Monthly Archives: March 2007

Spirituality and Religion

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In general, I haven’t talked much about personal stuff on the blog, unless it related to
something else that I was already talking about. This post is going to be an exception to that.

There’s a bit of a scienceblogs flamewar that started up, with Rob Knop, a new SBer on one
side, and a bunch of atheistic SBers on the other. I pretty much think arguments like this are a
total waste of time: Rob isn’t going to convince PZ that he’s not a delusional idiot for being
religious; PZ isn’t going to convince Rob that he is a delusional idiot. It’s all just
ranting.

But as part of it, PZ made a statement in one of his posts that bugged me. It’s one he’s made before, and which I’m sure he’ll make again; but it’s an example of a kind of thinking that has always bothered me. The statement, from the title of his post, is “Spirituality? Another word for lies and empty noise”.

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Basics: Tautology (with a free bonus rant!)

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Today’s bit of basics is inspired by that bastion of shitheaded ignorance, Dr. Michael Egnor. In part of his latest screed (a podcast with Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute), Egnor discusses antibiotic resistance, and along the way, asserts that the theory of evolution has no relevance to antibiotic resistance, because what evolution says about the subject is just
a tautology. (I’m deliberately not linking to the podcast; I will not help increase the hit-count that DI will use to promote it’s agenda of willful ignorance.)

So what is a tautology?

A tautology is a logical statement which is universally true, by nature of its fundamental structure. That is, even without knowing anything about what the statement means,
you can infer that it must be true.

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What happens if you don't understand math? Just replace it with solipsism, and you can get published!

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In the comments to another post, Blake Stacey gave me a pointer to a really obnoxious article, called “A New Theory of the Universe”, by a Robert Lanza, published in the American Scholar. Lanza’s article is a rotten piece of new-age gibberish, with all of the usual hallmarks: lots of woo, all sorts of babble about how important consciousness is, random nonsensical babblings about quantum physics, and of course, bad math.

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Theories, Theorems, Lemmas, and Corollaries

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I’ve been getting so many requests for “basics” posts that I’m having trouble keeping up! There are so many basic things in math that non-mathematicians are confused about. I’m doing my best to keep up: if you’ve requested a “basics” topic and I haven’t gotten around to it, rest assured, I’m doing my best, and I will get to it eventually!

One of the things that multiple people have written to be about is confusion about what a mathematician means by a theory; and what the difference is between a theory and a theorem?

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Basics: Modal Logic

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I’ve received a request from a long-time reader to write a basics post on modal logics. In particular, what is a modal logic, and why did Gödel believe that a proof for the existence of God was more compelling in modal logic than in standard predicate logic.

The first part is the easy one. Modal logics are logics that assign values to statements that go beyond “This statement is true” or “This statement is false”. Modal logics add the concepts of possibility and necessity. Modal logic allows statements like “It is necessary for X to be true”, “It is possible for X to be true”, etc.

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The Biggest Geek and the SF List

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PZ, Bora, Orac, John, and others have all put up posts about a list of the 50 most significant Science Fiction and Fantasy works of the last fifty years. As the reigning Geek-Lord of ScienceBlogs, I figured that I had to weigh in as well. Here’s the list: the one’s that I’ve read are bold-faced.

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Basics: Going Meta

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In math and computer science, we have a tendency to talk about “going meta”. It’s actually a
pretty simple idea, which tends to crop up in other places, as well. It’s also one of my favorite concepts – the idea of going meta is just plain cool. (Not to mention useful. There’s a running joke among computer scientists that the solution to any problem is to add a level of indirection – which is programmer-speak for going meta on constructs inside of a programming language. Object-orientation is, in some sense, just an example of how to go meta on procedures. Haskell type-classes are an example of going meta on types.)

Going meta basically means taking a step back, and instead of talking about some subject X, you talk about talking about X.

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Let's Arrest the Discovery Institute!

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This isn’t really math, but I can’t resist commenting on it. I was looking at Evolution News and Views, which is yet another “news” site run by the Discovery Institute, because the illustrious Dr. Egnor had an article there. And I came across this, which I found just hysterically funny:

If You Have Laws, Don’t You Have to Have Punish Lawbreakers?
Robert Crowther

The Advocate today gives a big hip-hip-hooray for Darwin’s “process.” They worry that the public doesn’t accept Darwinian evolutionary claims to explain the complex diversity of life and the universe. Must be that they just don’t understand. Their solution?

Perhaps the “law of evolution” would be more easily understood by the public than the “theory” of evolution.

It’s interesting that evolution is so solid, so proven, that it will only survive if it is declared a law. When evolution is the law of the land, what will happen then to those who dissent?

Yeah. The reason for talking about the law of evolution is so that we can throw anyone who disagrees with it in jail. Just like we do with the law of gravity, or the laws of thermodynamics.

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Good Math/Bad Math is One Year Old!

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I just realized that I’ve been writing this blog for a whole year! I managed to miss the actual
anniversary, which was on thursday. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been doing it for a full year.
When I started Good Math/Bad Math on Blogger, I honestly believed that I’d probably last a couple
of weeks; maybe a month at best. And I didn’t expect to find a lot of readers – my best guess was
that I’d be lucky if I got a couple of dozen readers a day. After all – what I write about is math – in particular, mostly extremely abstract math. Not exactly something that I expected a lot of people to be interested in.

And now, a year later, I’m part of the ScienceBlogs community. I’ve posted close to 500 articles since the blog started, and I’m averaging 3,000 pageviews per day. Absolutely unbelievable!

So I’d like to say thank you to all of you who’ve been reading and commenting. Writing GM/BM has been more fun and more rewarding than I could have imagined, and that’s mainly due to all of you who read, comment, and send links. Thanks for reading, and thanks for letting my share my love and enthusiasm for math with all of you.

I’d also like to say a particular thank you to my friend Orac. It was Respectful Insolence that inspired me to start my own blog, and Orac was the first blog to link to GM/BM, providing me with that first burst of readers that really got things rolling. So many, many thanks to you, Orac.

Here’s hoping that I can keep this going for many more years!

The Third Carnival of Mathematics is out!

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The third edition of the Carnival of Mathematics is out: this time around, it’s hosted at
Michi’s Place.

The next edition will be up in two weeks at my fellow ScienceBlogger Jason Rosenhouse’s EvolutionBlog.