My ESPN Insider content from the last week:
* My breakout player picks for 2015.
* A suggested rule change to cover the Kris Byrant situation, plus Jonathan Gray, Tyler Matzek, Yasmany Tomas, and Yoan Lopez
* Javier Baez, Brandon Finnegan, Danny Duffy, Kyle Schwarber
* Carlos Rodon and Tyler Danish
* Taijuan Walker and Rubby de la Rosa
* A draft blog post on Arizona infielders Kevin Newman and Scott Kingery
I’ll be on the ESPN game broadcasts on Tuesday (Phillies at Atlanta) and Friday (Red Sox at Atlanta), as well as some postgame content to be determined.
And now, this week’s links…
- There’s been a rash of suicides and attempts in Palo Alto, prompting this sound and accessible piece on how parents can try to help decrease the risks in their own children.
- This week in terrifying food science news: Antibiotic use at pork farms is soaring, and it’s not just in the United States. Of course, we can’t expect other countries to ban the practice if we refuse to do it ourselves.
- A Virginia middle school suspended a sixth-grader and referred him for substance-abuse counseling because he brought a leaf to school. No, not a marijuana leaf, or any other kind of illicit drug. This is zero-tolerance policy run completely amok, benefiting no one.
- It’s made the rounds, but just in case you haven’t seen it, Ashley Judd is seriously sick of your misogynistic bullshit. Death threats are illegal, so why aren’t rape threats? More importantly, why does Twitter persistently refuse to do anything about it?
- Making busy intersections safer. I imagine the initial reluctance to accept these new designs would be huge – never change anything, anywhere – but they’re fascinating to me as someone who used to love road maps and seeing different streets and intersections as a kid, but also to me as someone who drives all the time and worries a lot about getting in or even causing an accident. Although the skateboarder I nearly brained on San Diego Avenue on Thursday shouldn’t have been in the middle of the car lane, even at midnight.
- “Hands up, don’t shoot” was built on a lie. Or maybe it wasn’t. Hell if I know.
- Finally, Baltimore Ravens lineman John Urschel co-authored a math paper titled “A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector.” Are we praising him for being brilliant, or are we all just relieved that he’s not a wife-beater or a serial rapist? Regardless, graph theory is heady stuff, beyond anything I ever studied in school or on my own; I remember encountering the Königsberg Bridge Problem, a precursor to modern graph theory, but don’t recall learning its (dis)proof.