climate change — Page 12

→ April 30, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/30/16.

No new Insider content this week, although I had a draft blog post last Saturday on Riley Pint, Joey Wentz, Braxton Garrett, and more players I saw. I held my usual Klawchat on Thursday.

And now, the links…

From my alma mater’s magazine, can gene editing lead to the end of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases? What are the ecological consequences of wiping out a species to better humanity?
My friend Lindsey Adler wrote a heartbreaking piece about her past battle with anorexia.
A female state Senator in South Carolina has introduced a bill requiring counseling and a 24-hour waiting period for men to get a Viagra prescription to highlight the gender inequity in laws that restrict abortion access. No, it’s not an apt analogy, nor do I think Sen. Mia McLeod is trying to compare the two directly; she’s pointing out, correctly, that anti-abortion laws are largely passed by men and only affect women.
More evidence and arguments contradicting the allergen-avoidance strategy for new parents from the NY Times.
Nearly half of (self-described) conservative Republicans climate change is real, so why is the putative party of conservatives still in denial?
In Oklahoma, non-consensual oral sex isn’t rape if the victim is drunk, because Oklahoma law is still stuck in the 1800s.
The NY Times obituary of Ozzie Silna, former owner of the ABA’s Spirits of St. Louis, is an ebullient retelling of the saga of the greatest deal in sports history.
Memphis has six identified measles cases already, several infants plus one unvaccinated dipshit adult. A woman in Washington died of measles last year, so, you know, get the damn shot already.
I linked a few weeks ago to a story on Sci-Hub, the not-really-legal site where researchers can download copyrighted academic papers for free, and Science has a report on how everyone around the world is using it. Slate rips Science for an accompanying editorial defending the academic-journal paywall. Copyright law has a purpose, but providing huge economic rents on academic papers was not one.
Reader Ridley Kemp passed along this link after Thursday’s chat: Nature blows up the myth of gender as biologically binary.
FiveThirtyEight goes deep on the concept of universal basic income, a new and unproven way to address the income gap, poverty, and economic insecurity. It’s also very expensive and probably a political non-starter. My gut says it’s crazy.
There isn’t much new in the Brigham Young University honor code scandal, but this Guardian summary of the school’s absurd victim-crushing policies is a strong read. I still do not see why this school is receiving any federal funds at this point.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, rape culture, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ April 3, 2016
→ By keith

A rather unproductive trip to Florida (thanks in no small part to rain and high school coach decisions) is over and I’m heading home before my first TV hit of the new season, on this week’s Wednesday Night Baseball Telecast of the Phillies at the Reds. I’ll be on roughly for innings four through six, discussing the teams’ farm systems and strategies as well as this year’s draft, in which the Phillies pick first and the Reds pick second.

I had three Insider pieces over the last eight days: my status updates on the top 50 prospects; my full standings and award winner predictions for 2016; and a scouting blog on Detroit and Atlanta prospects, led by Michael Fulmer.

I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

And now, the links…

A North Korean defector describes growing up in one of the country’s prison camps, the mere existence of which Pyongyang has long denied. The Daesh gets the headlines right now, but among formal states in the world, is there any more dangerous than this one?
This Bloomberg BusinessWeek piece about an operative who claims to have rigged several Latin American elections is riveting and entirely disturbing, such as the claims about manipulating public opinion via social media sockpuppet accounts. He’s now in prison in Colombia. I know the Cold War CIA no longer exists, but one wonders if an unscrupulous government intelligence agency might find use for this hacker’s skills in disrupting elections in hostile states.
Nature discusses the black-hole collision that reshaped physics, because it produced gravitational waves that we could detect, thus providing direct observational evidence of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
A charter school – of course – in California has reopened after an unvaccinated student caught the measles, but some stupid, selfish parents still won’t vaccinate their kids.
The Netherlands is going to have to close some prisons because they don’t have enough criminals to fill them. A focus on rehabilitation for nonviolent offenders plus decriminalization of personal drug use are factors behind the drop in crime.
Donald Trump and his now-charged campaign manager used classic victim-blaming language to try to evade the consequences of an assault caught on video.
Climate change – which is actually happening, and caused by man, no matter what every remaining GOP Presidential candidate tells you – is affecting the Antarctic ice shelf more than previously forecasted, which could lead to sea level rises of up to three feet by the end of the century. On the bright side, there’s an enormous financial opportunity right now in future beachfront property near the South Pole.
From last year in the New Yorker, can reading make you happier? I’d certainly argue yes; reading is my daily meditation, although I sometimes indulge in the more traditional breathing meditations as well.
Why do we teach young girls that it’s cute or even expected to be scared? I’m guilty of this too, although I might be equally guilty if I had a son. I’ve always tended to be a nervous person anyway.
This rant by author LaMonte M. Fowler comes unapologetically from the left side of the political spectrum, but his targets are those on the far right, so I imagine many of you will find at least some of his points amusing, as I did.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, heavy reading, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ December 19, 2015
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/19/15.

For Insiders this week, I wrote about the Giants signing Johnny Cueto and the Todd Frazier three-team trade. I also held my usual weekly Klawchat.

Here on the dish, I compiled lists of my top 100 songs of 2015 and my top 15 albums of 2015.

Folks have been asking about my year-end gift guides, so here they are, once more:

• Top 80 boardgames of all time
• My 2015 gift guide for cooks
• My updated cookbook recommendations
• My all-time top 100 novels (from February 2013)

And now, the links…

That $10 Mast Brothers chocolate bar you bought along with your single-origin pour-over coffee at Blue Bottle? Well, it’s bad chocolate and might not even be what they claim it is.
Restaurant chain Fig & Olive, which had a salmonella outbreak in the fall, was caught using previously frozen food prepared at a central “commissary” and shipped to their individual locations.
What kind of person calls a mass shooting a hoax? Fortunately, Florida Atlantic has moved to terminate that nutjob professor, who has to be suffering from some kind of mental illness to so thoroughly believe these delusions he preaches.
Ah, the National Review‘s climate change graph was a big joke, and the Washington Post gives a concise explanation of why. I reviewed a book called Proofiness in June that talks about how organizations like NRO distort and manipulate stats to mislead the public.
Meanwhile, the New Yorker talks about how not to talk about nuclear power and climate change. Nuclear power can be a big part of the solution to both climate change and ocean acidification, but it’s already under a renewed attack from people who should probably know better.
Hate crimes against Muslims are surging over the past few weeks. It would be nice if we didn’t have an entire traveling circus competing to demonize this entire demographic group.
This Times review of the new book Lactivism by Courtney Jung details how unscientific and aggressive the anti-formula movement has become. There are even “ban the bag” movements to try to force hospitals to stop supplying bottles and other free equipment to new mothers – even though there’s little to no evidence to say breast-feeding is better for the baby.
A wonderful piece from the Times on the founder of the company behind the Hinge dating app going after the one who got away before it’s too late. (I’m also fairly sure I went to college with the author’s sisters.)
CTE isn’t just a problem affecting NFL players – Vice has the story of a D2 college player who died of it at age 26. This is the crux of my argument over Brandon McIlwain’s decision to enroll early at South Carolina: Not only did he pass up a guaranteed payday in June – actually, he passed up the mere chance to have someone offer it to him – but he’s entering an extremely dangerous profession for which he will not be paid for the next three years of his labor.
This isn’t new, but I just came across it this week: McSweeney’s imagined letter from Comic Sans.
My former residence of Arizona may be shifting from red to blue, thanks to the Latino vote – although I imagine the influx of engineers to work at Intel will contribute as well.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: chocolate, climate change, links, stick to baseball

→ November 7, 2015
→ By keith

Saturday five, 11/6/15.

My annual ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason is now up for Insiders, and I held my weekly Klawchat right after they were posted.

I reviewed the app version of Camel Up for Paste this week. Since I wrote that review, there’s been a minor update that cleaned up some of the issues I had with the graphics, notably the info available on screen to you. It’s available here for iOS devices or Android.

And now, the links…

Well this just sucks: Kevin Folta, scientist and advocate of genetic engineering of food crops and generally of the safety of food science, is removing himself from public debate. He’s been attacked by the FraudBabe and the dipshits at U.S. “Right to Know,” a group that uses the veneer of consumer rights to mask a blatant science-denial/anti-GMO policy. They’ve been using FOIA requests to try to scuttle legitimate research and discussion. The only solution I see is for more of us to speak up and out about science.
Peet’s Coffee has purchased a majority stake in Intelligentsia, their second such move into high-end craft coffee after their purchase of Stumptown. I don’t know what this means for the space; I don’t see a natural synergy here but fear it’s more a move to neutralize competition from a higher-margin competitor
We forget that the people pictured in certain memes are actual human beings, such as the skeptical Third World kid, so the BBC has done a story on that picture, finding the aid worker pictured but not the child.
Canada’s new government seems about as pro-science as it gets, including the creation of a new post, Minister of Science. Can you imagine any of the current Republican candidates for President doing such a thing? So many of them have staked out one or more denialist positions that this seems out of the question.
Some good sense from the Environmental Defense Blog on what the news about China’s coal consumption really means. Tip: Climate change is still real, and the CO₂ measurements aren’t affected.
Thanksgiving is coming and it’s never too early to start cooking, at least when it comes to preparing stock, as Michael Ruhlman explains. I actually make a brown chicken stock instead, since I always have chicken carcasses in the freezer (bones and necks, and sometimes wings) but rarely have turkey.
“Smile You Bitch: Being a Woman in 2015” lives up to its provocative title. Rape culture is everywhere, and it’s ingrained in many young men from childhood.
Speaking of treating women like navel lint, I give you the NFL’s attempt to hush up Greg Hardy’s domestic violence case.
So the demise of Grantland led to a lot of thinkpieces (and a few readers telling me they were canceling their Insider subs, which, to be perfectly honest, just punishes all the wrong people here), but one I liked was from Fortune, talking about its implications for the business of longform journalism. I didn’t read a lot of Grantland’s stuff, but I do believe their mission mattered, and I hope the end of that site is just a blip.
From Forbes, a good piece looking at the limited research to date on pediatricians who turn away vaccine-refusing parents. That’s a lot better than the nonsense hit piece on Bryce Harper the same publication ran earlier last week.
I’ve often wondered about whether linking to Spotify in my music posts was helping or hurting the artists in question, but Cameron from the band Superhumanoids told me in September that it was the former, and now FiveThirtyEight has a piece supporting this with data.
The long-running TV series Mythbusters is ending after its next season, and the NY Times offers an appreciation, crediting the show with rising interest in STEM education and careers.
New research on the lizards called tuataras supports the theory that the penis evolved just once for mammals and reptiles and has just, well, hung around.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, climate change, coffee, evolution, gmo, links, saturday five, vaccines

→ October 10, 2015
→ By keith

Saturday five, 10/10/15.

I visited the Dominican Republic for the first time this week, and saw Eddy Julio Martinez, six other Cuban defectors, and a handful of Dominican teenagers who will be eligible to sign in 2016 and 2017; Insiders can read all of my scouting notes on those players. I also wrote some preview/notes pieces on the American League and National League Division Series, although my Blue Jays in four prediction is already dead.

I held my regular Klawchat here on Thursday. I think the new software, despite some tiny glitches, is working out well; if nothing else it works far faster on my end.

And now, the links…

The United Nations – the one joke that makes everyone in the world laugh – caved to Saudi Arabia by removing LGBT rights from its “sustainable development goals” list. Why anyone would listen to a repressive dictatorship that still refuses to grant its women basic human rights is beyond me. Of course, the Saudis have a seat on the UN’s Council on Human Rights, which shows you how well that whole idea works.
NPR has a sad, brutal story on girls dying and disappearing in El Salvador.
Can’t make this up: Vaccine denial group Safe Minds is mad that a study they funded showed no link between vaccines and autism. Science is beautiful.
Texas 14-year-old falls pregnant after getting a flu shot. Go ahead and read it. I’ll wait here.
Joe Posnanski is a national treasure and he lays waste to the Hall of Fame’s “Segregation Era” Committee in a post for NBC Sports.
Los Angeles has enacted the nation’s strictest ban on plastic microbeads, which appear in many shampoos and other soap products but pass through industrial filtration of water waste.
The Atlantic asks what happens to digital content we’ve bought if the sellers should go out of business? Those Kindle e-books you “bought” aren’t quite yours, not the way a physical book would be.
The BBC reports that 2015 has been a very bad year for coral, which is undergoing a massive global bleaching as a result of the ocean acidification from our overproduction of carbon dioxide and deforestation.
Also from the BBC, a very entertaining podcast that discusses the science in science fiction, especially movies. Is accuracy necessary, or even better?
The New Yorker looks more at the daily fantasy sports “scandal” that has, in my view, received disproportionate news coverage. The so-called “insider trading” is far less of an issue than the firms’ insistence that regular joes are signing up and winning money when the bulk of the winnings go to a small number of sharks instead.
MIT Technology Review looks at the successes and challenges of implanting electrodes in the brain to treat neurological and mental illnesses.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, links, mental illness, saturday five, science fiction, vaccines

→ September 19, 2015
→ By keith

Saturday five, 9/19/15.

My Insider post this week named Astros first baseman A.J. Reed my 2015 Prospect of the Year, while listing other prospects who had fantastic years and highlighting Boston’s Andrew Benintendi for the best pro debut by a 2015 draftee.

I held my regular Klawchat here on Thursday. This upcoming week I may shift the chat and Periscope up by a day each, to Wednesday and Tuesday respectively.

And now, the links…

Here’s a shocker: Most fast-food and fast-casual chains use meat loaded with antibiotics. The major exceptions aren’t surprising; both Chipotle and Panera have been committed to eliminating meat from animals raised with antibiotics for years.
A wonderful chart highlighting twenty of the most common cognitive illusions that screw up our decision-making. If you want to learn more about these, read my reviews of the books The Invisible Gorilla and Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Mexico has a real problem with woman and girls vanishing without a trace, often to human traffickers.
This beautiful description of general relativity is an excerpt from an upcoming book that comes out this Thursday in Europe called Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. It’s just £7 through that amazon UK link.
More goodness from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at the Food Lab: The best way to reheat that old bagel. Lopez-Alt’s book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, comes out on Tuesday.
A good overview of the rising popularity of bitters.
The good news about the vaccine denial we saw in this week’s GOP ~~circus~~ debate was that the outcry against it was swift and severe. The bad news, as this Atlantic piece argues, is that vaccine denialism is now being linked to fear of big government, and that makes it even harder to argue with these dangerous nitwits.
Hugh Acheson brought his wisdom to food trucks in Luxembourg this week, which I mostly included because I’ve been to Luxembourg and it is kind of adorable.
The New York Times looks back at the 1815 eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia, the most destructive volcanic eruption in modern history, a cataclysm that resulted in a massive global cooling episode. The spur for the piece was the release of a new book on the subject, Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World, this past Tuesday. The author is quoted in the article.
That recent incident where a security guard at a Whole Foods beat a black customer unconscious is a symptom of a larger trend, where lots of minimally-screened guards are running around, often with guns, rarely with consequences for their actions.
Exxon’s own researchers showed their fossil fuels would lead to global warming back in 1977, which they subsequently ignored as they championed climate-change denial in the 1990s.
The hot mess that is Cobb County’s new stadium for the local racist-nicknamed baseball team is even worse than you thought because fans won’t have a safe route from the parking lot to the stadium. This wouldn’t have been such an issue if the majority-white (65%) county had allowed the light rail line to build a route to the stadium, but they didn’t want those city folk (Atlanta’s population is 54% black) to have such easy access.
Ruhlman waxes poetic on duck confit for Thomas Keller’s new magazine.
The BBC’s Why Factor explores why we love tea while giving a brief history of the drink.
Bloomberg looks at how most daily fantasy players lose money. A tiny percentage of players racks up nearly all of the winnings.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, links, saturday five, science, tea, vaccines

→ September 12, 2015
→ By keith

Saturday five, 9/12/15.

My one Insider piece from this week included my own scouting notes on prospects Jeff Hoffman, Spencer Adams, Gleyber Torres, and Brad Markey.

Klawchats have returned! They’ll be here on the dish from now on, as ESPN has ended all Sportsnation chats. The first one was on Thursday.

And now, the links…

Marlins beat writer Juan Rodriguez is fighting brain cancer, and some of his friends have set up a fund to help support his family.
Every Day Should Be Saturday says pay the players, dammit, through a personal essay about what it’s like to be broke.
Hand-pulled oyster with activated artichoke, anyone? The man behind the Brooklyn Bar Menu Generator talked to the Village Voice about his creation.
The passing of neurologist and author Oliver Sacks has led to some touching tributes, including Atul Gawande’s in memoriam piece, which also mentions their shared love of the excellent dystopian short story “The Machine Stops,” available for a buck for your Kindle through that link. It’s never mentioned in discussions of E.M. Forster’s works, but I’d take that over A Passage to India any day.
BBC’s Assignment radio program looks at Paraguay’s preteen pregnancy problem, exploring why schoolgirls there are so vulnerable to abuse.
Digg interviewed the Food Lab’s Kenji Lopez-Alt ahead of the release of his first book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, later this month.
I haven’t tried this recipe but I was intrigued enough to share it: Sichuan-spiced dry-brined turkey. Dry brining doesn’t require a giant bucket as a wet brine does, and the recipe calls for spatchcocking (stop laughing) the bird for more even cooking of the white and dark meats.
New York has a rare positive story on climate change, arguing that we’ve finally gotten serious about slowing it. One major reason, in the author’s opinion, is the threat of a Republican candidate winning in 2016, as that party steadfastly denies the science on climate change in embarrassing fashion.
How did lobster become so commoditized that it’s now on the McDonald’s menu? The New Yorker provides an “unnatural” history of the McLobster, looking at advances in lobster fishery that resemble other types of animal husbandry.
If you want to know why baseball is becoming whiter, there’s a simple explanation: youth sports are too damn expensive.
Celebrity chef Kerry Simon died this week at age 60 of multiple system atrophy. I first saw Simon on TV maybe fifteen years ago, on a Food Network show where he went to some off-Strip places in Vegas where he said the real chefs would go to eat. One of those places: Firefly, now one of my favorite restaurants in Las Vegas.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, food writing, links, saturday five

→ August 22, 2015
→ By keith

Saturday five, 8/21/15.

My short series on the best tools in baseball continued with my ranking of the players with the best hitting tools and the best fielding tools in the majors. I also had two draft blog posts, one on the Perfect Game All-American Classic and one on the Under Armour game.

I was the guest host of the Baseball Tonight podcast on Wednesday, with guests Tim Kurkjian and Alex Speier.

Chat is still down, so I did another Periscope video chat instead.

And now, this week’s links…

Back in N.W.A.’s heyday, Dr. Dre severely beat female journalist Dee Barnes, and she’s not happy the NWA biopic omitted the incident.
The Guardian had the best op ed I saw this week on the controversy over Josh Ostrovsky, aka “the Fat Jew,” stealing jokes on social media.
Is it the beginning of the end for online comments? I tend to hope so. Most comment threads quickly devolve into digital septic tanks.
Major food-processing companies are fighting to reduce what you know about the food in their packages. Regardless of your views on genetic modification, organic versus conventional, and so on, any laws that reduce transparency are losses for all consumers.
The best longread of the week is from the New York Times, on how poor people get caught in a cycle of prison time for inability to pay their bail or other court fees.
San Francisco Giants scout Stan Saleski took his own life while advancing the Royals and Orioles for the World Series last year, and his daughter, Whitney, has turned her grief into a photo project to reduce the stigma around suicide.
The global populations of certain species of bats has been threatened by a fungal disease, but there’s a new treatment on the horizon. It matters to us because bats are one of a handful of species, along with bees and monarch butterflies, that helps pollinate crops essential to our food supply – and the populations of all of those species are declining.
A few weeks ago, I linked to an LA Times investigative piece on an antibiotic-resistant bacterium that hit the UCLA hospital due to a specific type of duodenoscope; well, it’s back, this time at a Pasadena hospital.
Climate change has made the current California drought 8% to 27% worse than it otherwise would have been. There’s no silver lining anywhere in this story: It’s conserve or die.
The New Yorker has a brief overview of the ongoing lawsuit challenging minor-league player compensation as illegal because they earn less than minimum wage. The real solution here is to end MLB’s antitrust exemption, but that would require an act of Congress.
Yet more evidence that we are hopelessly suggestible: Hong Kong restaurant patrons preferred dishes “explained” by the chef, even when those dishes had inferior ingredients. Maybe none of them wanted to seem to be a philistine.
If you’ve followed the Shaun King story at all, this piece from the Black Lives Matter activist is worth reading.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, conceived a “hyperloop” sort of bullet train that would whisk passengers across a great distance via pneumatic tube; now it looks like construction of a hyperloop may start next year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, climate change, food safety, hip-hop, links, saturday five, suicide

→ May 30, 2015
→ By keith

Saturday five, 5/30/15.

This week I posted an updated ranking of the top 25 prospects in the minors and my second mock draft for 2015. I also held yet another Klawchat this week, still focusing on the draft.

And now, this week’s links…

A bipartisan editorial from Newt Gingrich and Van Jones calling for better treatment options for mentally ill nonviolent criminals. I couldn’t agree with this any more.
Twitter finally grew a spine and banned serial rules violator Chuck C. Johnson, who outed a rape victim and still was allowed to remain on the service.
Kansas has become a real political backwater, with their latest stunt the paternalistic $25 daily limit on welfare recipients’ withdrawals. The legislators supporting this awful law cite anecdotal evidence of waste rather than relying on research that gives the contrary conclusion.
If you can’t accept the reality of climate change, perhaps the fear of the extinction of coffee will get to you? That BBC piece details some of the efforts to breed hardier coffee plants that can adapt to a warming planet.
Still in denial? How about the loss of so much ice in Antarctica that it may be shifting the Earth’s gravitational field?
Bill Gates talked to Vox about the inevitable global flu pandemic, with a lot of additional reporting on the how, why, and maybe what we can do about it.
A funny take on helicopter versus free range parenting.
A fair question on why there isn’t more media coverage of Atlanta Hawks guard Thabo Sefolosha missing the playoffs because he was attacked by NYPD officers. You’d think an assault on a famous person of color would at least get the media’s attention.
Longread of the week: Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto (which I reviewed) and Being Mortal (which I haven’t read), writes about the plague of unnecessary medical care in America. There are a lot of expensive tests, procedures, and medications with little to no proven benefit (or a proven lack of benefit) that are routinely administered to patients in the U.S., and we all end up paying for them in our insurance premiums.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, coffee, links, saturday five

Stick to baseball, 4/30/16.

Stick to baseball, 4/3/16.

Stick to baseball, 12/19/15.

Saturday five, 11/6/15.

Saturday five, 10/10/15.

Saturday five, 9/19/15.

Saturday five, 9/12/15.

Saturday five, 8/21/15.

Saturday five, 5/30/15.

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