate degree from Amherst, and apparently no advanced scientific training.

In the review he discusses a new book by James W. Jones entitled Can Science Explain Religion? and says,

"If presented with this argument, Jones imagines, we would surely make several objections: that the origin of a belief entails nothing about its truth or falsity (if you learn that the earth is round from your drunk uncle, that doesn’t mean it’s not)..."

Now I can't tell if this is Jones or Ryerson speaking, but either way it illustrates the difference between the way philosophers think and the way everyone else thinks. For normal people who live in a physical world, where conclusions are nearly always based on partial information, the origin of a belief does and should impact your evaluation of its truth.

For example, I am being perfectly reasonable when I have a priori doubts about anything that Ted Cruz says, because of his established record for lying: only 20% of his statements were evaluated as "true" or "mostly true". Is it logically possible that Cruz could tell the truth? Sure. It's also logically possible that monkeys could fly out of James Ryerson's ass, but I wouldn't be required to believe it if he said they did.

For non-philosophers, when we evaluate statements, things like a reputation for veracity of the speaker are important, as are evidence, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the funding of the person making the statement, and so forth. Logic alone does not rule in an uncertain world; in the real world these things matter. So when a religion professor and Episcopal priest like Jones writes a book about science, I am not particularly optimistic he will have anything interesting to say. And I can be pretty confident I know his biases ahead of time. The same goes for staff editors of the New York Times without scientific training.

3.37 Degrees of Separation

This is pretty interesting: Facebook has a tool that estimates the average number of intermediate people needed to link you, via the shortest path, to anyone else on Facebook. Mine is 3.37, which means the average path length (number of links) to me is 4.37, or that the average number of people in a shortest chain connecting others with me (including me and the person at the end) is 5.37.

What's yours?

An interesting aspect of this is that they use the Flajolet-Martin algorithm to estimate the path length. The paper of Flajolet-Martin deals with a certain correction factor φ, which is defined as follows: φ = 2^-½ e^γ α^-1, where γ = 0.57721... is Euler's constant and α is the constant Π_{n ≥ 1} (2n/(2n+1))^(-1)t(n), where t(n) is the Thue-Morse sequence, the sequence that counts the parity of the number of 1's in the binary expansion of n.

The Thue-Morse sequence has long been a favorite of mine, and Allouche and I wrote a survey paper about it some time ago, where we mentioned the Flajolet-Martin formula. The Thue-Morse sequence comes up in many different areas of mathematics and computer science. And we also wrote a paper about a constant very similar to α: it is Π_{n ≥ 0} ((2n+1)/(2n+2))^(-1)t(n). Believe it or not, it is possible to evaluate this constant in closed form: it is equal to 2^-½ !

By contrast, nobody knows a similar simple evaluation for α. In fact, I have offered $50 for a proof that α is irrational or transcendental.

Yet More Bad Creationist Mathematics

It's not just biology that creationists resolutely refuse to understand. Their willful ignorance extends to many other fields. Take mathematics, for example.

At the creationist blog Uncommon Descent we have longtime columnist "kairosfocus" (Gordon Mullings) claiming that "a set of integers that spans to infinity will have members that are transfinite", showing that he doesn't understand even the most basic things about the natural numbers.

And we also have Jonathan Bartlett asking "can you develop an effective procedure for checking proofs? and answering "The answer is, strangely, no."

Actually the answer is "yes". A mathematical proof can indeed be checked and easily so (in principle). This has nothing to do with the statement of Bartlett that follows it: "It turns out that there are true facts that cannot be proved via mechanical means." Yes, that's so; but it has nothing to do with an effective procedure for checking proofs. Such a procedure would simply verify that each line follows from the previous one by an application of the axioms.

If a statement S has a proof, there is a semi-algorithm that will even produce the proof: simply enumerate all proofs in order of length and check whether each one is a proof of S. The problem arises when a true statement simply does not have a proof. It has nothing to do with checking a given proof.

Can't creationists even get the most basic things correct?

Our Car's Fibonacci Odometer

Been waiting for this for 11 years, and it finally happened!

You Don't Have to Be a Sociopath to Become a Theist....

...but apparently it helps, at least judging from this video.

Several things come to mind when I watched this. First, if David Wood's story is largely true, then he's clearly a sociopath and why should we believe anything he says? He could just be manipulating us for some sick purpose. On the other hand, if his story is largely false, then he's clearly a pathological liar, and why should we believe anything he says? Of course, his story could be partly true and partly false (my guess), but then the same conclusion holds.

Second is how persuasive even a terrible design argument like the one proposed here can be for a diseased or weak mind. Don't bother studying any mathematics, or computer science, or biology. Just assert that there is no evidence for the scientific world view, and voilà!

Third is what an ignorant bastard the guy is for someone who thought he was the greatest person in the world. He thinks shingles are caused by vitamin deficiency, fer chrissake!

Oh well. I am comforted by the fact that there's lots of decent people who are religionists. They're not all sociopaths like David Wood.

10th Blogiversary!

Ten years ago, this blog, Recursivity, was born.

I've had a lot of fun with it, even though I never really had very much time to devote to it. A thousand posts in ten years sounds like a lot, but I wish I could have written a thousand more.

Generally speaking, my readers have been great. In ten years, I think I only had to ban two or three commenters, including one Holocaust denier. Thank you to everyone who read what I had to say, and even more thanks to those who took the time to comment.

Here are 25 of my favorite posts from the last ten years:

1. Why We Never Lied to Our Kids About Santa: my absolute favorite, and still appropriate. You can criticize atheism and religion, but if you really want to get a reaction, just criticize the myth of Santa Claus.
2. Robert J. Marks II refuses to answer a simple question: still waiting, more than a year later.
3. Hell would be having to listen to Francis Spufford: Damn, he was boring.
4. By the Usual Compactness Argument: for mathematicians only.
5. Ten Common LaTeX Errors
6. I defend a conservative politician's right to speak on campus
7. Science books have errata. Holy books don't
8. No Formula for the Prime Numbers?: Debunking a common assertion.
9. In Memory of Sheng Yu (1950-2012): my colleague - I still miss him.
10. Another Fake Magnet Man Scams AP
11. William Lane Craig Does Mathematics
12. Why Do William Lane Craig's Views Merit Respect?: Nobody gave a good answer, by the way!
13. Stephen Meyer's Bogus Information Theory
14. Religion Makes Smart People Stupid
15. Test Your Knowledge of Information Theory
16. David Berlinski, King of Poseurs
17. Graeme MacQueen at the 9/11 Denier Evening
18. Mathematics in a Jack Reacher novel
19. The Prime Game: This appeared in my 2008 textbook, too.
20. Debunking Crystal Healing
21. Nancy Pearcey, The Creationists' Miss Information
22. Academic Vanity Scams
23. Time Travel: my second favorite, which nobody seemed to like that much.
24. Janis Ian Demo Tape: the best part was that Janis Ian herself stopped by to comment!
25. The Subversive Skepticism of Scooby Doo: my third favorite.

Happy Holidays to everyone, and may 2016 be a great year for you.

Merry Kitzmas!

It's been ten years since the landmark decision of Kitzmiller v. Dover was handed down, the case that exposed the religious fraud of that absurd pseudoscience, "intelligent design". The ID movement, and especially its "think tank", the Discovery Institute, has never recovered.

I had the honor of meeting the lead plaintiff, Tammy Kitzmiller, a few years ago at one of the trial reunion parties. (I played an extremely minor role in the case, meeting with the lawyers for the plaintiffs and preparing as a possible rebuttal witness, but I never appeared in court because one person on the other side never testified.) A more pleasant and modest (yet determined!) person you can't imagine. In fact, all the people involved in the case in various ways, including Eric Rothschild, Nick Matzke, Steve Harvey, Kenneth Miller, Wes Elsberry, Genie Scott, and Lauri Lebo are about the nicest and most interesting people I've ever met. The contrast with the other side couldn't be more stark.

Ten years later, what's happening? Well, the Discovery Institute and their friends continue to churn out lies pretty much unabated, but nobody's listening any more. Even the "academic wing" of intelligent design seems to have given up. Bill Dembski just threw in the towel. At the same time Casey Luskin tries to boast about all the scientific work published by ID advocates, the flagship scientific journal for the movement has only published a single paper in calendar year 2015, despite getting a new editor and having an editorial board with 29 members.

There's just so long you can keep up this charade.

Meanwhile, the same nasty, deplorable tactics that renamed the Discovery Institute the "Dishonesty Institute" continue unabated. When one of the Kitzmiller team recently got a paper accepted to Science, one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals, all the Discovery Institute (and their slavering friends) could do is make ridiculous and groundless insinuations about misconduct. Truly, they have no shame at all.

Why do the ID folks behave so reprehensibly, over and over again? Of course, it has nothing at all do with science. They behave this way because they are motivated solely by their conservative religious beliefs. Recently a window opened on the ID world view, when one creationist was so disillusioned by their behavior that he posted a private e-mail message from ID advocate Barry Arrington that clearly revealed their motives. Arrington wrote

"We are in a war. That is not a metaphor. We are fighting a war for the soul of Western Civilization, and we are losing, badly. In the summer of 2015 we find ourselves in a position very similar to Great Britain’s position 75 years ago in the summer of 1940 – alone, demoralized, and besieged on all sides by a great darkness that constitutes an existential threat to freedom, justice and even rationality itself."

When you view your opponents this way, then no tactic is off limits. Lying is permissible because otherwise the "great darkness" will win. Insulting, making insinuations, likening your opponents to Nazis or Communists or fascists are all perfectly fine tactics, because your opponents constitute "an existential threat to freedom" and "justice". Treating your opponents as subhuman is ok, because after all, they threaten "rationality itself". And of course, they never, ever, admit they were wrong about anything.

I feel sorry for the ID folks today, I really do. Ten years after Kitzmiller, ID advocates are like the Millerites on October 23 1844, when their predicted triumphal ascent into heaven didn't happen. They are wandering around feeling puzzled and alone, and it's natural that they will lash out against any available target in an effort to cure their misery. It won't work, I'm afraid. Intelligent design is, for all practical purposes dead. Prop up the corpse all you want -- it won't work.

Meanwhile, science and evolutionary theory continue unabated. Those of us who enjoy and respect science (and there are lots!) continue to think about and solve interesting problems. The joy of discovery is genuine for us. May you find it, too.

So, to you and yours, I wish you a very merry Kitzmas.

Polish Immigrants a German Problem?

Only if the immigrants are moose.

1000 citations for "Automatic Sequences"

I don't normally like to use this blog to advertise my own achievements, but this one was too fun to pass up.

Back in 2003, Jean-Paul Allouche and I published a book, Automatic Sequences, with Cambridge University Press. There's some info about the book, including errata and some reviews, here.

Just this week, our book reached a milestone we could not have anticipated 12 years ago: 1000 citations on google scholar:

It is our most cited work.

Of course, this number is a bit misleading, since it double-counts papers on the arxiv that later appear in conferences and journals. Nevertheless, I'm really pleased that our book (despite its defects) has been so useful and influential. And thanks to my great co-author, Jean-Paul Allouche!

The Difference Between Republicans and Democrats

Here is a chart that illustrates, better than anything I've seen, the fundamental difference between the two US political parties.

It wasn't always this way. There were lots of honest Republicans when I was growing up, from Philadelphia's Thacher Longstreth, to Millicent Fenwick, to Gerald Ford. Now I can hardly think of a single one, with Bob Ehrlich (former governor of Maryland) being an exception.

Today's Republican party is home to the craziest, most extreme, lying lunatics ever assembled in one place.

And it's no coincidence that of all the lying liars that represent the party today, the biggest lying liar of them all is Ben Carson -- who is also a favorite of the creationists.

To today's Republicans and creationists alike, the truth means absolutely nothing.

Discovery Institute Lies Again!

Oh, look! The Dishonesty Discovery Institute is out with yet another video. What a thrill.

Don't bother watching it, though. There are no new arguments at all. It's just the same lies as usual, repackaged for the nth time. You wonder why their spokesmen don't get just a little bit bored repeating the same misinformation, practically verbatim, over and over. It's more like they are evangelical hucksters than scientists. Why would that be?

• Citing the 1966 Wistar Institute Symposium -- and pretending it was an important and influential scientific meeting, when in fact it had basically no influence on biology at all. And then pretending that the questions raised haven't been answered since then. Misrepresenting the symposium has a long history among creationists.
• Doug Axe citing his 11-year-old 10^-77 claim, long debunked. As far as I can see, Dougie hasn't gotten anything published in a real scientific journal since 2008. All his recent publications seem to be in the intelligent design vanity journal Bio-Complexity or similar crappy venues. I wonder why the Ahmansons continue to fund this embarrassment.
• Stephen Meyer repeating his lie once again that "Whenever we see information, especially when we find information in a digital or typographic form and we trace it back to its ultimate source, we always come to a mind, not a material process." Of course, that's not true. The environment is full of information, or how would we able to do weather prediction? (I don't buy the implicit claim that the mind is not a material process, either.)

Intelligent design is so over. Get a life, guys. Do some actual work, or give up and stop pretending this charade is real science.

More Sprinkler Moose

Devoted readers of this blog (are there any?) will recall this post from 2008 with baby moose playing in a lawn sprinkler.

Apparently it's a thing, now. Here's a new video.

Hat tip: R. M.

Another Philosophy Fail

This article by Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting is interesting, but not in the way that Prof. Gutting seems to think. It's interesting because it demonstrates the intellectual bankruptcy and uselessness of the kind of philosophy that a lot of academics do.

Gutting presents the cosmological argument for the existence of a god, and seems to think it deserves to be taken seriously.

I say, it doesn't. Not only that, the fact that a well-respected philosopher thinks it does, and gets it published by a well-respected publisher like W. W. Norton, demonstrates that something is terribly, terribly wrong with much of academic philosophy.

Here, briefly, are just a few things that I think are wrong.

1. Gutting never defines "cause" or "caused". The words are very difficult to make rigorous, which is one reason why if you pick up a textbook on physics (say, Halliday and Resnick, the book I learned physics from), you won't even find them in the index (although of course the words themselves occur in the text). We sort-of-understand the colloquial and loose meaning of "cause" when it is associated with the events that are common in our lives, such as car accidents and elections and hot plates and Thanksgiving turkeys, but what guarantee is there that this understanding can be extrapolated to events on the micro or macro scales that physics deals with? Gutting seems to think that our folk understanding of these words is enough. I say it isn't.

2. After having acknowledged the looseness of the words, it nevertheless does seem that in nature there are genuinely uncaused physical events (like the radioactive decay of a particular uranium atom). Gutting doesn't even mention this possibility, except when it comes to his magical "first cause". So if events like the decay of this particular uranium atom has no explanation, why should we be so confident that all other kinds of physical events actually have explanations? This exemplifies another feature of much of academic philosophy, which is that it seems almost entirely divorced from what we have actually learned about the physical world. He is basically arguing to a Middle Ages audience (or even earlier).

3. There is no really good reason to always dismiss an infinite regress of causes, nor is there a good reason to dismiss a circular chain of causes (e.g., A causes B, which causes A). Of course, these don't seem to happen much in our daily lives, but again, we are talking about events (the creation of the universe) which are wildly different in scale from our ordinary experience. We don't experience cosmic inflation in our daily life, either, but that's not a good reason to dismiss that physical theory.

4. Gutting's description of "contingent" and "contingency" suffers from the same defects as "cause" and "caused". What does it mean to say "Germany might not have won the 2014 World Cup"? After all, possibly the universe was created by a supreme being who has an inexplicable love for German soccer. Perhaps everything was created and set in motion deterministically by a supreme being just so Germany won the 2014 World Cup and no other outcome was possible, even in principle. And just because I can imagine a different outcome doesn't mean a different outcome is possible; if I try very, very hard I can just barely imagine a square circle or a good philosopher, but that doesn't necessarily mean those things are possible.

5. Finally, I think what's wrong with this reasoning like Gutting's is that it is a kind of pseudomathematics: applying precise logical rules to vague concepts like "explanation" and "contingency" and "cause" without providing a rigorous mathematical or physical basis for those concepts, and then expecting the results to be meaningful. When you do that, it's kind of like doing a physics experiment and reporting the results to 20 significant figures when your measuring devices only provide 3 significant figures. You run the risk of thinking you're being precise and logical, when in fact you've only extrapolated your vague and inchoate understanding of what's really going on.

I realize in making these complaints I'm in a tiny minority. Nevertheless, I think my objections have at least some validity. What do you think?