Recursivity

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...

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.

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

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.

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?

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!)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

(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.

Yet another creationist letter to the editor in my local paper, the Waterloo Region Record.

There are some really terrific stupid lines in this one:

However, I have never heard an evolutionist give an adequate explanation of how life itself began. There is the big bang theory, but it ignores the fact that such an explosion would destroy any kind of life as we know it.

and

The theory of evolution seems to propound that given sufficient time -- millions and even billions of years -- all things are possible, even though the chances of DNA and cell changes to produce current results are infinitely small.

Great stuff - typical for our local newspaper.

Please, publicize and vote up my

White House petition

to improve US government services for the estimated 4 million Americans who live abroad.

Currently we face an array of annoying obstacles, such as US government websites with webforms that only allow US addresses, or agencies with 1-800 phone numbers that cannot be called from outside the US.

Maybe somebody can wade through this article entitled "Cultural Topology" by Brent Blackwell, professor of English at Ball State, and tell me if it is a joke or intended to be serious.

With lines like "A kind of patchwork space, topologic analysis can combine incongruent, even contradictory axiomatics by bounding them within a single topologic field", I am tempted to think it is an elaborate hoax. But who knows? The stupidity that lurks in some academic departments can be stupefying.

This link was sent to me in 2006 by the late Norman Levitt, but I didn't take a look until now.

Watch the video and tell me you aren't impressed with the quiet confidence and intelligence displayed by Jessica Ahlquist, victorious plaintiff in the Cranston, RI school prayer banner case.

Now contrast it with the threats and vituperation of Christians who wanted a different outcome.

Everybody's favorite moron neurosurgeon actually called Jessica a "pubescent brownshirt" and said she was worse than Nazi Youth. It's hard to imagine anything more vile.

The comparison between Ahlquist and her detractors illustrates the utter depravity induced by religion.

In the National Post, we have yet another example of a theist who thinks that actions that annoy secularists have some intrinsic virtue.

Father Raymond J. de Souza says, "I cheer for Tebow in part because his success annoys grumpy people who think Christians should require special permission to participate in public life."

Father de Souza seems to have no qualms violating the Catholic 8th commandment, since of course there is no one who thinks "Christians should require special permission" to do anything at all compared to non-Christians. And it's hardly grumpy to think that Tebow's repeated ostentatious public display of faith is a little over the top. After all, doesn't Matthew 6:6 say something relevant? Or is pointing that out considered "grumpy"? Of course, if Tebow were a Jew or a Muslim, I bet Father de Souza would have something else to say.

Father de Souza says nothing at all about Tebow's support of Focus on the Family. I guess supporting anti-gay bigots is the Christian thing to do.

De Souza's pleasure in annoying secularists is hardly unique to him; it's a commonplace among conservative Christians. Annoy an atheist, annoy a liberal, annoy a gay person: these are all examples of virtuous conduct to be extolled. That's what Jesus would say. I reckon he would, I dunno.

Addendum: Father de Souza's website here. No surprise - he doesn't allow comments or post his e-mail address.

Here we have Mother Jones's Tim Murphy, who presumably is an adult capable of filing taxes, claiming that

"Romney ultimately squeaked past Santorum by eight votes on Tuesday day night, in what was by far the closest margin in the history of the Iowa caucuses—30,015 to 30,007, good for a .000065 percent advantage."

Should columnists have to take a refresher course in grade school mathematics before their editors allow them to embarrass their magazines like that?

(There were 122,255 total votes. A margin of 8 votes is .0065%, not .000065%. Murphy forgot to multiply by 100.)

A hawk (probably a Red-Tailed Hawk, Buteo jamaicensis) has taken up residence on our street. Yesterday he (she?) attracted a bit of attention, with the neighborhood kids coming by to take photos. This is just one block from the Kitchener bus station!

I used to read Free Inquiry, but I was never really crazy about it. Sometimes it published dreck, like an article by philosopher Mario Bunge (Spring 1997) that made the following laughably unsupported claims:
-"there is no algorithm to design algorithms"
- "Only a living brain ... can invent radically new ideas"
- "the Internet will never displace refereed academic journals and books".
(The last one seems preposterous today, but was ridiculous even 14 years ago.) Furthermore, it refused to publish a letter taking issue with those claims.

But the main problem with Free Inquiry was that it was boring.

So I gave up reading it, but I always wondered why it was so bad. After all, its sister publication, Skeptical Inquirer, was often entertaining and lively. But I think I've finally figured it out: R. Joseph Hoffmann was Associate Editor of Free Inquiry from 2003 to 2009.

Yes, the same R. Joseph Hoffmann who loves to write mindless pieces like these two. Hoffmann has got to be one of the most unimaginative, boring writers I have ever encountered.

Hoffman has devoted his life to the study of religion, so it's no surprise that he reacts badly when people point out that gods offer no worthwhile answer to any interesting question. I imagine somebody who devoted their life to studying horse-drawn carriages must have felt the same way when the automobile came along: "Horse-drawn carriages are a big idea. Automobiles are unappealing, and so are their advocates. Only 1% of the population drive cars, so the death of automobiles is just a matter of time."

Another motivation seems to be envy. All those atheists he despises (Harris, Dawkins, Coyne, Myers, Rosenhouse) are popular; they're the ones getting the media attention and invitations to speak. No surprise; they're good and entertaining writers, and they have something novel to say. And, irony of ironies, Myers has now been added to Free Inquiry as a columnist. Poor Hoffmann: it must be the final indignity. (Hey, maybe it's time to subscribe to Free Inquiry again.)

But don't bother pointing out any of this on Hoffmann's blog. He's not a big fan of publishing critical comments.

According to the Canadian Press, local pastor Mark Koehler's telling fibbies about school prayer in Ontario.

He is quoted as saying, "We’ve taken prayer out of school. We can’t say certain greetings at Christmas time."

Really? Students are prevented from praying in Ontario schools? That's news to me.

Pastor Koehler is legally prevented from saying "certain greetings"? I wonder what law that is.

The truth is that prayer has not been taken out of school. Rather, in Zylberberg v. Sudbury Board, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that a sectarian prayer offered by school administrators violated the Charter. This doesn't mean students can't pray on their own.

And of course, there's nothing preventing Koehler from saying "Merry Christmas" to anyone he wants.

Pastor Koehler should read his own Bible - I seem to remember the 9th commandment had something relevant.

This recent post by Cornelius Hunter exemplifies, in one sentence, the special combination of arrogance and ignorance that creationists possess:

Random events are simply not likely to create profoundly complex, intricate, detailed designs.

Even if one is able to come up with a rigorous scientific definition of terms like "profoundly complex", "intricate", and "detailed", this is a remarkably arrogant claim. How does Hunter know this to be true?

The answer is, he doesn't; he just believes it because his religion demands it. And it isn't true: we have abundant evidence from the field of artificial life that the claim is false.

To look at just a single example, take the work of Karl Sims. He has shown that virtual creatures can evolve intricate and novel locomotion strategies by a process of mutation and natural selection. This 1994 video shows some of the behaviors that evolved.

There's a good reason why none of the principal ID creationists (Dembski, Behe, Berlinski, Hunter, Luskin, etc.) address the challenges to their claims posed by artificial life: the rebuttal is so devastating that they can find nothing to say.

What is wrong with the Associated Press?

Just a few months ago, they were scammed by a Serb family who claimed their child was magnetic.

Now they're back again with pictures of Etibar Elchiyev, a Georgian man who claims "his body acts as a magnet".

Sad to say, my local paper, the Waterloo Region Record, fell for this scam again, publishing the AP photo in their December 15 2011 issue.

Hey, the runners can't be blamed too much if they didn't realize this ball was caught.

Here's a poem by my mother entitled "The Little Christmases". It appeared originally in The Lutheran, Vol. 9 No. 24 (December 15 1971), pp. 6-7.

Christmas is least of all
The wreath on the door
The lights on the tree
And the block on the calendar
Marked 25.

Christmas is the day
A week after Christmas
When the tinsel lies in sad sparkles
All over the house
And the tree droops, forsaken,
And the ornaments are once again just things
To put away --
And a little boy comes to you and says:
"I'll help, Mom."

Christmas is the day in February
When the snow closes your house
From the world and your boy-man goes forth to shovel
And the phone rings and the aged neighbor says:
"Just want to tell you about your son:
He shoveled my walk, he wouldn't take a cent,
I offered, but he wouldn't take a cent."

Christmas is the day in spring
When your husband comes through the kitchen door
And says, "You look like a little girl,"
And hands you the first crocus
To put in a jelly glass on the table.

Christmas is the wedding anniversary
When everything goes wrong.
The child is sick; the dress, the special dress
Stays drooping in the closet, and the dance
Is never danced, nor the wine drunk,
And in between thermometer and doctor calls,
The two friends come, bearing a flower pot
With three geraniums
Dug from their garden.
"Everybody's got to have an anniversary,"
The two friends say.

Christmas is the summer night with the band on the pier
And Sigmund Romberg's bright blare in your ears,
And far below, the dark waves' orchestration,
And your husband turns to you and says,
"Next year we'll have a boy in college."
And you look at each other
In wonder and sadness
The salt on your cheeks
Is from the leaping ocean spray.
If ocean spray can be so warm.

Christmas is the private time
On any night of the year
When grief strikes, loss invades,
Hurt shatters, and the heart,
Groping for solace,
Stumbles on the memory of a smile
Smiled years ago,
Or the echo of a gentle voice,
Or a kindness that dropped upon you,
Sudden as a star ...
All the little Christmases come back to you,
And reaffirm the blessedness of life.

Christmas is least of all
The wreath on the door
The lights on the tree,
And the block on the calendar
Marked 25.

Or anything that ever could be wrapped.

Here's my review of the atrociously bad book, Why Us?, by James Le Fanu. It appeared in Reports of the National Center for Science Education, 31 (6) (2011).

...but you can't make him think, as this post at Uncommon Descent makes clear.

It doesn't matter if bad creationist arguments are debunked, because they just keep bringing up the same bad arguments over and over again, as if no one ever explained why they are bad.

Here we have lawyer Barry Arrington (not a mathematician or biologist, as far as I can see) explaining Dembski's concept of design detection and making exactly the same bogus claims we debunked long ago.

Problem #1: the notion of "specification" is incoherent. Arrington says “ten straight flushes in a row" is a legitimate specification because "This pattern is not post hoc". OK, how about "100 straight flushes in a row, except one is not". Is that legit? Why or why not? How about "50 out of 100 deals are straight flushes"? Is that legit? Why or why not? How about "one straight flush, then a straight, then a flush, then 3 consecutive 4 of a kind, then two more straight flushes"? Why or why not? We explain the problem in detail in our paper.

Bottom line: there is a good way to decide about the reasonableness of a "specification" -- namely, Kolmogorov complexity -- but it is not anywhere near as simple as "valid" or "invalid" or "independent" or "not independent". When you use Kolmogorov complexity as your basis for deciding about specifications, then you get the theory of Kirchherr, Li and Vitanyi, not Dembski's theory.

Problem #2: Even if you can make the notion of "specification" reasonable, we showed that Dembski's claim about the "law of conservation of information" is bogus. The result is that his conclusions about design don't follow.

Problem #3: The proper way to do probability, the way that everyone else except creationists does it, is to pre-specify a region and then see if your observation matches that region. If you do so, and the probability of hitting the region out of the whole space is very very very small, then the proper conclusion is not "design"; it is simply that you estimated the probabilities wrong. It could well have occurred because a person arranged it that way, but it could also be because you didn't know about some non-human process that could result in the same observation. In our paper we illustrate this with some examples.

That's what makes creationism different from legit science: creationists just pretend that criticism doesn't exist and recycle the same bad arguments over and over.

Sneery O'Leary, the World's Worst Journalist™, spends most of her blog space attacking scientists and reporters more talented than she is.

But would a New York Times reporter be so foolish as to confuse Massimo Pigliucci with Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini?

Probably not. But Sneery is.

Screenshot, for when it gets dumped down the ever-growing Uncommon Descent memory hole:

I like linguistics, although I don't know much about about it. (Much of what I know comes from reading Language Log, which should be on your blogroll.)

A few weeks ago I was at McMaster University, and I saw this poster advertising for participants in a study about word order:


Mastering the correct word order in English often seems one of the hardest tasks for German and French speakers. French mathematicians, for example, often write things like "We study here the case x > 2" instead of "Here we study the case x > 2".

The funny thing is the bizarre word order in the sign itself! Maybe it was deliberate, but I still found it amusing.

In case you can't read the text, here it is:

We are seeking German language speakers from Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein or Germany for a linguistic study on the relation between word order and articles currently living in the Hamilton area...

I had to read it three or four times before I realized they were seeking German language speakers currently living in the Hamilton area.

Enjoy!

Yesterday, at Waterloo Ignorance Day, one speaker mentioned the Ellsberg paradox, which I hadn't heard of before. Believe it or not, it is named for Daniel Ellsberg, who would later become famous for releasing the Pentagon Papers.

Here it is: you have an urn with 90 well-mixed balls. There are R red balls, Y yellow balls, and B black balls. You know only the following information: R = 30, and Y+B = 60. You now get to choose between

Gamble A: win $100 if you draw a red ball vs.
Gamble B: win $100 if you draw a black ball.

You are also given a choice between

Gamble C: win $100 if you draw a red or yellow ball.
Gamble D: win $100 if you draw a black or yellow ball.

Which choices do you prefer? A over B or B over A? And C over D or D over C?

Oh, look! The Discovery Institute flack Jonathan McLatchie has responded with a barely literate screed.

In addition to his charming mangling of English grammar and the spelling of my name, he asks, "Does Shallit really think that we haven't heard of processes such as genetic drift and endosymbiosis?"

Well, I bet McLatchie has, since he seems to have studied some biology. But I wasn't talking about McLatchie, as is clear from my text. Johnson, when the video was shot back in 1993, apparently didn't know a damn thing about drift - and that was the issue I was addressing. McLatchie tries to switch attention from Johnson in 1993 to all ID advocates today. Nice try at misdirection, Jonathan!

McLatchie goes on to claim, "I'm sure Phillip Johnson is aptly aware of the various kinds of selective process: balancing selection, stabilizing selection, disruptive selection, directional selection to name just a few."

Then why did Johnson lie and claim selection could not produce change? And why did he claim natural selection acted to preserve neutral mutations? No, it's clear Johnson was just being pig-ignorant. And McLatchie thinks it's just peachy. Why any Christians would want to be associated with such dishonesty is beyond me. But as we all know, it's just fine to lie for Jeebus.

You've just reached cruising altitude, and the passenger in the seat next to you turns to you and says something. What lines should tip you off that your seatmate is a mindless zombie with whom rational discussion is pointless? Here are a few that tell you to move to a different seat immediately, but feel free to nominate your own.

1. "Classical philosophers for several millennia have pointed out that that existence of nature itself presupposes Someone who is uncaused existence. The evidence for an Uncaused Cause is massive-- you can fill a library with the arguments in its favor."

2. "Universals are immaterial-- truth, beauty, goodness, love".

3. "The abortion industry is big business."

4. "Frauds like climate scientists can't operate under cover anymore."

5. "[Jesus' birth] is the most beautiful and astonishing story ever told, even more beautiful and astonishing because it is true."

6. "We all worship something... Atheists no less than Christians."

7. "The Screwtape Letters is a literary masterpiece"

8. "After 200 years of Malthusian pseudoscience, when are overpopulation morons going to admit they're wrong?"

9. "contraceptive culture is promiscuous and inculcates a disrespect for the sanctity of life"

10. "There's been no warming in a decade, and they lied about it."

And extra points if you can figure out who said all ten of the things above.

I think this 1993 interview with creationist law professor Phillip Johnson should be shown to every biology student at every American university.



After the biology students stopped laughing and shaking their heads at the sheer pig-ignorance and numerous blatant lies smugly spouted by Johnson, they'll have a much better understanding of the Religious Right's assault on science, and be better prepared to rebut their local creationists.

The most significant misunderstanding Johnson repeatedly exhibits is that he thinks modern evolutionary biology is synonymous with his understanding of the meaning of the term "Darwinism": all biological change is due to mutation and natural selection. The fact that other mechanisms, such as genetic drift and endosymbiosis, are now an essential part of the picture, seems to have escaped him completely. Ignorance or dishonesty? I'm not sure; maybe it's a mixture of both.

So how many other misunderstandings, misrepresentations, and lies can you identify? Here are just a few I saw:

"Well, if I'm out of my element, then Charles Darwin must have also been out of his element, because his training was in medicine and theology, although he was in fact a very good scientist, self-taught, a gentleman amateur like others of his time. Charles Lyell, the father of modern geology, was a lawyer."

Very deceptive. Science as an institution at the time of Darwin and Lyell was quite different from modern science. It is extremely hard (although not impossible) for an amateur, untrained in science, to make a significant contribution to science today.

As for Lyell, it is quite misleading to just say that he was a lawyer and not also mention that at Oxford, Lyell attended lectures by Buckland; at Edinburgh, by Jameson; and he was a colleague of Mantell. Lyell gave up law, travelled extensively and did geological research on the ground in many locations, publishing his papers in scientific journals. If Phillip Johnson ever did any geological research on the ground, and published papers on his research in geology journals, he might be accorded some respect. As it is, he's just a laughingstock.

"There aren't really any specialists in evolution; it's a generalists' country."

This is simply false. Any evolutionary biologist is a specialist in evolution. There are, ferchrissakes, many annual conferences on evolution.

If Johnson's point is that evolution, as a scientific theory, depends on different fields such as paleontology and genetics, then this is no different from any other scientific theory that has multiple underpinnings, such as climatology.

"[I'm] explaining to them [evolutionary biologists] what they overlooked. That in fact, their books are not convincing because they're assuming at the beginning of the inquiry the point that they claimed to have demonstrated at the end, and so there's a thinking flaw. So instead of responding to that, naturally they say, "Oh, why don't you shut up? And leave us alone, so we can continue to get away with this."

This is just the usual Christian martydrom lie. No scientists has said anything remotely like the quote Johnson gives. Biologists have laughed at Johnson's ignorance, that is true. But scientists have also written detailed rebuttals of Johnson's bogus claims. Also, the implication that biologists know they are being deceptive is an outrageous slander. But that's not the only slander Johnson casually tosses off.

"The sophisticated people in the universities know that this is founded on philosophy. But because it's their philosophy, you see, they think that's fine. And because they have contempt for the public, they think that it's alright to mislead the public through you know, propaganda, because the public doesn't really deserve to know the truth, because they're not intellectuals like we are, so we can say anything we want to them. That is a widespread attitude..."

Considering that Johnson was a co-founder of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, a group dedicated to nothing other than misleading the public about evolution, this is pretty rich.

[on the term "creationist"] "So that what the scientific establishment tends to do is to say, that well first place we'll put everybody in that group into a very narrow box and then we'll dispose of them by ridicule. And then having got rid of all our enemies by that set of language tricks and propaganda mechanisms, we'll say the only thing left is us, so everybody is supposed to believe the way we do. That's what they call the scientific method these days, and it's just a very reprehensible kind of propaganda."

For me, "creationist" doesn't just mean "believer in Noah's ark". It means any person, like Johnson, who repeats long-discredited arguments (paucity of the fossil record; "finches are just finches", etc.) about evolution as if they were never rebutted. As for ridicule, if you make ridiculous arguments, expect to get ridiculed. That's the way science works.

"We do know of one natural process - natural selection - which is excellent at preventing fundamental change, because it eliminates the mutants - the overwhelming majority of mutants, practically all ones which are either of no benefit at all to the organism or actually harmful - will be eliminated in the end by natural selection."

Johnson seems completely confused here. One kind of natural selection, stabilizing selection, does indeed act against extreme changes. But to imply that this is all that natural selection can do is either extremely ignorant or extremely deceptive; there is, for example, directional selection that is very good at producing change. And, of course, I hardly need point out that natural selection does not act to remove neutral mutations, as Johnson claims.

"Some creatures become extinct, some species become extinct, and others come into existence somehow -- no one knows how."

Another lie. Maybe Johnson doesn't know how speciation occurs, but biologists do. All Johnson has to do is pick up a biology textbook or, for example, Coyne and Orr's book, Speciation (admittedly not yet published when the video was made). Mechanisms of speciation include geographic isolation, founder effects, sexual selection, polyploidy, hybridization, and others. We may not know all the causes of speciation yet, and scientists argue about the relative importance of the mechanisms I've mentioned. But to say "no one knows how" is a gross misstatement.

"The fossil record hasn't gotten any better, in the intervening century and a third... [since 1859]"

Another blatant lie. Archaeopteryx was discovered in 1861. Since then, we have thousands and thousands more discoveries that add significantly to our understanding of evolutionary history: Diplodocus, Maiasaura, Paranthropus, Australopithecus, Ardipithecus, Pakicetus, just to name a few.

These examples, chosen just from the first 22 minutes of the video, give the flavor of the ignorance and misrepresentation offered up by Johnson. This video would make a great educational experience and expose the dishonest anti-intellectualism at the heart of creationism.

I recently received this query from a young girl:

Dear Recursivity:

Some bloggers, like Jason Rosenhouse and Jerry Coyne, have said that intelligent design is dead. Papa says, "If you read it on Recursivity, it's so." Please tell me the truth; is ID really dead?

(signed) Virginia O'Hanlon, 115 W. 95th St., New York

and here is my reply:

Virginia, those little bloggers are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the Christian god and his inordinate fondess for beetles.

Yes, Virginia, intelligent design still lives. It flourishes as certainly as fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no creationists. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias! There would be no childlike faith then, and everyone would have to read biology textbooks and learn what the theory of evolution actually says. Bill Dembski and Michael Behe and Phil Johsnon would be out of jobs. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which religion fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in an Intelligent Designer! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to try to find traces of the Intelligent Designer, but even if they did not see Him, what would that prove? Nobody sees the Designer, but that is no sign that there is no Designer. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see, like David Berlinski's mathematical achievements or Denyse O'Leary's command of the English language. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only religion and intelligent design, not science, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding, except maybe Howard Ahmanson's checkbook -- if you know what I mean.

No Intelligent Designer! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, we will continue to smear scientists and destroy public education. As long as there are credulous Christians and Muslims looking for something, anything, to prop up their faith, intelligent design will live. As long as there are Religious Right warriors like Bruce Chapman able to dole out the big bucks to third-rate law school graduates like Casey Luskin, intelligent design will live. As long as there are ignorant sociologists hoping to cash in like Steve Fuller, ID will live. As long as faux journalists like Denyse O'Leary need you to buy their books, ID will live.

Don't believe everything you read, Virgie baby. Intelligent design's still around.

... and I liked it there.

But take a look at this and you will see the utter insanity of the New Hampshire Republican party.

Oh, lookie!

Our local creationists at the University of Guelph, Kirk Durston and David Chiu, have teamed up with wacky David Abel and Donald Johnson on a book!

(Kirk Durston is the creationist who thinks that his god magically calms angry bulls, and David Chiu is the guy who stuck in an irrelevant citation to Dembski's work in a paper having nothing to do with Dembski, and told me he did it as a "courtesy".)

Judging from this excerpt, it's not likely that real scientists will take it seriously, with laughably bogus claims such as
- "Fifteen years ago, it started to be realized that `junk DNA' was a misnomer."
- "All known errors during replication result in a decrease of both Shannon and functional information"

I wondered who would publish this drivel. It's a place called "Longview Press". Never heard of it? I hadn't either. But this page suggests that it's just David Abel's private little enterprise. Wow, what a surprise.

It's in keeping with the intelligent design vanity journal, Bio-Complexity, which seems to have a hard time finding papers to publish (7 in 2 years). But hey! It has no problem publishing papers by people who are on the editorial team. And look: David Abel is there, too.

And they wonder why we call it pseudoscience.

Addendum 1: even the University of Guelph library, where Durston and Chiu are based, doesn't have the book in its collection.

Addendum 2: Thanks to Bayesian Bouffant for pointing out the self-congratulatory description of the book on Amazon. I especially love this part: "Change in the FSC of proteins as they evolve can be measured in “Fits”— Functional bits. The ability to quantify changes in biofunctionality during evolutionary transition represents one of the most important advances in biological research in recent decades. See especially, Durston, K.K.; Chiu, D.K.; Abel, D.L.; Trevors, J.T. 2007, Measuring the functional sequence complexity of proteins, Theor Biol Med Model, 4, 47".

Well, if it's "one of the most important advances in biological research in recent decades", then it's amazing how few citations there are to this groundbreaking paper. ISI Web of Science lists exactly 4 citations, 3 of which are self-citations by Abel and Trevors. Wow, that is sure important and groundbreaking.

Politicians of all stripes are generally spineless opportunists, but Mitt Romney has got to be an extreme example of the genre.

See the video.

This looks like a lot of fun (details in the poster here).

That's the difference between science and religion. Scientists are happy to admit when they don't know something, and they view it as a challenge to learn more, while religionists like to "revel in the mystery" and just sit there.

It's been 20 years since the publication of that exemplar of religiously-motivated incompetence, Darwin on Trial, by lawyer Phillip Johnson, and the creationists are salivating over the anniversary.

Johnson, who had no training or expertise in biology, but did have a recent conversion to Christianity following a divorce, penned a book that was widely panned. And with good reason: Johnson had nothing new to say, preferring to trot out the old creationist canards such as gaps in the fossil record, natural selection is a tautology, and many others.

Johnson's book had basically no effect whatsoever on the scientific debate about evolution. To see this, one only need look at Web of Science (previously called Science Citation Index). I searched for references to Darwin on Trial and found exactly 6 citations. Three were reviews of the book in La Recherche, Nature, and Zygon. Two were articles in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Theology Today. Finally, there was a citation in the book Does God Belong in Public Schools?

To illustrate the contrast, I also searched for Dawkins' The Selfish Gene on Web of Science, and found 3,954 citations in dozens of fields: ethology, biology, genetics, engineering, modeling, computer science, and economics, just to name a few.

Google Scholar provides another example of the disparity. Darwin on Trial gets 393 citations, while The Selfish Gene gets 12,727 citations. Looking at the citations themselves is also quite revealing: Darwin on Trial is cited primarily as a negative example (in books such as Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism) and there are only 12 citations in the primary biological literature, largely negative -- such as this article by Forrest and Gross.

So Johnson's book had little impact. But if you think that's going to stop creationists from hagiography, you're wrong. Tom Bethell, a reliably blathering buffoon, has emerged to produce this encomium (no comments allowed, of course). The single funniest line: "Phil Johnson was a highly skilled and tactful electronic correspondent".

Yes, I remember very well when Johnson visited the Usenet newsgroup talk.origins. He, a recent convert to evangelical Christianity (oh! the irony!), liked to say things such as "My purpose is not to insult anyone, however, but to free minds. Many of you have been indoctrinated not to question assumptions that are based on ideology rather than evidence. You can be free of that indoctrination if you wish to be." He also claimed, "It is my practice always to respond to well-informed and intelligent criticism", but when well-informed and intelligent commenters pointed out that Johnson's doubts about whale evolution were ill-founded, they were surprised to find that Johnson never responded to them at all.

Ultimately, it turned out to be a pretty brief visit: Johnson's ignorance of biology was quickly exposed, and he left in a huff. So much for his "skilled and tactful" e-correspondence.

So, creationists, enjoy your 20-year anniversary of more religiously-inspired foolishness masquerading as scholarship. Anyone who's willing to dig into the record can see how pathetic it is.

How could I have forgotten these?

21. John Sayles, The Anarchists' Convention

22. J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories

23. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

24. Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career

25. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography

26. Glenn T. Seaborg and Evans G. Valens, Elements of the Universe

27. E. L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

28. Richard D. Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs

29. Martin Gardner, In the Name of Science

30. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel

31. J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: a Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three
American Families

32. Larry McMurtry, All My Friends are Going to be Strangers

My wife and I own a lot of books - I once estimated something like 10,000. We have so many that some of them are in boxes in the attic, boxes in the basement, and in rented storage. So I was interested to read this article in the Financial Times where some famous authors are interviewed about their book collections. There are also some nice photos of their libraries.

Those interviewed were also asked to list their top 10 books. I've read hardly any of the books listed in that article, but it did prompt me to make my own top list. These are books that had the most influence on me in various ways. They are not listed in any particular order, and I've probably forgotten a lot of important ones.

1. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich-Maria Remarque

2. Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

3. The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien

4. An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers, G. H. Hardy and E. M. Wright

5. The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

6. A Handbook of Integer Sequences, N. J. A. Sloane

7. The Art of Computer Programming, Donald Knuth

8. Recreations in the Theory of Numbers, Albert H. Beiler

9. Men of Mathematics, E. T. Bell

10. The Happy Hollisters and the Haunted House Mystery, Jerry West (Andrew E. Svenson)

11. The Caves of Fear, John Blaine

12. Mathematics, David Bergamini

13. Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis

14. The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury

15. The Basketball Diaries, Jim Carroll

16. Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger

17. APL\360 User's Guide, K. E. Iverson and A. D. Falkoff

18. Basic Programming, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz

19. Getting Even, Woody Allen

20. A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn

Over at Uncommon Descent we learn the most amazing things about mathematics:

Take the last two digits of the year in which you were born and the age you will be this year and the result will add up to 111.

It works for everyone this year.


Shshsh! Don't tell Denyse about people born in 2001. It might upset her world view.

I don't know which is more pathetic, the Toronto Star for printing this drivel, or Denyse O'Leary, for thinking it was interesting. Or maybe me, for thinking it is worth pointing out the mistake.

From reader "MiKo", here is some great footage of a moose being induced to leave a swimming pool.

It probably would have been easier just to announce that moose swim was over, and that wolf swim was next.

Let's see: start with a guy who claims that left-wing intellectuals are responsible for the death of culture because they are intellectually dishonest.

Let him be the book reviewer for a book written by a fierce right-wing partisan described over and over again as a "pathological liar" (and with good reason).

Have the reviewer say not a single word about the well-documented dishonesty of the author of the book he is reviewing. And, for good measure, have the reviewer make ill-considered remarks about neuroscientists, claiming that their goal is to "empty life of its mystery".

Result: pompous drivel applauded by my favorite faux journalist.

But it is funny!

For your entertainment, here are some Quebecois enjoying their time with a moose:



We never get to enjoy this where I live.

Since Uncommon Descent became, for all practical purposes, Sneery O'Leary's personal blog, it's become an amusing fountain of stupidity. The only question is, which particular bit of idiocy is worth remarking about?

Well, this one is. Sneery approvingly quotes the following excerpt from David P. Goldman's book, How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying Too):

Richard Dawkins and other self-styled New Atheists postulate that humankind evolved a genetic predisposition to altruism. This assertion is something of a flying spaghetti monster. Among all American ethnic groups, Jews share the most consistent gene pool – as studies have established beyond question – the result of two thousand years of marrying within the same community. Yet secular Jews show the least altruism – at least in the form of willingness to raise children – of any group of Americans, while religious Jews show one of the highest degrees of altruism by the same measure. A religious explanation of altruism, not a genetic one, fits the facts.

This one is just too funny! Goldman, whose education was in music theory and German (!), is so far out of his depth he's gasping for air. "Altruism" - as it is understood by biologists - is about individuals acting to increase the fitness of others at the cost of decreased fitness for themselves. It was developed by Hamilton and Maynard Smith, not Dawkins (although Dawkins has popularized it.) For closely related organisms, as in parents and their biological children, altruism is explained by the theory of kin selection, and has nothing to do with belonging to a "consistent gene pool". Whether you're Jewish or not, the chance that a particular allele is inherited from your father is 50%.

Relatedness is important in the biological theory of altruism not because two individuals might share many genes (Goldman's "consistent gene pools"); it is important because the degree of relatedness controls the probability that two such individuals share a specific gene with altruistic effects. Furthermore, once such a gene arises, it will be fixed in the populations with high probability, so that nearly members of the population will possess it. These misunderstandings of the theory are so pervasive that there are articles devoted to correcting them.

It's clear that Goldman has never read Alexander's Darwinism and Human Affairs -- one of the deepest and most important works in philosophy ever written. (Or, if he has read it, he's misunderstood it thoroughly.)

Furthermore, no one is saying that culture can't influence altruism as it is practiced in humans. I don't doubt that the cultural practices of religions can affect altruism, but the effects can be both positive and negative. Frequently this manifests itself as altruism to others who share your particular sect's beliefs, and hostility to those who don't (as this famous Emo Phillips joke illustrates). Teasing out the separate genetic and cultural effects of such a complex phenomenon in humans is likely to be difficult.

The biological theory of altruism has been tested (not "postulated"), and it even has been tested in artificial life settings. It has passed these tests. Pretending, as Goldman does, that it does not "fit the facts" is just a delusion.

But then what would you expect from Goldman, whose past is less than savory? And what else would you expect from Sneery O'Leary?

Found this one in my basement. Can anyone identify the species? It's about 4 cm tall.

Here's an opinion piece by monarchist Jeffrey Tighe in the National Post.

If this is the kind of reasoning the monarchists are proud of, then the republicans have already won.

Tighe invents a straw man, claiming that republicans believe "all world cultures are of equal value in Canada, except the “British” one". Actually, I think the British are admirable in many ways -- I just find the idea of an unelected head of state, chosen solely by heredity, to be childish and archaic.

He ends with "There’s room for all who wish to enter its walls, but living here requires a commitment to Queen and country". I guess I'm not welcome then.

Jovana Gec, an AP reporter, was scammed by a Serb family near Belgrade into believing that two children have "magnetic" properties that allow silverware to stick to their bodies.

The accompanying photos do not show a single piece of silverware attached to the body in a position parallel to the ground.

There are two possible explanations. The first, which I doubt, is that the children have swallowed powerful NdFeB (neodymium) magnets.

The second is more prosaic, but much more likely. The "sticky" items are simply being balanced on the kids' bodies, aided by a bit of sweat. Here is a video of a similar claim by another Serb family that looks completely unimpressive. It was debunked by Benjamin Radford back in February, but apparently Ms. Gec was too lazy to do a web search.

And - no surprise - my local paper, the Waterloo Region Record decided to run this article in a prominent position on page F10. That's par for the course for the Record.

Recursivity's Bad Journalism award of the month goes to Ms. Gec and her credulous editors at the AP, with honorable mention to the Record for reprinting it.

We haven't had a moose post here for quite a while, but this story definitely makes up for that.

Here's an interview with Sherry Turkle, originally released back in April, but replayed yesterday.

For me, here was the most interesting exchange:

Nora Young: "So if we imagine a future where we have robotic companions, the way we now have Roomba vacuum cleaners and Furbies, what's the problem with transferring our idea of companionship to things that aren't actually alive, what's at risk of us losing?"

Sherry Turkle: "Well, these are companions that don't understand the meaning of our experiences, so it forces us to confront what is the meaning of a companion. It's like saying, 'I'm having a conversation with a robot.' Well, you have to say to yourself, 'You've forgotten the meaning of a human conversation, if you think a conversation is something you can have with a robot.'"

Now, I understand that an interview like this is necessarily shallow, and I haven't read Turkle's latest book on the subject. But still, this interview seems to suggest a real misunderstanding on Turkle's part.

Yes, when we interact with technology that mimics living creatures, we run the risk of having an overly-optimistic mental model about how much the technology "understands" us. That's the lesson of ELIZA. But in terms of "companionship", many of our companions fail to understand us, in exactly the same way.

When you tell your troubles to your dog, how much do you think your dog understands? A little bit, obviously -- a dog can pick up on your mood and react appropriately. But it seems unlikely a dog will "understand" the details that your best friend just died of AIDS, or that your latest book got a bad review, or that your spouse just walked out on you. Nevertheless, a dog can be a great companion. Why is a living dog a legitimate companion, and a robot dog not?

Even when we interact with other people, they will often listen and express sympathy (and we will happily receive their sympathy and feel comforted by it) without really understanding. As children, we had our crises that were beyond our parents' understanding. And now, as a parent, my children have emotional lives that are largely hidden from me. Yet we can comfort each other, and be good companions, without the deep understanding that Turkle seems to think is required.

Turkle seems to have a mental model of "understanding" that is too black-and-white. Just as, in the famous words of McCarthy and Dennett, a thermostat can be said to have "beliefs", so too can animals and robots have "understanding" of our experiences and needs. Here, by "understanding", I mean that animals, young children, and robots have limited models of us that suffice to provide the appropriate responses to comfort us. A dog can come and lick your face or curl up with you. A child can come sit in your lap. A robot can commiserate by asking what's wrong, or saying it's sorry to hear about our troubles, or even make the right facial expression.

I think it's foolish to obsess about what such a robot "understands". For, after all, we can do the same thing with dogs and young children. How much do they "really" understand of our troubles? Less than an adult human, probably, but the experience is not necessarily worthless despite this lack of understanding.

When Chuck paints a face on a volleyball and makes it his companion in the movie Cast Away, nobody stands up and says, "You idiot! That's just a ball with a dumb face on it." We don't say that, because we understand what loneliness is like and the value of companionship. When Wilson falls overboard later in the movie, we understand why Chuck is so devastated.

I know the value of human conversation, but I still think you can have a conversation with a robot. As I said, I admit there's a danger in overestimating how much a robot understands about us. But children who have grown up with technology have a better understanding of the limitations than those adults who were fooled by ELIZA decades ago. They're not going to be fooled in the same way. Already, as Turkle points out, they've constructed a new category for things like Furby, which is "alive enough". And furthermore, the technology will improve, so that future robots will have better and better models of what humans are like. As they do so, they will become better companions, and questions about whether they "really" understand will simply seem ... quaint.

While playing chess at FICS, I received the following message:

HUNriderrr tells you: if u r a jew--so i guess-- then tell your disgusting israel government NOT TO DEAL with turkey..ok???...othherwise we w will #$%& all jews in world       (punctuation marks in original)

Well, I'm not Jewish. But even if I were, why would the the Israeli government necessarily be "mine"? And even if I were Israeli, why would the proper response to the Turkish flotilla raid be a threat to "#$%& all jews in world"?

The confused mind of the antisemite is sometimes hard to fathom.

P. S. He lost the game.

There's good news and bad news on the 9/11 denier front.

The good news is that Jonathan Kay has a new book, Among the Truthers, containing a perceptive analysis of the commonalities among 9/11 "Truthers", Obama "birthers", and other fringe conspiracists.

The bad news is that the 9/11 deniers are soon to host yet another laughable truther meeting, which they pompously call the Toronto Hearings, September 8-11, at Ryerson. Here's an article in the Canadian Press that mentions it.

Many of the usual Canadian 9/11 crowd will be there, including Michael Keefer, Graeme MacQueen, and Adnan Zuberi.

I hope some of our local skeptics can attend and report on it.

There's a certain kind of columnist who, whenever some deplorable event occurs (such as the recent riots in Britain), doesn't hesitate to use it to rail opportunistically against some perceived moral failing. Reliable scapegoats to blame include liberals, immigrants, and atheists. And the morons who read these columnists eat it up.

Michael Coren is that sort of columnist.

He offers "six ways to prevent a repeat of London, Vancouver, Toronto scene". But his "six ways" are mostly vague appeals to religious morality, with no specifics.

Let's look at each of Coren's solutions in turn:

1. "Reduce the role of the state and, as a balance, increase the role of the family."

Right, because in the days when the state played little role in supporting health and the poor, there were never, ever, any riots in Britain? The Economist dismantles that claim. England has a long history of violent youth; the Economist traces it back to at least 1751.

Coren says, "parents are not informed by law if their underage daughters tell doctors or teachers they are sexually active, but they are left to face the consequences when teenage pregnancy or STDs occur." But ironically, he supports a church that declares birth control to be a sin. No disconnect there, no sirree.

2. "State-supported education and health care may, arguably, serve a purpose, but state-supported welfare and social services have become so all-embracing that individual self-reliance has evaporated. The balance is important here. Neither the fanatical libertarian nor the obsessive socialist model works."

I'd agree with the last line, but not the first. Where's the evidence? The last time I looked, European social democracies such as Sweden and Norway were prospering (in terms of objective measures, e.g., healthy life expectancy, longevity, child mortality, and homicide), while more libertarian countries such as the US do not do as well. And European social democracies lead the world in scientific papers per capita; no sign that social democracy has sapped "self-reliance" there.

3. Stop the war on religion. Whatever your view of faith and God, the massive decline of religious observance and community in Britain has removed one of the glues that held the country together.

This is just an insane fantasy. There is no "war on religion", metaphorically or otherwise. God-soaked commentators like Coren are just so used to not being questioned about their beliefs that they mistake demands for evidence, or questions raised about their beliefs and their consequences, as a "war". In reality, it's just that religion is increasingly being subjected to the same standards as other truth claims about the world. Religion has been exempt from these standards for far too long. If, for example, Coren supports the Catholic Church's ban on condom use and thinks that this ban is a boon to people in developing countries, let him make that case without appealing to sectarian dogma.

I don't deny that religion can hold people together. But it can just as easily drive them apart. There are many reasons why immigrants came to North America, but the religiously tolerant climate of their home country wasn't one of them. Coren doesn't present any evidence that the "war on religion" led to the riots, and as the Economist article shows, similar violent events have occurred in England for at least 250 years.

4. Control immigration, so it is based on the cultural and social needs and unity of the host population as well as on compassion and economic growth.

And what do you think immigration is based on now? Go read this page from Citizenship and Immigration Canada to see the kinds of professions that Canada is looking for. Surely physicians, nurses, social workers, and psychologists contribute to the "cultural and social needs" of the country.

5. Liberate the police from the whims of political correctness and government fashion.

Right. If only the police had been able to taser those damn rioters, that would have taught them a lesson. After all, it's not like the police had anything at all to do with the immediate cause of the riots.

6. Do not romanticize the worst of lower-class antics on TV and in cinema and music. Entertainment once presented a world worthy of aspiration, now it glorifies the mud and muck.

This is exactly the same argument that the small-minded made 60 years ago against classics like Caldwell's Tobacco Road. Coren is no better.

Boors like Coren don't have any interest in thinking deeply about the causes of mob violence and how to remedy them. They're just interested in blaming the usual suspects from some assumed position of moral superiority. From their mouths, a fountain of stupidity spews forth.

Without using a search engine, see if you can identify this "design theorist" from quotes from his 1992 book:

• "The product of the total number of these identified relationships would thus give an `overall probability' for assessing if what we are seeing ... favors a design --- or merely chance."
  
• "What is the probability for this being merely a random situation?"
  
• "Some critic will immediately leap up and shout, `But, that's assuming a strictly random process.... [subject] is not a random process..."
  
• "Which gives less than one chance in a hundred million that this unique relationship ... is random!"
  
• "If we are looking at multiple levels of connection and association, Occam's Razor would tell us to choose the simplest model for it -- which here appears to be that we are looking at Design!"
  
• "What are the odds against that randomly occurring?"
  
• "The product of the two preceding probabilities ... leads to an overall probability of less than one chance in 70 trillion that this ... is the result of merely random forces!"
  
• "...is direct support for the Intelligence Hypothesis..."
  
• "...the overall probability is overwhelming-- That what we are observing ... [is] ... designed."
  
• "We are seeing `the products of Design' ... and all that that implies."
  

Hint: It is someone with the same kind of credentials and respect as our other beloved "design theorists".

Peter MacKay, Canada's Defence Minister, is renaming Canada's air force and navy.

They will now revert to their pre-1968 names, the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Canadian Navy.

Licking the boots of royalty is, regrettably, still popular in Canada. Many Canadians still prefer to be subjects of the ruler of a foreign country instead of standing up on their own feet.

You can express your opinion about this silly move.

Here's your favorite ignoramus "reporter", Sneery O'Leary, trying to understand the mathematics of infinite sequences:


...Series terminate, according to their nature.

For example, the number 1 is the terminus of the natural numbers. It just is. There is no natural number below 1.* If you do not like that, you do not like reality.

Some series terminate because they depend on a higher or larger series at a certain point, one that governs them...

*0 is a placeholder, signifying: No number occupies this position.


Hopeless confusion in all measures here.

Sneery
- confuses sequences with series
- doesn't understand that the "natural numbers" often (but not always) are considered to contain the integer 0 (it's just a convention, and not one that is universally followed)
- thinks that 0 is not a number
- confuses the sequence of natural numbers with decimal representation of numbers
- thinks sequences always terminate
- etc.

But remember - her blog is the reliable source for news, destined to replace the New York Times!

Here.

Here are three points of concordance:

- use of dismissive and propagandistic terms, such as "Darwinitis", "neuromania", and "neuromaniac"
- insisting that the position he is arguing against constitutes "orthodoxy", as if it were a religious doctrine
- dismissing "materialism" and ignoring the lack of evidence for immaterial objects

Of course, I don't think he's actually a creationist. But I do wonder why he adopts their tactics.

Maybe he should have chosen another dismissive term in place of "Darwinitis", because it already has a definition:

a complaint that afflicts those of a literary bent and strong attachments to pre-scientific culture, who find in the theory of evolution a disturbing and mysterious challenge to their values (Anthony West)

Come to think of it, that sounds like a reasonably good description of Tallis (replace "evolution" with "evolutionary & neural explanation of consciousness")

Matthew Taylor probably wasn't the best choice for an opponent to Tallis. I imagine that Daniel Dennett (whose last name was comically mispronounced by Tallis) would have him for breakfast.

Both speakers agree that human beings are the only ones who "think about thinking". I wonder how they know this with such certainty? For example, how do they know that dolphins do not think about thinking?

From Eric Holloway, we learn:

Interestingly, Kolmogrov complexity is uncomputable in the general case due to the halting problem. This means that in general no algorithm can generate orderliness more often than is statistically expected to show up by chance. Hence, if some entity is capable of generating orderliness more often than statistically predicted, it must be capabable, at least to some extent, of solving the halting problem.

From the moronic misspellings of "Kolmogorov" and "capable" to the moronic misunderstanding of algorithms, what they can generate, and the halting problem, this is just too funny for words.

But remember, Uncommon Descent is destined to replace the New York Times as the respected source for news!