Here's yet another example: this article about naturopathy didn't include a single skeptical voice. Couldn't the reporter have noted, for example, that homeopathy is regarded by most medical experts as a fake and worthless therapy?
Monday, September 22, 2014
Record Coverage Fails Again
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Gelernter's Non-Response
But Gelernter -- who apparently doesn't believe that academics have the duty to justify their claims and retract them when wrong -- has never replied.
Until recently, that is. My brief correction of Gelernter's wild misrepresentation of the reaction to Thomas Nagel's silly book elicited this reply from Gelernter:
Little needs saying to Jeffrey Shallit, except that I was not using "lynch mob" to suggest that Nagel’s opponents wanted him to be hanged or even gently murdered. "Nagel had some fundamental misunderstandings about science and biology" is a statement some people might possibly disagree with, especially those who care about what a person knows versus what degrees he holds. As Emerson would have said: Ph.D.’s, Mr. Shallot, are the hobgoblin of little minds.
This is preposterous in so many ways.
1. Gelernter dismisses his own misrepresentations by insinuating I interpreted "lynch mob" literally. Read my reply again, and my longer and more detailed one here. (I sent Gelernter a link.) It is clear I am objecting to Gelernter's exaggerations. Maybe Gelernter thinks describing Nagel's critics as "punks" and a "lynch mob" and "mass attack of killer hyenas" is accurate and appropriate. Does anyone else?
2. Gelernter fails to address my points, saying only "some people might possibly disagree". True enough, but does their disagreement have any rational basis?
3. Gelernter implies I am a person who doesn't "care about what a person knows versus what degrees he holds". Well, which group of people is likely to know more about evolutionary biology? Actual evolutionary biologists, who disputed Nagel's claims in detail, or Nagel and Gelernter, who have no expertise and no training in evolutionary biology? I challenge any fair-minded person to read Nagel's book (I have), Gelernter's praise of it, and the reviews by people like Orr and Elliott Sober and decide who has made the better case.
4. Finally, Gelernter can't even be bothered to spell my name correctly, even when his only task is to copy and paste it from the first line of his own reply.
All in all, it's a pretty poor performance for Professor Gelernter. But -- I am not surprised to see -- par for the course.
Monday, September 15, 2014
Meet David Gelernter, First Amendment Hypocrite
I'm very glad that Gelernter is such a stalwart defender of the 1st Amendment of the US constitution.
But then, let's read what he says about atheists who have rightly objected to forcing nontheist schoolchildren to publicly acknowledge their belief in the Christian god: the children have a choice, Gelernter says, because they can just shut up.
Oops, I guess that 1st Amendment is just so much chin music.
Tuesday, September 09, 2014
The Robert J. Marks II Information Theory Watch, Day One
I wanted to see the details of the calculation justifying this claim, so I asked Professor Marks to supply it. He did not reply.
So today I e-mailed him, as follows:
Dear Prof. Marks:
Here
http://humanevents.com/2014/08/19/biological-information-new-perspectives-from-intelligent-design/
you claimed
"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".
I asked you there for the details of the calculation that would show this, but you did not reply on that page, so I'm asking again.
Could you please provide me with your calculation to justify this claim?
Regards,
Jeffrey Shallit
I'll let you know if and when he replies. Not holding my breath, though. ID advocates have a history of wild claims that they refuse to justify.
Sunday, September 07, 2014
Answering a Baptist's Question
It says
Dear Atheist,
If you don't believe in God
Why do you care if I pray to him?
Nevertheless, I'm going to pretend that the question is an honest one and do my best to answer.
Dear Pastor Seidel,
You ask, if I don't believe in God, why do I care if you pray to him?
The simple answer is, I don't. Neither I, nor most of the atheists I know, give a damn one way or another. I personally wouldn't waste my time with that particular activity, but then there's a lot of activities that others enjoy -- such as stock car racing or listening to Celine Dion -- that I consider a waste of time and don't participate in. If prayer makes you happy and gives you some consolation, go right ahead. You don't need my or other people's approval to pray to your god -- be my guest.
It's not your prayer I'm concerned with. It's not even your beliefs, which I think are irrational. Lots of people have silly and irrational beliefs.
No, what I'm really concerned about is the actions your irrational beliefs might lead you to take. If your beliefs cause bigotry against black people, I'll oppose you. If your beliefs cause you to deny equal rights to gay people, then I'll oppose you. If your beliefs cause you to suppress the teaching of scientific theories like evolution in public schools, or deny the problem of global warming, then I'll oppose you. If your beliefs cause you to prevent sex education, and instill in young people an unhealthy view that sex is somehow "sinful", then I'll oppose you. If your beliefs result in anti-Semitism, I'll oppose you. If your beliefs cause you to work to further entrench Christian privilege in North America, then I'll oppose you.
I'm not saying you do any of these things. I know that Baptists are a very diverse bunch. Maybe you marched in solidarity with black people in Selma. Maybe you welcome gay people in your church. Maybe you conduct same-sex weddings. Maybe you acknowledge the truth of evolution and global warming. Maybe you warn your flock about the sin of anti-Semitism. If so, more power to you. We can join hands and work together.
Speaking of Christian privilege, I hope you're not one of those theists who think they can violate the separation of church and state by having teacher-led prayer in public schools, or forcing non-theists to listen to sectarian prayers at the beginning of government meetings. Not only is it not respectful of those whose beliefs differ (and there are lots of us), it's not constitutional, either.
Do I think we'd all be better off if you didn't pray? Probably. There are a lot of societal problems that won't be fixed by prayer. As a famous agnostic once said, "The hands that help are better far than lips that pray."
Still, I'll repeat myself: pray all you like. Neither I, nor most atheists, care. But we do care about your actions when your irrational beliefs take you down roads that adversely impact other people's rights, and create policies that are bad for non-Christians and bad for society. When you do that, suddenly we care. We care a lot.
Saturday, September 06, 2014
Anti-Science Nuts are On All Sides of the Political Spectrum
Here's an example I recently stumbled across: this radical feminist blogger thinks that women have "higher cognitive and sensory capacities than men" and "that compared to men, women simply seem to have a fully functioning brain (or far better functioning than men at least)" and "The mutation process clearly generates a deteriorated version of the original", thus showing she doesn't have much understanding of what a mutation is.
Of course, she also thinks that "some women do have the capacity to communicate with plants and trees and living beings in different ways, they ask the plant what kind of healing powers she has and the plant may reply, if she wants to". It's hard to understand someone whose world view is so distanced from reality.
The same blogger believes that all (literally all) sexual intercourse is rape and that sexual intercourse is somehow unnatural. When a commenter reasonably asks "Almost every mammal species reproduces this way, how can it be unnatural?", the blogger responds that "The purpose of PIV is to cause harm" (PIV, by the way, is the acronym for "penis-in-vagina sex") and "PIV isn’t natural, it’s an action done by men to us".
I feel very sorry for someone so filled with hate towards men, with such a warped worldview. Not filled with hate, you say? Read her December 12 comment here, where she advocates killing most or all men simultaneously: "The only way it could work without risking severe male retaliation is for all women to do it [kill men] at the same time, literally at the same time, so that the remaining males wouldn’t be sufficient in number and wouldn’t have enough time to organise repression harshly enough to terrorise women back into domestication." Honestly, this person sounds seriously dangerous to others. Let's hope her homicide fantasies don't become reality.
The Nonsensical Syllabus
Needless to say, this disease of absurdity has already been happening at Waterloo for some time. For example, here's part of a message I recently received concerning my fall Algorithms course:
"It is now mandated by Senate that each offering of a course must provide a course outline that will be archived (those for CS will be archived on https://sharepoint.uwaterloo.ca/sites/cscourses/). Information that does not exist for the course, such as the names of the teaching assistants if there are none, may be omitted. Course outlines should include the following basic elements: course number and title; class days, times, building, and room number; class instructor's name, office, contact information, office hours; TA's name, office, contact information, office hours (if applicable); course description; course objectives; required text and/or readings; general overview of the topics to be covered; expectations of the course, including requirements, deadlines, weight of requirements toward the final course grade; acceptable rules for group work; indication of how late submissions and missed assignments will be treated; indication of where students are to submit and pick up marked assignments; the institutional-required statements regarding "Academic Integrity", "Grievance", "Discipline", "Appeals", and the "Note for students with disabilities" (see https://uwaterloo.ca/secretariat/sites/ca.secretariat/files/uploads/files/courseoutline-requirements.pdf for the text of these statements); The outlines are to be distributed to students electronically or on paper by the end of the first week of classes; and are required to be filed with the appropriate administrative authority."
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Huckabee is a Moron
When one Fox News host dared to ask the obvious question -- namely, isn't it reasonable to worry about the misuse of all those guns in schools? -- Huckabee merely dismissed this concern, saying something like 'If this ... if that ... you can waste your time worrying about scenarios like that'.
Huckabee is a moron. The chance that any particular school being attacked by an armed intruder is vanishingly small, and the chances that it occurs and an armed teacher is going to stop it successfully is even smaller. On the other hand, accidents with guns happen every day, and there is certainly a nontrivial probability that (a) an accident will happen (b) a teacher will misuse a gun or (c) the gun will be stolen and used against a teacher or other student.
If you are going to evaluate the wisdom of arming teachers in schools, you have to have some good estimates on the various probabilities. And if the school district is going to pay for all that teacher training, you also have to factor in the costs of doing the training instead of (say) installing higher-security doors or training students how to respond in the unlikely event of an attack. This sensible approach to deciding about the proposal was dismissed by Huckabee as "if this".
It's not just conservatives who are stupid in this way. Sometimes you hear liberals saying something like "if it saves just one life, it's worth it" about some new policy. Well, of course, it's not necessarily worth it. A law restricting the speed limit to 10 mph on US roads would probably save lives, but we deem it not worth it because of the inconvenience and extra time it would cost us.
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Robert Marks Caught!
Saturday, August 23, 2014
Nonsense from Marks
Here's Robert Marks, writing nonsense in Human Events:
"Yet 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."
We do, eh?
"Since it is our uniform experience that elsewhere, information is only created by intelligent agents..."
Here Marks is just repeating the familiar lie of ID creationist Stephen Meyer, which I pointed out was wrong four years ago.
Repeating lies doesn't make them any more credible.
Addendum: Tom English points out that Marks's claims about the publication of their creationist volume are bogus. Big surprise.
Saturday, August 16, 2014
A Probable Meteorite Hoax (or Prank)
By and large, press coverage of this guy has been completely credulous, referring to unnamed scientists at "Belgrade University" who have verified that the rocks are indeed meteorites.
In pictures he is shown holding a rock that doesn't look very much like a meteorite.
Here is what I think probably happened: either
- They're not meteorites, and he is confused, or
- This is a hoax perpetrated by Lajic himself. Perhaps the rocks aren't even meteorites, although it is easy to buy meteorites, even fairly large ones, at mineral shows or on e-bay. It is then simple to pretend to discover it after you claim it hit your house, or
- One of Lajic's neighbors is having a little fun with him in the same way.
My New Book
Here is my new book, Neverending Fractions:
My co-authors, Jon Borwein, Wadim Zudilin, and the late Alf van der Poorten, wrote most of the book. I only contributed one chapter, a couple of sections, and some editing. I hope you'll enjoy it!
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Avoid This Conference: CSNT 2015
Here is the solicitation I just got from them:
Dear Jeffrey Shallit, I am the secretary of the 2015 International Congress on Computer Science and Network Technology (CSNT 2015). On behalf of CSNT 2015 Organizing Committee, we cordially invite you to be a member of Technical Program Committee of CSNT 2015. CSNT 2015 will be held in Hong Kong, China, from February 10-11, 2015. The main objective of CSNT 2015 is to provide a comprehensive global forum for experts and participants from academia to exchange ideas and present results of ongoing research in the most state-of-the-art areas of Computer Science and Network Technology. More information about the conference, please visit the website: http://www.as-se.org/conf/csnt2015/ As a leading authority of the field, your participation and support is essential to the success of the conference. And we believe your participation will bring more glory to this conference! Note: As a TPC member, 1. Your paper or papers recommended by you can enjoy a discount on registration fee. - 2. Your name will be shown on conference website and hardcopy of proceedings. If you are interested in being a member of TPC, please attach your CV in your reply. Thank you for your consideration, and we look forward to hearing from you! Best regards, Yours Sincerely, CSNT 2015 Organizing Committee Email: icsnt2015@hotmail.com Website: http://www.as-se.org/conf/csnt2015/Notice everything wrong with this:
- They invited me to be on the program committee, even though I have never published a thing on "network technology"
- The solicitation does not mention a single person on the program committee
- The solicitation is unsigned
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Must Pop Science Writers Know What They're Talking About?
On the one hand we have the Denyse O'Leary school of journalism, blending lousy writing with an even lousier understanding of her subject matter.
On the other hand we have Carl Zimmer, whose books are praised by scientists knowledgeable in the areas he covers.
In between, we have books like The Violinist's Thumb by Sam Kean. Kean seems like a nice fellow, not at all like the know-nothing harridan O'Leary. But a master's degree in library science doesn't exactly inspire confidence that he knows what he's talking about. Nevertheless, his books have garnered some positive reviews, so I thought I'd take a look.
I was disappointed. Just to name four howlers:
- On page 107, Kean reveals that he thinks that Mitochondrial Eve is the "oldest matrilineal ancestor of everyone living today". No, she's the youngest (most recent) matrilineal ancestor. The distinction is absolutely crucial.
- On page 159, Kean states that he thinks the name "junk DNA" has "haunted [scientists] as an embarrassment ever since". Not so.
- On page 255, Kean claims that Paganini was not a composer. Even I, a classical music dilettante, know that Paganini wrote many works.
- On page 267, Kean translates the French idiom "étrangler le perroquet" as "strangling the parakeet". But "perroquet" mean "parrot", not "parakeet", in French. The word for "parakeet" is "perruche".
Friday, August 01, 2014
Monday, July 28, 2014
Conversation with a "Cantor Crackpot"
A few weekends ago, I got a chance to chat with a "Cantor crackpot". This is not pejorative; it is the term he used to describe himself. S, as I'll call him, is a pleasant and educated person, but he is convinced that Cantor's proof of the uncountability of the real numbers is wrong.
Here is what he recently wrote to me (paraphrased): Cantor's proof is wrong because the diagonal method that he used fails to produce a number not on the list. He illustrated this with the following example, in which S purports to give a 1-1 correspondence between the integers and the real numbers:
integer <-> real 23456 <-> 0.65432 23457 <-> 0.75432 23458 <-> 0.85432 23459 <-> 0.95432 23460 <-> 0.06432
This is a common misunderstanding among people when they first see Cantor's proof. I think this misunderstanding is essentially rooted in the following misconception: either that the only real numbers are those with terminating expansions, or that the set of integers contains objects with infinitely long base-10 representations. In this case, having talked with S, I know his misunderstanding is of the latter type.
In his example above of the purported bijection, we can ask, what integer corresponds to the real number 1/3? Its decimal expansion is 0.33333... where the 3's go on forever to the right. This must correspond to the integer ....3333333 where the 3's go on forever to the left. But this is not an integer!
So in this case the misunderstanding is really of a trivial nature. I would be interested in speaking to people who deny the correctness of Cantor's proof based on more elaborate misunderstandings.
Silly Barry
For some comedy gold, read this post and enjoy the logical fallacies, straw man arguments, and misspellings. (Barry also doesn't seem to know what "antecedent" means.) It looks like it was written by an 8th grader, not a member of the bar.
Let's start with the first line: "Living things appear to be designed for a purpose. That statement is entirely non-controversial." Well, I dispute it. Living things don't really appear designed to me, much less designed for a purpose. Most of the designed things I know look like artifacts: the characteristic product of human activity. Mark Isaak even wrote a paper in which he tried to list commonalities among designed things. Living things don't fit very well.
As for "designed for a purpose", what purpose would that be? What is the purpose of the Ebola virus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the tick, the cockroach, and Celine Dion? A commenter tried to ask this, but didn't get any sensible answer.
Barry's post is called "Denying the Obvious". Lots of things which people used to think were "obvious" turn out to be not so obvious. It was "obvious" for many years that the earth was flat. It was "obvious" for many years that the earth was stationary. It was "obvious" for many years that witches were real, that slavery was the natural order of man, and so forth.
Barry thinks the denial of design is dishonest: "Dawkins and his ilk deny design, however, not because the evidence compels them to deny it, but because their a priori metaphysical commitments compel them to do so." Actually, they don't, at least not for me. I think it would be really mind-blowing if we discovered that life on earth (in general) or people (in particular) were part of an extraterrestrial engineering experiment. But since there is currently no evidence for this, pardon me if I am skeptical.
Barry thinks "Materialists must deny the existence of libertarian free will". Well, not this materialist. I don't deny it because I don't think anybody --- and certainly not Barry --- has a coherent definition of "free will". I do think that the folk and religious understanding of free will is very, very likely to be wrong, or at least wildly simplistic, as we are finding out from neuroscience. I think ultimately we will come to a scientific understanding of the various phenomena we currently lump under "free will". Progress is unlikely to come from philosophers and even more unlikely to come from theologians or certified public accountants.
Barry thinks "A man’s body is designed to be complimentary [sic] with a woman’s body and vice versa. All of the confusion about whether same-sex relations are licit would be swept away in an instant if everyone acknowledged this obvious truth." Well, no, it's not "an obvious truth", even if one uses the correct word "complementary". And even if it were, what does that have to do with whether same-sex relations are "licit", by which I assume Barry means "lawful"? After all, hammers are designed for hammering, but does that mean if I use a hammer as a doorstop I am breaking the law?
Barry illustrates the truth of William James' observation, "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
Sunday, July 27, 2014
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
James Keegstra Dead
As a public school teacher in nearby Eckville, Keegstra spread his anti-Semitism to a captive audience in the Eckville public schools for years with hardly any complaints. When his lies were exposed, many in the community came to his defense. He was even Mayor for a time.
Keegstra was the classic fundamentalist Christian anti-Semite. He learned his anti-Semitism from crackpot Christian tracts like The Talmud Unmasked. Keegstra taught his students all sorts of nonsense, from the claim that John Wilkes Booth was Jewish, to Illuminati conspiracies, to the claim that Jews killed Franklin Roosevelt and that they were behind all kinds of world disasters, to Holocaust denial --- and his students duly repeated these claims in their essays. (One student essay contained the line "we must get rid of every living Jew so that we can live in peace and freedom.")
It was only when some courageous parents finally spoke out against Keegstra that the school board took action. It was actually his anti-Catholicism that got initially got him noticed; echoing today's crackpot claims of Rebecca Bynum and Jody Hice about Islam, Keegstra claimed that Catholicism was not a religion but a "humanly created ideology". In 1982 he was finally suspended from teaching. Later, he was prosecuted under Canada's hate speech laws. (Personally, I think the prosecutions were misguided; they only served to make Keegstra more of a martyr. He should not have been teaching his pernicious lies in the public schools, but neither should he have been convicted for believing them.)
If you would like to know more about Keegstra, a good source is Bercuson and Wertheimer's book A Trust Betrayed: The Keegstra Affair.
Believe it or not, there are people who praised Keegstra. For example, Joshua Blakeney, a former Alberta graduate student who was actually awarded a Queen Elizabeth II graduate scholarship for his bizarre "investigations", tweeted a recommendation of this Press TV article eulogizing Keegstra. (Warning: you're likely to want to wash your hands after clicking the link.) In case you didn't know, Press TV is a propaganda arm of the Iranian government. Blakeney is, by the way, also heavily into 9/11 conspiracies. Blakeney was a student of Lethbridge professor Anthony Hall, whose reasoning ability can be gauged from this article.
More praise from Keegstra comes from Arthur Topham who was (you guessed it) a recent guest on Blakeney's podcast.
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