Fuller thinks that what the intelligent design movement really needs is another creationist geology book. And he thinks that Dembski is updating Shannon on information theory. (That'll be news to everyone who actually does information theory.) I'm really glad that Fuller is the intelligent design movement's favorite philosopher. Imagine the damage he could do if he were on the side of science and reason!
Although the show is one of my favorites, I have to admit it was not as good or funny as shows in the past. They sometimes play old shows or highlights from old shows, and you can hear the difference: they used to have lightning-fast wordplay and deductions, and lately they've been slipping a bit. Maybe they need some new blood: some younger panelists.
By the way, if you want to listen to the show, you either have to pay for it, or listen to it live on Saturday or Sunday on your local NPR station, or over the internet.
Do you have some favorite radio shows that you listen to over the internet? If so, give links in the comments.
This is the usual scam where someone advertises a book that consists of nothing but reprints from freely-available web pages, and then prints a book on demand if someone is stupid enough to buy it.
The same "author" has written 6000 other books.
Believe it or not, the Department of Applied Mathematics at University of Western Ontario, located in London, Ontario, invited the loony Christopher Monckton to give a prestigious invited lecture, the Nerenberg lecture, last March. Previous speakers included Roger Penrose.
In addition to being a pompous twit, Monckton is famous for global warming denial and, in his latest schtick, claiming that Obama's birth certificate is fraudulent.
My source tells me that the invitation to Monckton came from Chris Essex, professor of the department, and another global warming denier. Most of the Department boycotted the talk, I was told.
If anybody attended the talk, I would like to hear about it. This is really a disgrace.
I'll just mention one open problem from Kurt Mahler's last paper: what are the positive integers n, not divisible by 7, such that n2 has only digits 0 and 1 when expressed in base 7? The only examples known are n = 1 and n = 20. There are no other solutions with n < 1.67 · 1011.
Now, just three years later, it is closing. Big surprise there. Administrators were warned that it was unlikely to succeed, and if I remember correctly, our School of Computer Science voted against it. There was a lot of opposition to setting up a campus in a place with little protection for free speech and a free press, as well as violations of women's rights and gay rights.
By the way, the article in the Record I pointed to above is the typical shoddy job done by local reporter Liz Monteiro. There is nothing about how much this failure has cost the University (if anything), nor any interview with anyone originally opposed to the campus, nor any investigation of why the campus was set up to begin with. This is not good journalism.
No, I'm not talking about Mitt Romney. I'm talking about a little-noticed ballot measure -- little-noticed, that is, if you don't live in Ontario or Michigan.
Believe it or not, one of the most important crossings between Canada and the United States -- Ambassador Bridge -- is privately owned by a guy named Matty Moroun. For years people have wanted another bridge, because the existing one can't support the traffic. Canada has even offered to pick up all the cost of the new bridge, so it will be essentially free for the US.
Moroun can't stand the competition, and he's tried in every possible way to block the new bridge. Who cares if the bridge will benefit millions of people on both sides of the border? The only thing that matters is Moroun's profit.
He spent $33 million to back a statewide ballot measure intended to block the bridge, but lost badly, 60% to 40%.
Maybe now this important bridge will get built.
Nearly all the crazies lost: Allen West, Connie Mack, Todd Akin, Joe Walsh, and Richard Mourdock. Unfortunately it looks like we are still stuck with Michele Bachmann. And Judge Roy Moore won election in Alabama. Alabama secures its reputation as the worst place to live in the US.
Elizabeth Warren, who was the subject of nasty attacks about her native American heritage, easily defeated Scott Brown. Brown was not nearly as extremist as depicted by Democrats, but he was in the wrong state. He would have been a decent candidate for a state like Indiana or Pennsylvania, but not Massachusetts.
Maine and Maryland legalized same-sex marriage. Minnesota turned down a bid to change its constitution to prevent same-sex marriage. And Washington voters have apparently approved a law allowing same-sex marriage.
Two states legalized marijuana. This may be the start of a sane drug policy.
The mathematical illiterates who were skeptical of Nate Silver were proven wildly wrong. Silver's predictions were basically completely correct.
As predicted, crazies like Doug Groothuis are apoplectic. Groothuis raves as follows: "American [sic] does not know how to think, has no moral or political principles worth having, is manipulated by images and slogans, does not fear the idol of the State does not give a rip about unborn children; we will be taxes [sic] for their murders, does not believe in its own God-given greatness."
The dishonest Charles Krauthammer was raving about the "nationalization" of health care under Obama. Krauthammer is a liar. If you want to see nationalized health care, go to Britain. Obamacare isn't even close to "nationalization"; it's a timid initiative that maintains the status quo in almost every health care aspect except insurance. Bush's prescription drug benefit was a much bigger change.
Americans proved that the majority was not racist and was not fooled by pandering. That's a very good sign.
Here are my slides for the talk.
I said a lot of things that were not on the slides. In particular: "More foolish things have been said about APL than any other programming language, and Edsger Dijkstra was one of the biggest offenders."
In addition to the talks, there were some really nice displays from the collection of the York University Computer Museum. For example there was an IBM 5100 APL machine (one that I spend several years programming as an undergraduate), and an MCM APL machine.
We also saw a short film by Catherine Lathwell, who is working on a full-fledged documentary about APL.
At a panel we were asked to summarize what APL meant to us. I said something like the following: APL taught us that a good notation is half the battle. Computing is ultimately about insight, and a system that encourages experimentation and variation is one that can be used to treat mathematics almost as if it were an experimental science.
Thanks to Zbigniew Stachniak and Catherine Lathwell for organizing this.
The funniest thing is that the quote they are suing over is not even a direct quote. Faulkner wrote "The past is never dead. It's not even past." -- that's different from what is in the movie, which is "The past is not dead! Actually, it’s not even past."
This is not a lawsuit to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. Oops! I hope Dorothy Parker's literary estate is not going to sue me for that.
Russell Humphreys, the young-earth creationist, also denies that global warming is a problem.
Recently I learned about another example, possibly one of the most impressive yet. R. Webster Kehr is a Mormon and ex-Marine who
- thinks "evolution is the most absurd scientific theory in the history of science!!"
- denies Einstein's theory of relativity and the photon theory
- thinks that the naturals and the reals are the same size, even though he admits there is no bijection between them. He also describes himself as the author of many mathematical papers, although oddly enough, MathSciNet doesn't list a single one.
- subscribes to cancer quackery
You have to work pretty hard to be so deluded in so many fields simultaneously.
However, he remained an evangelical Christian. And in some ways he continued to argue exactly like a creationist. I remember once on a private mailing list, we had a disagreement about information theory. I quoted definitions from books about information theory to make my point, but these weren't good enough: Morton insisted that he used information theory in the oil industry and was correct and he would not budge from that. No amount of evidence could persuade him.
Now he's had a hissy fit and deleted his own anti-creationism pages. His reason is that most people who fight creationism are "religious bigots" who are taking advantage of his work to further their own agenda.
But take a look at his arguments! They are classic right-wing crackpot stuff:
- "someone got a draft of a book by John [sic] Buell and they were scheming how to put an injunction on his book PRE-PUBLICATION" - Buell's book figured in the Dover trial; I know the people involved and this injunction claim is completely untrue
- "It doesn't matter that the earth stopped warming in 1997 as the UK Met Office reveals in the latest HADCRUT data, one MUST still believe that it is still occurring" - a fabrication, one that was quickly debunked.
- "The president of Chic-Fil-A is not allowed to have freedom of speech or religon if that speech or religion offends the sensitivities of the elitists who think they have a right to hector everyone into their boring conformity." -- Morton clearly doesn't understand freedom of speech; it refers to the right to be free of government censorship, and it doesn't prevent private boycotts of business owned by people you disagree with. The Religious Right puts out boycott requests practically every week; Morton says not a word about these.
- "These same elites will not grant the religious the courtesy and right to put up monuments in the public square." - Morton needs to take a refresher course on the separation of church and state. I defend the right of people to put up religious monuments on private property, but public property is a completely different matter.
- "Why do people think it is ok to ridicule [a Mormon's] beliefs? Debate them, yes, ridicule them? no" - ridiculous beliefs deserve ridicule. Labelling them "religious" doesn't get you a free pass.
- "And if a majority want to teach their kids YEC or that the Martians are living amongst us, they should have that freedom" - How about if a majority wants to keep black students out, or teach that black students are inferior? Still OK? There is a clear public interest in having good science in public schools.
- "Freedom is dear; and you, the religious bigot, are a danger to my freedom." - right! That explains why the ACLU consistently supports the religious rights of Christians. And here is my modest contribution.
I'm sorry to see Glenn Morton leave the fight against creationism, but if his reasons are this intellectually dishonest, I say, good riddance.
The report strongly suggests that the complaints by certain students about his teaching were ridiculous and unfounded. Furthermore, it suggests that the complaints were badly mishandled by the administrators, including James Carson, chair of the Department of History, and Vice-Principal Daniel Bradshaw.
Professor Mason deserves a public apology and compensation from Queen's University.
The paper contains such deathless phrases as "By a little-known result of Fibonacci..." and "It is not yet known whether every real, surjective, pairwise regular functor is ultra-standard". The author pairings in the bibliography include Atiyah and Leibniz, and Atiyah and Eudoxus. Very nice work.
Mary Ellen Marsh of Sydney River said she thought someone was at her door and then realized it was a moose. She said the moose was in the neighbourhood for about an hour, going from yard to yard and down the street.
The animal visited Sydney River Elementary, where she made an impression on students.
Mikki Armishaw, the principal, said, “The children just went out of their minds.”
Boolean matrices have a natural interpretation in terms of directed graphs: given a graph G on n vertices, we put a 1 in row i and column j of M if there is a directed edge in G from vertex i to vertex j, and 0 otherwise. Then the boolean matrix power Me has a 1 in row i and column j if and only if there is a directed path from vertex i to vertex j of length e.
Given an n × n boolean matrix M, a natural question is, what is the largest size s(n) of the semigroup generated by M under boolean matrix multiplication? In other words, how many distinct powers can M have, in the worst case? Believe it or not, this natural quantity has received very little attention in the literature. There is a paper by Markowsky in 1977, and another by Denes, Roush, and Kim in 1983, but that's about it. For small n, it is known that s(n) = n2 - n + 2, while for larger n, it is known that s(n) is approximately g(n), Landau's function, which counts the maximal order of an element in the symmetric group of order n. It is known that Landau's function is approximately esqrt(n log n), so this tells us how s(n) behaves for large n. But to my knowledge nobody knows the exact value, or even small values past n = 20. This might be a nice computational challenge for an undergraduate.
