The hot stove was cooking with gas this week, so I managed to get a fair amount of writing done about the various deals, such as …
* Friday’s three-way trade involving the Yanks, Tigers, and Dbacks
* The Andrew Miller contract with the Yankees
* The Nick Markakis deal with Atlanta, with smaller deals like the Happ/Saunders trade included in this post
* The Nelson Cruz deal with Seattle, maybe the worst of the offseason so far
I also posted a review of the two-player deckbuilding game Star Realms late Friday night.
This week’s links…
- Our Ability To Digest Alcohol May Have Been Key To Our Survival. The common ancestor we share with chimps and gorillas developed an enzyme, ADH4, about 10 million years ago, that enabled them to digest foods that had begun fermentation. You had me at “alcohol,” though.
- Also via NPR, Why did non-GMO versions of cereals lose their vitamins? Maybe the whole GMO/non-GMO dichotomy isn’t as clean and simple as the labeling advocates (with whom I tend to side) argue it is? Besides, I’ve pointed out before that no GMO foods will mean no more bananas some day soon.
- So much for the Big Bang’s afterglow, which confirmed the standard theory of cosmology so well that researchers are actually disappointed. By the way, did you know the Big Bang theory was first proposed by a Catholic priest, the Belgian George Lemaître?
- There were a lot of great (if infuriating) stories this week about hockey blogger/creeper Steve Lepore harassing women via Twitter DMs and Gchat, but this story from the Blonde Side was the best/most infuriating, because it happened so long ago and because Lepore’s boss/editor/some authority figure at the time just blew it off.
- This ThinkProgress piece argues that a 21st Circuit Court judge could appoint a special prosecutor in Ferguson and try to get a new indictment. I fully concede I’m not a lawyer and don’t know if this is accurate, but a fresh grand jury proceeding with an impartial prosecutor sounds like a good idea for the community. I’d love to hear some lawyers in the audience weigh in on whether this is a legitimate argument and/or whether it would be a smart move.