My third mock draft went up Friday morning, without a ton of big changes from the last one. Feedback from club sources so far is that it’s reasonable other than the fact that I don’t have Mickey Moniak going in the top ten; I agree with them, and was very uncomfortable with where I had him, but as I said in yesterday’s Klawchat I didn’t have a clear indication of any teams on him other than Philly and Colorado. I can add a bonus tidbit here: Boston, at 12, is on Virginia catcher Matt Thaiss as well as the other names I’ve mentioned.
I also tweaked my my rankings of the top 100 prospects for the draft, again with the help of Eric Longenhagen.
My latest monthly new music playlist went up Thursday morning.
Thanks to all of you who’ve signed up for my newsletter – I’m well over a thousand subscribers already.
And now, the links:
- I tweeted this link, but here it is again: The founder of the Take Back the Night charity relives how she used her own assault to tell the world about date rape. How she was treated may appall you, or you may think “rape culture” is just some bullshit that SJWs made up on social media. Also, I’m not going to lie – I skimmed through the details of the rape, for the same reason I fast-forwarded through that scene in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I just can’t.
- Brock Allen Turner, a former Stanford student who sexually assaulted an unconscious woman, received just six months in prison for raping an unconscious woman because the judge feared a longer sentence would have a “severe impact” on him. His victim read this statement about the “severe impact” his assault had on her at the sentencing hearing. I’m not sure what the terms are for recalling a judge in California, but this would seem to be a good reason for doing so.
- The Ringer has already featured some great stuff, none better so far than Keith Olbermann’s tribute to Muhammad Ali.
- There’s a deluge of great content today on the life of Ali, and I’ve only read a sliver of it, but I’ll also recommend David Remnick’s remembrance in the New Yorker.
- The NY Times details the appearance of two indie coffee shops in the South Bronx. There’s a real question underneath here: what kinds of small businesses (or large ones, I guess) encourage urban renewal? Do we want a Starbucks or a Whole Foods in a blighted area to help drive economic growth, even if a side effect is some gentrification? I’d certainly vote yes.
- The Big 12 conference won’t even let walk-ons transfer without sitting out a year. I mean, really, the NCAA should be broken up by the feds for all of these restrictions on athletes. It’s a cartel.
- Alan Sepinwall looks back at twenty years of writing about watching television and how the medium – both media, really – have changed in that period.
- Buzzfeed covers the bizarre story of how two bands toured as the Zombies in the 1960s even though neither was the real band.
- Could psilocybin, the psychoactive chemical found in ‘magic mushrooms,’ help treat depression and/or anxiety? A pair of studies show some promise, although the mechanism is not yet understood.
- The Nation offered an op ed slamming the Washington Post‘s poll on their NFL team’s nickname. I have some problems with that poll, especially the identification of respondents, but I think this focuses too much on the potential harm of the name and not enough on questioning the science behind the poll (if needed).
- A chemist and a synthetic biologist (I didn’t know this was a thing) at Harvard have developed a “bionic leaf” that creates alcohol fuels from sun, water, and CO2. It’s still very early in the development process, but the possibilities – creating renewable fuels and plastics while reducing CO2 in the atmosphere – are huge.
- This article on what questions quantum computers might best be able to solve reminded me of Lance Fortnow’s book on the P vs NP problem, The Golden Ticket. So-called “NP-hard” problems represent the most complex problems in computational theory, and quantum computers right now appear to offer the only possible way to solve them.
- A deranged pediatrician in Nashville has stopped offering vaccinations, claiming they cause autism. Needless to say, if you live around there, don’t give him your business.