HPV, Cancer and Friends

Stephanie Zvan who blogs at Almost Diamonds has cervical cancer. A recent Pap smear came back with abnormal results and follow-up work found the cancer. Stephanie has talked about her experience and given follow-up information about her prognosis. Pieces responding to Stephanie's situation are at ERV and PalMD that are both worth reading.

I'm going to use this as an opportunity to go over some very basic issues:

First, for many cancers, getting them caught early matters. This is the case for many cancers. If you are a woman make sure you get regular Pap smears. If you are a man make sure to get regular prostate exams. No matter who you are, if you are older, make sure to get a regular colonoscopy. Etc. Etc. These exams save lives. When cancer is found doesn't just impact what treatment options there are but can be the difference between life and death.

Second, get the HPV vaccine. Unfortunately, this vaccine is not yet available for men but is available for women. HPV is one of the leading causes of cervical cancer. HPV is also associated with penile cancer in males. Once one has a given strain of HPV, getting a vaccine later isn't going to help matters. Moreover, HPV transmission is not prevented by condom use. HPV is a nasty little bugger and is much more easily transmitted than most STDs.

Stephanie grew up before there was a vaccine. However, in another respect, she is lucky. Stephanie and her husband don't intend to have children. However, for others they aren't so lucky. If you are a woman, get vaccinated. Men, when the vaccine is finally approved for males, please get vaccinated. Not only will this protect you, it will prevent you from getting a nasty disease which could then be given to those you love.

Stay informed. Stay protected. Stay safe.


Edit: Apparently the vaccine has now been approved for males. Good timing.

Where Are All the Smart Apologists?

Recently I read The Screw Tape Letters, a series of letters written by C.S. Lewis. The letters purport to be from an old demon giving advice to a young demon. Lewis is a smart, funny and talented writer. What the demon Screwtape says is as revealing and clever as what he does not say. This is not the only great work of apologetics by Lewis. Why are there no great Christian apologists like Lewis today?

Lewis is far from perfect. Lewis gave birth to one of the most annoying apologetic arguments, the Trilemma. However, even there his intelligence and originality shine through. I have not seen any contemporary apologist produce any argument that isn’t a tired repackaging of pre-existing arguments.

Who are the major apologists today? There really aren’t any in the influential way that Lewis was. But if one had to identify those who today continue the tradition of Christian apologetics, one would probably list Ray Comfort, William Demsbki, and Alister McGrath.

Do any of these people measure up to C. S. Lewis? No. Consider these writers individually:
Does Ray Comfort stack up to Lewis? No way. Ray Comfort is an idiot and an ignoramus. He’s the man who most famously tried to claim that the modern shape of the banana was evidence for a divine creator. Yes, the banana, a fruit that has been heavily modified by extensive breeding by humans, a fruit whose wild form is a nasty hard thing full of seeds.

Does William Dembski stack up to Lewis? Wililam Dembski isn’t an idiot like Comfort. He has a real PhD in mathematics. But this also is a man who, after intelligent design failed in the courts, was reduced to teaching apologetics at a second rate seminary while giving course credit to students for trolling pro-evolution websites. I can’t see C.S. Lewis doing that. Moreover, Dembski’s writing ability resembles that of a 7th grader trying to sound like he’s really bright and well read. I should know. I used to write like Dembski when I was in 7th grade. Demsbki also seems to spend most of his time fighting with other Christians. (He really, really doesn’t like theistic evolution.)

Does Alister McGrath stack up to C. S. Lewis? Now we are getting closer. McGrath is a respected theologian who also has a degree in biophysics. He’s bright. He’s willing to accept both science and religion. He has on occasion made cogent arguments. But there are two problems: First, he’s a dreadfully boring writer. I have trouble staying awake when I read anything he writes. Someone needs to get Ben Stein to do a book on tape of one of McGrath’s books. It would be the ultimate sleep aid. Or maybe it would be a weapon of mass destruction as just playing it nearby would cause individuals within a hundred mile radius to fall into irreversible comas. This brings us to the other issue with McGrath: The subjects and titles of his books are equally dreadful. His two most well known books are "The Dawkins Delusion?" and "Dawkins' God." Ok, Alister. We get the point. You don’t like Richard Dawkins.

So why are there no great apologists for Christianity today? Here are four possible explanations:
First, perhaps great apologists are simply rare and C.S. Lewis is a great outlier. This isn’t a satisfactory explanation. I could compare the modern stock of apologists with G. K. Chesterton and they would still not match up.

A second argument is that Christianity is not the common belief among intellectuals that it was fifty or sixty years ago. Since a smaller fraction of intellectuals today are deeply Christian and since apologetics is valued less today as it has been in the past, intellectuals are much less likely to go into apologetics.

Third, the state of the evidence has changed over time to make belief in Christianity less probable. This argument is almost certainly wrong. The major modern controversies implicating Christianity and Judeo-Christian religions in general have existed for a very long time. The Documentary Hypothesis and similar theories about other Biblical texts have been around for more than a century. So has evolution. Thus, the need to address these issues (either by reconciling Christianity with them, or by refuting them) has existed for a long time.

Fourth, the modern focus of apologetics has been the watchmaker analogy and variations thereof. The watchmaker analogy is an argument for the existence of God based on an analogy to a watch found in the desert which one would immediately realize had a designer. It is no coincidence that the three apologists listed above, all have arguments that revolve around the watchmaker. Ray Comfort uses a particularly stupid form of the watchmaker argument. William Dembski uses a particularly obfuscated form of the watchmaker argument. And Alister McGrath doesn’t really use the argument itself but rather spends most of his time arguing that Richard Dawkins hasn’t sufficiently refuted the watchmaker argument and that if Dawkins is fallible God must then exist.

This focus is understandable: The watchmaker argument and other teleological arguments for the existence of God are some of the hardest to refute. However, the focus of all contemporary apologetics on a single argument has left the industry stagnant and uncreative. In such circumstances, it isn’t surprising that apologetics fails to attract many intellectuals. Moreover, the focus on the watchmaker argument has caused much of modern apologetics (and thus many of modern apologists) to go head to head with much well-established science. C. S. Lewis in contrast was open to the possibility that evolution was correct. If the entire apologetic system revolves around attacking basic science, one shouldn't be surprised that not many bright, educated people are willing to lead it.

I’m not completely satisfied with any of these explanations. However, the decline of contemporary Christian apologetics needs explanation.

New Largest Prime Number Found

The largest known prime has now been bumped up. The recently discovered prime is 2^43112609 − 1 which in base 10 has around twelve million digits. As with all the largest primes discovered for most of the last hundred years, the prime is a Mersenne prime, that is it is one less than a power of 2. As with the last few Mersenne primes discovered, this was discovered by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search which uses distributed computing to search for Mersenne primes. I've blogged before about Mersenne primes. For more details on why we care about Mersenne primes and their history dating back to the ancient Greeks see this post and this post.

There are reasons to suspect that if 2^n-1 is prime that n-1 should be likely to have a lot of small prime factors. In this case, 43112609 -1= 2^5 * 7 * 11 * 17497. So while some of the prime divisors look very small, it has at least one prime very large prime divisor and so doesn't seem to fit this pattern well. This is in contrast to the last discovered Mersenne prime 2^42643801 - 1. In that case one has 42643800 = 2^3 * 3^3 * 5^2 * 53 * 149. It remains to be seen if this new example is simply an outlier or if we need to reevaluate what we expect the exponents of Mersenne primes to look like.

Glenn Beck, International Law, and Hypocrisy

The last time I discussed Glenn Beck on this blog, we discussed Beck's general ignorance and contempt regarding basic legal history. Most astounding of Beck's claims was the claim that the notion that laws change over time was an idea that arose in the 1920s as a response to "Darwinian evolution."

After remarks like that one might think that Beck isn't a bad person but just incredibly ignorant. However, Ed Brayton has drawn attention to Beck's latest interaction with international law demonstrates his true hypocrisy.

Beck frequently use the "I'm just asking questions" gambit to insinuate hurtful and borderline libelous claims. In response, One enterprising individual started a satirical website "Did Glenn Beck Rape and Murder a Young Girl in 1990?"Frankly, this seems to me to be over the line of reasonable civil discourse (even if it is amusing).

How has Beck responded to this website? Beck has petitioned World Intellectual Property Organization to remove control of the domain from the satirist. Beck's argument is that the domain creates confusion with his brand name and therefore is a violation of international conventions on trademarks. That claim is so profoundly stupid that I'm not going to bother addressing it.

The lawyers for the website responded by explaining in detail what was wrong with Beck's claim and noting that his appeal to WIPO seemed to be an attempted run-around of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. What makes Beck's behavior noteworthy is that, as one of the commentators to Brayton's blog observed, Beck has a history not just of complaining about transnationalism but of any intervention of international law into U.S. affairs. Indeed, Beck wrote in a March 30, 2009 column:

"Once we sign our rights over to international law, the Constitution is officially dead. When you say things like, 'We are not going to put the Constitution behind international law,' you say that in the international court, if you say that on the floor of the United Nations, you are a freak show."

In the same column Beck also wrote this gem:

"Let me tell you something. When you can't win with the people, you bump it up to the courts. When you can't win with the courts, you bump it up to the international level."

I'll let those comments speak for themselves.

Lockhart’s Lament: A Cogent Criticism of Math Education

I’ve received multiple requests to blog about Paul Lockhart’s “A Mathematician’s Lament.” Lockhart is a math teacher who is fed up with elementary and high school math education. I haven’t blogged about Lockhart's piece primarily because I agree with most of what he has to say and also a lot of people have already talked about it. (See for example, Scott Aaronson’s insightful commentary.)

Lockhart’s thesis is that much of mathematics education is simply wrong. According to Lockhart, the vast majority of our math education before college is rote learning that does not convey what mathematics is about. Lockhart argues that much of what children do in high school would be the equivalent of painting by numbers if we translated it into art. Mathematics is far more about exploration and understanding than it is about rote memorization. Lockhart argues that, by failing to let children understand and explore, we are not even teaching them mathematics. Lockhart further argues against rote math education based on practicality i.e. that these are techniques children will need when they are older.

Lockhart makes many good points and I recommend that people read his piece. As someone who has worked for many summers with the PROMYS program which uses a method similar to that outlined by Lockhart, I have much sympathy for his viewpoint. However, there are three problems with his thesis.

First, Lockhart overemphasizes the willingness of students to do exploratory mathematics. Exploration is intrinsically difficult. Moreover, it is difficult to get people to do math exploration if they don’t want to. If one tries to get youngsters to explore and they can’t do it effectively , the result is that parents will do the “exploration” for them. I’m sure there are readers of this blog who remember their parents “helping” with art projects back in elementary school.
Second, Lockhart underemphasizes the actual importance of rote learning and drills in picking up basic mathematics. Students need to be able to add, subtract, divide and multiply. They need to be able to do these things quickly in real life. Moreover, they need to do them enough times that they develop an intuition for orders of magnitude and when answers look right or wrong. That requires drilling in arithmetic from a young age. Lockhart addresses this issue briefly, but his response is unsatisfactory.

Third, Lockhart’s choice of focus on specific aspects of the high school and elementary curriculum is poor. He is correct in his criticism of the large amounts of trig memorization that occur. But he is incorrect in his example of the quadratic formula. In order to have an intuitive understanding of parabolas and other curves of degree 2, you need to know the quadratic formula. Moreover, the formula comes up frequently enough in later math classes that not knowing it would be a serious barrier. Finally, there are some items that educated people just need to know. Understanding the quadratic formula is one of those things that educated people just need to know in the same way that you can’t be an educated citizen of the United States and not know who Abraham Lincoln was.

Despite these criticisms, Lockhart is essentially correct. There are many serious problems with how we teach math and Lockhart correctly identifies many of them. While the massive overhaul that he outlines may not be necessary, it would substantially help matters if children were exposed at a much earlier age to what mathematics actually is, a subtle and beautiful art.

Alan Turing, Apologies, and Cthulhu

The British Government has finally apologized for its treatment of Alan Turing. Turing was one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century. He was responsible for founding computer science and he lead the effort to crack the Enigma encryption used by the Germans during World War II. This work saved many Allied lives and according to some historians proved crucial to the victory over the Axis forces. Without Turing's work, our world would look very different. However, Turing was gay. In 1952, Turing was convicted for engaging in homosexual acts. He was forced to undergo hormone therapy which lead to weight gain and other problems. Turing's security clearance was revoked. At the time, homosexuals were considered a security risk because of the potential of blackmail. The fact that the entire risk of blackmail was because they were considered a security risk apparently did not matter. Nor did it matter that since Turing was publicly gay, there was no possible risk of blackmail. Turing's ongoing consulting work with the government was terminated. Turing's life took a steady downhill side. In 1954, he committed suicide.

I am ambivalent about this apology. On the one hand, it is good to acknowledge how horribly Britain treated one of the saviors of civilization. On the other hand, apologies to the long dead always strike me as hollow. The living always face more than enough issues that are of far more practical importance than assuaging the feelings of the long-deceased.

Rather than discuss the pros and cons of such apologies, I am instead going to suggest three pieces of further reading.

First, Wikipedia has an excellent biography of Turing which explains his accomplishments and his mistreatment in far more detail than one can easily do in a short blog entry.

Second, Greg Egan, an excellent science fiction writer, has written a short story imagining a world in which Turing's life went slightly differently. In this case, "slightly differently" means had the assistance of a time-traveling robot. The story is more serious than one might think from that summary. The story looks at Turing's interactions with C.S. Lewis. I'm not sure the story is completely fair to Lewis overall, but it is very well-written and is an amusing what-if. Like most of Egan's writing, there's just enough plausibly correct mathematics to make it interesting.

Third, Charles Stross has written an amusing novel The Atrocity Archives in which Turing figures in the background. The essential premise is that Turing did not commit suicide but was assassinated by the British government to cover up far scarier discoveries he made (so presumably the Brits still owe Turing an apology in that universe). In that novel, mathematics is deeply connected to magic and thinking about certain theorems can accidentally lead to summonings of Cthulhu and other eldritch horrors. Turing was killed for discovering a series of powerful theorems including a proof that P=NP which if invoked improperly could destroy our universe. Unlike the Egan story, this is not a story I can claim has much in the way of serious merit. But it is very fun. By most accounts, Turing was a man with a sense of humor about things. I'd like to think that he'd smile to know that fifty years after he was dead, Great Britain would be apologizing to him at the same time that people were reading novels which linked him to Lovecraftian horrors.

Health Care, Death Panels and GPFM

Recently, Sarah Palin and other prominent Republicans have repeated claims that the proposed health care legislation would result in the creation of so called "death panels."This claim was quickly determined to be an egregious falsehood. However, the damage was already done and all elements of the proposed legislation that dealt with end-of-life issues were removed. My father has a piece up at the Oxford University Press Blog arguing that in fact death panels aren't such a bad idea. Essentially, the point is that one of the major reasons our health care costs are so high in the United States is because we go through tremendous effort to extend life during the last few months of life for many elderly. It is an issue very much worth discussing.

However, there are two related matters I'd like to mention. First, we should not lose track of how incredibly mendacious Palin and her compatriots have been about this matter. The fact that Bush's earlier proposed health care legislation had nearly identical end-of-life provisions is just one of the many ways in which Palin has simply become divorced from anything resembling reality. At this point, one must wonder if reality has taken out a restraining order on Palin.

Second, as someone who grew up with a very Jewish ethic about end-of-life issues it is emotionally very hard to agree to actively deciding that we will no longer provide health care to certain people. In classical Jewish thought, every effort must be made to continue to sustain life, regardless of cost. However, this view was constructed when medical technology was very different. Two-thousand years ago we didn't have the option to add a few painful months of life to someone at the cost of millions of dollars. We do now. This different situation may require serious reexamining of this sort of belief. This probably isn't an issue for most people in the US or at least the form it will take will be very different. Catholicism for example has for a long time tried to make a distinction between ordinary and extraordinary standards of medical care. In event, as medical technology becomes even more advanced, more and more value systems are going to need to serious think about these issues. Go read his piece here.