boardgames — Page 17

→ July 21, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/21/21.

For Insiders this week, I updated my ranking of the top 50 prospects in the minors and posted analyses of the Manny Machado trade and the Brad Hand/Francisco Mejia trade. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My next game review for Paste will go up next week; this week I reviewed the app version of Istanbul, a great strategic game of pathfinding and set collection, here on the dish.

I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, Massachusetts, on July 28th at 1 pm to talk Smart Baseball and sign copies.

And now, the links…

Before I hit the longreads, I want to highlight this editorial from The Daily Barometer, a student-run newspaper at Oregon State, which states what probably should have been obvious all along: “OSU supporters who cheered Luke Heimlich have embarrassed the entire community.” It placed winning baseball games over believing the words of a sexual assault victim and over the impact of the trauma that Heimlich caused. I wish this had run a few months ago, but I am proud to see OSU students put this message out there themselves, knowing the backlash they’ll likely receive for doing so.
OK, longreads: Popula’s Maria Bustillos has the last great interview with Anthony Bourdain, a wide-ranging piece that runs over 10,000 words. Their argument over Obama’s tenure and legacy is outstanding. There are so many wonderful quotes in here, but I’ll pick just one: “We live in a world where we cannot, if you’re running for political office, you cannot admit to speaking a second language, extensive travel, or a familiarity with arugula.” Maybe that’s why our dear leader nicknamed the North Korean dictator “Rocket Man?”
There will be no Nobel Prize in Literature this year in the wake of a scandal involving a serial sexual abuser married to an Academy member, where the two of them also misused Academy funds. Eighteen women spoke about against him, two accusing him of rape. Resignations of other members in protest left the Academy without a quorum for its vote on the candidates for this year’s honor. The story is one of men protecting men, but also symptomatic of the rot of small institutions that operate without oversight.
You’ve probably seen this already, but just in case: Mina Kimes spoke at length to Aly Raisman about the gymnast’s vault to prominence as a forceful advocate for sexual assault victims and for change in the corrupt hierarchy of U.S.A. gymnastics.
Anti-wolf activists ruined the career of a tenured professor who researched the canines’ habits and pushed for conservation efforts, including extorting his employer, Washington State, by threatening to withhold state funding for a new medical school on campus.
George Will’s op ed’s title sums up its message: “This sad, embarrassing wreck of a man” who is now our President.
The Guardian also ran an excerpt from Michiko Kakutani’s forthcoming book The Death of Truth, in which she argues that ‘truth decay’ and alternative facts gave us Trump and are eroding our democracy.
I enjoyed the Atlantic‘s piece calling this the “moment of truth” for Republicans as if there was a damned chance in hell of any of them stepping out of line to criticize their dear leader.
And why would they, when the Supreme Court nominee they’re about to confirm promises to roll back voting rights sixty years.
Actually, one Republican found a backbone here: Will Hurd, a Republican House member from Texas, wrote a searing op ed for the New York Times that Russia is manipulating the President, calling for Congress to act to protect our interests.
Another Republican Congressman broke with Administration on the issue of net neutrality, as Colorado’s Mike Coffman signed a petition to force a vote on legislation to reverse the FCC’s giant gift to the telecom industry.
Meanwhile, current Minnesota Congressman Jason Lewis said African-Americans have a “cultural” problem and an “entitlement mentality” on a previous radio show where he pushed the idea of a race war.
The Treasury will no longer collect information on large donations to 501(c) nonprofits, meaning ‘dark’ money can flow unimpeded to political groups. “The news was well-received among conservative groups and congressional Republicans,” whom I’m sure have nothing at all they’d like to hide now that they can do so without fear of disclosure.
There’s scant good news on the rationalist front, but some scientists running for office have fared well in elections this year. Hiral Tipirneni nearly won a special election in a crimson-red district in Arizona this spring, and she is running for the same seat again in November.
A new investigative paper published in JAMA found that the poor quality of sleep received by hospital patients slows their healing, so stop waking them up for routine tests that might not be necessary for all patients.
Should lab-grown meat be labelled as meat? It’s biochemically identical to meat that came from an animal’s carcass, but is cultured and grown in a lab, obviating some ethical and environmental concerns. Of course, the meat manufacturing and processing industries are trying an end run around the technology, hoping to ban those products from calling themselves ‘meat,’ rather than, you know, telling consumers what the product is and letting the market decide.
Wild optimism over CRISPR-based therapy has been slapped with several large charges on its latest reality bill, including potential long-term DNA damage to patients, some of which could lead to cancer.
CNN got played by a pseudoscience-pushing conspiracy theorist who claimed on air that cell phones cause cancer – but didn’t disclose his conflict of interest, working for a company that sells equipment to “protect” people from such radiation.
An arcane type of numbers called octonions (beyond real and complex numbers) may provide the unifying math behind the Standard Model of Physics.
No one can quite explain those $2000-plus used book prices on amazon, charged by third-party sellers with murky identities.
Eritrea and Ethiopia have signed a peace deal promising to end their pointless, twenty-year border war, giving hope that democracy may finally come to Eritrea, Africa’s last true one-party state.
Every time I bring up offensive team nicknames like those of the baseball teams in Cleveland or Atlanta or the football team in Washington, some chud shows up with a “What about Notre Dame?” Here’s a well-written editorial from Irish news site The Journal that explains why the analogy isn’t just wrong, but ignorant of history.
r/Dodgers has solved the mystery of Kiké Hernandez’s (tight) pants.
Alan Sepinwall reviewed Sacha Baron Cohen’s new show and says it’s about 15 years out of date with its conceit of trying to shock the audience by what victims of his pranks will say or do.
Your brain is always looking for problems to solve, so when problems become a bit scarce, it can try to find problems where there are none.
Eagle-Gryphon published a Kickstarter for Escape Plan, a new game from Vital Lacerda, known for overlong, complex games like Lisboa.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, links, math, metoo, nobel prize, racism, science, stick to baseball

→ July 19, 2018
→ By keith

Istanbul won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2014 and was one of my favorite new games of that year, ranking only behind Splendor on my personal list. Although the basic mechanics of individual turns revolve mostly around set collection, gathering items you can trade for rubies (required to win the game) or for money you can use to buy rubies, the real heart of Istanbul strategy is critical path modeling: figuring out the best way to move around the variable board to ensure you’re being as efficient as possible with your turns. Because the board itself is built each game, with a basic ‘short paths’ setup but millions of potential arrangements of the 16 tiles, you can master the concept but can’t go into a game with a set plan.

Acram Digital has now introduced a port of Istanbul for iOS and Android, and it’s excellent right out of the chute, with just minor flaws even at its first release. The app particularly helps the novice player by making it hard to forget options you might have to enhance your turns; if you have earned a special ability or have the right to play a card that might help, the app reminds you of this, sometimes with a dialog asking if you’re sure you don’t want to use that ability, sometimes just with an icon right on the screen that puts the option in front of you. That makes game play much easier against the AI and more fair if you’re playing online against more advanced players.

In Istanbul, each player is trying to be the first to collect five rubies, anywhere on the board. You can buy them with combinations of goods, with gold coins, by upgrading your ‘wheelbarrow’ three times (a total cost of 21 coins), or by buying both upgrades at the small mosque or the great mosque. The catch with all of those tiles, other than the wheelbarrow upgrade, is that the cost increases each time someone uses the tile, so getting there early can be beneficial … but it costs you the change to acquire upgrades that might make it easier to collect rubies later in the game. You move around the 4×4 board of tiles with your merchant and a stack of ‘assistant’ tokens; when you land on a tile and want to use it, you must leave one assistant there, or, if you’ve been there before and left an assistant already, pick that one back up. Once your stack is out of assistants, you can move but can’t take an action unless you pick an assistant back up or return to the Fountain tile and bring ’em all home. I reviewed the game in full for Paste back in 2015.

The app is pretty much spot on; I had just one little glitch, found some spelling errors in the tutorial, and would like harder AI opponents, but that’s a modest list of criticisms for a brand new release – and it has yet to crash on me through dozens of plays. The app offers four board setups, including the semi-random setup described in the physical game’s rulebook, and lets you play one to four human or AI opponents, with three difficulty settings for the latter. The game’s icons are simple, but sometimes the function of a card or a mosque upgrade isn’t immediately clear; you can click on any of those and hit the (i) in the upper left corner to get a full description of what it does. There’s a tiny lag sometimes when you complete an action before the app gives you the icons to move to the next screen, not a serious problem but something that threw me off the first few times I played.

The app also includes the ‘neutral assistants’ variant, where each player starts the game with one assistant in his/her stack that doesn’t belong to any single player, so if you go to a tile with a neutral assistant on it, you can pick it up and take the action even if you didn’t leave the token there in the first place. It’s definitely worth the $7 as is, although again, I think the hard AI players need to be stronger; I’m no expert at the game but can beat them more than half the time even on the harder boards.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: apps, boardgames

→ June 13, 2018
→ By keith

Compounded.

The board game Compounded takes its theme from the world of chemistry, asking players to gather five elements to assemble any of the sixteen compounds available at any given time on the table, while boosting players’ abilities to form and fill compounds as the game progresses. The core game play is pretty simple, although the rules are more detailed than they probably need to be, and there’s one rule I could probably have done completely without.

The elements that players will use to form their compounds are drawn at random from a bag, and no two elements appear with the same frequency – hydrogen is the most common, sulfur is the rarest. Compounds can be as simple as three elements, and can require up to eight. You can ‘claim’ one compound at a time, before you finish it, and can then place two elements anywhere on the tableau on a turn. Once you do finish a compound, you take the card, return the elements to the bag, earn three to seven points, and get to move up one of your four tracking tokens that affect how many elements you draw at the start of each turn (default is two), how many compounds you can claim at any given time, how many elements you can place on a turn, and how many elements you can store on your board (default is four). Some compounds also give you a bonus token or ongoing ability; for example, if you have three elements of any color, you can return them to the bag to take one element of your choice, but with the Pipette that ratio becomes 2:1 instead.

The game progresses until one player has scored at least 50 points – the scoring track is a separate board showing the periodic table, so you have to at least get to tin – or one player has reached the top of three of his four tracks, or the deck of compounds is exhausted. That can take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half in our experience, playing with three to five players. (It plays two with some rules variations.)

The one rule that I would gladly ditch is the lab fire, which doesn’t do much but add some randomness and a little ability to screw your opponents to the game. Some compounds have one or two tiny fire icons at the bottom of their cards, indicating that the compounds are flammable. The deck of compound cards has five Lab Fire cards in it, and when one appears, players must add one very tiny fire token to every compound on the table that has the icon on it. Once all flame icons on a compound have been filled, the compound explodes and is removed from the board, and all elements on it are scattered to adjacent compounds (at the discretion of the player who had claimed but not finished it). There are also a few volatile compounds in the deck that explode when they’re completed and have a similar effect on the tableau. Players can complete their fire extinguishers – two oxygen, one carbon and use them to remove one flame token from any compound, although I think it’s better to save it until the end of the game for 4 extra points. And you may earn a one-time use Bunsen burner token that you can use to light someone else’s compound on fire, which is just mean.

There’s more strategy required in Compounded that just figuring out which compounds you can easily finish; gaining the abilities to draw or place more elements each round is huge, and whichever player moves up the fastest on those tracks is going to have an advantage that will be hard for other players to catch. Getting those abilities does require some luck, however, as you have to draw the right elements to be able to complete the right compounds; we had one five-player game where one player never managed to finish a compound that would have allowed her to draw more than two elements at a time. There is a slight workaround – if you finish a compound with a graduated cylinder on it, you can then bump one track down a peg and another track up a peg, once per turn for the rest of the game – but it can lead to a serious imbalance if one player just gets the wrong draws from the bag.

I’m all for more science-themed games, and chemistry games seem to be especially scarce, so Compounded is a welcome entry to the field. I did find some of the rules a little fiddly, and the Lab Fire mechanic didn’t really work for me other than to add more maintenance and move through the compound deck a little faster. The core game play itself, trying to figure out how best to deploy the elements you’ve drawn, is the best part of Compounded, and you can certainly tweak the other rules to work with just that basic mechanic for a cleaner experience.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, chemistry

→ June 9, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/9/18.

The 2018 MLB Rule 4 draft has come and gone and I have recaps up for all National League teams and all American League teams. I also wrote my reactions to day one on Monday night, and held a Klawchat on Tuesday after the fourth round, while teams continued drafting.

You can find more details on my top 100 prospects for the draft on my Big Board, and can see my final first-round mock from Monday afternoon, which had 9 picks on the dot and flipped Arizona’s first two picks.

Over at Paste, I recapped what I saw at Paradox Interactive’s PDXCON in Stockholm last month, where they announced tabletop versions of four of their popular video game titles: Crusader Kings, Cities Skylines, Europa Universalis, and Hearts of Iron.

My free email newsletter is back and I hope it’ll be more or less weekly again now that the draft is over; I’m planning to send the next issue this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I will be at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, on July 14th, joined by my friend Jay Jaffe (The Cooperstown Casebook), and hope to announce a signing in the Boston area for the weekend of July 28th shortly.

And now, the links…

Kat Kinsman had the best piece I read on his suicide & what it means for the industry and society overall. (I’m sure there were many great pieces I didn’t read, too.)
Bourdain’s 1999 piece for the New Yorker on the dirty secrets of restaurant kitchens is what launched his career as a writer and eventually a celebrity (ex-)chef.
WIRED gives us a hybrid profile/book review around former DNI James Clapper, who just wrote a memoir that is highly critical of the current Administration and the societal trends that enabled it.
As a lifelong fan of the Muppets, I greatly enjoyed Slate’s group interview with several Muppeteers and execs as well as a TV critic and even a therapist who offers insights on the Kermit/Miss Piggy relationship.
The California judge who sentenced Stanford rapist Brock Turner to just six months in jail – reduced to three months for good behavior – has been recalled by voters, the first judge to be recalled in that state in 86 years. Julia Ioffe wrote a long piece for the Huffington Post on how Stanford law professor Michelle Dauber led the recall effort, citing the judge’s history of considering the needs of the rapists and abusers in his court over the impact of their crimes. Dauber also identifies Stanford as “one of the most unfriendly, if not the most unfriendly school to victims of sexual assault.”
Alia Shawkat (Maeby on Arrested Development) spoke to Vanity Fair about her disappointment in her co-stars’ comments in a recent New York Times interview that broached Jeffrey Tambor’s inappropriate behavior on set.
South Dakota Rep. Michael Clark said businesses should be able to turn away customers of color if they want. He later apologized and admitted the comment was racist, although Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. compared the moment to a hood being removed.”
Florida gubernatorial candidate Adam Putnam likes to brag about being an “NRA Sellout.” While he was Commissioner of the state’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, his office stopped running background checks for concealed carry permits for nearly a year … because an employee couldn’t log on to the national database to run the checks. Thirty-odd other states, including Delaware, honor these permits under reciprocal agreements.
Florida is also one of the states that denies voting rights to convicted felons, and Governor Rick Scott, also a Republican, has made it even harder than ever for those citizens to regain that Constitutional right, often dismissing petitioners’ applications in mere minutes.
Thousands of Poles demonstrated against mandatory vaccination laws. A measles outbreak in Romania has already killed dozens of children, with 200 new cases a week. Some cretin named Kat Von D announced to the world she won’t vaccinate her as yet unborn child. We all deserve to die in a plague for creating this world.
Jess McHugh wrote about the societal expectation that women should smile, which is both very American and relatively new.
Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach rode in a local parade with a replica .50 caliber gun in the car alongside him. It didn’t go over well.
You’ve probably seen coverage of the increased numbers of scientists running for political office this year; the Washington Post documents a new wave of teachers doing the same, and they’re not all running as Democrats (as just about all scientists are).
The Guardian interviewed first-time author Elaine Castillo about her debut novel America is Not the Heart and issues of race and cultural appropriation.
The UN’s human rights investigator on extreme poverty has found that America’s poor are becoming even worse off under Trump. I’d like to see what portion of that underclass voted for Trump and/or other Republicans in 2016.
The Harvard Business Review offers some brief tips on how to be a more productive learner.
This NPR piece on raising better eaters by skipping the kids’ menu is generally good advice, even acknowledging that cost and time become factors in what we feed our kids. My daughter is an adventurous eater with a broad palate. When servers in restaurants compliment me on her taste, I tell them I can only take so much credit; I introduced her to lots of foods, but she was willing to try everything.
A rare bit of positive news in the fight against climate change: the cost of removing CO₂ from the atmosphere has plummeted. Now we just need to devote more public funds to the effort.
Doctor/scientist Edzard Ernst writes about realizing that homeopathy isn’t just useless, but actively harmful in the way it misleads patients and can steer them away from effective medical treatment. It’s not just that homeopathy has failed every test of whether it works, but it isn’t chemically possible for it to work.
Board game news: Game Salute’s new Kickstarter for A War of Whispers is nearing its $30,000 goal.
Asmodee Digital announced it’s going to bring some of its board game titles to Nintendo Switch.
Acram Digital released a new 30-second trailer for the Istanbul app, due by the end of the month for iOS and Android.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, climate change, florida, guns, kansas, links, mental health, muppets, south dakota, stick to baseball, suicide, vaccines

→ June 2, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/2/18.

My third first-round projection for Monday night’s MLB Draft went up on Thursday for Insiders; I’ll do one more on Monday morning. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday, and will do another on Monday afternoon. I wrote a piece earlier in the week for Insiders on why players withdrawing from the draft is a terrible idea for them, benefiting no one but the college coaches encouraging them to do so.

Longtime Marlins scout Orrin Freeman and his wife Penny are both facing awful health problems and mounting medical bills, so Penny’s daughter has set up a GoFundMe to help offset some of these costs. You can expect MLB to try to help one of its own as well. Of course, universal health care would make a difference in cases like this – and it could happen to any of us in time.

My book Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at Washington DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose on July 14th, along with fellow author Jay Jaffe, to talk baseball, sabermetrics, and whatever else you kind readers ask about. I should be able to announce another event in the Boston suburbs for July 28th very soon.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Huffington Post’s Luke O’Brien finds the woman behind one of Twitter’s most vile Islamophobic accounts. The biggest question I have is why Twitter hasn’t kicked her off the service. Meanwhile, she’s directing her followers to attack O’brien, and various alt-right trolls are claiming her First Amendment rights were violated.
The Guardian‘s longread of the week looks at how American freedom of speech is threatened by white supremacists whose hate speech challenges even those who’ve sworn to defend that 1A right, including the ACLU. It’s easy to say neo-Nazis preaching hate are in fact inciting violence against marginalized groups, and that they’re beyond the boundaries of the First Amendment (since some forms of speech, like death threats, have long been criminalized), but moving the boundaries always creates new and unexpected quandaries.
New York has the hard-to-believe story of a 25-year-old con woman who fooled New York elites largely through social engineering and strategic cash drops in front of the right people.
I assume most of you have seen the Ringer’s exposé on 76ers GM Bryan Colangelo’s many secret Twitter accounts.
The BBC tells the story of six young stowaways put overboard on the ice in eastern Canada in 1868 by a sadistic British captain and his first mate. Four survived to tell their story, which was largely lost until now.
Also from the BBC, Maddy Savage looks back at when Sweden shifted drivers to the right-hand side of the road, a change that was literally enacted overnight after months of planning and public education.
Evan Grant wrote a fantastic piece for the Dallas Morning News on recent tragedies and challenges for the Rangers scouting staff. One area scout died in early April of a stroke; another lost his wife to cancer in February, and a third has just returned to the job after missing two years to care for his wife, who also had a stroke.
Rachel Herron writes for Vox about the frequent, overly racist calls she’d get as a 911 dispatcher.
Major media outlets gave disproportionate coverage to the Roseanne Barr controversy relative to the release of one estimate (since disputed) that the twin hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands caused at least 4600 deaths in that one U.S. territory.
Eve Peyser writes for VICE that the ‘Twitter mob’ got it right on Roseanne, but that is an outlier on a site that is often “a toxic cesspool” and a “viral outrage” generator. She also points out, correctly, that, “as a journalist it’s a useful career tool.” I have my problems with the site too, including its apparent non-policing of harassment, hate, and fraud, but it’s also been a career boon, and I’ve made many new friends and professional contacts through the site as well.
Buried behind the Roseanne Barr and Puerto Rico stories this week: Newly released emails show EPA leaders worked with a climate change denial group to combat information on the reality of climate change and to “tout” Scott Pruitt’s leadership of the agency.
The Administration may try to order power grid operators to buy power from specific, failing coal and nuclear plants, including many operated by a major Trump donor. This sort of economic dirigisme is a hallmark of fascist economies, not the free market principles long espoused by the Republican Party.
As measles outbreaks spread throughout the country, including a recent one in Maryland and Virginia, New York is considering expanding the religious “exemption” from mandatory vaccination rules. Many of you live in New York state, so if you do, please call your state representatives Monday to oppose any such expansion. Multiple courts have ruled over the past 110 years that public health considerations override such so-called religious freedom concerns (which may not even be real, as with the Catholic mother quoted in the piece).
A Harvard Law School professor argues that the NFL’s ban on players taking a knee is ‘flatly illegal’ under U.S. labor law.
The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to Arkansas’s anti-abortion law, handing a victory to opponents of women’s rights. The case is expected to return to a lower court for a trial.
My friend Jeb Lund writes for NBC News that Trump should be afraid of the Mueller investigation because he’s an outsider whom the Republican Party has largely run out of uses.
I’ve included many links about the rising threat of antibiotic resistance, largely from overuse or rapid evolution in bacteria. But this Guardian story has a new twist – supply of the drugs is running low too.
The Gainesville Sun looks back at the 1923 Rosewood massacre, where a dubious rape accusation against a black man led a white mob to torch an entire black neighborhood, killing as many as 27. No one was ever even charged with a crime, even though at least one black man was tortured and lynched.
Astronomers have identified dunes of methane on the surface of Pluto.
The BBC has been working quietly to speak to North Korean citizens about their government and Dear Leader, with two commenting that sentiment is improving towards him because of market reforms even as they individually criticized him. Their Inquiry podcast also looked at North Korea in a May 24th episode that examined whether North Korea is broke. The short answer is ‘no,’ but there’s quite a bit of detail on how and why the repressive regime has managed to stave off a second economic catastrophe in three decades.
With news that Illinois became the 37th state to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, leaving it just one state short of the required ¾ (after which we’ll have a debate over whether these votes are too late, I’m sure), Delaware’s Senate rejected a proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the state constitution. My state Senator, a co-sponsor of the amendment, was absent from the vote.
Monique Judge writes for The Root that Obama doesn’t owe this country anything as a former President, responding to a post on Splinter that criticized him for inaction in the face of a wave of racism and regressive policies.
The Splendid Table podcast looks at the burgeoning Philadelphia food scene, including two of the city’s preeminent chefs in Michael Solomonov (Zahav, Federal Donuts) and Eli Kulp (High St. on Market, my favorite restaurant in the city).
Board game news: Game Salute shared the draft Kickstarter for A War of Whispers, an area control game where players represent secret societies rather than armies.
Lil Cerebral Games also shared a draft Kickstarter, this one to bring back GAMES magazine Hall of Fame title TwixT, which has been out of print for some time.
Skyrim finally has that mod you’ve all been waiting for: You can now ride giant chickens and ducks. (Note: this piece’s author, Chris Livingston, and I went to high school together.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, baseball, boardgames, climate change, con men, environment, first amendment, florida, links, philadelphia, puerto rico, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, twitter, vaccines, women's rights

→ May 26, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/26/18.

My ranking of the top 100 prospects for this year’s MLB draft is up for Insiders. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

Over at Vulture, my ranking of the 25 best mobile board game apps went up last week.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at Politics & Prose in DC on July 14th and am shooting for an event in the Boston suburbs on July 28th. Throw a comment below if you think you could make the latter event.

And now, the links…

Longreads: the New Yorker looks at corrupt Chicago cop Ronald Watts, whose reign of terror in the city’s projects was ended by an FBI investigation and helped by a woman herself wrongfully charged with drug possession. Thirty-two convictions have already been vacated because of Watts’ own crimes, but he was involved in something like 500 in total.
The Guardian goes long on how a small group of dissidents ended the 23-year reign of Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh last year. The BBC’s Inquiry podcast from last week covered similar ground, asking why some revolutions succeed, starting with the recent peaceful regime change in Armenia.
60 Minutes investigates how the media fell for the story peddled by Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who talked a good game about her company’s medical products that never worked. She defrauded investors and put patients at risk, but hasn’t even been charged with a crime. You’ll get more jail time for a second arrest for marijuana possession (the federal mandatory minimum is 15 days) than Holmes did for a nearly billion-dollar fraud.
The New York Times‘ Sopan Deb sat down with the cast of Arrested Development for an interview with some very unsatisfying answers on Jeffrey Tambor’s on-set behavior. The men seem to be handwaving away whatever happened, while Jessica Walter (his victim here) and Alia Shawkat, the only women in the room, are outnumbered while standing up for themselves.
This SABR article by Pete Palmer is from 2017, but just crossed my timeline this week: Palmer looks at how big luck/randomness can be in individual year-to-year stats. One big takeaway is that for NOPS (similar to OPS+), “five percent of the players can change 40 or more points from year to year due to luck alone.”
Basketball writer Bo Churney took his own life at age 31 last week. His brother set up a fundraising page to benefit at-risk LGBTQ youth in Atlanta in Churney’s memory, and it has already passed $20,000 in just a few days.
A 30-year-old manchild living with his parents fought them in court over their demand that he move out, claiming he was entitled to six months’ notice of eviction. He lost, but of course he’s now some sort of folk hero, appearing on InfoWars on Friday.
A (now former) doctor spiked his girlfriend’s tea with an abortifacient and was sentenced to three years in prison after she asked the judge for leniency in his case.
Harley-Davidson took its tax cut from the Republican-led tax bill, closed a manufacturing facility in Kansas City, then bought back $700 million in stock.
Arizona’s Secretary of Education, a dingbat creationist, wants to weaken or delete references to evolution in state educational standards.
Who on earth told Jameela Jamil, who plays Tehani on NBC’s The Good Place, that she was “too ethnic” for Hollywood? She also discusses #MeToo in the embedded video interview. I’m halfway through Season 2 of The Good Place, which really hit its stride near the end of season one after a sluggish start.
Deadspin’s Tim Burke points out, yet again, that the claim that ESPN is losing subscribers over ‘politics’ is bogus.
From The Onion: ‘The Onion’ Has Finally Read Michael Cohen’s 2013 Email Regarding His Client Donald Trump And Would Like To Discuss The Matter Further At His Convenience.
The BBC revealed that Cohen received $400K from Ukraine’s government to arrange talks with President Trump.
An Associated Press investigation found that Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy used his connections to enrich himself by trying to shift U.S. policy in the Middle East against Qatar.
Center-right Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin excoriates Devin Nunes for burning a source to save the President’s skin. Lawfareblog’s Benjamin Wittes writes on the same subject that Trump has ‘all the power’ through his unfettered interference with the FBI and DoJ.
The Kentucky congressional candidate who was told, when she was 13, by her congressperson that she could never be a fighter pilot beat the moderate candidate in the Democratic primary despite national party support for the latter candidate.
You’ve probably seen the story that the feds have lost track of nearly 1500 migrant children forcibly separated from their parents. The collective non-response by our politicians is reminiscent of the pattern in pre-WWI Germany described by Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Two Montana residents detained by a Border Patrol agent for speaking Spanish are now talking to the ACLU about legal options.
Sweden distributed a ‘prepare for war’ leaflet to homes in anticipation of a cyber or terror attack.
There’s an Ebola outbreak in sub-Saharan Africa again, and while the new vaccine will help, it won’t stop the epidemic without changes in behavior.
Maine is dealing with increasing vaccination refusals from stupid parents. The answer is simple – change the law to eliminate nonmedical exemptions, especially the “philosophical exemption,” which amounts to “I’m an idiot and don’t like vaccines.” Get on it, Mainers.
There’s a new Kickstarter for a co-op zombie survival board game, Z First Impact, just out from WYSIWYGames.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, baseball, boardgames, chicago, frauds, links, longreads, metoo, stick to baseball, the swamp, tv, vaccines

→ May 20, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/20/18.

I was busy this week, including posting another first-round mock for next month’s MLB draft (Insider).

For Vulture, I ranked the 25 best board game apps for mobile devices, considering anything available for iOS or Android. Steam-only titles were not eligible.

For Paste, I reviewed the light deduction/puzzle game Automata Noir, a fun filler title that lets you do a little more than most deduction games where you’re just trying to guess who’s the bad guy.

PennLive asked fifty Pennsylvania librarians for their summer beach read recommendations and one kind soul recommended my own Smart Baseball, now available in paperback.

I’ll be appearing at Washington DC’s Politics & Prose on July 14th along with Jay Jaffe to talk baseball & sign our respective books (or I can sign Jay’s and he can sign mine, whatever you fancy).

And now, the links:

One question I posed near the end of Smart Baseball and in the new afterword is whether we actually know if Statcast metrics actually predict better performance going forward – that is, it sounds great that a pitcher limits exit velocity or has a higher spin rate on his fastball, but does it lead to better results? Jonathan Judge looked at MLB’s x-stats like xwOBA, which are derived from Statcast data and used in much of MLB’s content, and found that they don’t seem to predict future performance well at all.
This long-ish read from WIRED looks at the myth of purely rational and non-tribalist thinking promulgated by Sam Harris, who likes to tell you he’s not subject to these extremely pervasive, human biases – but falls prey to them all the time, just as you and I do.
Are SNL cold opens just hackneyed, unfunny pieces of elitist-liberal propaganda? I think that VICE piece asks several separate questions, and they don’t necessarily all have the same answers. I also think the liberal/conservative dichotomy is kind of dead at the moment; this isn’t about liberal positions, but opposition to kakistocracy.
A Qatari investor and former government official claims that Michael Cohen asked for a million-dollar bribe after the 2016 election in exchange for information on and potential access to the president-elect. Meanwhile, the Middle East blockade of Qatar is about to enter its twelfth month.
The Basque terrorist group Eta, which waged a nearly five-decade long separatist terror campaign in Spain, claims it has completely dismantled.
Cape Town’s water crisis never quite reached Day Zero, but there are still important takeaways from the barely-averted catastrophe, including that we can live on just 50 liters of water a day.
E-books were going to kill off physical books; then we heard that dead-tree editions were making a comeback and e-books were fading. Neither is quite true, as self-published authors are driving strong e-book sales that don’t always show up in industry reporting because Amazon, like Netflix, doesn’t release data on internal content.
The American Association of University Professors says the University of Nebraska violated a professor’s rights when the school fired her for protesting an alt-right organization’s event on campus.
An idiot white high school student in Montana is claiming he has a right to wear a Confederate flag shirt (note: isn’t that ‘disrespecting’ it?) to school; the Missoula County school district says they have a clear right to ban such clothing based on court rulings in other states. You couldn’t wear a swastika shirt to any school without repercussions; this is no different, as the Confederate flag has always been a symbol of slavery.
The Trump Administration is considering a rule banning some doctors from even discussing abortion with some patients. The rule would cover doctors who receive Title X federal funds, which go to low-income patients, which in turn would mean providing worse medical care to poor people – all to satisfy evangelical voters, who make up just a quarter of the American population.
The White House is very mad about all the leaks, so Axios talked to some of the leakers about why they leak.
Kickstarters! Paradox Interactive is bringing four popular video game titles to tabletop in partnerships with various board game publishers. The first of them, Crusader Kings, hit Kickstarter yesterday and is already more than fully funded. I played a demo of this on Friday in Stockholm and liked what I saw.
Greenbrier Games’ Posthuman Saga Kickstarter has already quintupled its original goal in just five days.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, books, first amendment, links, spain, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ May 5, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/5/18.

My first mock draft for 2018 is now up for Insiders, as is a short post on the Ronald Acuña show. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

I did some podcasts with friends this week. I appeared on the Productive Outs podcast to talk some baseball and music. Then I talked with Seth Heasley on his Hugos There podcast to discuss To Say Nothing of the Dog, one of my all-time favorite comic novels (and a Hugo Award winner). And of course on Thursday I was on the BBTN podcast with Buster Olney.

By the way, if any of you happen to live in/near Stockholm, there’s a pretty good chance I’m going to be there for a conference in the near future. Let me know in the comments what I should try to do or see in the few hours I’ll have free while there.

And now, the links…

I am quoted in this longread from Tim Grierson on the complicated legacy of sportswriter Jerome Holtzman, who invented the noxious save stat, ruining the sport for decades.
ProPublica investigates a private trash hauler in NYC that covered up the death of an off-the-books worker, claiming he was a homeless person who’d jumped under their truck.
Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources approved a plan to divert public waters from the Great Lakes to a Taiwanese electronics factory in Mount Pleasant.
Baseball Prospectus’ Matt Trueblood wrote about how Albert Pujols appears to have outed himself as age 40, at least if you follow the math as Trueblood did. Although rumors around Pujols’ real age have been around since he debuted in 2001, there’s never been anything more tangible than third hand hearsay. Also, if you’re a BP subscriber, Russell Carleton, author of the new and very good book The Shift, explains how many fans and writers misuse his ‘stabilization’ concept when looking at small, early-season samples.
Parker Molloy writes for GOOD that the White House Correspondents Dinner has always been a bad idea. I agree – it’s far too chummy for what should be an arm’s length relationship. And Charles P. Pierce wrote the best defense of comedian Michelle Wolf’s set at the WHCD in a column for Esquire.
Senate Republicans are prepared to ditch the so-called “blue slip” protocol by confirming a hard-right Ninth Circuit Court nominee over the objections of both of the candidate’s Senators (Democrats from Oregon).
Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history, according to the former CEO of Intuit and Paypal. I’m not worried: I’ve invested my entire 401k in tulips and South Seas stock.
The Arizona teachers’ strike is over, but not before Republican opponents came up with some bizarre conspiracy theories to attack the educators, who were fighting for living wages. Supermajority tax laws in many states, backed by the Koch brothers and other Republican donors, make raising teacher salaries difficult.
Speaking of the Koch Brothers, it turns out that George Mason University, the largest public college in the state of Virginia, gave the Koch foundation a say in hiring and firing decisions after taking a donation from the group.
Gilead update: Oklahoma’s House voted to let adoption agencies turn down LGBTQ couples (as well as single moms, Muslims, atheists, etc.). Meanwhile, Iowa has now banned nearly all abortions with a likely unconstitutional law that prohibits the procedure after a ‘fetal heartbeat’ is detected, around six weeks after conception.
Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams writes in Fortune why her $200,000 personal debt shouldn’t disqualify her from public office. Given the student loan burden of Americans, any stance that holds that people with large outstanding debts can’t be elected officials is awfully elitist and antithetical to democracy. For what it’s worth, I didn’t pay off the last of my own grad school debt until I wrote Smart Baseball.
The ‘biohacker’ Aaron Traywick, who injected himself with an untested herpes treatment in front of a live audience, was found dead earlier this week at some sort of weird spa. The life-extension advocate was 28.
Evolution in real time: Lizards on Redonda Island are evolving more quickly now that two of their main predators have been eradicated.
There’s a bird of paradise whose feathers are so black that they absorb 99.95% of visible light when faced head-on. It made the news in the last few weeks due to a new paper demonstrating there are two distinct species of this bird, rather than one, as previously believed. You can read the original research paper for free on PeerJ.
Orac details Chelsea Clinton’s #vaccineswork tweet and how it unhinged the denialists, including Andrew Wakefield’s partners in fraud.
Former anti-vaxxer moms say empathy is the way to get through to parents who still refuse to vaccinate their kids.
If you live in or near London, do not touch these caterpillars.
Private equity firm Alden Global Capital continues to turn big profits by gutting local newspapers.
Young Fathers’ third album, Cocoa Sugar, dropped in March, and their video for “Toy” features little kids as world leaders, with what appears to be a subtle jab at the President of the U.S.
Two board games designed by the CIA for internal training are now public and playable thanks to some FOIA requests and the print-and-play community.
Empyreal: Spells and Steam, a new fantasy-themed train game from Level 99, just hit Kickstarter this week.
Ruben Bolling’s latest Tom The Dancing Bug comic strip is titled What Trump Supporters See, although its ultimate target is the gullible media.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, boardgames, cryptocurrencies, evolution, iowa, links, oklahoma, rap, stick to baseball, vaccines, wisconsin

→ April 29, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/28/18.

My one Insider post this week looked at four pitchers who could go in the first round of this year’s draft, led by Florida RHP Carter Stewart, who was second on my latest ranking of draft prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Ancestree, a light, filler game from the designer of Blood Rage and Rising Sun, but one that I think borrows too heavily from other titles.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback, and it’s a bestseller … (checks notes) in Sonoma, California. I’ll be at Washington, DC’s legendary bookstore Politics and Prose at 6 pm on July 14th to discuss & sign the book.

And now, the links…

The Guardian had three superb longreads this week, so I’m including them all. The first calls for universities to ‘bulldoze’ their business schools, as the author, a B-school prof himself, argues they do more harm than good. I have an MBA, and I agree with many of his points, as well as the additional evidence that expensive full-time MBAs do not provide sufficient ROIs to students. But some MBA programs include useful material, including accounting and operations research. There’s a worthwhile course of study in there somewhere, but perhaps under a new name.
The second looks at the challenge in updating the Oxford English Dictionary, producing a third edition in the digital era when language appears to be changing faster than ever. A good read for fellow fans of The Professor and the Madman.
The third is a bit weird, as it documents people who pretend to be wealthy influences on Instagram as a way to make money, somehow, although the main subject is more poseur than profiteer.
The Atlantic has a longread that argues that American democracy no longer accurately represents the will of the people. The anecdote that opens this story, in Oxford, Massachusetts, is absolutely infuriating.
Black students nationally are several times more likely to be suspended or disciplined than white students are for the same infractions. The Obama Administration had begun civil rights investigations into the practice in Texas, but this ProPublica/Mother Jones longread explains how Besty DeVos is ending the effort. If you can’t re-segregate the schools by law, do it by fact.
BuzzFeed investigates Facebook’s role in recent anti-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka, where the government temporarily blocked access to the site because Facebook wouldn’t take down bigoted posts and videos calling for Sinhalese Buddhists (!) to attack Muslims and Muslim-owned businesses.
The British morning show Good Morning Britain, hosted by Susanna Reid (who seems to be sharp) and Piers Morgan (a pile of wilted romaine lettuce in an expensive suit) ran a feature on people who didn’t vaccinate their pets for fear their pets would get autism. No, that isn’t actually possible, and some people are just really fucking stupid.
More and more research on behavior shows that changing attitudes isn’t enough to get people to do the right or smart thing, nor is giving them more information: If you want to change someone’s behavior, you need to convince them that everyone else is already doing what they should be. That’s why vaccine denialism is contagious, and why drowning out these cranks and charlatans with reminders that the vast, vast majority of parents still vaccinate their kids is so important.
Canadian fraudsters (they call themselves “homeopaths,” but homeopathy is just bullshit) are telling parents of autistic children they can ‘cure’ autism with diluted doses of vaccines. This nonsense, called CEASE, is just stealing money from desperate parents, and anyone who offers it should be tried for fraud.
A new study shows evidence that Trump’s election was driven by white racism, not by economic anxiety.
The Alfie Evans tragedy has been co-opted by grifters and vultures, looking to score political points off bogus claims of liberty that ignore the sad fact that there is no hope of recovery for the severely brain-damaged child.
Finland will not continue its Universal Basic Income trial after it reaches its scheduled end in 2019.
A former reporter for a Sinclair-owned station says she was pressured to include climate change denialism In her reporting on climate change itself.
Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kodachrome mocked students protesting for reforming gun laws, and later in the week a law reporter found a huge gaffe in Kobach’s filings in the ACLU’s ongoing suit against his voter suppression law, which has done a great job of eliminating the voter fraud that didn’t exist in the first place.
Some Delaware news: a recent attempt to raise the state’s minimum wage to $9.25/hour failed, but it looks like a “red flag” gun bill will be signed into law soon.
Writer Rebecca Solnit, a contributing editor at Harper’s, asks who gets to control the narrative in a country that claims to want equality but is awfully abstemious about handing it out.
A fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School talked to the university’s alumni magazine about better ways to detect and fight the spread of disinformation online as we head towards another round of elections this fall.
Sacramento DA Anne Marie Schubert, who is up for re-election on June 5th, has a history of declining to prosecute police officers who injure black civilians or suspects in the line of duty. The Intercept reveals that she took $420,000 in donations from police organizations across her three campaigns. She may soon be handed evidence that would support charging the officers who killed Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man, in his own backyard.
Senator Marco Rubio writes for CNN.com that it is time to force Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro from power. I agree, but how? Sanctions, Rubio’s main solution, are unlikely to work in isolation. Maduro is planning to abolish more voting rights soon and has been raising capital by selling the “petro,” a new cryptocurrency that I’m sure is an excellent investment.
My employer ran a fairly favorable profile of Cleveland pitcher and climate change denier Trevor Bauer this week; Deadspin offered a rebuttal.
The EU is set to ban neonics, pesticides suspected of contributing to bee colony collapses worldwide. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., EPA chief Scott Pruitt proposed adding neonics to drinking water.
This essay on Theness.com makes a good point about GMO labeling: The government can’t regulate what it doesn’t understand, and in the case of GMOs, a functional definition of what O’s are GM and require labels may not be feasible.
Texas Monthly looks at the Texas gerrymandering case headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The 2014 suicide of a student-athlete at the University of Pennsylvania has spurred an ongoing focus on mental health among Ivy League athletes, including the “success culture” that may have contributed to her death.
Protests in Armenia against a power grab by the country’s outgoing President have led to his resignation, although the protests have continued as the ruling Republican Party refuses to relinquish power.
Ali Noorani, the Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum and the son of Pakistani immigrants to the U.S., writes for CNN about the controversy over the Simpsons character Apu.
The alt-right front group Turning Point USA has hired numerous employees with histories of racist and/or bigoted tweets. I wonder why that is.
Could a postal banking system help ‘unbanked’ Americans while also providing much-needed revenue for the US Postal Service? Lack of access to capital is a huge obstacle to the upward economic mobility that is, or at least was, a hallmark of capitalist economies.
The Ringer examines Netflix’ strategy of buying or funding original movies no one can find on its service. Grierson and Leitch have discussed this as well on their podcast – the Netflix algorithm doesn’t even seem to effectively push this content to viewers whose own histories would indicate interest in these indie films.
A study funded by the U.S. military on climate change and sea level rise found that nearly a thousand islands risk becoming uninhabitable this century as a result of man’s effects on the global climate.
Citing low sales and supply chain problems, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson is discontinuing production of a pump used by cancer patients that extends their lives by two years. The headline makes it seem like this is just an evil corporate decision, but the story is more involved than that.
A British activist with cerebral palsy is asking the government to rethink a proposed ban on plastic drinking straws, saying for people with movement disorders, straws are critical to help them drink. (Perhaps reusable, more durable plastic straws, or straws made from paper, would work?)
The CJR interviews Steve Fishman about his podcast, Empire Of Blood, the story of how he helped exonerate a man who served 22 years for a murder he didn’t commit.
The Guardian looks at how the Michael Cohen case has exposed the extent of Sean Hannity’s real estate holdings, which is now in turn leading to stories on substandard living conditions and poor treatment of tenants in his buildings.
Jeet Heer’s Twitter thread on Kevin Williamson and the “troll three-step” move resembles all too well how opinion writers with extremist views try to both appeal to their base and dance around valid criticism from the center or the opposite end of the spectrum.
Alexandra Petri follows this by writing about how she’s been silenced In a column for a small paper in Washington called the Post.
Asmodee Digital announced an upcoming adaptation of the Lovecraftian board game Mansions of Madness, due out on Steam early in 2019.
I loved the Bard’s Tale PC RPGs when I was a teenager, eventually finishing the first two (I never tried the third), so I’m stoked to see inXile is developing a new sequel/update more than 30 years after the series appeared to be finished.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Armenia, boardgames, climate change, Economics, gmo, guns, history of language, links, longreads, mental health, pseudoscience, racism, rpgs, social media, Sri Lanka, stick to baseball, texas, tv, vaccines, Venezuela, voter suppression

→ April 15, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/15/18.

Two new posts for Insiders this week, both on draft prospects I went to see: one on Ryan Weathers, Ryan Rolison, and Ethan Hankins; another on Kentucky’s Sean Hjelle and Tristan Pompey. All five are likely first rounders, although Hankins, coming back from a shoulder issue, could end up going to Vanderbilt if teams aren’t willing to pony up.

My latest board game review for Paste covers the dice-drafting game Sagrada, which is easy to learn but has very high replay value. Players choose dice from a common set, rolled each round, to fill out their personal boards resembling stained-glass windows. I’ve also been playing a ‘pre-alpha’ release of the Terraforming Mars app on Steam, and it looks fantastic.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! Buy a zillion copies for all your Linkedin contacts. You should also sign up for my free not-quite-weekly email newsletter, which has more personal essays and links to everything I’ve written.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Dayn Perry writes about the new White Sox ballpark that should have been but wasn’t, a tight stadium in Armour Park that would have preserved more of the neighborhood and allowed for more economic development. Instead, the city and state caved to team ownership, funding a monstrous stadium, forcibly removing hundreds of families from their homes, and failing to even charge the team rent for 18 years.
The BBC has a story written by an American man who was a schoolteacher for 17 years despite being illiterate. He didn’t learn to read until he was 48, and how he got as far as he did is incredible.
The Guardian‘s long read of the week looks at the ongoing debate over the minimum wage, which tends to be expressed solely in economic terms and often involves one side or the other rushing to claim victory based on a single study.
Author Junot Diaz (The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) revealed in a first-person piece for the New Yorker that he was raped by a family friend when he was eight years old, never got therapy or any kind of help, and spent the next few decades dealing with the consequences.
Also in the New Yorker, staff writer Adam Davidson looks at the Michael Cohen case, calling it the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency; I’m not so sanguine. The lawyerly folks at Popehat weighed in on what Monday’s raid on Cohen’s office implied.
A professor of social psychology and decision-making writes in Scientific American that targeted stories and fake news likely affected just a small percentage of voters in the 2016 U.S. election, but that small number was also more than enough to swing the overall result. The author also looks at why those stories were effective.
Adweek looks at the change in Facebook’s news feed is killing digital publishers. I’m still there with a public page for readers, but I get less traction there than on Twitter or via this site.
Franklin Foer writes in Atlantic about our new era of fake videos – not just the ‘deepfakes’ of the porn world, but the new potential for fake news videos or videos of politicians ‘saying’ things they never said.
Hamilton Nolan has an angry “guide” to how private equity firms are gutting companies for shareholder profits, which was in evidence recently at the Denver Post. A writer at the Boulder Daily Camera wrote an editorial about this very topic that the publisher refused to print, so he posted it on his own blog instead.
The former Texas Deputy DA who rejected a recommendation to pursue charges against Trump University just landed a nomination to a federal judgeship. I’m sure that’s all a coincidence, though!
The National Academy of Medicine is resisting efforts to expel a member who plagiarized and fabricated major parts of his C.V..
Australian novelist Tim Winton argues toxic masculinity in adults leads to the raising of misogynist boys as the latter are discouraged from showing empathy or tenderness to meet a one-sided standard of macho behavior.
The belief that people have different learning “styles,” usually categorized as visual or auditory, is not supported by any evidence. And folks have certainly tried.
Antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis is on its way, and North Korea may be its incubator, exacerbated by cuts to global funding (including sanctions by our current Administration) that will include money to try to fight the disease. While looking more into this I found an article from February 2017 explaining how human encroachment on rain forests leads to the emergence of new viruses, profiling one researcher trying to identify new pathogens before they start killing humans.
CMON Games announced the August 2018 (scheduled) release of a board game based on the Kick-Ass comic book series:

In 2018, @CMONGames will release Kick-Ass: The Board Game. Dudes on a map w/players managing social media, too. —WEM pic.twitter.com/vxOeKOfgsV

— BoardGameGeek (@BoardGameGeek) August 16, 2017

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, boardgames, Economics, links, ptsd, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp

Stick to baseball, 7/21/21.

Istanbul app.

Compounded.

Stick to baseball, 6/9/18.

Stick to baseball, 5/26/18.

Stick to baseball, 5/20/18.

Stick to baseball, 5/5/18.

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