Congratulations to Bill Dembski!

Bill Dembski has a new job as the "Phillip E. Johnson Research Professor of Science and Culture" at the Southern Evangelical Seminary. I know all readers of this blog will join me in congratulating Prof. Dembski in obtaining this position, for which he is most suited.

Southern Evangelical Seminary's doctrinal statement says "We believe in the special creation of the entire space-time universe and of every basic form of life in the six historic days of the Genesis creation record. We also believe in the historicity of the biblical record, including the special creation of Adam and Eve as the literal progenitors of all people, the literal fall and resultant divine curse on the creation, the worldwide flood, and the origin of nations and diverse languages at the tower of Babel." I wonder if Prof. Dembski will be required to recant his belief in an old earth?

David C. Levy Should Not be Allowed Anywhere Near an Institution of Higher Learning

In the Washington Post, some moron named David C. Levy opines:


An executive who works a 40-hour week for 50 weeks puts in a minimum of 2,000 hours yearly. But faculty members teaching 12 to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks spend only 360 to 450 hours per year in the classroom. Even in the unlikely event that they devote an equal amount of time to grading and class preparation, their workload is still only 36 to 45 percent of that of non-academic professionals. Yet they receive the same compensation.

This guy is the president of some education group? And a former Chancellor at the New School? He shouldn't even be allowed near a university.

Anyone who thinks that the time spent in a classroom dominates the activities of a university or college professor is a moron. For each hour that I teach, for example, I spend 2-4 hours preparing - and that's for a course I've taught many times. Add in constructing assignments & course web pages, marking, helping students during office hours, and a conservative estimate is that the work needed for a 3-hour class is something like 10-15 hours per week. Now, how about creating new courses or revising old ones? Teaching a course you haven't taught before takes something like 10-12 hours preparation per lecture, at a minimum.

Then there are all the other activities: advising students, serving on committees, giving public lectures, and so forth. And I haven't even mentioned research: believe it or not, even at small colleges some faculty do research.

Yet David C. Levy thinks faculty members' workload is "36 to 45 percent of that of non-academic professionals". Get real.

Charles Rice: Question and Answer Session

There was a brief question-and-answer session after the main talk, which was unfortunately dominated by two questioners. I didn't take detailed notes. Again, my comments in brackets.

First questioner: "So, isn't the Enlightenment really another Dark Age for Catholics"?
Rice: Yes. Our culture has lost its mind. You should pray the rosary. One of the things we are missing is an appreciation of spiritual reality. We are more than material beings. We know this because we can do two things that a material being cannot: abstraction and reflection. An abstract idea does not exist in the material world. [Pure assertion. There is no reason why a "material being" could not abstract or reflect, and there is good evidence that some animals can do abstraction and reflection.]

Another questioner: The bible approves of slavery. Doesn't that make God unjust?
Rice: Slavery in the bible means something different from the slavery we think of today.

After the lecture was over, Rice suggested he would take additional questions informally. I approached him and tried to ask about a passage in his book, 50 Questions on the Natural Law. The passage in question reads:

"It would make no more sense to force a day-care center to hire an acknowledged or practicing homosexual than it would to make a bank hire an acknowledged or practicing thief."

Holding a copy of the book, I said, "I understand why a bank would want to not hire a thief, because a thief might steal from the bank. But why would a day-care center want to not hire a gay person?"

Rice responded, "Read the book." I replied, "I have. But it's not clear. What is the rationale you are implying?"

Rice said, "Look, I already said I'm not going to answer any questions on that topic." I replied, "It's a shame you don't have the courage of your convictions to defend your views." Rice began to look rather annoyed.

Rice said, "At least you bought my book." I said, "No, I borrowed it from the library." And that was that.

[In my view, a scholar has an obligation to defend his published views in his area of expertise. I don't know why Rice refused to do so; perhaps it is because the passage is indefensible. Even if he didn't want to do so last night, Rice could have said something like, "I don't want to get into that here, but if you give me your e-mail address, I'll address your question later." But he didn't. In my mind, he has spectacularly failed his obligation as a scholar.]

By the way, news reports say that Rice will give a secret, by-invitation-only seminar for faculty today and teach a philosophy class. In the past, these additional seminars have been publicized and available for everyone who is interested. But not this year. I guess the Pascal lecture committee would rather have secret seminars away from people who might dare to ask inconvenient questions - which Rice probably would refuse to answer, anyway.

Summary of Pascal Lecture by Charles Rice (Part 2)

I'm continuing with my summary of what Charles Rice said. My comments are in brackets.

Next, Rice asked, "How do you know using just your reason that there always had to be an eternal being?"

He quoted a line from Rodgers & Hammerstein's The Sound of Music: "Nothing comes from nothing; nothing ever could." [But quoting music lyrics doesn't constitute a coherent argument. It seems to be that assertions like "nothing comes from nothing" are just that; assertions. In the view of modern physics, particles and anti-particles can, in fact, come from nothing.]

Finally, he revealed his deep argument for why there always had to be an eternal being: "Of course there had to be an eternal being."

Pope John Paul asked, why is the something rather than nothing? The culture where we live rejects that. The principle of our society is the dictatorship of relativism. "All things are relative": but if true, then that statement must be relative. And legal positivism is the jurisprudence of relativism. The foremost legal scholar of positivism was Austrian philosopher Hans Kelsen (1881-1973). Philosophical relativism is the philosophy of democracy. If everybody agrees, no one can tell what is right or wrong, so philosophical absolutism leads to totalitarianism. Legal positivism says that a norm of any content can be a valid law, and that justice is an irrational ideal. However, Rice disagreed with all that, saying we could pass a "John North extermination law" and we would know it is wrong. Kelsen, however, would have said "stop emoting, for we can't know what is just." After World War 2, Kelsen wrote, "Auschwitz & the Soviet concentration camps were all based on valid law". What do we give up and what have we invited if we can no longer say that Auschwitz is unjust? [It's like Rice never heard of any other legal theory. How about John Rawls and his Theory of Justice?]

The three principles of modern society are secularism, relativism, and individualism. Take the Obama health care mandate as an example: is conscience important? Oliver Wendell Holmes said "The purpose of law is to enforce the taste of the dominant group." But John Paul said that relativism is the philosophy of totalitarianism; if you don't have common reason, then all you have left is force. Natural law says you can know objective reality.

Take a pen. Can it be a battleship?

A door presents itself to me. How do we know it is a door? Because of our senses, both internal and external. The internal senses are imagination, memory, instinct, and common sense. Our active intellect abstract the essence of the door and passes it to the passive intellect which forms an idea. Idea: that by which we know. [Shouldn't our models of perception and cognition be based on what we know about neuroscience, rather than archaic 13th century views of the world?]

Judgment is the 2nd activity of intellect. Truth is the conformity of a statement with reality. If I say, "that is a geranium" while pointing at the door, that is false. There is a principle of non-contradiction. Can a pen be a pen and not be a pen? No, a thing cannot be and not be at the same time in the same aspect. [I'm not sure this is precise enough to mean anything, but even so, in modern physics, it is possible to create a system that is both vibrating and not vibrating at the same time. The real world could well be more complicated than simple Aristotelian logic might suggest.]

What is good? "The good is that which all things seek." All things, not just persons. [What good does a rock seek?]

There are 5 basic inclinations that are natural and self-evident. Choosing to prove this, he asked people what they were. Answers from the audience were empathy, trust, happiness, sex, food, and understanding. But Rice was clearly disappointed by these answers, and gave these instead, from Thomas Aquinas:
1. seek good, including the highest good, God
2. self-preservation
3. preservation of the species
4. live in community
5. to know and to choose, to use intellect and will
[Again, why should we base our reasoning & law on what some 13th century philosopher, ignorant of biology and neurophysiology, said? In modern biology the idea that a "basic inclination" of an organism is the "preservation of the species" is laughable; that's group selection.]

You can reason from all basic inclinations to understand why theft, murder, etc., is wrong.

Nevertheless, sincere people will occasionally take opposite positions on a moral issue. How can you tell who is right? We have the ability to know objective moral wrong. You are culpable only if you know it was wrong.

John-Paul said that Catholics have a great advantage in the Magisterium. It is a positive and hopeful document that provides
- dignity of the person created in the image and likeness of God
- solidarity
- subsidiarity: social tasks should be performed by individuals, families, associations, and the State (in that order). The State exists for the person, not the other way around.

Cardinal Ratzinger said, "Adolf Hitler and Stalin could be saints if they really thought what they were doing was right." Synteresis: general moral faculty. Anamnesia: remembrance imprinted in us of the way things were before the Fall.

The Magisterium is an aid recalling to a person the anamnesis of his being. Cardinal Newman said, "I will toast my conscience first and then the Pope." Conscience is whatever you decide? No, that trivializes it and the State need not respect it. The reality is that conscience is transcendent.

Every state or corporation that has ever been has either gone extinct or will go extinct. But every human being who has ever lived will live forever. [You can't base a valid legal theory on a false claim.]

Only if you are willing to say human reason can reach moral truth can you say a law is just or unjust. Rosa Parks: was she morally obliged to disobey the law that said blacks need give up their seat to a white person and move to the back of the bus?
No: if a law is contrary to common good you have an obligation to disobey it unless doing so would cause scandal. Example: income tax. It may be unjust but you have an obligation to obey it. [A little ironic that he would refer to Rosa Parks, since what gay people want is similar to what Rosa Parks fought for.]

But laws that violate the divine good must be disobeyed even at the price of your life. If a doctor in the military were ordered to perform an abortion, would he be obligated to do so?

We must affirm the transcendence of the person over the state. If you're incapable of affirming moral truth, then the state has won. If you're a relativist, you get your rights from the state. Only if you can affirm that you are endowed with rights by your Creator, as in the Declaration of Independence, can you assert these transcendent rights. You have transcendent rights because you're going to live forever.

Rice said, "I ask you to think about this and pray about it. It comes down to a question of God and the common moral code of society, founded on objective reality, and ultimately God. God is not dead; he's not even tired."

He concluded by saying that "the protesters have my admiration and respect" and we "should convey this to them". [I don't buy it. Real respect means he would have addressed some of his bigoted statements about gays, instead of ruling all questions about them out of bounds at the beginning. He could have easily "conveyed" his respect himself, in person, by going to talk with the protesters before or after his talk.]

Summary of Pascal Lecture by Charles Rice (Part 1)

Here's the first part of my account of Charles Rice's Pascal lecture tonight. For background, see previous posts on this blog. I will try to report fairly what Rice said, but I'm evidently biased. Inside quote marks the quotes are exact to the best of my ability to take notes; other comments are just paraphrases of what he said. My comments are in brackets.

My guess is that there were about 100-150 protesters outside & inside the building, and about 150-200 listening to the lecture inside an auditorium that could hold 500. There were a lot of empty seats, despite the controversy.

Charles Rice: 80-year-old professor of law at Notre Dame & former Marine who looks 65.

Rice was introduced by David B. Perrin, the President of St. Jerome's University, the Catholic university that is affiliated with the University of Waterloo (it used to be called a "church college"). [Perrin pronounced "Pascal" as if it rhymed with the computer language Haskell, and pronounced "Marine Corps" as "Marine Cores", both of which I found odd.] Throughout the night, Rice behaved almost as if it were an undergraduate lecture, moving out from behind the podium, asking questions directly of audience members, and rambling a bit.

By the way, in contrast to all the previous Pascal lectures I've attended, no member of the University's administration was there to welcome and introduce the speaker: neither President nor Provost. This was a pointed statement that the University administration did not approve of the choice of Rice as speaker.

Rice started with a joke, saying he was a lawyer and that "99% of lawyers give the rest of us a bad name". Throughout his approximately one-hour lecture, he had some mild jokes, some of which were more successful than others. He said his talk would be about epistemology - "how do you know?" He quoted Pope Benedict as saying that "modern culture restricts reason to the empirical", but that this was unwise, since if reason can only reach the empirical, it can't reach objective moral truth or God. Questions about objective moral truth and God are dismissed as non-rational in our society, Rice claimed, because reason cannot know anything about them. "We lose the ability to ask if a law is unjust because if reason is limited to the empirical, we can't decide, what is justice?"

He then said he was "frankly surprised to the objection to my participation in these lectures. I'm just a guy from Mishiwaka, Indiana. Why should I get singled out?" [I found this disingenuous. He's not just "a guy", he's a law professor at a major university who has inserted himself into public controversies before, such as when he protested Obama's selection as commencement speaker at Notre Dame. So it's a little ironic that he claims not to understand why someone would protest his own selection as a speaker. I think he knows quite well.]

The objections, Rice said, are because "I advance the teaching of the Catholic Church. I plead guilty. I fully agree with all the teachings of the Catholic church. Jesus Christ, who is God, lives in and teaches through the Catholic church. I respect the protesters and their protest. I admire their tenacity."

He went on to rule out any questions about anything except the subject of his lecture: "Don't take what I say as disparagement, but I'm not getting into these subjects in this lecture. It would be a disservice to the foundational issues to allow the discussion to be diverted into another agenda. Questions will have to be limited to things covered in the lecture. I don't want the focus to be diverted." [I found this a transparent ploy to avoid answering any hard questions about his extensive record of bigoted statements. It is ascholarly and disgraceful.]

He said, "We're going to talk about conscience. What is it?" Thomas Aquinas said it is "how we judge the rightness of wrongness of a particular action." Is there an objective standard, or is it simply your decision? Pope John Paul 2 said our society says "whatever I decide is right for me".

The Enlightenment's goal was "to organize society as if God does not exist". That is its basic principle.

He then asked a number of people in the audience individually if they think God exists. First person: "No." Second person: "No." Third person (me): "No!" [I think he was taken aback by this; he's probably not used to so many people disagreeing with one of his basic beliefs. Well, Waterloo is not Notre Dame, where he's used to teaching.] Finally, someone in the audience said, "I do!"

Rice then tried to move to causality. He said, "If I drop a pen" and asked why it fell, and you said, "No reason", would anybody believe it? There are things, he said, that are self-evident. One is the "principle of sufficient reason": every effect has a cause. [I don't understand why people elevate this claim to a universal. Causality might fail, for example, at very small or very large scales. For example, when an individual U-238 atom decays, what is the cause of its decay? The modern view of physics at the quantum level (admittedly not shared by all physicists) is that randomness is really "built in" and some "causes" are only statistical, not the deterministic ones envisioned by Rice. It seems to me that as a scholar, he needs to deal with this objection forthrightly.]

God is "an eternal being" and people "are immortal". "Only spiritual beings, such as humans, can abstract and reflect." [This seems just like a groundless assertion to me. I think Rice needs to read some ethology, such as the work of Gordon Gallup and Frans de Waal. It is not clear at all that the ability to abstract and reflect is restricted to humans; indeed there is evidence that baboons and apes can do so.]

More tomorrow...

Photos from the Pascal Lecture Protest

Here are three photos from tonight's protest of Pascal lecturer Charles Rice. That's UW Philosophy prof Tim Kenyon at the bottom.

Tonight's Pascal Lecture and Protest

Tonight Charles Rice from Notre Dame will be on campus at the University of Waterloo to present the annual Pascal lecture. I wrote about Professor Rice and this invitation before, but here are some more thoughts in advance of tonight's talk.

1. There will be a silent protest before and during the talk, from 6 to 9 PM, in the Theatre of the Arts, Modern Languages Building, on the UW campus. One organizer is Shannon Dea, a philosophy professor at UW. The organizers ask that you (a) refrain from interrupting the lecture in any way (b) wear rainbow-themed clothing (c) bring posters (but not on sticks) (d) cooperate with UW security. This is a good, peaceful way to let Charles Rice and the Pascal lecture committee know your disapproval of Rice's views. (Sample Rice quote: "It would make no more sense to force a day-care center to hire an acknowledged or practicing homosexual than it would to make a bank hire an acknowledged or practicing thief." - 50 Questions on the Natural Law: What It Is and Why We Need It, Ignatius Press, 1999.)

2. I've been reading some of Professor Rice's writings on "natural law"; they are so boring and unoriginal I could probably give his lecture for him. Here is some of what we are going to hear:

• An objective natural law exists and is binding on all of us.
  
• Natural law effectively coincides with Catholic dogma on subjects like homosexuality, birth control, etc.
  
• Gay people are "objectively disordered"
  
• The best way to understand the world is by following medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, ignoring 8 centuries of progress in science
  
• Animals have no rights
  
• Evolutionary biologists are wrong; people could not have descended from ape-like creatures because we have souls.
  

3. The local media coverage of the lecture and its protesters has been -- no surprise -- absymal. The Waterloo Region Record, our local paper, has spectacularly failed in its obligation to explain what the controversy is about. The coverage has been so bad that today's paper carries a letter to the editor in protest, written by student Stephanie Chandler.
I single out one reporter, Terry Pender, for his particularly egregious reporting. Here is an archive of some of the local coverage:

• Terry Pender, Choice of speaker at UW sparks protest, March 16 2012
  
• Luisa D'Amato, D’Amato: Campus can set an example as a home of free debate, March 17 2012
  
• Terry Pender, Pair of protests will accompany (post-departure) Charles Rice lecture, March 18 2012
  
• Editorial Staff, A teachable moment at UW, March 20 2012
  
• Greg Mercer, Lecturer at UW prompts silent vigil, March 20 2012
  
• Stephanie Chandler Letter to the editor, March 20 2012
  

4. The University of Waterloo has a well-deserved reputation for censorship in the past. Ironically, it's usually been the University administration that was responsible. From newsgroup censorship to removing newspapers from the University library with coverage of the Karla Homolka case to Ethics Committee harassment of Professor Ken Westhues for remarks he made in a course, to removing copies of the Imprint, the student newspaper, because of articles about sexual topics, the University administration has rarely stood up for the principles of free speech and academic freedom.

Students have, on occasion, unfortunately aped the administration. The most recent infringement was the shameful treatment of speaker Christine Blatchford, whose first talk had to be cancelled because three student protesters failed to move from the stage. Thankfully, this one time the UW administration did the right thing, and apologized and rescheduled the talk.

However, the impulse to censor lives on, as shown in this article that quotes a student, Ashling Ligate, as saying “He [University president Hamdallahpur] could cancel this. He could have sent a much stronger statement.”

More later...

"Proof" of Fermat's Last Theorem

One problem with the proliferation of "open access" journals is the decrease in quality. A good example is this "proof" of Fermat's Last Theorem by a guy who seems to specialize in rather eccentric papers. This paper was passed around to great laughter at the van der Poorten memorial conference in Australia. (The list of keywords alone is funny to a professional mathematician.)

This journal - the Journal of Mathematical and Computational Science - and its editorial board should be ashamed of publishing this junk.

Friday Moose Blogging

Here is a koala from Australia -- or, as it is commonly known -- the "Moose of the Treetops".

A Puzzle

Still here at the van der Poorten memorial conference in Newcastle, Australia. The following problem occurred to me:

What is special about the integer 2007986541?

The labels for the post may give some hints.

A Compass Puzzle

So I'm here for a week in Australia at the memorial conference for Alf van der Poorten.

I can tell it's really Australia because they are selling Kellogg's "Rice Bubbles" in the supermarket instead of Rice Krispies.

But there's another way to tell that it's the Southern Hemisphere, since I have a compass with me. Can you figure out what it is?

Shocked! Shocked!

This week's Shocked! Shocked! episodes are particularly funny.

David Limbaugh, who (if possible) seems even more talentless and vile than his brother Rush, is shocked! shocked! that people would dare to criticize his brother. Doing so constitutes "the most radical display of hate and intolerance" that he's witnessed in years! Bonus wingnut points for David -- he manages to mention Saul Alinsky. (Hat tip -- Ed Brayton.)

Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, aka "Kennedy", a Christian who hosts a morning radio show in Los Angeles, recently said something stupid about atheism and was shocked! shocked! to find that people would dare criticize her about it. That's what the good folks at Reason magazine think deserves a column. (And over at Uncommon Descent, they call the 39-year-old Ms. Montgomery a "girl".)

Ms. Montgomery's column is yet another example of something I've noticed before: the tendency of Christians --- who presumably think religion is a good thing --- to use religious terminology in a negative way to describe atheism and evolution. The criticism she received was a "Biblical floodgate"; the criticism exhibited "the same fervor the religious use"; atheists exhibit "intense—even religious—zeal". (Along the way, she hilariously misspells "Maimonides" -- pseud alert!)

Yet Another Creationist Misunderstands Information Theory

It's always funny to see a creationist try to use information theory, because they almost always get it wrong. Here we have Joseph Esfandiar Hannon Bozorgmehr, who posts under the name "Atheistoclast", demonstrating his ignorance:

---

"Matzke misunderstands what is meant by "new information".

He apparently thinks that new genes, produced by duplication, represent novel information. But if you copy one gene 1000 times over, the information content remains the same even though you have created many more genes.

---

Poor Bozorgmehr needs to sit in on my course CS 462 at the University of Waterloo, where we will shortly discuss this very issue. Then he can prove the following theorem:

Theorem: If K denotes Kolmogorov information, then K(xⁿ) - K(x) is unbounded as n tends to infinity.

This would be regarded as a relatively simple exercise in my course.

Yet Another Black Eye for the Pascal Lecture Series

The Pascal lecture series at my university, the University of Waterloo, has a history of inviting really terrible speakers. (Why a public university should be sponsoring an explicitly evangelical lecture series is a good and legitimate question, but not one I'll address today.)

You can read about last year's embarrassing choice, Mary Poplin, here, here, and here.

I didn't think it was possible, but this year's choice seems even worse than last year's. It is Charles E. Rice, an emeritus professor of law at Notre Dame. Rice is a big believer in "natural law", which (big surprise) just so happens to coincide with the Catholic Church's stance on everything from contraception to abortion to gay marriage. Here you can read Professor Rice's enlightened views about homosexuality.

You can watch 10 minutes of Rice in action here on Youtube. How many distortions and misrepresentations can you find? It'd be great to see the rest of this lecture, but I haven't been able to find it anywhere. Maybe some reader can help out.

Rice, by the way, is a director of the Thomas More Law Center, the legal organization that lost the Kitzmiller v. Dover intelligent design case. Here you can read Professor Rice's deep and penetrating analysis of the issues involved in that case.

While not an outright birther, he seems to have some sympathy with the birther movement, as evidenced by this column. Money quote: "The American people do not know whether the current President achieved election by misrepresenting, innocently or by fraud, his eligibility for that office."

I've been reading Rice's book, 50 Questions on the Natural Law. Stay tuned.

A Functional Equation

You might know the gamma function, which is one way to extend the factorial function to the complex plane. It obeys the functional equation

Γ(1) = 1

Γ(z + 1) = z Γ(z).

In fact, if we demand that it be logarithmically convex and obey the rules above, then the ordinary gamma function is in fact the only way to extend the factorial function to the positive reals. (Here Γ(n) = (n-1)!.)

Now the successor function z → z + 1 is on the lowest level of the Grzegorczyk hierarchy. The next higher level includes the function z → 2z. So, in analogy with gamma function, suppose we demand that

f(1) = 1

f(2z) = z f(z).

Then what's a "reasonable" function that satisfies this functional equation? My answer in the comments tomorrow, unless someone comes up with the same answer I did.

More Evidence that ID Isn't Science

Are you a young religious fundamentalist who feels threatened by the theory of evolution? Then this summer program run by the Dishonesty Institute may be right for you!

Of course, you'll need to prove that you are devoted to the Truth. That's why you'll need a "recommendation from a professor who knows your work and is friendly toward ID, or a phone interview with the seminar director."

Copy here, for when it disappears down the DI memory hole:



Yes, that's exactly how real science works. I remember well when I wanted to study theoretical computer science at Berkeley: one of the requirements was that I get a recommendation from someone who knew my work and was friendly toward computational complexity.

Not.

I mean, could it be any plainer that ID is a religious and political movement? It's just like when politicians set up "free speech zones" to keep out protesters, or when creationist organizations demand statements of faith.

No real scientific organization demands a "statement of faith" or that applicants to educational programs be "friendly" to the prevailing view. That kind of stuff is reserved for areas where questioning the evidence is not tolerated -- like intelligent design.

What We're Up Against

Read these quotes from Francis Schaeffer, and you will see what we're up against.

On the one side, the heritage of the Enlightenment: democracy, free speech, free inquiry, science, pluralism, tolerance, a secular state, and rights of women, gays, and the poor.

On the other side: people like Francis Schaeffer who reject those things because of "a life and death conflict between the spiritual hosts of wickedness and those who claim the name of Christ."

I know what side I'm on. Do you?

Stephen Talbott Doesn't Understand Randomness

Anyone who waded through Stephen Talbott's dreary, wrongheaded columns about the Internet 15 years ago know him as a tedious and remarkably uninformed writer.

Here we are treated to yet another case of Talbott's vapid maunderings-- this time about evolution. I don't see that Talbott has any professional training in evolutionary biology, and he repeats creationist canards uncritically. Anyone citing the creationist journalist Tom Bethell (whose work is filled with misunderstandings and falsehoods) favorably is hard to take seriously.

The most remarkable thing about it is that Talbott doesn't seem to have much understanding what the word "random" means in a physical and biological context. "Random" doesn't mean that every outcome is equally likely. For example, if I flip two fair coins repeatedly and write down "1" each time I see two heads, and "0" otherwise, the resulting list of outcomes evidently has a strong random component, despite the fact that any particular bit does not have a 50% chance of being "1" or "0".

Instead, Talbott prefers to give us crap like this: All we can possibly mean by “random occurrences” relative to an organism is “occurrences that have not yet been woven into the meaningful life story of the organism.”

No, that's not all we can possibly mean. There is not a shred of evidence that cosmic rays, for example, are anything but random. (The one paper Talbott cites is largely about exposure to intense man-made radiation sources, not cosmic rays.) Furthermore, Talbott seems to be confusing the role of mutations in germ cells (which are the only ones that are heritable) with others.

Talbott apparently has an aversion to hard science. He doesn't do any experiments, or report his finding in the language of science. His whole shtick revolves around some vague "holistic" analysis which has never produced anything of interest scientifically. That's why he's reduced to publishing his drivel in places like The New Atlantis.

A Fossil Meteorite

The Tucker Tower Nature Center in Lake Murray State Park, Oklahoma is a fascinating and weird place.

Built (with state funds!) as a summer retreat for corrupt Oklahoma governor William H. Murray, it now houses exhibits about local fauna in an eccentric 4-story building.

The most interesting object is the main mass of the Lake Murray meteorite, found in Carter County in 1933, weathering out of Lower Cretaceous strata. It is believed to be a meteorite that fell about 110 million years ago and then was incorporated into the sandstone that formed around it. I visited the museum in January 2007.

In Memory of Sheng Yu (1950-2012)

(photo courtesy Manfred Kudlek)

Yesterday I heard the sad news that Sheng Yu, a Chinese-Canadian computer scientist, and a good friend and colleague, died this weekend in London, Ontario.

I first met Sheng Yu shortly after I arrived in Waterloo as an associate professor in 1990, but I can't remember the circumstances. At the time he was working actively with the late Derick Wood (for whom Sheng gave a memorial talk just last year), who taught at Waterloo at the time, so it probably was through Derick.

We wrote a paper together on regular languages with polynomial densities. Later, Sheng asked me an interesting problem about whether it is possible to find a sparse language L such that L² = Σ^*. I found one example, and Andrew Granville found another. In 1994, we all wrote a paper with Per Enflo, who had found yet another example. Our last joint paper was in 2001, joint with Mike Domaratzki, on covers of formal languages. Although we did not work actively together in the last ten years, we often spoke on the phone.

Sheng got his master's degree in computer science from Waterloo in 1982, under John Beatty, and his Ph. D. in 1986 under Karel Culik II. Then he taught for several years at Kent State before taking a position at the University of Western Ontario.

Sheng's work on state complexity is well-known in our community. His influential 1994 paper with Zhuang and Salomaa is his most-cited non-survey paper (with Google scholar giving 156 citations), and re-introduced state complexity as a research topic to the theoretical computer science community. (It turns out that many of the results in that paper were already discovered by the Soviet computer scientist Maslov in 1970, but Maslov's results were either not known or quickly forgotten in the West.) Since then, state complexity became an active area of research, with dozens of papers published.

When I first met Sheng, I thought his only interests were about automata. I quickly found out I was wrong. He was incredibly broad, publishing papers on object-oriented programming, parallel processing, parallel programming, and teaching a wide variety of courses at UWO, including computer architecture, programming languages, and of course, automata theory.

Sheng Yu also had influence in other ways. He was one of the people responsible for the CIAA conference series, and served on the program committee of dozens of conferences. He also was one of the people responsible for the Grail system, which is widely used to carry out experiments with automata. He supervised dozens of graduate students.

Sheng told me a little bit about his life in China. He got his Ph. D. older than many of his contemporaries because his life was disrupted by the Cultural Revolution. He still had family in China, which he kept in close contact with.

About 5 years ago In 2000, Sheng had a heart attack while playing tennis at UWO. Luckily, he was very near the university hospital, and immediately went there, and the good care he received saved his life. He told me that his family had a history of heart disease and that he had high cholesterol, which he tried to control through diet.

I will miss him as a colleague and friend.