For Insiders this week, I wrote about the Giants signing Johnny Cueto and the Todd Frazier three-team trade. I also held my usual weekly Klawchat.
Here on the dish, I compiled lists of my top 100 songs of 2015 and my top 15 albums of 2015.
Folks have been asking about my year-end gift guides, so here they are, once more:
• Top 80 boardgames of all time
• My 2015 gift guide for cooks
• My updated cookbook recommendations
• My all-time top 100 novels (from February 2013)
And now, the links…
- That $10 Mast Brothers chocolate bar you bought along with your single-origin pour-over coffee at Blue Bottle? Well, it’s bad chocolate and might not even be what they claim it is.
- Restaurant chain Fig & Olive, which had a salmonella outbreak in the fall, was caught using previously frozen food prepared at a central “commissary” and shipped to their individual locations.
- What kind of person calls a mass shooting a hoax? Fortunately, Florida Atlantic has moved to terminate that nutjob professor, who has to be suffering from some kind of mental illness to so thoroughly believe these delusions he preaches.
- Ah, the National Review‘s climate change graph was a big joke, and the Washington Post gives a concise explanation of why. I reviewed a book called Proofiness in June that talks about how organizations like NRO distort and manipulate stats to mislead the public.
- Meanwhile, the New Yorker talks about how not to talk about nuclear power and climate change. Nuclear power can be a big part of the solution to both climate change and ocean acidification, but it’s already under a renewed attack from people who should probably know better.
- Hate crimes against Muslims are surging over the past few weeks. It would be nice if we didn’t have an entire traveling circus competing to demonize this entire demographic group.
- This Times review of the new book Lactivism by Courtney Jung details how unscientific and aggressive the anti-formula movement has become. There are even “ban the bag” movements to try to force hospitals to stop supplying bottles and other free equipment to new mothers – even though there’s little to no evidence to say breast-feeding is better for the baby.
- A wonderful piece from the Times on the founder of the company behind the Hinge dating app going after the one who got away before it’s too late. (I’m also fairly sure I went to college with the author’s sisters.)
- CTE isn’t just a problem affecting NFL players – Vice has the story of a D2 college player who died of it at age 26. This is the crux of my argument over Brandon McIlwain’s decision to enroll early at South Carolina: Not only did he pass up a guaranteed payday in June – actually, he passed up the mere chance to have someone offer it to him – but he’s entering an extremely dangerous profession for which he will not be paid for the next three years of his labor.
- This isn’t new, but I just came across it this week: McSweeney’s imagined letter from Comic Sans.
- My former residence of Arizona may be shifting from red to blue, thanks to the Latino vote – although I imagine the influx of engineers to work at Intel will contribute as well.
Probably more than CTE, my biggest fear for a player who played both baseball and football in college would be a serious injury in football. Serious injuries could also happen in baseball, but they aren’t nearly as prevalent. He could get an injury that ends his career in both sports, with no compensation. If he choose minor league baseball, he could still try football later if it didn’t work out. Russell Wilson, Josh Booty, Chris Weinke, Brandon Weeden are all examples of this. The rules were different years ago, but John Elway and Danny Ainge both tried professional baseball and played in college (and the NCAA should allow this again).
Somewhere buried in the recesses of a closet lies my Danny Ainge Toronto Blue Jays baseball card.
There are more false flaggers out there than deniers. It’s a little unsettling to me because they blend in easier. They use some of the same tactics as deniers. I’m not just talking about 9/11 was an inside job people. I swear they’ve expanded in scope and in numbers. I’ve had a person try to convince me that the Holocaust happened for different reasons and was more merciful than history will tell you to the “fact” that Egypt took down that Russian jetliner on U.S. orders this year alone. These are educated people too.
It’s weird to me and I wonder if we should expect more of this stuff moving forward.
Just to follow up on the these false-flag/hoax clowns…
Behold! The single greatest concentration of derp on the internet.
https://www.facebook.com/HoaxAtSandyHook/?fref=nf
The worst people on earth – and it becomes their own echo chamber, where they find other delusionists.
I forgot about the Boston Bombing false flag attempts. I haven’t heard that one recently, but I remember people telling me to watch the surveillance video for the g-men in backpacks who were the real bombers.
That Sandy Hook Facebook page is hella creepy.
Keith, I normally agree with you on scientific stuff, and certainly Courtney Jung is less ignorant and anti-science than most, but it’s still science denial. Just go to the CDC website, there are several studies demonstrating well-documented and convincing evidence that breast feeding is extremely beneficial for the baby. My wife is an OB/GYN and she literally keeps a pile of peer-reviewed studies in her office to show people who question the benefits.
There are woman who are unable to breastfeed, for a variety of reasons, and I agree with Ms. Jung that the demonization and criticism of those women needs to stop. However, the science is settled.
All that said, I do really enjoy the Stick to Baseball posts, and I think this is the first time I’ve read something you wrote that I decisively disagreed with. Keep up the good work!
Keith, as an analyst whose common response to questions of baseball performance is “irrelevant due to small sample size”, I’d think you’d know that the problem with the NRO graph isn’t the scale of the y-axis but the scale of the x-axis. 135 years of temperature variation can’t possibly be anything but SSS on a planet that’s 4 billion years old.
Also, the WaPo writer’s comparison to national debt or DJIA is ridiculous; the national debt went from 0.3 trillion to 18 trillion on its graph, and the DJIA went from 50 to 17000 on its graph. Temperature going from ~57 to 58.5°F, (or 516.7 to 518.2 Rankine on an absolute scale), has nothing to do with a 340x or a 60x multiplier.
Jeff might be correct – if mankind had never existed and the industrial revolution had never happened – but let’s not let that get in the way of a good fairytale.
What is my fairytale – age of the earth? Scale of the graph? To prove that something remarkable has happened since 1880 you would need complete data over the earth’s entire history showing that the earth has never had avg temp over 58.5 and has never previously increased by 1.5 deg / 135 yrs. Otherwise, data from 1880-2015 only is small sample size. I’m not making any conclusions one way or the other.
To answer your original post, the graph has problems with both axes, but the Y-axis trick is a bit more insidious and was itself worth pointing out to educate folks who haven’t seen that scam before.