You are Not Allowed to Laugh at the Lies and Idiocies of the Right!

Somebody sent me a link to this piece by Emmett Rensin at Vox.

The author's thesis is that liberals have stopped thinking and spend all their time being smug instead -- but this is certainly not true of conservatives. Liberals, according to Rensin, "hate their former allies". Conservatives, by contrast, are open-minded and persuadable. And, Rensin says, The Daily Show is a perfect example of this liberal smugness.

Well, Rensin goes wrong right there. "Smug" is not even close to the right word to describe Jon Stewart. Bill Maher is smug. Jon Stewart is, at times, almost painfully earnest. Does he make fun of people? Absolutely. But modern conservatism has so many targets that the jokes write themselves: Ben Carson and his pyramids that stored grain. Donald Trump and his claim that he saw "thousands and thousands" of American Muslims celebrating the 9/11 attacks. Ted Cruz and his "Trus-Ted" slogan, when his record of public dishonesty is hard to deny. Rensin apparently thinks we are not allowed to poke fun at all this idiocy and dishonesty.

Here are some examples of liberal smug ignorance, according to Rensin: "the Founding Fathers were all secular deists". Well, that's clearly not so, but some were, at least during part of their life, like Thomas Paine and Ethan Allen. But how is this mistake worse than the conservative claim that "94 percent of the [the era of the Founders'] documents were based on the Bible" (debunked here)?

Another one: "that you're actually, like, 30 times more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder". Perhaps the number "30" is wrong, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a significant health risk in owning a gun. And how is this mistake worse than the conservative insistence on "more guns mean less crime"? Pro-gun "researchers" such as Kleck and Lott are treated by conservatives as unimpeachable, when in fact their errors are extensively documented.

Rensin's thesis is essentially a denigration of the importance of knowledge and facts. Who cares, Rensin says implicitly, if watching Fox News makes you less well informed? Pointing that out is just liberal smugness. Knowledge and facts are just unimportant compared to empathy and open-mindedness, which liberals today lack (while, presumably, conservatives have it in spades). Pay no attention the fact that when President Obama cited empathy as a desirable characteristic in a Supreme Court justice, conservatives jumped all over him.

Open-mindedness is a virtue -- I'll agree with that. But open-mindedness without skepticism and facts and knowledge just becomes credulity, a willingess to believe anything if it confirms your world view.

Here are just a few of the things that conservatives "know" that just ain't so: that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet (debunked here); that Bill Clinton delayed air traffic while he was having a haircut (debunked here); that Hillary Clinton was fired from the Watergate investigation for incompetence (debunked here). Visit any conservative website, mention Al or Bill or Hillary, and you'll only have to wait a few minutes before one of these lies is dragged out yet again. I have grad-school-educated conservative friends that proudly repeat these stories, ferchrissake.

Rensin claims that all this liberal smugness has "corrupt[ed]" them, but he gives no examples of corruption. He claims the case against conservatives is "tenuous", but just dismisses evidence like that given above and his own article.

Rensin thinks it is somehow "smug" for atheists to point out the religious hypocrisy of Kim Davis. It is here that his argument (and I use the term generously) becomes the most unhinged. Is it really necessary to be a Christian to criticize Christians? Do you have to believe in the divinity of Jesus or be a professional theologian to point out that Kim Davis cannot find support for her actions in Christian theology? When Mike Huckabee opportunistically elbowed out Ted Cruz to be at Kim Davis's rally, Rensin finds Huckabee genuine and admirable, instead of the pandering opportunity it clearly was.

Rensin is rhetorically dishonest. At one point he tries to refute a claim about the Ku Klux Klan by citing statistics about Stormfront.org. But these are entirely different groups.

Rensin is upset that the Daily Show is "broadcast on national television". Has he never listened to Fox News? Or conservative radio hosts with huge audiences, like Mark Levin and Michael Savage? The vitriol and the outright lies that happen every single day in these venues make Jon Stewart look like gentle fun.

Rensin claims that only Democrats have "made a point of openly disdaining" the dispossessed. One can only make that claim by wilfully ignoring the time Donald Trump made fun of a disabled reporter, or the time a Republican congressional candidate called poor people slothful and lazy, or Mitt Romney's comment that he could never convince 47% of the American people that "they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives".

Rensin thinks liberal smugness is going to ensure a Trump victory: "Faced with the prospect of an election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the smug will reach a fever pitch: six straight months of a sure thing, an opportunity to mock and scoff and ask, How could anybody vote for this guy? until a morning in November when they ask, What the fuck happened?". Yet who is a better match for the word smug? Hillary Clinton? Bernie Sanders? Look, when even Bill Maher calls you smug, you know you've got smug issues.

Finally, I observe that there doesn't seem to be any way to leave comments on Rensin's piece. That seems pretty smug to me.

The Small Mind of the Conservative

Here is a splendid example of a certain kind of conservative mind: the kind that can't imagine how things could be any different, or why anyone would want them to be any different, from the way they are today. This kind of person always says, whenever anything novel is brought up, "But we've always done it this way!" Next, they go on to invent all sorts of silly reasons to avoid making any change.

Small-minded is what we used to call this trait, and it's particularly on display here. Mike Strobel, who despite once being Editor-in-Chief of the Toronto Sun doesn't seem to know the difference between "stationary" and "stationery", can't think of a single decent reason to turf the monarchy in Canada.

Instead, he believes keeping them around is a good idea because "the Trudeaus might declare themselves Canada’s royal family and we’d wake up one morning as subjects of King Justin". Perhaps the Queen will save Strobel someday by pushing him out of the way of an errant taxi. Those two preposterous scenarios are about equally likely.

Allan Fotheringham, a commentator that actually has connected brain cells, once said, "Grown-up nations do not need, as head of state, a woman -- however nice -- who lives across a large ocean in a castle in a foreign country." Someday Canada will grow up. Strobel, I'm not so sure about.

Under the Influence - An Amazingly Good Radio Show about Advertising

There are only a few radio shows I listen to regularly, but one of them is "Under the Influence" on CBC, an amazingly good show about advertising, hosted by Terry O'Reilly. I recommend it. O'Reilly may have a kind of whiny voice, but he seems to possess detailed knowledge about all facets of advertising, and he paints great pictures with his descriptions.

The latest show is about business-to-business advertising, and features a couple of famous commercials I had never seen before: the Jean-Claude van Damme ad for Volvo, and the "herding cats" ad for EDS.

Do you know any niche radio shows that are exceptionally good?

How to Be a Good Little Right-Wing Pundit

Right-wing pundits see bullies everywhere they look. But always on the Left, never on the Right.

Right-wing pundits see lynch mobs everywhere they look. But always on the Left, never on the Right.

A great example is Yale computer scientist David Gelernter. As I've pointed out before, when philosopher Thomas Nagel published a book about materialism, he got a lot of public criticism for his silly and uninformed views. But, according to Gelernter, all this criticism was downright unfair: he called Nagel's critics "punks, bullies, and hangers-on of the philosophical underworld" and a "lynch mob" and a "mass attack of killer hyenas".

But nobody picketed Nagel, or demanded he be fired from his academic job, or threatened to boycott journals where he published. They just criticized him.

Has Gelernter ever stood up for leftist professors who have been threatened with bodily harm or loss of their jobs for their opinions? Not that I've seen.

The latest right-wing pundit to get into hysterics is Brendan O'Neill. He calls transgenderism "intolerant". Novelist Ian McEwan was "subjected to a Twitch hunt", which is a "bloodsport". Critics of McEwan "went berserk" and engaged in "virtual tomato-throwing". It was "reminiscent" of "the Inquisition". The criticism was "attempted silencing". It was "straight out of Nineteen Eight-Four".

Yup, bullies and lynch mobs everywhere. Except that there aren't any lynch mobs. Nobody attacked McEwan physically. Nobody got in his face, or blocked his path, or threatened him. All critics did was take issue with what he said.

If you want to be a good little right-wing pundit, you have to learn this game. All criticism from the Left is "bullying". All criticism from the Right is "free speech". All criticism from the Left is just like the Inquisition. All criticism from the Right is brave disagreement with the status quo. All criticism from the Left is Orwellian. All criticism from the Right is the true spirit of democracy.

Good little right-wing pundit. Have a puppy treat.

NPR's Word Puzzle

NPR's Sunday puzzle last week was the following: find a five-letter word in which the position, in the alphabet, of the first letter is equal to the sum of the positions of the last four letters.

This week they gave the following answers: maced, table, whack, and zebra.

More generally, one could ask the same question for words of other lengths. Here are a few I found:

cab
hag
jade
leaf
leg
mage
mica
mid
need
pig
rale
real
ride
same
sand
seam
toad
toe
vial
vim
weeded
wend
who
wick
win
yet
yip
zeta
zinc

So "weeded" seems to be the longest word in English with this property. Can you find a longer one?

They also talked about words like "easy" in which the position of the last letter is equal to the sum of the positions of the preceding letters. I found the following other examples:

abbot
ally
away
babe
bail
bendy
bidet
bleat
boar
cachet
debit
dim
draw
eager
fag
feces
flew
gnu
habit
hair
hem
hoax
how
idly
jaggy
joy
kit
lam
man
neat
pact
paddy
sex
tabby
tau
wax

So the longest seems to be "cachet". Can you find a longer one?

They Offer Nothing But Lies, 6

Once again, the creationists are telling fibs about information theory. Are they dishonest, or just stupid? In the case of Denyse O'Leary, I'm inclined to suspect the latter:

The belief that randomness produces information (central to Darwinism) is obviously false. It’s never been demonstrated because it can’t be. It is assumed.

No, it's not "assumed". It's proved. It's one of the most basic results in Kolmogorov information theory, demonstrated every year in the classes I teach. With high probability, a randomly-generated list of symbols will contain a lot of information. To understand this you can use one of Dembski's own metaphors: the combination lock. Which will be harder for someone to deduce, a combination that is your birthday in the form mmdd, or the first four digits of pi, or a randomly-generated 4-digit code?

This does not seem to penetrate the skull of the rather dense Ms. O'Leary, who then tries to weasel out of her claim by saying

by "information," one means here complex, specified information, produced in vast interlocking patterns on a regular basis.

Oh, so she's not talking about "information" in the way it is used by mathematicians and computer scientists. She's talking about creationist information, that vague, incoherent, and self-contradictory mess invented by Dembski and used by basically no one except creationists.

That mess was debunked years ago.

Here's an example: take any English text T, like the first 10 lines of a Shakespearean sonnet. Now apply any decent encryption function f to it that is not known to an adversary, getting U. To the adversary, U will look like random noise and hence be "unspecified", so it will not constitute creationist information. Now I come along and apply f^-1 to U, getting T back again. Voilà! I have now magically created information deterministically, something Dembski claims is impossible.

No matter how many times you explain this, creationists offer nothing but lies in response.

Margaret Russell on Mississippi's Anti-Gay Law

Here's my old pal Margaret "Peggy" Russell, professor of law at Santa Clara, speaking on KQED about the new anti-gay law passed in Mississippi.

Mississippi is one of three US states I've never visited. I probably won't visit while this law is in effect.

Another Day, Another Right-Wing Quote Lie

It seems that pretty much every day of the week, one can find right-wing spokesmen using fake quotes to justify their beliefs.

Today's lying wingnut is Sarah Palin, who gave a sing-song speech-like thingie in Wisconsin supporting Donald Trump to barely any applause at all. Near the end (at the 20:30 mark of the video), she says, "Well, General George Patton, he said it best, he -- leading the greatest generation -- he said 'Politicians are the lowest form of life on earth', he said it, I didn't, OK? he said it. And he said, 'Liberal Democrats are the lowest form of politicians.' "

Well, no, Patton didn't. This was debunked months ago.

Sarah Palin, like most of her wingnut friends, is completely uninterested in the truth. All she cares about is having a cudgel to beat Democrats with.

These Lawyers are All ASSoLs

This is pretty funny: two donors paid off George Mason University to the tune of $30 million to change the name of their mediocre law school (rated #40 in the US by one measure) to the "Antonin Scalia School of Law".

I guess nobody noticed at the time that the acronym "ASSoL" was really, really appropriate. At least not for a while. But now they've quietly changed their public presence to the "The Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University".

That won't prevent everyone else from calling them ASSoLs, though.

Cold-FX Lawsuit May Be a Remedy for False Health Claims

Cold-FX, a drugstore remedy hawked by Canadian fashion icon Don Cherry, is the subject of a lawsuit alleging the makers "ignored their own research and misled consumers about the short-term effectiveness of the popular cold and flu remedy". Cold-FX is basically just some sort of ginseng extract, although they give it the fancy name "CVT-E002". The suit was brought by Don Harrison of Vancouver Island.

Questions about the efficacy of Cold-FX have been raised for years.

Whether or not the claims of Cold-FX are false -- nothing has been proven in court yet -- there is no question that there is a lot of fraud in the over-the-counter pharmacy market, including worthless homeopathic remedies marketed as being effective against a wide variety of illnesses.

Hopefully this lawsuit, whether it succeeds or not, will make pharmaceutical companies much more diligent about ensuring the veracity of their claims.

Et in Arcadia Ego

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?

Friday Moose Stories

Moose goes through car windshield, but driver survives

Moose go window shopping in Vail, Colorado

Moose killed illegally in eponymous town

Moose don't really get drunk?

Hat tip to R. M. for all four stories.

Another Intelligent Design Fail

Over at the creationist blog, Uncommon Descent, they just don't know when to shut up.

They present the story of an artifact which may be a 45,000-year-old flute. Then again, it might just be a partially eaten bear femur. And they present it with the title "Design inference: is it a Neanderthal flute?"

But wait a second. Don't the ID folks have a mathematically rigorous method of detecting design? I thought intelligent design was a thought revolution that was going to have significant impact on almost every field of science, including archaeology.

Then why hasn't anyone in the intelligent design field jumped in with their "mathematically rigorous" method and resolved the question about the flute? Why are there no papers by the ID giants like William Dembski and Jonathan Wells and Stephen Meyer and Paul Nelson submitted to Science and Nature about artifacts like this? Or even submitted to their own vanity journal, which has published a total of one paper this year?

The answer should be obvious. Intelligent design is a massive intellectual fraud. It's a completely useless tool in science which can't even answer the simplest challenges put to it.

ID is not really about science at all -- it's just a cover for conservative Christianity.

Zonnestraal in Hilversum

Another cool set of buildings I saw in the Netherlands was Zonnestraal, an old tuberculosis sanitarium in Hilversum. The goal was to let as much light in as possible, and indeed, the buildings are practically entirely glass. My architectural in-laws tell me it's extremely famous. It's still being used as a physical rehab facility. There's also a family connection, as my wife's great-grandfather worked there in 1921-2 and wrote a little book about his experiences, which was published in 1923.

"Thinking Machines" Lecture at Waterloo November 27 -- And a Free Bingo Card

At first glance, this upcoming lecture at the University of Waterloo looks like it might be interesting:

Date: Friday, November 27, 2015 - 7:30pm
Lecture Title: Mathematics and Thinking Machines
Talk abstract: In the nineteenth century, mathematician Charles Babbage designed a programmable calculating machine that could execute algorithms with an accuracy and speed surpassing human abilities. Though Babbage’s mechanical computer remained unbuilt during his lifetime, his interest in developing machine intelligence anticipated twenty-first-century concerns about the promises, limitations, uses, and misuses of machine-generated data. This lecture will consider how our conceptions of thinking machines have evolved over the past 200 years and what issues may arise in the future. What does it mean to imagine machines “thinking”? What avenues are made available to us by the power of machine mathematics? And in what ways do calculating machines challenge our sense that human cognition is an exceptional phenomenon?

But when I look at the people speaking, I'm not so confident.

Nevertheless, I'll probably go.

To keep myself amused, I've made the bingo card below. It contains just a few of the worst arguments (courtesy of people like Michael Egnor, David Gelernter, John Searle, Roger Penrose, and Hubert Dreyfus) that I've heard proposed against the idea of thinking machines.

If you want to join me, print out a copy and bring it. Try not to disrupt the lecture by shouting "Bingo", though.

Library at TU Delft

There were lots of interesting buildings in the Netherlands. Here is just one: the library at TU Delft. Outside there is a large grassy ramp leading to the top, punctured by a cone. Inside, the cone gives light to the lower floors. At the far wall are all the books.

The building won a bunch of awards, and was designed by Mecanoo and built in 1996-7.

The Dutch Support the People of Paris

Here's a sign in the Delft (Netherlands) train station on Monday, November 16. It says (roughly) "Respect the victims of the Paris bombings with one minute of silence in stations and in trains at 12:00 Noon".

Are All Neurosurgeons Crazy?

I'm beginning to think so, what with Ben Carson claiming that the pyramids were used to store grain, not to bury rulers and that he had a violent past.

So it's not really a surprise to see that walking Dunning-Kruger effect-man, Michael Egnor, claiming that humans can't be apes because "Human beings have mental powers that include the material mental powers of animals but in addition entail a profoundly different kind of thinking" and "Human beings think abstractly, and nonhuman animals do not".

I'm really curious to know how Dr. Egnor knows with certainty that nonhuman animals cannot think abstractly. I guess he is just egnoring all the research that suggests just the opposite. It's not like this is hidden stuff; Egnor could read, for example, the books of Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal.

Maybe not all neurosurgeons are this batshit loony. After all, another thing that Carson and Egnor have in common is that they are both creationists. Maybe that's the real problem. Maybe you have to be immersed in jeebus-juice to believe, like Egnor does, that "Human rationality is different because it is immaterial." I guess our thinking powers are just magic; all that neurocircuitry is just there for show.

Torley Defends Dembski, Attacks Me, Over Bogus Schopenhauer Quotation

Over at the creationist website, Uncommon Descent, we have the logorrheic Vincent Torley trying to defend the behavior of creationist William Dembski with regard to a bogus quote of Schopenhauer.

I've discussed this alleged quote of Schopenhauer before, and you can see a summary of what I found out here.

A rough summary is as follows (you can read more here, if you like): I noticed a bogus quote in one of Dembski's articles, which he attributed to Schopenhauer. It is a quote that had interested me for a long time, long before I ever saw Dembski use it. I had already done some research on it, and I knew that Schopenhauer did not really say what was attributed to him. I pointed this out to Dembski, who was (in private correspondence) quite contemptuous of my point, and asked me to prove to him that Schopenhauer never said the alleged quote. Of course, this is impossible, and a completely unreasonable demand. The burden of proof is on the quoter, not the person disputing the quotation! The quote then appeared, unaltered, and still attributed to Schopenhauer, in one of Dembski's books. Not only that, Dembski later belittled me publicly for the fact that I chose to investigate the quotation! So much for respect for scholarship.

But this isn't the only time Dembski has been sloppy with quotations, as I documented before. There's a pattern here, which Torley doesn't address, of course.

Apparently Torley is quite taken with the fact that 10 years later, Dembski used the bogus quote once more, but this time wrote "In a quote widely attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer". I guess it only took ten years for my point to sink in. Torley seems to think this shows how ethical and scholarly Dembski is. Others might differ with that assessment.

For all his logorrhea, Torley essentially acknowledges my point. The quote is bogus, and Dembski knows it is bogus, and Dembski doesn't seem to care that others have put in the time and effort to trace its origins, while he nevertheless continues to use it. All that effort expended when any reasonable colleague would just have written, "Thanks, Jeff, for letting me know about the quote. I'll be more careful in the future."

What could be more emblematic of the intelligent design movement?

Every Moose Was Kung Fu Fighting

From my colleague Jean-Paul, here's a video of a moose skirmish in Alaska. Or, if that one doesn't work for you, try this link instead.

Neat Trompe L'Oeil Bike Rack in Sacramento

While visiting my childhood friend, musician & cartoonist Mark Stivers in Sacramento, I spotted this neat bike rack.

Here's what it looks like from one angle. Just an ordinary, but weird, bike rack, in three pieces.

Here's what it looks like from another angle.

According to this page, the rack was designed by Jason A. Silva.

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.