The index to all 30 MLB farm reports and top tens is now up; all reports are Insider except for Baltimore’s, which is free for all readers. Insiders can also read my top 100 prospects ranking and my my ranking of all 30 farm systems.
And now, the links…
- The University of Tennessee has a lot of explaining to do about the rape culture on campus.
- More SVIIB content, now just six days from the release of their final album. The questions in this interview are generic, but Alehandra Deheza’s answers are always enlightening. She also spoke to DIY about the process of finishing the record, with the tantalizing suggestion that she’ll be embarking on some sort of tour.
- The Huffington Post has some actual journalism for a change, with this piece on the horrifying scope of domestic violence in the United States.
- Here’s yet another good reason to avoid buying grated cheese: You may be buying fake cheese, or cheese doctored with cellulose. Buy hard cheeses whole and they’ll last for months. I’ve recommended the grana padano, which is virtually identical to Parmiggiano-Reggiano but is produced in a neighboring region of Italy, sold at Trader Joes; it’s 40-50% less than buying whole P-R at Whole Foods but in most applications you’d never notice the difference.
- I stand with Apple.
- Everybody seems to want their eggs to be “cage-free,” but getting to that point is complicated and expensive. One fundamental problem with our food supply, especially that of products from animals, is that we’ve lost any sense of what eggs or milk or meat really should cost. Factory-farming techniques that weren’t good for the animals drove prices down for consumers, but that model is not sustainable and consumers are increasingly demanding better treatment of the animals as well.
- One of my alma maters just reached a $750 million settlement in a longstanding patent lawsuit against Marvell Technology, after two judgments against the company that including a ruling that said infringement was wilful. The best part? The school’s President has said that CMU should “dedicate a substantial majority of this resource to helping qualified students afford a Carnegie Mellon education.”
- Meanwhile, another win for the collegiate athletics cartel, as former athletes at Penn lost their case arguing they were analogous to work-study employees and thus should be paid minimum wage for their time. The quote from the NCAA’s lawyer is stunning in its intellectual dishonesty.
- Vox interviews the woman who took 47 million academic papers and made them available, free, online. Yes, it’s copyright infringement, but I still see value in what she has to say, even if I can’t approve of what she did. The copyright owners in these cases are not content creators in the sense intended by U.S. copyright laws.
- I’ve seen this pitched as a “debunking of seasonal affective disorder,” but if I’m reading the underlying research correctly, it’s really a debunking of the idea that we’re all a bit down in winter. I’d welcome feedback from the more science-literate out there.