I discovered that my upcoming book has an amazon page for pre-orders! The tentative title is Smart Baseball (not #smrtbaseball, although we’re playing off that) and the tentative release date is April 27th. I suppose I need to finish writing it soon.
My main Insider piece this week covered the Reign of Error in Arizona under Tony La Russa and Dave Stewart, both of whom should be replaced now that their contracts are expiring. I held a Klawchat here on Thursday afternoon and discussed that piece a little more.
I was the guest host on the BBTN podcast this week, on Tuesday with Jayson Stark and WATERS singer Van Pierszalowski (a big Dodgers fan), Wednesday with Eric Karabell and Tim Kurkjian, and Thursday with Jerry Crasnick and Nick Piecoro.
I’ll be reviewing a boardgame a week for Paste through the end of the year, and the latest review is on Costa Rica, a light family game from the designer of Relic Runners and Elysium. It’s fun for the kids but I think too unbalanced for adults to play on their own.
And now, the links…
- Juanita Broaddrick was the most credible of all of the women – and there were a lot – to accuse Bill Clinton of sexual improprieties; her accusation that the then-Governor of Arkansas raped her stood up to what scrutiny was possible twenty years after the incident. Buzzfeed talks to Broaddrick about her opposition to Hillary’s candidacy and asks why her case hasn’t gotten the attention today it deserves. (Hint: it might be because pretty much all non-right-wing media want Trump to lose.)
- Florida’s Duval County prosecutor Angela Corey tried to charge a 12-year-old kid with second-degree murder while appearing to conspire with his public defender to coerce the kid into accepting it – then charging the same kid with molesting his 5-year-old brother after he rejected it. Corey and Jacksonville’s elected public defender, the delightfully-named Matt Shirk, appear to be crossing numerous ethical lines, including frequently charging minors as adults in felony cases. Corey is up for re-election this fall and if you live in Duval County you should examine her record.
- Forget Zika or Ebola; yellow fever could be the next pandemic, and we are totally unprepared for it.
- If you have young kids, when they turn 11 get them vaccinated against HPV. Just fucking do it.
- A year ago it appeared that vaccination efforts had eradicated polio in Nigeria and thus in Africa as a whole, but it’s back thanks to Boko Haram. So vaccine deniers and murderous Islamists have something in common!
- Why did NASA, an agency of the U.S. government, issue a $1 million grant to study theology? And why is it now refusing to reveal details of the grant?
- You could see this coming a mile away: The Austin American-Statesman has run a redemption story for Paul Qui, the former Top Chef winner who was arrested for a domestic violence incident in March.
- The Atlantic looks at the imminent climate change-induced demise of Kiribati after one of its weightlifters does a dance following a lift.
- A new study published in Nature Communications found more evidence that neonic pesticides are harming bee populations. Neonics probably aren’t safe, and we should curtail their use until manufacturers can prove they are.
- Gay BYU students who are victims of assault are disciplined for being gay when they try to report the crimes.
- The 2016 Olympics haven’t had a major disaster, but the Guardian‘s Marina Hyde notes that they’re a disaster for the host country anyway. Her best point: arguing that the IOC itself should build a permanent home for the Games.
- Arranged marriages are still common in many poorer parts of the world; NPR ran a fascinating story on one father’s campaign to free his daughter from a marriage he helped arrange.
- Popular Mechanics explains that chemtrails aren’t real no matter what you read on tinfoilhat dot com.
- “I’m 36 and not on Facebook. You probably shouldn’t be either.” doesn’t quite make the case the headline promises, and I don’t agree with the conclusion, but I think it’s a point worth considering especially as social media, especially Facebook, change the nature of friendships in my generation and those that follow.
- WIRED endorsed Hillary Clinton for President, the first official endorsement of a Presidential candidate in the publication’s history.
- Those of you aged 35 and up might remember the Gopher internet protocol, which eventually lost out to the world wide web despite some early promise as the first user-friendly way to access information on the Internet.
- British physicist and professor Brian Cox took on a climate change denier politican from Australia on the ABC (Australia) TV show Q&A, where the politican came off pretty clearly as a conspiracy theorist loon.
- Physicists at UC-Irvine, building on research by another group working in Hungary, found evidence of a new subatomic particle that may carry an unknown force. The standard model of physics has long held that there are four fundamental forces; three of them, the weak, strong, and electromagnetic forces, appear to have all been unified at the moment right after the Big Bang, but a solution unifying gravity with the other three has proven elusive. This particle, thirty times heavier than an electron, might carry a fifth force previously unknown and unaccounted for in standard or modern models.
- The “proton radius puzzle,” where the measurements of that subatomic particle’s radius differ depending on what is orbiting the proton, was further confirmed in experiments using deuterium, a hydrogen isotope with an atomic weight of 2 due to the presence of a neutron in the atom’s nucleus.
- An experimental physicist in Haifa, Israel, created an artificial black hole to test one of Stephen Hawking’s predictions, namely that black holes will emit a type of feeble radiation (now known as “Hawking radiation”) that, over time, will lead to the black holes shrinking and vanishing entirely – taking all information lost in those black holes over their existence with them. These are early results and incomplete ones at that, but the linked piece gets into Hawking’s predictions and the information paradox.
- The Romanian soccer team recently donned uniforms with math equations instead of numbers to encourage kids learning math, with kids also getting soccer-themed math questions to work on.
What a bummer of a week. I cannot agree more about having a permanent home for both Olympics, along with other events such as the next couple of World Cups (or at least the one in Qatar) that burden the fuck out of the local populations (or in the case of Qatar, the guestworkers/close-to-slaves that they bring in from Asia and Africa).
That Paul Qui piece is infuriating.
No, folks, Paul Qui really IS the victim here! Can’t you see? He’s a famous guy and he’s suffering for his art!
Would the greatest April Fool’s Day prank ever be if the CDC announced that they have a vaccine for chemtrail exposure? I really wish The Onion would do this, just to see the tinfoilhat group go after each each other as which is the greater threat.
If the Olympics were always held in one city, how is the IOC going to fly around the world first class while accepting bribes? Other than that obvious joke, what city would want the games? I would imagine that most city’s citizens would get awfully tired of having to vacate their city for 2-3 weeks every four years so a few tourists and athletes can come in. In addition, most of the venues are going to lie vacant in between games. Maybe the best idea is do what soccer is doing for the 2020 European Championships. Here, 13 different cities are hosting matches in 13 different federations/countries. Cities from Baku to Dublin are hosting them, so it isn’t just in a small section of Europe close to each other. So the Olympics could choose a group of cities in different countries to co-host the games.
The venues lying vacant between the games would be the IOC’s problem, rather than the host city’s or country’s. Maintaining facilities is an ongoing expense, one the IOC should pay. But of course it doesn’t work that way…
The article about Gopher was interesting–the comments were really fascinating. I remember trying to use Gopher, Archie, Veronica, but none were intuitive.
As gross as the Broaddrick story is, isn’t the reason it isn’t getting traction the simple fact that Bill isn’t up for election? Blaming Hillary for her husband being an ass (especially when the only viable alternative has had multiple credible sexual assault accusations against him directly) seems somewhat problematic.
Broaddrick also claims Hillary tried to silence her, and of course it’s one particular case where Hillary doesn’t believe the accuser (HRC has been very outspoken for rape victims’ rights). I’m voting for her and I don’t think this is a compelling reason not to vote for her, but I’m a little surprised the story hasn’t gained more traction. Then again, it didn’t go anywhere when Broaddrick accused a sitting President of raping her so perhaps that’s a sign that the public doesn’t care.
As I’ve understood them, the portion of the story related to Hillary is significantly less convincing than that related to Bill. While there’s clearly no way to know without having been there, the most obvious interpretation to me was Hillary thanking ppl at the event genetically, without knowing about Bills actions rather than doing so knowingly (http://www.vox.com/2016/1/6/10722580/bill-clinton-juanita-broaddrick). Perhaps I’m wrong. In which case the actions are clearly abhorrent, and a terrible black mark against her character.
Isn’t a presidential candidate letting a rapist campaign for him/her a big deal? To me it has nothing to do with Hilary having to answer for her husband as a politician. Take Trump out of it (because he’s a cartoon), if an actual candidate from the other side of your aisle’s most prominent campaigner was a rapist you would be incensed.
I’m not sure why the NASA grant is a problem. Theology is a real field of study, and is not necessarily about promoting a particular faith. Public universities teach religion and support research in the field. $1 million is a tiny amount for NASA, and building bridges to religious thinkers is probably a smart move for an agency that relies on funding from a religious public.
I’m an atheist.
Thanks for sharing the BYU story. I was born and raised in the Mormon church but left it shortly after I became an adult – in part because the Mormon church (and by extension – it’s university) allows this type of discrimination to continue.