Recursivity

About twenty years ago, when I started teaching at Dartmouth College, a book called ProfScam appeared. Written by a journalist (and now conservative talk show host), Charles J. Sykes, and published by that fountain of evangelical foolishness, Regnery Gateway, ProfScam claimed that American university education was in a terrible state, and professors were the ones to blame.

ProfScam was passed around with astonishment at Dartmouth. Sykes described professors the likes of which we had never seen. Professors, in Sykes' view, were interested in publishing "trivial and inane research in obscure journals that nobody reads". Actually, in my field, publishing trivial results would quickly earn you a reputation for doing so, with the result that no one is likely to read what you write in the future. You won't get tenure, and you won't get promoted.

Professors, Sykes says, "communicate in impenetrable jargon, often to mask the fact that they have nothing to say". Difficult concepts in mathematics and computer science are not always easy to understand, even for experts. The "impenetrable jargon" is usually the result of striving for precision: taking an imprecise, intuitive notion of something (say "information") and trying to make it rigorous. Again, people who have nothing to say won't impress their peers.

Professors, Sykes claims, "are not only indifferent to good teaching, but actively hostile to it". Again, not in my department, where teaching is an essential component of getting tenure, and where good teaching earns you a higher annual evaluation and a commendation in department meetings.

But the main thing that I remember about ProfScam was Sykes' claim about how little time professors spend in their jobs. He claimed that the average professor works only 8-16 hours per week. Again, this didn't agree with my experience at all.

So, this past week, I decided to keep track of the number of hours I worked and what I did. Here is a summary, with times in hours and minutes.

Teaching: 6:22 (includes time walking to class from my office, setting up computer, and talking to students afterwards)

Lecture Preparation: 9:17

Preparing solutions to course assignments: 4:45

Miscellaneous course work: 2:15 (includes meeting with TA's, getting key for projector)

Office hours: 2:00

Departmental meeting: 1:00

Writing recommendation letters for students and faculty: 0:46

Answering e-mail: 6:10

Research paper preparation: 4:00

Research: 1:05

Errata for book: 0:16

Refereeing papers for journals: 2:15

Editing work for two journals: 2:33

Answering questions about the course online and in my office: 1:50

Meeting with graduate students: 2:25

Help another faculty member with grad admission: 0:20


Total time: 47:19


During a non-teaching term, I would have a very different schedule, as much of the time devoted to teaching and talking with students above would be replaced by research time.

Keep in mind that we are paid for 35 hours of work. I'm not complaining - I love my job and am happy to put in the extra hours. But I do object to being labeled as lazy by people like Sykes, who appears to have no idea what professors actually do with their time.

Most of my nominees for Blowhard of the Month are talentless, pretentious hacks. For example, David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen has won the award twice.

This month, with some reservations, I'm going to nominate a man with serious accomplishments. Unfortunately, serious accomplishments in one field don't prevent you from being a blowhard in others.

Freeman Dyson is a well-known mathematician and physicist. Number theorists know him from his earliest papers on continued fractions and Diophantine approximation, but then he got seduced by theoretical physics and most of his subsequent work was in that field.

In his later years (Dyson is now 85), though, Dyson's output has become increasingly cranky. He's commented favorably about intelligent design; yet when I questioned him via e-mail, he admitted that he had not read any of the work of Michael Behe and William Dembski, the ID movement's most prominent advocates.

Despite having no training in climatology, Dyson has sneered at the consensus of climate scientists about global warming. (The hallmark of the blowhard is to spout off in areas outside his competence.) Actual climate scientists, such as Michael Tobis, begged to disagree. Dyson used a review a review of two books on global warming, to cast doubt on the seriousness of the problem, and accused climate scientists of being contemptuous of those who disagree. Dyson's maunderings were taken apart by the actual climate scientists at RealClimate. An essay in Dyson's book, A Many-Colored Glass, also attacked the global warming consensus; his critique was dismantled by a post at Climate Progress, which didn't hesitate to call Dyson a crackpot.

Dyson even wrote a friendly foreword to Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer's credulous woo-fest, Extraordinary Knowing.

All this is in the past, so why should Dyson get a Blowhard nomination this month? It's because of an article that recently appeared in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Here is an excerpt:

"The mathematicians discovered the central mystery of computability, the conjecture represented by the statement P is not equal to NP. The conjecture asserts that there exist mathematical problems which can be quickly solved in individual cases but cannot be solved by a quick algorithm applicable to all cases. The most famous example of such a problem is the traveling salesman problem, which is to find the shortest route for a salesman visiting a set of cities, knowing the distance between each pair. All the experts believe that the conjecture is true, and that the traveling salesman problem is an example of a problem that is P but not NP. But nobody has even a glimmer of an idea how to prove it."

This is not even close to correct. The distinction in P versus NP has nothing to do with being a problem being "quickly solved in individual cases", but rather, that the answer can easily be verified once a small amount of extra information is provided. As stated, Dyson's example of the traveling salesman problem is not even in NP, since he states it in the form of finding the shortest tour, as opposed to checking the existence of a tour of length less than a given bound. (If I give you a traveling salesman tour, nobody currently knows how to check in polynomial time that it is the shortest one.) And finally, he blows the punchline. The decision version of traveling salesman is known to be in NP, but most people believe it is not in P. Dyson got it backwards.

The mark of the blowhard is not simply to comment on areas outside his competence, but to do so publicly, with the weight of his reputation behind him, while not doing the appropriate background reading and refusing to seek the opinions of actual experts in the field before publishing. In doing so, the blowhard frequently makes mistakes that would be embarrassing even for those equipped with an undergraduate's knowledge of the area. Freeman Dyson is the Blowhard of the Month.

Added January 13 2009: Prof. Dyson has very kindly responded to my e-mail, and concedes his description was wrong and that he was speaking outside his area of expertise.

According to this article in the Spokesman-Review, Tony Mantese got an unexpected visitor to his house in Spokane, Washington yesterday.

It was a baby moose that crashed through his basement window.

Despite the fact that we have "Moose Welcome" signs all over our house, we never get this lucky.

My colleague David Goss, who is the Editor-in-Chief of one of my favorite journals, the Journal of Number Theory, has started a new and unusual feature: video abstracts for accepted papers.

In a recent message to the NMBRTHRY mailing list, he suggests the following video as a "terrific example of what is possible with this technology". The video is of the renowned number theorist, Alain Connes, discussing his paper, Fun With F₁.



Although I think the use of video abstracts is a clever idea that could be quite useful, I'm afraid I have to differ with David about this particular video. I think the video exhibits many of the problems inherent in trying to communicate advanced mathematics:

1. Assuming too much. What percentage of viewers will even know what A₁, A₂, B₂, and G₂ are? My guess is that, even among number theorists, only a small percentage will know what is being referred to here.

2. Not explaining enough. In the video, Prof. Connes talks about his paper, but never says explicitly what F₁ actually is. (He says it is the field with characteristic 1, but of course there is no such field; we are meant to understand that it is not an actual field, but some sort of degenerate analogue of finite fields.)

3. Not giving any examples. It's often hard to grasp abstract mathematics without a simple example that one can manipulate.

Finally, it doesn't help that Prof. Connes has a very strong French accent that makes much of the video difficult to understand. (He also breaks into French in several sentences, seemingly without noticing.)

Alain Connes, a Fields medallist, is a much better mathematician than I am, but I don't think this video will be at all useful for the vast majority of mathematicians who view it.

I am glad to see that the Center for Inquiry has started a new blog, Free Thinking. With contributors such as Derek Araujo, D. J. Grothe, and Joe Nickell, it should prove to be a lively addition to the blogosphere.

Creationists think information theory poses a serious challenge to modern evolutionary biology -- but that only goes to show that creationists are as ignorant of information theory as they are of biology.

Whenever a creationist brings up this argument, insist that they answer the following five questions. All five questions are based on the Kolmogorov interpretation of information theory. I like this version of information theory because (a) it does not depend on any hypothesized probability distribution (a frequent refuge of scoundrels) (b) the answers about how information can change when a string is changed are unambiguous and agreed upon by all mathematicians, allowing less wiggle room to weasel out of the inevitable conclusions, and (c) it applies to discrete strings of symbols and hence corresponds well with DNA.

All five questions are completely elementary, and I ask these questions in an introduction to the theory of Kolmogorov information for undergraduates at Waterloo. My undergraduates can nearly always answer these questions correctly, but creationists usually cannot.

Q1: Can information be created by gene duplication or polyploidy? More specifically, if x is a string of symbols, is it possible for xx to contain more information than x?

Q2: Can information be created by point mutations? More specifically, if xay is a string of symbols, is it possible that xby contains significantly more information? Here a, b are distinct symbols, and x, y are strings.

Q3: Can information be created by deletion? More specifically, if xyz is a string of symbols, is it possible that xz contains signficantly more information?

Q4: Can information be created by random rearrangement? More specifically, if x is a string of symbols, is it possible that some permutation of x contains significantly more information?

Q5. Can information be created by recombination? More specifically, let x and y be strings of the same length, and let s(x, y) be any single string obtained by "shuffling" x and y together. Here I do not mean what is sometimes called "perfect shuffle", but rather a possibly imperfect shuffle where x and y both appear left-to-right in s(x, y) , but not necessarily contiguously. For example, a perfect shuffle of 0000 and 1111 gives 01010101, and one possible non-perfect shuffle of 0000 and 1111 is 01101100. Can an imperfect shuffle of two strings have more information than the sum of the information in each string?

The answer to each question is "yes". In fact, for questions Q2-Q5, I can even prove that the given transformation can arbitrarily increase the amount of information in the string, in the sense that there exist strings for which the given transformation increases the complexity by an arbitrarily large multiplicative factor. I won't give the proofs here, because that's part of the challenge: ask your creationist to provide a proof for each of Q1-Q5.

Now I asserted that creationists usually cannot answer these questions correctly, and here is some proof.

Q1. In his book No Free Lunch, William Dembski claimed (p. 129) that "there is no more information in two copies of Shakespeare's Hamlet than in a single copy. This is of course patently obvious, and any formal account of information had better agree." Too bad for him that Kolmogorov complexity is a formal account of information theory, and it does not agree.

Q2. Lee Spetner and the odious Ken Ham are fond of claiming that mutations cannot increase information. And this creationist web page flatly claims that "No mutation has yet been found that increased the genetic information." All of them are wrong in the Kolmogorov model of information.

Q4. R. L. Wysong, in his book The Creation-Evolution Controversy, claimed (p. 109) that "random rearrangements in DNA would result in loss of DNA information". Wrong in the Kolmogorov model.

So, the next time you hear these bogus claims, point them to my challenge, and let the weaselling begin!

For my birthday, I got a kit from National Geographic's Genographic Project. For $99, you can submit a cheek swab and have the DNA of either your maternal or paternal lines analyzed. (Women will have to settle for just the maternal line.)

I had my paternal line done this year; next year, maybe I'll have the maternal line done.

The results are in, and they're not a surprise. I'm a member of Haplogroup E3b1, which, the project says, " is most heavily represented in Mediterranean populations. Approximately 10 percent of the men in Spain belong to this haplogroup, as do 12 percent of the men in northern Italy, and 13 percent of the men in central and southern Italy. Roughly 20 percent of the men in Sicily belong to this group. In the Balkans and Greece, between 20 to 30 percent of the men belong to E3b, as do nearly 75 percent of the men in North Africa. The haplogroup is rarely found in India or East Asia. Around 10 percent of all European men trace their descent to this line. For example, in Ireland, 3 to 4 percent of the men belong; in England, 4 to 5 percent; Hungary, 7 percent; and Poland, 8 to 9 percent. Nearly 25 percent of Jewish men belong to this haplogroup."

Here's how my ancestors are believed to have moved around from about 60,000 years ago to about 20,000 years ago.



Of course, since this data reflects only my father's father's father's .... father, it doesn't tell me about most of my ancestors. But it's still oddly moving to contemplate.

Sadly, some Native Americans are opposed to the Genographic Project, because learning about their ancestry "can clash with long-held beliefs".

There are many things to dislike about Christmas: the bloated newspaper ads, the second-rate music repeated endlessly in shopping malls, the inane evangelical bleating that "Jesus is the reason for the season", and the pressure to conform lest you be labeled a Scrooge, or, even worse, a Grinch.

Of course, there are things to like about Christmas, too. Everybody enjoys giving presents, and some even like receiving them. A break from work is always appreciated -- even if, like me, you just use it to catch up on work left undone -- and a house that smells of roast turkey is one worth coming home to.

But there's one Christmas tradition that my wife and I have never shared: deceiving our kids about the real nature of Santa.

You know -- Santa Claus, Jolly St. Nick -- the man in the red suit who delivers the presents, as immortalized in the classic poem by Clement Clark Moore. (Shhh - don't tell the kids that Moore, a dour, humourless man who owned slaves and opposed abolition, probably stole the poem and its authorship from Henry Livingston.)

Ever year, Christmas offers adults the opportunity to participate in an absurd fraud against your own children: to pretend that Santa Claus is real, that he spookily monitors their behavior, that Santa won't bring them presents if they misbehave, and that he somehow manages to invade a billion houses in one night, aided by eight (or is it nine?) aviating ungulates.

I can already hear the howls of outrage. "It's a harmless fantasy," some will say. But it's not that harmless. Someday your Santa lie will be discovered. If you lied to them about Santa Claus, kids will wonder, what else did you lie to them about?

"It's only a little lie," others will say. But it's not so little. Once you lie about Santa's existence, you have to lie another time when your kids see Santa in two different stores. You have to lie once again when the kids leave Santa cookies before going to bed, and in the morning they're gone. It starts small, but it soon becomes an elaborate deception. We refused to play along.

I have nothing against fantasy stories. As a child, I loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy and read it over and over again. But it's important to know the difference between reality and fantasy. I never believed that Tolkien's Middle Earth was real, and my parents didn't lie to me that it was.

My wife and I never lied to our kids about Santa Claus. We treated him as a mythical figure, just like the the Easter Bunny and the Great Pumpkin.

Our kids don't seem to have been permanently harmed by our choice. Both like reading and telling stories, and they enjoy fantasy and role-playing games. The Narnia books are some of their favorites. They've even been known to wear Santa hats and play Christmas carols on their violins.

"You deprived them of a magical experience," some will say. I don't think so. Our kids know there is magic in the world, because they've looked through a microscope at a cell, and they've looked through a telescope at the rings of Saturn. They know that the tilt of the Earth's axis is the real reason for the season, but they also know the magic of their parents' love.

So no, Virginia -- Santa Claus isn't real. But there's nothing phony about human imagination, fantasy, the telling of tales, the complexity of our universe, the desire for a better world to live in, and our ability to achieve that world if we work hard enough and care about others. We told our kids the truth about those things, too.

President-elect Obama has chosen Rick Warren, that clueless hypocrite and gay marriage opponent to deliver the invocation at his inauguration.

Well, I'm one Obama voter who thinks there shouldn't be a religious invocation at all. But if there is going to be one, I don't want a creep like Warren to be the one to deliver it.

Now, there's simply no way that Obama's going to go back on this choice. Once invited, the man stays invited.

But we can still express our displeasure.

So here's my solution: if you're going to the inauguration (and more than a million people may go), when Warren gets up to the podium, boo.

That's right, boo.

Boo loudly and lustfully. Boo more than once. Boo for more than just a few seconds. Drown out Warren's first sentence in a chorus of boos.

Boo Warren because you think he's an anti-gay bigot. Boo him again because he's prejudiced against atheists. Boo him once more because his book is a piece of crap.

At the inauguration, let Warren and Obama know what you think of this appalling choice.

When you read a theist's denunciation of atheism, one thing is certain: you are not likely to find any original criticisms. Instead you'll find the usual nonsense:

• Atheists are "dogmatic" and their criticisms are "shrill".
  
• Deep down, atheists really believe in a god.
  
• Atheists have mental problems.
  
• Atheists are hateful.
  
• Atheists have no moral code.
  

etc., etc. For more along these lines, see my account of Tim Kenyon's talk last January.

Now look at this silly opinion piece by Dow Marmur, a "rabbi emeritus" at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto. How many of the atheism myths can you find?

The wonder is that the Toronto Star found this drivel suitable for publication. At least the letters published in response, including one from Larry Moran, uniformly disagree with the good rabbi emeritus.

Hat tip: Ed Barsalou.

Academia is one of the few places in American society where accepted truths get questioned. Ronald Reagan was a great president? The general public may think so, but historians definitely don't. Religion is a positive force in American society, and believers are more moral than non-believers? Sociologists might beg to differ.

Conservatives, however, like accepted truths -- and the older the truth, the better. This produces a certain kind of academic who yearns for an earlier time and, secretly or not-so-secretly, despises his students. Such a man (and it is nearly always a man) has little or no understanding of any discipline outside his own, and labels his colleagues as "sour" or "depressed" or "overpaid". He is almost always to be found in an English or philosophy department, and distrusts science because its achievements are beyond him and its practitioners are too excited by the joy of learning and discovery to be encapsulated by his thesis.

Allan Bloom was that kind of academic. In his screed, The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom claimed that what American universities really needed was a healthy dose of the Great Books. Reading Plato, Bloom said, would cure the University's ills, while modern science was not to be trusted.

And here's another: Joseph Epstein. In this egregious 2005 piece from the Weekly Standard, he calls university teaching a "racket", describes university working conditions as "complete freedom", and claims academics work "fewer than six months a year". His colleagues are "obviously disappointed, depressed, and generally demoralized". They are "dour". He wonders why no one has done a study on academic unhappiness. Well, someone has.

For example, in 1999 Melanie E. Ward-Warmedinger and Peter J. Sloane studied job satisfaction among Scottish academics. They concluded that "levels of overall job satisfaction among academics are high, though not with pay and promotion". By the standards of the study, 41.5% of respondents found their jobs highly satisfying, while only 5.9% reported being highly dissatisfied.

A 1997 study by Lacy and Sheehan, published in Higher Education in 1997, found that about 60% of academics in Sweden and the US were satisfied with their jobs. Job satisfaction was lower in the UK, Australia, and some other countries.

A 2007 NORC report found that teachers were among the most satisfied of all professions, with 69.2% "very satisfied", compared with 47% for all workers (but the survey report seems to have lumped together all teachers with college and university professors).

Yale Law School surveyed its graduates from 1996 to 2000 and found that academics were the most satisfied of all its graduates, with 75% reporting that they are "very satisfied". (By contrast, only 24% of those working at private law firms said they were "very satisfied".)

Finding these sources took me about half an hour. Why couldn't Epstein find them? Because he is not interested in the truth; he is, in the words of William James, only interested in rearranging his own prejudices. And prejudices abound: when discussing a black female English professor he met at Denison University, he feels it necessary to condescend parenthetically that she was "very nice, by the way".

Epstein's conception of academia seems entirely limited to English. He shows no awareness of the existence of other departments. He maunders on about "feminism, Marxism, and queer theory", but says nothing at all about quantum cryptography or string theory. Joe: there's an exciting world out there in other academic departments; maybe you should make an effort to learn what's going on.

When he says that aging professors "discover the students aren't sufficiently appreciative; the books don't get written; the teaching begins to feel repetitive", he's not describing anything in my experience. My students are absolutely terrific, and I don't waste time thinking about whether I am unappreciated. My books do get written, and so do those of my colleagues. While some teaching is repetitive, it is easy to enliven it by covering new topics. And when he labels academics as jealous of the success of others ("Meanwhile, people who got lots of B's in school seem to be driving around in Mercedes, buying million-dollar apartments, enjoying freedom and prosperity in a manner that strikes the former good students, now professors, as not only unseemly but of a kind a just society surely would never permit.") it gives you some idea of what Epstein himself thinks is valuable.

All this is typical blowhard fodder. But wait, there's more.

In his most recent piece in the Weekly Standard, Epstein criticizes Obama's administration because (wait for it) it has too many people who attended schools like Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, and Yale. Epstein dismisses such people because they "[work] hard in high school and [pile] up lots of activities, and [score] high on [their] SAT's". He seems to have no conception that good students might do well because they actually enjoy learning.

Epstein justifies his criticism by saying that "some of the worst people in the United States have gone to the Harvard or Yale Law Schools: Mr. and Mrs. Eliot Spitzer, Mr. and Mrs. William Clinton, and countless -others [sic]". Whatever you think of Hillary and Bill Clinton, labelling them as "the worst people in the United States" is ridiculous rhetorical excess. (If he gets to mention the Clintons as examples of bad people who attended elite schools, then I get to mention George W. Bush, Pat Robertson, and Phyllis Schlafly. I think I win.) As for Mrs. Spitzer -- that is, Silda Alice Wall Spitzer -- it's not clear why Epstein despises her. Was it her founding of Project Cicero, which works to improve classroom libraries? Or her founding of Children for Children?

Epstein clearly doesn't believe in government by educated, knowledgeable people who attended good schools. What we need, he says, is someone who attended a second-rate religious school like Eureka College: Ronald Reagan. Reagan, Epstein tells us, was one of the two greatest presidents of the 20th century. Reagan, that most conventional of small-minded men, is, in Epstein's view, "without the least trace of conformity or hostage to received opinion or conventional wisdom." I guess that explains why Reagan believed that evolution is a "theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science and is not yet believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was believed. But if it was going to be taught in the schools, then I think that also the biblical theory of creation, which is not a theory but the biblical story of creation, should also be taught." Yup, it sure looks like a Eureka College education made Reagan challenge conventional wisdom there. If this passes for intellectual conservative commentary, it is yet more proof that intellectual conservatism is dead.

Or maybe, what we need is government by second-rate hacks who achieve their positions by being born to achieving fathers. You know, like George Bush and Epstein's employer, William Kristol?

Maybe Epstein thinks academics are "sour" and "unhappy" because he is, I don't know. Maybe Epstein is unhappy because his fellow academics don't put up with the kind of fact-free claptrap he displayed in these two articles, I don't know. But I do know that Joseph Epstein is December's Blowhard of the Month.

Postscript: It might be objected that I addressed job satisfaction, not happiness. So I went to the NORC survey website and, based on the interface at sda.berkeley.edu, I tabulated the happiness of "teachers, college and university" for the years 1972-2006. The cumulative results are: 37.95% report being "very happy"; 54.8% report being "pretty happy", and only 7.3% report being "not too happy". By contrast, for all professions the results are 34.1% report being "very happy", 54.6% report being "pretty happy", and 11.25% report being "not too happy". I conclude that academics are, on the whole, slightly happier than the average person.

Here's a YouTube video of a terrific guitar performance. José Antonio López plays an arrangement of Fernando Bustamante's guitar solo piece, "Misionera". This piece has it all: dramatic changes in dynamics, some flamenco strumming, sul ponticello, sul tasto, tremolo, and virtuoso runs. Just the thing to warm you up on a cold fall day here in Canada.

The one really surprising fact about the US presidential election is how few people voted for me.

After all, I have international experience, having lived in Canada since 1990. And I know more about economics than John McCain, and more about geography than Sarah Palin. Why not me?

I've been training for the job since 1963. In the photo, that's me in the White House cabinet room, waiting for the rest of the cabinet to assemble for our meeting. I was only 5 at the time, but they still gave me the seat of honor.

[My father knew Myer Feldman, the deputy special counsel to President Kennedy, because they both grew up in Philadelphia, so we got a special tour of the White House on May 11, 1963. Kennedy was away in Massachusetts meeting with the Prime Minister of Canada, so we didn't get to meet him.]

My younger son had some English homework where he was supposed to find all the errors in the given sentence. I see one error, but what's wrong with the moose?

Ionica Smeets of the website Wiskundemeisjes (Math Girls) has written to let me know that a Dutch TV program has featured my paper on optimal coin denominations. Probably only of interest if you are fluent in Dutch, or enjoy seeing my head being animated and doing strange things.

Not satisfied with their truly ignoble performance the last time around, our local 9/11 crackpots are holding another event this Thursday:



The misnamed "9/11 Truth" movement seems to be dying out almost everywhere, except in Canada, where it has a very strong strain of US-hatred to draw on. In the US, it seems the crackpots have moved on to "Obama is a Muslim Manchurian candidate, the secret love child of Malcolm X, who will become a dictator, take away everyone's rights, and turn the US into a socialist paradise."

As John Ray points out, "Today, the 9/11 conspiracy movement is a shell of what it once was. The website masquerading as an academic journal, Journal of 9/11 Studies, has dropped from a high of six articles in its August 2006 issue to one in March and its two most recent editions (it's supposed to be updated monthly) were simply skipped over, evidently for lack of a single article."

In case you can't read the poster, you can see a better version here. Global Outlook, the group sponsoring the Waterloo event, is also hosting a lecture series at the University of Toronto that looks just chock-full of all sorts of woo, including a bizarre focus on "natural medicine" and "out-of-place artifacts".

There is no subject like evolution to bring out the blowhards, and Wayne Eyre is just the latest. Writing in the National Post, Eyre praises David Berlinski's latest screed, The Devil's Delusion.

Berlinski, as you probably know, is the poseur who somehow managed to get his anti-evolutionary blather published in venues such as Commentary. He was also recenty caught inventing bogus claims about John von Neumann's attitude towards evolution. A reliable source? I don't think so.

Nevertheless, Blowhard of the Month Eyre accepts Berlinski's claims about evolution at face value. If Berlinski says that the theory of evolution "makes little sense", Eyre believes it must be so. Somehow, Berlinski -- a man with no biological training -- knows more than actual biologists. Differential reproductive success coupled with a mechanism for genotypic/phenotypic change means evolution is inevitable. Any beginning biology student understands this. What about it is so difficult for Eyre?

If Berlinski says the theory of evolution "is supported by little evidence", it must be so. Never mind the painstaking case assembled by Darwin that convinced biologists a hundred years ago. Never mind the mounds and mounds of evidence assembled since then -- if Eyre has ever cracked open a biology textbook or Endler's Natural Selection in the Wild, I would be amazed. No: philosophy Ph. D. David Berlinski has said it, and so it must be true.

Eyre even resorts to the favorite ploy of the blowhard: if all the experts say I am wrong, that is proof I am right.

The fact that the National Post would publish this idea-free dreck is yet more proof that intellectual conservatism is dead.

This election has shown without a doubt that the American Right is totally bereft of any sensible ideas. So far they've produced:

• Obama is a terrorist
  
  
• Obama is not really an American citizen
  
  
• Michelle Obama refers to white people as "whitey"
  
  
• Obama is a communist mole
  
  

and many other similar claims that are jaw-dropping in their utter insanity. One McCain supporter even refused to give Halloween candy to the children of parents who supported Obama.

But this is one of the craziest yet. Now the claim is that Obama is secretly using hypnosis techniques to deceive the public. And what's the evidence? It's that Obama uses the hackneyed phrase, "As I stand here before you" in his speeches. Well, then I guess that McCain supporter Joe Lieberman must be using the same technique. After all, it was pioneered by baseball great Brooks Robinson, who apparently developed it to hypnotize pitchers.

It used to be that Republicans had some legitimate criticisms of the Dems. Now all they have is insanity.

On the left, yours truly. In the center, T. Ryan Gregory of Genomicron. On the right, the world's most famous science blogger, P. Z. Myers of Pharyngula. We were all in Guelph for P. Z.'s talk sponsored by CFI and the University of Guelph Skeptics.

The talk was well-attended, as P. Z. and his daughter discussed a variety of different subjects, including science education, the upcoming election, and strategies for fighting the foolishness of creationism and intelligent design.

The highlight for me, however, had to be the fellow who during question period insisted that there had to be something outside scientific inquiry, and gave as his prime example (and no, I am not making this up) the 2004 World Series victory by the Boston Red Sox. He claimed that the Sox's improbable finish, including victory during a total lunar eclipse, was proof of supernatural intervention. The majority of the audience laughed, because I suspect they know what I know: that the 2008 World Series Victory by the Phillies is the ultimate, unquestionable proof of a deity.

From the Manifesto Club comes this news of a poem removed by the AQA (the awarding body for A-level exams and GCSE's) from the GCSE (General certificate of secondary education) syllabus in Great Britain.

The poem is entitled "Education for Leisure" and was written by the award-winning poet, Carol Ann Duffy. It can be found here.

Syllabi change all the time, but this case is special, since the decision to remove it was spurred by an exam invigilator, Pat Schofield, who apparently felt the poem glorified knife crime. She is quoted as saying, "I think it is absolutely horrendous - what sort of message is that to give to kids who are reading it as part of their GCSE syllabus?"

What's next, banning The Charge of the Light Brigade because it glorifies suicidal military exploits?

The AQA itself responded with these weasel words: "The decision to withdraw the poem was not taken lightly and only after due consideration of the issues involved. We believe the decision underlines the often difficult balance that exists between encouraging and facilitating young people to think critically about difficult but important topics and the need to do this in a way which is sensitive to social issues and public concern."

It looks like Carol Ann Duffy got the last laugh, however. She's written a response entitled Mrs. Schofield's GCSE. How fitting that Schofield, like Bowdler, will pass into the language as a synonym for small-minded censorship.

Mrs Schofield's GCSE

Carol Ann Duffy

You must prepare your bosom for his knife,

said Portia to Antonio in which

of Shakespeare's Comedies? Who killed his wife,

insane with jealousy? And which Scots witch

knew Something wicked this way comes? Who said

Is this a dagger which I see? Which Tragedy?

Whose blade was drawn which led to Tybalt's death?

To whom did dying Caesar say Et tu? And why?

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark - do you

know what this means? Explain how poetry

pursues the human like the smitten moon

above the weeping, laughing earth; how we

make prayers of it. Nothing will come of nothing:

speak again. Said by which King? You may begin.