My Insider post this week named Astros first baseman A.J. Reed my 2015 Prospect of the Year, while listing other prospects who had fantastic years and highlighting Boston’s Andrew Benintendi for the best pro debut by a 2015 draftee.
I held my regular Klawchat here on Thursday. This upcoming week I may shift the chat and Periscope up by a day each, to Wednesday and Tuesday respectively.
And now, the links…
- Here’s a shocker: Most fast-food and fast-casual chains use meat loaded with antibiotics. The major exceptions aren’t surprising; both Chipotle and Panera have been committed to eliminating meat from animals raised with antibiotics for years.
- A wonderful chart highlighting twenty of the most common cognitive illusions that screw up our decision-making. If you want to learn more about these, read my reviews of the books The Invisible Gorilla and Thinking, Fast and Slow.
- Mexico has a real problem with woman and girls vanishing without a trace, often to human traffickers.
- This beautiful description of general relativity is an excerpt from an upcoming book that comes out this Thursday in Europe called Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
. It’s just £7 through that amazon UK link.
- More goodness from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at the Food Lab: The best way to reheat that old bagel. Lopez-Alt’s book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science
, comes out on Tuesday.
- A good overview of the rising popularity of bitters.
- The good news about the vaccine denial we saw in this week’s GOP
circusdebate was that the outcry against it was swift and severe. The bad news, as this Atlantic piece argues, is that vaccine denialism is now being linked to fear of big government, and that makes it even harder to argue with these dangerous nitwits. - Hugh Acheson brought his wisdom to food trucks in Luxembourg this week, which I mostly included because I’ve been to Luxembourg and it is kind of adorable.
- The New York Times looks back at the 1815 eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia, the most destructive volcanic eruption in modern history, a cataclysm that resulted in a massive global cooling episode. The spur for the piece was the release of a new book on the subject, Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World
, this past Tuesday. The author is quoted in the article.
- That recent incident where a security guard at a Whole Foods beat a black customer unconscious is a symptom of a larger trend, where lots of minimally-screened guards are running around, often with guns, rarely with consequences for their actions.
- Exxon’s own researchers showed their fossil fuels would lead to global warming back in 1977, which they subsequently ignored as they championed climate-change denial in the 1990s.
- The hot mess that is Cobb County’s new stadium for the local racist-nicknamed baseball team is even worse than you thought because fans won’t have a safe route from the parking lot to the stadium. This wouldn’t have been such an issue if the majority-white (65%) county had allowed the light rail line to build a route to the stadium, but they didn’t want those city folk (Atlanta’s population is 54% black) to have such easy access.
- Ruhlman waxes poetic on duck confit for Thomas Keller’s new magazine.
- The BBC’s Why Factor explores why we love tea while giving a brief history of the drink.
- Bloomberg looks at how most daily fantasy players lose money. A tiny percentage of players racks up nearly all of the winnings.
Wait so Sanjay Gupta says “a good rule of thumb is to avoid eating foods with ingredients you can’t prononce?” Isn’t that what the Fraud Babe says too?
Yeah, Gupta can be a pandering twit sometimes. He’s also been ripped for advocating lots of screening tests even though those tests often aren’t cost-effective.
I think the FUD Babe says to avoid eating ingredients a third-grader can’t pronounce. Still, that caught my attention too.
Found your links and blog a few weeks back and look forward to it every week.
That said re: Atlanta. I am one of those city-folk living in City of Atlanta. Yes, some hesitation to extending rail is based on race, but the stadium is actually going in an area that is racially diverse. Cobb Co is 45% AA, Hispanic, and Asian. Smyrna (the city) is 45% AA and 15% Hispanic.
Light rail will come. But it may never go further north or west for your stated reason.
I’m surprised daily fantasy games aren’t considered gambling. I suppose one difference is that you are “betting” on the performance of a player, not the outcome of a game but that doesn’t seem like a good place to make one side legal and the other side illegal. It does seem like this will lead to sports betting being legal, like in Canada, Europe/UK, etc. There are betting shops all over the place in the UK, including at the stadiums themselves. Some football/soccer teams are sponsored by big bookmakers.
I also heard a statistic about DraftKings last week. They had almost 6,000 commercials and paid about $20 million for those spots leading up to the first NFL weekend. They attracted about one million new players. No doubt those one million new players will on average spend more than $20, easily making up for their investment.
Not all of the winners may get cash. Instead they may get a prize. A friend of mine once participated in something like a daily fantasy league a few years ago. He finished in the top 2% of the league, but got a $5 t-shirt that was valued at $40.
Sadly, the stats mentioned for Cobb County are not accurate. Here is a link from the US Census Bureau: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/13/13067.html
That’s the link I used, John.
Shaun: I was drawing from deMause with my comments, but your stats cite only the city of Smyrna whereas the relevant electorate and governing body is the whole county. I don’t think anyone can prove or disprove a racist motivation here; I’d characterize it more as a bad look, not to mention terrible environmental policy.
Keith, I was commenting to Shaun, who cited stats in the comments. Sorry for the confusion.
Those are the stats that I looked to as well. I added Latino, AA, and Asian. I am not sure why there are two white only columns but the white only non-Hispanic column matches the numbers I calculated.
Agreed on environment. Not to mention the traffic headaches it will create.
That daily fantasy article was interesting. I’ve considered doing it, knowing my odds were like the lottery…..but I have stopped myself so far. Not sure it changed my mind at all, but it is exactly what I expected was true. All the money is in the pros’ hands.