Stick to baseball, 3/19/16.

I had a big scouting blog post from Arizona for Insiders this week, leading with Dodgers outfielder Yusniel Diaz, plus a draft blog post on UVA’s Connor Jones and Matt Thaiss, including thoughts on why the Cavaliers have never churned out a big league starter. My weekly Klawchat transcript is up as well.

I reviewed the simple abstract strategy game Circular Reasoning for Paste.

And now, the links…

• Jessica Jensen put together a series of tweets recommending female voices on baseball to follow if you’re looking for some diversity in your Twitter feed. Baseball Twitter is indeed very white male dominated (says the white male).
• Why big-name chefs are getting into the coffee game. It’s not a huge profit center, but I do think it’s a way for chefs who are passionate about coffee to share that with their clientele.
• The biggest junk science stories of 2015 includes more shots at the so-called FoodBabe, whose ignorance and fraud reached bigger levels than I’d realized.
• No, vaccines do not lead to more food allergies, no matter what the Internet tells you.
• Stella Parks, aka bravetart on Twitter and Instagram, shows you how to make real Irish soda bread, which is nothing like the crap usually labelled with that name.
• I keep linking to School of Seven Bells stories because Alejandra Deheza is such a good interview; here’s one from WNYC on her work to finish the album after her partner died.
• Andrew Wiles just won the Abel Prize for his mid-1990s solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem, a story that has always fascinated me because it seems impossible that Fermat himself had the solution he claimed to have. I recommend Amir Aczel’s slim book on the topic, Fermat’s Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem.
• The Zika virus preferentially kills developing brain cells in utero. Lovely.
• A Rockland County, New York, high school censored the swastikas for a school production of The Producers, although the school’s superintendent says the school’s actions were mischaracterized.
• The chief U.S. district judge for Washington D.C. faces an allegation that he raped a 16-year-old woman in 1981. It’s not statutory rape, because the age of consent in Utah at the time was 16 (good job, Utah!). The judge submitted his letter of resignation after the news of the victim’s lawsuit emerged.
• I don’t agree with the melodramatic conclusions here, but it certainly presents food for thought: how “deep learning” may put more and more people out of work. It’s certainly true that many jobs long reserved for people will be better done by computers, and preparing for that shift should be a priority for our education systems, public and private, over the next twenty years. I don’t think that a computer learning to play Go, which, despite incredible complexity is still a game with specific rules and thus predictable outcomes, means that three quarters of our workforce is about to become obsolete.
• A Chinese fraudster uses a puppet “news” site to defame his critics, including Bloomberg journalist Dune Lawrence, then tries to hide behind the First Amendment. He’s facing criminal charges related to securities infractions, but his manipulation of Twitter and Google as well as his 1A defenses should be worrisome to anyone whose career takes him/her online.