My ESPN content from the past seven days:
* My 2004 redraft, going back to that year and redoing the draft with the benefit of hindsight.
* And a companion piece looking at the 2004 first-rounders who didn’t work out.
* How the Rangers should respond to Fielder’s injury.
* My SEC tournament wrapup.
* Friday’s Klawchat.
My next mock draft goes up Tuesday, and I’ll have a pro prospect ranking update later in the week as well, because I don’t have enough going on right now.
I left Alabama a little earlier than expected, since the 3 pm game on Friday didn’t include anyone I needed to see, but I did stop by Octane in Homewood for an espresso and a bag of beans (Rwandan, since I enjoyed the Four Barrel beans from that country). The space is bigger and brighter than the Octane I visited in Atlanta, too.
And now, this week’s links, with two extra today since I went a little heavy on the vaccine topic.
- Vaccines are not associated with autism. A meta-study covering over a million kids found, once again, that water is wet and vaccines don’t cause autism. Link goes to an abstract for a subscriber-only journal article.
- Delaying the MMR vaccine may increase seizure risk. Granted, this is small potatoes compared to, you know, getting the actual measles, but it’s just another reason to vaccinate fully and on schedule.
- Antivaccine activists attack and bully high school filmmakers. Just in case you didn’t realize vaccinutters were dangerous, evil zealots.
- And one more on vaccines – why showing someone their belief is false doesn’t work. It’s more complicated than just disproving a dumb idea.
- From the NY Times, a long column on why counting reducing calories won’t help you lose weight. The authors have hypothesized that it’s a combination of factors behind our national weight gain: We eat too many refined carbohydrates that drive up insulin levels, and storage of excess glycogen as fat actually reduces the amount of energy available for the body to use – so we eat more.
- Chef Dan Barber talked to NPR about his new book, The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food
- Haverford commencement speaker lambasts students. They mounted a protest against the original speaker, former Cal-Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau, causing his withdrawal. Some of this stuff happened when I was in college, although it was more likely students would refuse to stand or would turn their backs to the speaker. The idea of petitioning to cause a speaker’s removal has the whiff of sport, not political activism, and the actual speaker, former Princeton president William Bowen, makes several excellent points on the imbroglio.
