What's Norwegian and Commutes?

Why, an Abelian plane, of course!

Norwegian Airlines has pictures of famous Scandinavians on the tails of their planes, including the mathematician Niels Henrik Abel (1802-1829). You can see some of the other ones here. Oddly enough, the Norwegian Air website itself only lists a few of them.

Creationists Try to Do Mathematics - Again

It's always amusing when creationists try to do mathematics.

At the recent very silly Engineering and Metaphysics conference, there were at least three different talks with mathematical content.

But the funniest by far was by Eric Holloway, whose masterful work I admired once before. You can watch Eric

• claim that intelligent design will revolutionize all human thought
  
• shamelessly promote Dembski's "complex specified information", without mentioning that this bogus concept has been debunked in detail
  
• claim that physics deals with only two kinds of "agents"
  
• claim that a "search process" is not an "algorithm" - and then later talk about "search algorithms" (!)
  
• confuse the complexity classes NPC and EXPTIME
  
• claim that all polynomial-time algorithms depend on "incrementally find[ing] better solutions"
  
• confuse finding solutions with maximizing a function
  
• claim that the travelling salesman problem can be solved in polynomial time (at 19:14)
  
• claim that humans can solve the travelling salesman problem in linear time
  
• repeat Stephen Meyer's lie that "only intelligent agents create information"
  
• claim that "clouds" have "no information" (and hence imply that weather prediction can be done without any information at all!)
  
• claim that a specific instance of a maze can be changed, by removing a wall, into an NP-complete problem - thus making two fundamental errors in one sentence
  

All good stuff! You can see why creationists have to set up their own parallel pseudoscience conferences, because junk like this would be laughed out of any real scientific or mathematics conference.

Larry Moran Would Approve

It's pretty easy to get to: you go to Victoria Rail Station, and take the train to Bromley South. Trains run rather frequently. Once at Bromley South, you walk out of the station and up the street to the right a bit, and catch the 146 Downe bus. Your Oyster card works for the train and the bus - very convenient. The last stop is Downe Church, and then it's a short walk up Luxted Road.

The walk along the road is a bit unpleasant, since it is narrow and there is no sidewalk, so here's a tip: walk up until you see a sign on the left of the road that indicates the footpath to "Cudham". Follow this footpath until there is a sign indicating "Down House" to the right.

Inside you will find exhibits about Darwin's life and work, including his study and library. Outside, you find his gardens, and the famous Sandwalk. Not to be missed if you are in the London area!

Map Quiz

This is a rather famous map; indeed, it was even the subject of a recent book. What is it, who made it, and where was this picture taken?

The Death of Nano-Thermite

Did 9-11 "truthers" mistakenly identify ordinary epoxy, clay, and steel as "nano-thermite"?

That's what a new study concludes.

Gee whiz, it looks like the conspiracy crackpots got something wrong again. Who's surprised?

Strangest Textbook Title

There are a lot of strange textbook titles, but this one may be the strangest of all:

Discrete Mathematics with Ducks.

That's just silly! Everybody knows that you do discrete mathematics with geese, not ducks.

Friday Moose Blogging

Here's an account of canoeists who rescued two hypothermic moose.

Hat tip: Anna

Norwegian Moose Dance

You must see the famous Norwegian moose dance.

Hat tip: son #2.

Hard Questions?

Here a very silly person lists 20 questions he thinks atheists are incapable of answering.

Some of them are just question-begging, such as "What caused the universe to exist?". Ignoring the fact that causality is not very well-defined, how do we even know for certain that the universe was caused? And if atheists cannot answer this question, it's not like the theist answer ("God created it") provides any more insight.

Other questions are downright strange, such as "Why did cities suddenly appear all over the world between 3,000 and 1,000BC?" What this has to do with theism or atheism is beyond me. Mesopotamia had cities even earlier, in 4000-3500 B.C.E. In any event, probably the development of agriculture led to the formation of cities, and once this innovation occurred, it would have spread through trade.

Question 10 asks, "How do we account for self-awareness?" This has a relatively easy answer. Through natural selection, organisms come to model their environment. Sometimes this modelling is reflected in their geometric structure: a camel has a very different body profile than a shark. But organisms also sense the natural world and react to it. Having a better model -- one that allows an organism to predict future events in the world -- clearly would contribute to better survival and reproductive success. As the model becomes more sophisticated, eventually it will have to encompass the organism itself. Self-awareness is just when your model of the world becomes so detailed that it has to include yourself.

I won't spend any more time on this silly list, but readers should feel free to chime in with their own answers.

Don't Attend Crandall University

There are a lot of reasons not to attend Crandall University in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. For one thing, it used to be Atlantic Baptist College, and today it still describes itself as "Atlantic Canada’s Leading Liberal Arts University Devoted to the Christian Faith". Its motto is "Christ is preeminent". Not surprisingly, it gets crappy ratings, with this place rating it 7748 out of 11,000 North American universities, and 91st out of 98 Canadian universities.

Now there's yet another reason: the people who run it are bigots who won't hire a gay person in a gay relationship.

Programming Contest Results

The results from the 2012 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest are in, and Waterloo finished 9th in the world. Congrats to my colleague Ondrej Lhotak and to students Tyson Andre, Benoit Maurin and Anton Raichuk.

What's particularly interesting to me is the continued excellent performance of Russia and former-Soviet-Union countries such as Belarus and Kazakhstan. What accounts for their dominance? Is there some lesson from their educational system we can draw on in North America?

Well, This Should Certainly Help Baylor's Reputation

Here's a video by creationist professor Bob Marks that claims to be a lecture he gave at Baylor's "Introduction to Engineering" course, ENGR 1302, in Fall 2011 at the invitation of Professor Brian Thomas. It prominently features the logo of the Baylor University School of Engineering and Computer Science. I wonder why Baylor's Engineering department thinks it's a good idea to indoctrinate their freshmen engineers in creationist propaganda.



Watch Marks
- violate copyright by including videos of movies
- repeat the bogus claim that information only comes from an intelligent source (easy counterexample: weather forecasting)
- dramatically overstate the importance of the "No Free Lunch" theorem (which isn't very deep or important; nor does it have any real relevance to evolution). He claims it implies that "all algorithms kind of work on average the same as blind, exhaustive search". The only problem is that this assumes that the "average" is taken over a uniform distribution of all possible assignments of values to elements of the search space. Real search spaces don't look anything like this.
- claim that "The universe is not old enough or big enough to allow the evolution of complex life" (at 50:00)
- talk about his "active information" and "endogenous information" without revealing that the only people who use these measures are Marks and his creationist friends
- misrepresent Dawkins' "Methinks it is like a weasel" example
- claim that "In general, computer programs do not have the ability to create information". (Easy counterexample: write a program to map a string x to xx. By iterating this you can generate as much information as you like.)
- cite another creationist, John Sanford, to try to impugn Avida
- suggest that exhibiting other searches that are more efficient than evolutionary search algorithms casts doubt on evolution

Having faculty deliver creationist lectures like this is certain to improve Baylor's worldwide reputation. Why, I imagine the applications for graduate study will be rolling in. He needs to work on the cheesy sound effects and the hideous cartoons, though. Maybe adding some fart noises or stolen Three Stooges footage might help.

Doves Almost Ready to Fly

Back on May 6 I showed you how some mourning doves have taken over a former robin's nest at our front door. Now there are two baby doves just waiting to make their first flight.

Matthew LaClair: American Hero

Watch this documentary about student Matthew LaClair, who stood up to his Bible-thumping teacher (despite a lack of support from the school administration and fellow students) and struck a blow for the separation of church and state. The teacher, David Paszkiewicz, is exposed as a liar and a moron.

Prize for Dishonest Reporting

You can't make this kind of stuff up. The folks at PJ Media are offering a prize for dishonest reporting, and the committee includes Glenn Reynolds and Roger Simon.

Let's see, shall we nominate Glenn Reynolds for dishonestly attributing a right-wing columnist's views to the Kansas City Star? Or the time he misrepresented economic figures to blame it on Obama? There are just so many examples to pick from.

For Roger Simon, how about his recent interview of uber-fruitcake Jack Cashill about a meaningless error in a 20-year-old biography of Obama?

Or how about PJ Media's own Andrew Klavan for this dishonest commentary?

We could also nominate the Discovery Institute "News & Views" section, for having the most consistently dishonest reporting about evolution. There are so many DI lies to choose from, it's hard to know where to start. I'd nominate Denyse O'Leary, too, except the prize is for reporting, and it's hard to call what she does with that name. "Reprinting" would be a better word.

The Discovery Institute Gets a New "Expert"

I have to admit, I find it amazing how desperate the Dishonesty Institute folks are. They're willing to join forces with almost any nonentity, no matter how irrelevant their "expertise", if they toe the "evolution is a hoax and Darwinism is Nazism" party line. I mean, how else can you explain their fascination with David Klinghoffer? Casey Luskin? James Barham? John West? Not exactly Nobel Prize winners there, if you see what I mean.

Of course, their big tent has its limits. Michael Egnor got in a few columns at News & Views, but he's been quiet since this one. Even the Discovery Institute, it appears, has limits on the kind of nonsense they're willing to put up with.

Now they've got a new "expert" on their team: Stephen A. Batzer. Batzer is, at least judging from his cv, the person I might turn to if I wanted someone to give me a "review of recent glazing literature". But the theory of evolution? Not so much.

Here is Batzer's analysis of Sims' famous evolutionary simulation of locomotion strategies: "This program is modeling a very simplistic random search algorithm to produce an output, like a radar searching for an aircraft, or a robo-call computer punching out all the numbers inside of one area code, looking for a mark. The information, process, and therefore success have all been pre-loaded." I mean, you have to really work at it to miss the mark this much.

Congrats, Dishonesty Institute! You and Prof. Batzer deserve each other.

Yet Another P vs. NP Proof

From the Saudi Gazette we read about the truly astonishing work of Dr. Rafee Ebrahim Kamouna, who claims to have resolved the P vs. NP question.

“The paper has been on the site of Cornell University to conform its academic standards. This means the paper is of relevance and of interest to the scientific community."


No, it means he put it on the arxiv, a preprint archive that happens to be housed at Cornell.

"Dr. Kamouna is currently writing a book that will be entitled “Bi-Polarism Theory: The Death of Computer Science, The End of Mathematics, and The Birth of Logical Physics.”

... which we are all looking forward to read with breathless anticipation.

If this silliness isn't enough to satiate you, you can look at Gerhard Woeginger's page.

More Stupidity from Hoffmann

R. Joseph Hoffmann, the world's most boring atheist, is at it again with a new post telling us why the New Atheists are just so stupid and everyone should really be listening to R. Joseph Hoffmann and the even-more-boring Jacques Berlinerblau.

The reason why we laugh at Hoffmann is not because he has anything challenging or thought-provoking to say, but because he is so shamelessly contentless in such a sneering and supercilious manner. He claims the New Atheists do nothing but "shouting at people", but gives no examples, all the while getting in a few shouts himself. (Atheists need to "learn table manners"; they don't have "savvy"; they are "historically [incompetent]".)

Of course the Gnus (and I mean Dawkins, Harris, Rosenhouse, Hitchens, etc.) don't shout, but write intelligently and calmly almost all of the time. And they're fun to read, unlike Hoffmann, who is best read late at night when having trouble sleeping.

He claims that "Americn [sic] secularism hasn’t had the savvy to know how to preach its gospel in a way that (really) ups the numbers". Yet all the polls show just the opposite: atheists' numbers are rising faster than almost every religion. (Facts are not Hoffmann's strong suit. Don't bother correcting him, because he likes to remove comments that are uncomplimentary.)

Hoffmann wonders why there is "profound stress and anxiety about religion in these movements". He could, you know, actually ask someone involved in the "movements" to tell him why. No, it's much for fun for a pundit-wannabee to throw out a bunch of made-up explanations as if they were facts.

I'd be happy to tell Hoffmann why there is "profound stress and anxiety about religion", but first he has to remove the fingers he has inserted so deep into his ear canals.

Why Does the University of Toronto Demand Payment by Money Order or Certified Check?

Today we had to pay the residence fee for our older son at the University of Toronto. But unfortunately the Residence Office form says they only allow payment by certified check or by money order.

Look, this is the 21st century. I can pay my taxes online. I can buy airline tickets online. I can use a credit card, or a debit card, or paypal. But not, apparently, at the University of Toronto.

Each year thousands of new students move into residences. For each one of those students, parents have to make a special trip to the bank to satisfy this archaic requirement. The University of Toronto should be ashamed for wasting thousands of hours of time just because they can't move into the present.

Stephen Woodworth Refuses to Answer

Stephen Woodworth is a Conservative MP from Kitchener Centre, the Canadian riding (Americans would call it a "precinct") where I live. Although we disagree politically on many issues, I had always been impressed with his integrity and seriousness.

Recently he's become famous for trying to reignite a debate about abortion in the Canadian Parliament, by introducing Motion 312.

In a recent press release, Woodworth claims he "hopes to answer even more questions" about this proposal. He says, "I am more than willing to answer any questions Canadians may have".

Yet he refuses to answer my question, which I have asked twice: were abortion outlawed again in Canada, what should be the proper legal penalty for a woman who has an abortion?

He replied, saying it was premature to ask such a question. That's just avoiding the issue.

This is, I'm afraid, typical of those who advocate stricter controls on abortion.