Saturday five, 7/4/15.

I wrote two Insider pieces this week, one with some All-Star candidate thoughts and one on Tyler Glasnow and Josh Bell. I also held my usual Thursday Klawchat.

There will be no Klawchat or any other content this week, as I’m officially on vacation now and won’t be online at all until next Friday at the earliest.

I contributed a paragraph or two on the term “umpshow” to a fun Rob Neyer piece on five bits of new baseball slang.

And now, the links…

• Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy blog tears into vaccine denier Jim Carrey, who lost his mind on Twitter this week when California did the right thing and eliminated the religious exemption from mandatory childhood vaccinations. By the way, I wrote to Delaware’s Governor and both of my state legislators asking them to pass the same law here. Meanwhile, a woman in Washington state has died from the measles, the first such death in the U.S. in over a decade. Good job, deniers!
• How badly did Carrey lose his mind? He used a developmentally-disabled child’s photo, without permission from the child’s mom, who is now pissed off because vaccines did not cause the child’s issues. He later apologized.
• A notorious crank vaccine-denier doctorkilled himself last week, and the denier crowd is joining his family in claiming it’s some nefarious murder conspiracy.
• Also from the Washington Post, why municipal recycling programs are running into financial trouble. Turns out consumers aren’t very good at even the simple task of putting recyclables in the big blue bin.
• The Internet makes you think you’re smarter than you are, or so sayeth a new study whose author spoke to the Harvard Business Review about it.
• Creationists are selling their crap to science teachers at the NEA convention. The NEA shouldn’t have even allowed them on the convention floor: Not only is creationism wrong, teaching it in public schools is unconstitutional.
• It’s behind a journal paywall, but you can at least see an abstract on a novel C. Difficile vaccine candidate. Clostridium difficile is a nasty bug that’s on the rise thanks to antibiotic overuse and mutations that have led to more virulent strains.
• The Supreme Court had another good ruling this past week: They struck down an incredibly stupid, anti-free market economic program that allowed the USDA to seize raisin farmers’ crops.
• Big data has come to the music industry. It’s good for consumers, and it’s bad for consumers.
• Sonia Manzano, whom most of you will recall as Maria, is retiring from Sesame Street. She started on the show two years before I was born.
• Extremely important: Tempe restaurant/coffee mecca Crepe Bar is expanding to over 2000 square feet. They serve heart coffee, one of my favorite small roasters in the country.

Last, my favorite troll tweet of the week … I guess maybe this guy thinks Rob is a vaccine denier too? (He’s not.)