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Saturday five, 7/18/15.

I posted an updated ranking of the minors’ top 50 prospects this week, and held a Klawchat that afternoon to talk about it. On Sunday night, I posted a briefer-than-normal Futures Game recap, since the talent in the game was somewhat light relative to past years.

Over at Paste, I have a review of the family-friendly boardgame Flea Market up. I’ve been playing the new Splendor iOS app for the last two weeks, and my review of it will be up on Paste within the next few days. It’s excellent.

And now, the links…saturdayfive

  • A terrifying, critical longread about the inevitable earthquake and tsunami coming to the Pacific Northwest. It’s not just temporal parochialism at work here, but a general distrust of science and a mistaken, possibly hard-wired belief in our invincibility as a species.
  • Another longread worth your time: A child refugee from the Rwandan genocide talks about her time in exile, both on the run in Africa and here in the United States.
  • Germany is trying out a new prevention-oriented approach to child molestation by working with confessed pedophiles, even those who have offended already. It’s a complex subject, especially if this means past victims aren’t getting help, but early results have some promise and it beats simply declaring these people “evil” (when they may be trauma victims themselves) and locking them up forever.
  • North Carolina wants to stop black people from voting, using modern-day versions of the literacy test and the poll tax. This shouldn’t happen in our day and age, but it does in white-run states with large African-American minorities.
  • The Large Hadron Collider hasn’t collapsed the universe into a singularity – yet – but it has verified the existence of sub-subatomic particles called pentaquarks.
  • The Atlantic discusses the world’s smallest language, Toki Pona, a constructed language with just 123 words. This just reminded me that I need to read Babel-17, a short novel that incorporates the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ linguistic determinism.
  • GMO foods are safe. I still think they should be labeled, because consumers do have the right to know and may wish to avoid supporting monoculture farming, but the science on their safety is quite solid.
  • A small Brooklyn yogurt maker has started bottling the whey that’s typically discarded after yogurt is strained to make Greek yogurt. Disposing of that whey has become a major business problem for the big Greek yogurt companies because it can’t just be dumped like water, but it turns out that it’s high in beneficial bacteria and is already consumed as a drink in other countries.
  • Scientists working in China, led by friend of the dish Dr. Steve Brusatte, believe they’ve discovered the remains of the largest winged dinosaur found to date, posing new questions for evolutionary biologists on how and why wings caught on as an adaptation.
  • This post on “Hospital Glam,” photos of people with invisible disabilities in health-care environments, seems like both a way to increase awareness and perhaps help the self-esteem of the subjects.
  • Gawker had a bad week – the piece outing a closeted CFO was salacious and incredibly distasteful – but this piece on growing up in fundamentalist households is well-written and surprisingly balanced.
  • Sticklers, unite: A grammar nut used her knowledge to beat a parking ticket.
  • Top Chef judge and friend of the dish Hugh Acheson demoed several recipes from his latest cookbook for Talks at Google. “If you buy pre-minced garlic, you are dead to me.” This is why we love Hugh. If you haven’t picked up the book, The Broad Fork, you should do so. It’s fantastic, and entirely built around produce; the charred-onion vinaigrette, which he makes in this video, is also a fantastic steak sauce.
  • Alton Brown set the world straight by saying that a hot dog is indeed a sandwich, but more importantly, he showed everyone how to store all of those pesky mustard containers in your fridge:

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