climate change

→ November 11, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/11/17.

I have a new boardgame review at Paste, covering the card-drafting game Skyward. I also had two Insider posts go up earlier this week, one previewing some potential offseason trade targets, the other ranking the top 50 free agents this winter. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Feel free to sign up for my free email newsletter, which I send out … I guess whenever I feel like it. I aim for once a week, although I’ve gone as long as two weeks between issues when I haven’t had much to say. You can see past issues at that link.

Also, don’t forget to buy copies of Smart Baseball for everyone on your Christmas list! Except for infants. They might eat the pages. Get them the audiobook instead.

And now, the links…

Longreads: You probably saw this remarkable New Yorker piece by Ronan Farrow on how Harvey Weinstein used PIs and former spies to track and harass his accusers. If he could do that, think of the other rich, powerful men who stand accused (or have yet to be accused) of sexual harassment and assaults, including a former president and a current one both accused of similar acts. They’ve probably done it too.
This 2015 piece from the Guardian details a failed effort to turn the Comoros into a citizenship-for-sale destination for Bidoon, stateless Arabs living in wealthy countries without actual citizenship or even documentation. The Comoros are a desperately poor island country between Madagascar and mainland Africa, beset by repeated coups since they became independent of colonial France in 1975. Needless to say, the plan didn’t work out well for the the tiny nation.
ProPublica details how right-wing trolls harassed three of its reporters via low-cost methods like filling their inboxes with subscriptions to newsletters.
James Bridle went very long on algorithm-driven kids’ videos on Youtube and more, arguing that such pablum is damaging our kids. (I would also suggest that parents not give their kids unfettered access to any part of the Internet, but that’s just me.)
Scientific American gives us Journey to Gunland, on how more guns do not mean less crime, even though many Americans believe the opposite. The more guns in a state, the more violent crimes, including shootings and rapes. They also ran a rebuttal from a pro-gun social scientist they mentioned, and then (scroll down from there) a rejoinder from the original author.
Are American private colleges and universities making inequality worse as tuition increases and income gaps in the population of potential students grow?
Roy Moore, who believes gays should be jailed or killed and Muslims banned from Congress, sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl in 1979 and behaved inappropriately with several other women in their teens. Several leading Republicans called on Moore to withdraw from the Senate race if the allegations are true.
David French of the National Review cautions conservatives not to dismiss or ignore the allegations. David Leonhardt writes in the New York Times about the cowardice of the “if true” admonitions, which leave the speakers a perfect out.
Utah Representative Rob Bishop is close to his goal of “invalidating” the Endangered Species Act.
Trump’s voter “fraud” commission, which is itself based on a fraudulent premise that pervasive voter fraud exists, has been sued by one of its members, alleging violation of transparency laws and other malfeasance by the Republican members.
A Trump nominee for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench who was unanimously ranked “not qualified” by the American Bar Association was approved in a party-line vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. The judge referred on his blog to “Hillary Rotten Clinton” last year and pledged support for the NRA. If you have a Republican Senator from your state, this would be yet another good reason to call and ask him/her to vote against Talley’s confirmation from the full body.
The swamp is so swampy that minor imbroglios like, say, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross lying about $2 billion in personal wealth just sort of slip under the radar.
They did, however, force one unqualified nominee to withdraw: Michigan state legislator Tim Kelly has his nomination pulled after it was revealed he wanted all Muslims banned from air travel. He’s also said that women aren’t interested in STEM careers, and efforts to encourage girls to pursue such careers are a waste of money. This leaves unanswered the question of what the hell his home district in Michigan is thinking.
One of my Senators, Chris Coons, is demanding an explanation for the ‘resignation’ of U.S. Attorney Dana Boente just days before Robert Mueller announced the first criminal charges in his investigation of the President’s campaign ties to Russia. Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked for Boente’s resignation in late October.
A Kansas City Star investigation led Antonio “Rico” Soave to end his campaign for Congress, as the story uncovered multiple instances of graft while Soave was the state’s Commerce Secretary – and forced Kansas Governor Sam Brownback to admit he’d fired Soave in June.
A fungus called coffee rust threatens the world’s arabica crop, exacerbated by climate change that extends the fungus’ active season.
Climate change is killing farm workers around the world, contributing to the rise of a deadly kidney disease or disorder of unknown cause. I heard about this from a reader who saw in my email newsletter that I like Flor de Caña rum; he mentioned to me that working conditions for their sugar harvesters are abysmal, and they’ve had a rash of deaths due to this disorder.
Also from the Guardian, those supposedly financially disciplined folks in Congress destroyed an expensive Arctic ice probe rather than pay to store it … because the probe would facilitate research on climate change. You read that right: They threw away a major investment because they didn’t want further proof we are warming the planet.
Louis C.K.’s film I Love You, Daddy has been pulled from distribution before its release due to revelations of his past sexual harassment of women. Meanwhile, Mel Gibson’s latest movie is out in theaters, even though he’s a pretty terrible human being too.
Paste calls on all comedians repped by 3 Arts’ Dave Becky to drop him as their manager, as he is accused of facilitating Louis C.K.’s sexual harassment of other comedians.
Tom Colicchio wrote a widely-praised open letter to male chefs urging them to do more to change the culture of restaurant kitchens, which he argues accept harassment as standard operating procedure and thus stymie the efforts of young female (or, I’d imagine, LGBT or nonbinary) chefs to advance in the industry.
Some baseball links: Fangraphs’ Jeff Sullivan asks if the pitch-framing market efficiency is closing.
Baseball America‘s Teddy Cahill looks at increasingly early college commitments from teenaged players, a practice everyone dislikes but no one wants to address.
Lindsey Adler (at Deadspin) had the best piece I saw on the Baseball Prospectus writer who didn’t exist. Ryan Schultz was the online persona of a girl, who started the act at age 13 and is now 21, who catfished numerous readers and writers via social media and later multiple sites.
Mike Tanier writes on Bleacher Report that the NFL has passed the point of no return with Colin Kaepernick as teams give quarterback jobs to vagrants grabbed off the streets rather than call the principled former 49er.
The World Health Organization is now advising farmers to avoid using antibiotics in healthy animals, given the practice’s contribution to the evolution and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Why hasn’t California cracked down on anti-vaccination doctors? These quacks are exploiting “medical exemptions” rules, but so far, none has been charged with any form of fraud. If you live there, call your state rep or senator to demand real action on this, before there’s another measles outbreak.
There’s a new shingles vaccines that is vastly more effective in older patients than any previous vaccine. It uses a new type of adjuvant that might change how vaccines, especially those for patients over 50, are developed.
Michigan Republicans are pushing forward bills to allow concealed carry in churches and schools.
Cincinnati politicians are trying to gift FC Cincinnati team owners with a publicly-funded stadium in the town’s Oakley neighborhood. Call your local reps and tell them you know what a colossal waste this is.
I agree with President Trump! The federal government needs to revoke the Church of Scientology’s tax-exempt status. It’s a real-estate holding company running a long con on members, and harassed its way into this status in the first place.
Is vermouth making a comeback? Sales are on the rise, largely due to the wine’s use in certain cocktails, like the Negroni and the Manhattan, which are seeing revivals as well.
A Macallan 1878 bottle reported to be worth $300,000 has been exposed as a fake, likely produced between 1970 and 1972.
Astronomers have discovered the first known star to survive a supernova, eventually exploding five separate times over a two-year period.
Mental floss looks at how the death of a chemist in 1996 changed how labs handle dangerous chemicals forever.
Five tips for helping your anxious child (or yourself). They check out for me at least.
Anti-abortion activists are very successful on Twitter, says a pro-choice writer for DAME magazine. Much of what she describes here, like hashtag hijacking, reflects a flaw in the machine, exploited well by one side.
Necessity breeds invention: Food shortages in North Korea have boosted a black market in privation foodstuffs, many of which are made from soybeans.
The 7 Wonders app, in development for at least two full years, will be released for iOS this Tuesday, November 14th, with an Android release coming on December 20th.
An English reporter who happens to be black interviewed white supremacist Richard Spencer on camera, and he let the racist show his true colors. If anything, I wish Younge had let Spencer keep talking; he’s hardly the well-groomed intellectual he pretends to be.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alcohol, anxiety, baseball, chemistry, climate change, coffee, food safety, links, longreads, rum, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ October 21, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/21/17.

I wrote two scouting posts for Insiders from my week in the Arizona Fall League, which you can read here and here. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I reviewed the card/dice game Valeria and its new expansion here on Friday; my next boardgame review for Paste will go up in early November. I also posted about a big boardgame app sale going on right now from Asmodee Digital.

The schedule for PAX Unplugged, a new boardgaming con to be held in Philadelphia in November, is now up. I’ll be signing copies of Smart Baseball there on November 18th and plan to attend the entire event.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Climate change is warming the Alaskan permafrost, affecting residents and potentially releasing an enormous amount of sequestered CO2 into the atmosphere, thus further accelerating global warming.
Meanwhile, Kiribati, an island nation in the central-south Pacific, may cease to exist due to climate change and rising water levels.
ProPublica investigates a new white supremacist group that espouses violence but isn’t on authorities’ radar, at least not yet, despite their involvement in multiple violent incidents.
The drug industry lobbied Congress heavily to emasculate the DEA so they could sell more opioids, and Congressional Republicans (with the help of at least two Democrats) were more than happy to oblige, even as opioid addictions and deaths continue to surge.
The National Review‘s Kevin Williamson weighs in on the “white minstrel show” that has replaced traditional, values-based conservatism with an opportunistic blend of populist anti-elitism and an abdication of personal responsibility.
Mother Jones argues that voter suppression tipped the scales in Wisconsin and possibly in the entire election. Voting rights are under attack in most of the south and midwest despite a lack of any evidence of systemic voter fraud.
The New Yorker looks at what a Mike Pence Presidency might look like, given his ultra-conservative views on pretty much every topic.
The media reaction in Italy to director/actress Asia Argento revealing that she was sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein has revealed how backwards the country is when it comes to women’s rights. Many writers have blamed her, or said she should be grateful to Weinstein, or argued she must have consented because she wasn’t injured. It’s right out of the 1970s.
Deadspin writer Lindsey Adler asks why this time would be any different from previous revelations of serial sexual abusers’ actions, like Bill Cosby just a year or so ago.
Victims of Michigan State & US Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar spoke up for 20 years, and no one did anything about it. Even now, he’s going to jail on child pornography charges, not on the dozens of sexual assaults he committed against mostly children.
Chef Jose Andres has been working tirelessly in Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria devastated the island, serving nearly 1.5 million meals to hungry residents.
Meanwhile, the federal government is sending beef jerky and cheese-flavored crackers to Puerto Rico and calling them meals.
Budding theocrat Roy Moore, removed from the bench for refusing to accept the separation of church and state (on gay marriage, displaying the Ten Commandments, and so on), now has a large lead in the Alabama Senate race to fill the seat vacated by Jeff Sessions.
The Columbia Journalism Review argues that media outlets’ restrictions on reporters’ social media activity will backfire, failing to convince readers that the reporters are unbiased while also reducing the value of social media itself.
Irony alert: Anti-fascist (or just plain old anarchist) protesters disrupted a UCLA event focused on civil discourse and free speech co-sponsored by the Holocaust Museum. Perhaps irony isn’t the right word; ignorance may fit better.
A mother shares her grief after her 5-year-old died from the flu and is channeling it to urge people to get the flu shot.
An epidemiologist explains why a recent British article arguing against the flu shot was dead wrong.
A Georgia lawmaker & former anesthesiologist suggested quarantining people with HIV, further underlining how utterly science-ignorant many of our elected and appointed officials are. It’s yet another reason to support 314 Action, a group dedicated to encouraging more scientists to run for office.
The first oral treatment for sleeping sickness is nearing approval in Europe, potentially replacing an expensive, difficult intravenous treatment. Sleeping sickness is spread by tsetse flies, and is found in sub-Saharan Africa, with over 2000 new cases a year and the last major epidemic lasting nearly two decades. It’s fatal without medication.
I didn’t realize InfoWars, the fake news empire led by hoaxer Alex Jones, profited by selling supplements to gullible viewers. It turns out two of their supplements contain dangerously high levels of lead, which can cause brain damage.
Nestle pays $200/year to bottle clean water in Michigan, just 120 miles away from Flint, where residents can’t drink their tap water due to lead contamination and pay over $200/month to the water utility.
Mexico is trying to cope with the invasive species they call “the devil fish” by cultivating a taste for this variety of catfish, which has squeezed native species out of its waterways.
Italian scientists are working to understand the supervolcano located just west of Naples.
A Los Angeles restaurant was caught selling reheated Popeye’s chicken as its own.
St. Helena, one of the world’s most isolated islands and a place best known as the place of Napoleon’s exile and death, now has its first commercial airline flights. Dubbed “the world’s most useless airport” by critics, the island’s small airstrip cost the UK government over $300 million to build.
This story has been well-covered, and it’s still ongoing, but I can’t get over the President of the United States insulting a dead soldier in a call to his mother. “He knew what he was signing up for?” Even if true, which I doubt, what a heartless thing to say to a grieving parent.
Boardgame news: There’s a new expansion for the Uwe Rosenberg game Fields of Arle, called Tea & Trade.
The upcoming co-op game Sleepy Hollow hit Kickstarter this past week and is already on the verge of hitting its funding goal.
Asmodee sent a copy of its upcoming game When I Dream, due out here on 11/23, up into the stratosphere on a helium balloon.
Europeans find our gun culture utterly baffling, as they should. A Dutch comedy program aired a segment describing the condition known as Nonsensical Rifle Addiction. It appears to have no cure.
This Atlantic story about a catfishing case that led to a happy ending seems too cute to be true, but let’s just go with it because we could all use some decent news.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, climate change, first amendment, fish, links, science, stick to baseball, vaccines, voter suppression

→ October 14, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/13/17.

For Insiders this week, I posted my first batch of scouting notes from the Arizona Fall League, covering prospects from the Cardinals, Yankees, Brewers, Orioles, Padres, Cubs, Rockies, and Twins. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

Later today (Saturday) I will be at Changing Hands in Phoenix, at 2 pm, to talk about and sign copies of Smart Baseball. I’ll also be signing books at PAX Unplugged, a new boardgaming convention that takes place in Philadelphia the weekend before Thanksgiving.

And now, the links…

Longread of the week: The New York Times on the rise of severe anxiety among American teenagers. The piece doesn’t really get at the question of why we’re seeing more cases, but does explore various treatment options and explain various signs of anxiety for parents to know.
As Puerto Rico’s humanitarian crisis deepens, with hospitals still without power and short of medicine and clean water, the President is threatening to pull FEMA and military support from the U.S. territory. Meanwhile, the 100,000 American citizens on the Virgin Islands are also largely without power and water several weeks after Hurricane Maria.
The New Yorker asks how many Puerto Ricans will move to the mainland given the awful conditions and awful federal response on their island. The money quote, from a Puerto Rican man whose house was destroyed by a Maria-induced mudslide: “All (Trump) brought to Puerto Rico were those napkins. And you know what everyone’s wondering? What we’re expected to wipe with them: our asses, or our tears.”
And the President, whose own Secretary of State called him “a fucking moron,” may be mentally unraveling, according to Gabriel Sherman for Vanity Fair.
DeAndre Harris, who was beaten by white supremacists in Charlottesville in August, was himself arrested on a dubious charge, as one of the racists did an end-run around police and convinced a (white) magistrate to issue an arrest warrant for Harris. The Washington Post has more on this story.
An Indiana lawmaker introduced a bill requiring journalists to be licensed by the state police. If you live there, maybe call your state reps and remind them of the existence of the First Amendment.
Video: A Connecticut man, angry after the Paris attacks of 2015, shot up a local mosque (after dark, while it was empty). Then he met the Muslims who worshipped there, and everything changed.
A terrorist tried to blow up the Asheville airport last week, but the media coverage has been virtually nonexistent.
A new study from the Food Climate Research Network at the University of Oxford found that grass-fed cattle don’t fight or reduce climate change. Previous theories held that grazing cattle would encourage carbon sequestration in the soil, but this study found the cows still … um … toot too much for that to matter. (Of course, grass-fed beef may taste better, may be more healthful for us to eat, and might be nicer to the cows themselves, since they’ve evolved to eat grass, not corn or soybeans or, worst of all, animal flesh.)
The Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry is retracting a junk-science anti-vaccine study mere weeks after publishing it. The study’s authors are familiar with the retraction process, having submitted a similar pseudoscientific paper to Vaccine in 2016, only to find it pulled back.
Gene therapy was hailed as the next great advance in medicine in the mid-1990s, but couldn’t delivery on its promises in that timeframe. Now its time might have arrived, as an FDA panel endorsed a gene therapy protocol to treat a rare form of retinal dystrophy, an inherited disorder that causes blindness in children.
Senate candidate Roy Moore, the Ayatollah of Alabama, claimed for years he wasn’t compensated for his work for a local non-profit when in fact he was receiving $180K a year for part-time work for the organization.
The University of Wisconsin has passed a new student conduct rule that threatens students who disrupt or interfere with others’ free expression with explusion. In other words, if a UW student group were to invite, say, white nationalist Richard Spencer to speak on campus, and a student disrupted his speech, that student could be suspended or expelled for it. The ACLU opposes the policy.
Shake Shack is introducing automated kiosks to take orders, possibly a response to rising minimum wage laws. I hate seeing low-wage jobs eliminated for automation, but as a fan of Shake Shack, I would say my #1 issue with the chain is the frequency of incorrect orders.
Bananas have been under threat for decades from a fungus that causes fusarium wilt (also called Panama Disease), which renders entire plantations incapable of producing fruit. Australian scientists might have a new banana that resists the fungus – but it’s genetically modified, which many people believe, incorrectly, is a Very Bad Thing.
Asmodee Digital just released an app version of the boardgame Smash Up, which is available for iOS devices, Android, and Steam.
Videogame developers are increasingly including pay-to-play loot boxes in games to try to counteract the industry’s punishing economics. The tabletop industry hasn’t had that problem yet, as consumers in that space seem more willing to pay $40-plus, even $100, months after a game has been released.
Sony plans to make a Settlers of Catan movie, which sounds like a really terrible idea.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anxiety, boardgames, climate change, first amendment, food science, links, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, videogames

→ October 7, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/7/17.

My lone Insider piece this week looked at the top under-25 players on playoff rosters, so of course someone complained that I’d left Manny Machado off the list. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Next Saturday, October 14th, I’ll be at Changing Hands in Phoenix, talking about and signing copies of Smart Baseball, starting at 2 pm ET. This Changing Hands location serves beer and wine, which may help make me more interesting.

And now, the links…

This BBC piece on a young adult who daydreams constantly, a habit that may be a disorder called maladaptive daydreaming, was the best thing I read this week.
Runner-up: An Eater piece titled Christ in the Garden of Endless Breadsticks.
The LA Times ran a six-part series on a con man who romanced women by pretending to be a doctor.
A woman whose fetus had a malignant tumor describes having an abortion at 23 weeks and why Republican attempts to ban such procedures are cruel.
The Trump Administration is refusing to let Puerto Ricans use food stamps to buy hot meals even though electricity and fuel are scarce on the island. But hey, they have those paper towels.
Trump’s pick for an EPA position overseeing chemical safety has previously argued that kids are less sensitive to toxins than adults (this is not true, by the way). Dourson defended himself at a confirmation hearing as “very science.”
Kris Kobach is trying to weaken key federal voter rights protections, part of his bogus “voter fraud” effort that continues despite the lack of any evidence of voter fraud occurring in recent elections.
Senator John Thune (R) of South Dakota blamed the Las Vegas shooting victims for failing to “get small” when the gunfire began. He’ll win reelection handily.
Harvey Weinstein is a sexual predator who has abused his power in the movie industry to harass young women and worse. I would like to see the industry turn its back on him, but given their recent history, I doubt that’ll happen. The New York Times has been calling on Democrats to cut ties with him, but it seems like that’s already starting, just nowhere near fast enough.
Sweden’s economy has more restrictions and higher tax rates than that of the United States and most other European nations, so why does Sweden have so many startups? The answers hinge largely on how laissez-faire you like your capitalism. There are good lessons here for when we have adult supervision in the United States again.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics went to three scientists for the 2015 discovery of evidence of gravitational waves as predicted a century ago by Albert Einstein.
The Red Cross stands accused of failing to deliver aid to victims of Hurricane Harvey despite a massive fundraising effort after the storm.
Contrary to popular belief, tropical forests add CO2 to the atmosphere, rather than trapping it. Of course, it’s because of what we’ve done to those forests.
The Guardian looks at how the residents of the Scottish island of Eigg bought their own island back after years of private ownership.
Splinter listed every member of Congress who took money from the NRA and then tweeted that “thoughts and prayers” bullshit after the massacre in Vegas.
American fast-food outlets like KFC may be contributing to the rise in obesity in African nations like Ghana, according to this NY Times report.
Modern humans of non-African descent may owe some of our looks from Neanderthal DNA.
The Stranger‘s David Lewis posted as a white nationalist and attended a Seattle neo-Nazi convention.
The British pharmacy chain Superdrug is under fire for selling homeopathic products that don’t work. The firm that manufactures them won’t back up claims of efficacy, probably because homeopathy is bullshit.
A Detroit mother is going to jail for violating a court order to vaccinate her son, an order to which she had previously agreed. This is more a question of custody and family law than of science, but notable because she trots out the “able to make medical choices for my child” canard. Courts have ruled repeatedly that parents cannot deny medical care to their children, and have ruled that governments can require or, in case of epidemic, force vaccinations over parental refusals.
A small biotech company plans to introduce apples that don’t brown, but won’t specifically label them as “genetically modified” for fear of scaring off consumers. I’ve generally favored labeling GMOs because consumers do have the right to know what they’re buying, even if their choices are dumb, but this speaks to the rising science-phobia and anti-intellectualism across our culture.
A recent study by the National Soil Project found that soils from organic farms sequester 26% more carbon than those from conventional farms. If you have journal access, you can read the original paper here.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, links, physics, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ September 23, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/22/17.

I wrote three pieces for Insiders this week: scouting notes on Yu Darvish, more notes on Aaron Nola and some young Phillies hitters, and my annual look at players I was wrong about. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I’m down to biweekly game reviews for Paste, so the most recent one is from last week, covering the great Days of Wonder-published title Yamataï, by the same designer who won the Spiel des Jahres (game of the year) this year for his game Kingdomino.

My book, Smart Baseball, is out and still selling well (or so I’m told); thanks to all of you who’ve already picked up a copy. And please sign up for my free email newsletter, which is back to more or less weekly at this point now that I’m not traveling for a bit.

And now, the links…

Our federal government and many state governments continue to deny that anthropogenic climate change exists, even as multiple U.S. states and territories are battered by hurricanes (possibly) made worse by warming oceans. Our military, however, has accepted climate change for over 25 years and is planning around it, given its attendant security risks and operational challenges.
The New York Times reports that a massive drop in international travel to the U.S. cost our economy $2.7 billion just in the first quarter of this year. This kind of economic contraction hits everyone, including lower-income people in the service industries that gain directly from tourism spending.
Longreads: Indy Week, a North Carolina alternative newspaper, ran a three-part investigative series this July on the environmental and quality-of-life damage wrought by industrial pig farms in that state. I reviewed Barry Estabrook’s book Pig Tales, on the rise of Big Pig, this summer; he detailed how the North Carolina state government bent over backwards to remove regulations on industrial pork producers. This is the result: The swamp you want to drain is actually full of pig feces.
The Guardian offers a long, deep look at Luxembourg’s attempt to move from tax haven to space-mining haven, courting investors who wish to privatize celestial assets like asteroids. The piece touches on many subjects, including the tiny European duchy’s odd history and questions of sovereignty.
The Verge looks at climate change, India, and the war against heat. Climate change will affect the entire planet, but heavily populated tropical countries may take the worst hit.
And my last longread of the week is on Longreads itself: a thorough look at the history, purpose, and problems with the federal Freedom of Information Act. Among other notable bits: why are fourteen federal ‘food boards,’ like the American Egg Board, now exempt from open records requests? (Because they might be breaking the law, of course.)
If you have kids, you need to ensure they get vaccinated against meningitis. A mother in England whose daughter died of meningitis type W shares her story; the girl came home from school very sick, but the telltale MenW symptoms weren’t there, and she died the next day.
Florida Power & Light has written – literally – state regulations that helped it to $1.7 billion in profits in 2016, including rules that forbid homeowners from powering their own houses with solar panels. And if the power grid goes out, you have to turn your solar panels off. In one of the sunniest states in the country, you can’t power your own goddamned house because the power company said no. I wonder if FPL is okay with candles.
The classic real-time strategy videogame series Age of Empires will return this fall with a new edition, and Ars Technica has a very long look at the history of the genre, including a lot of obscure titles I didn’t know. I loved the original AoE and AoE II but never could beat the thing on Emperor level.
Roy Moore is running for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, and has a real chance of winning, despite a total disregard for the doctrine of the separation of church and state, and such views on people of color as referring to Native Americans and Asians as “reds and yellows”.
A similar reactionary conservative is running in Arizona against incumbent Republican Senator Jeff Flake, who was a critic of Trump prior to the election but has cheerleaded many of the President’s nominations and orders, including that of Betsy DeVos, as Flake and DeVos share an antipathy towards public education.
Meanwhile, the swamp is rank: Health & Human Services Secretary Tom Price, a member of a fringe, anti-science doctor’s group, was caught billing taxpayers for expensive charter flights when commercial routes would have saved tens of thousands of dollars. Then he got caught doing it more. Vox has an overview of how he bilked taxpayers out of $300,000 by doing so.
And it’s getting ranker: the President has nominated a lobbyist who fought regulations to keep certain chemicals out of consumer goods to lead that regulatory program in the EPA.
Oh, I’m not done: he’s also nominated unqualified campaign workers to fill science-oriented positions at the US Department of Agriculture. The USDA is often useless, but this practice might gut the little it does to help ensure a modicum of safety in our food supply, or to stop rampant pollution from food producers like the pig slaughterhouses mentioned in the longread above.
The coalition governing Iceland collapsed last week due to revelations of pardons its leaders were giving to convicted child molesters.
Tim Grierson looks at the fabricated mystique of “unplugged” concerts and albums.
A Royals fan in southern California donated a kidney to a Giants fan, and the donor told the recipient (they were friends already) with some help from the Giants and AT&T Park.
If you didn’t see this when I tweeted it last week, this story on the research grant that led to BRCA1 is absolutely remarkable and it too has a baseball connection.
Also from last weekend, Amber Tamblyn is done with men refusing to believe women, retelling the story of how James Woods tried to pick her up when she was just 16 years old.
This sounds like abuse, not love: actor Ian Somerhalder, whom I’d never heard of till Friday, threw out his wife’s birth control pills so she would get pregnant.
The rehabilitation of Sean Spicer is already well underway, according to Lauren Duca, with his Emmy appearance and tour of the talkshow circuit. Maybe we should pump the brakes, says Jay Willis at GQ.
Garrett Martin, my editor at Paste, asks Jimmy Kimmel to keep up the righteous anger and dispense with the jocular asides that detract from his very real, important message.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Store Full of Bullshit is now selling psychic vampire repellent. At least they’ve moved on from selling things for women to stick up their vaginas.
Should a restaurant that’s been awarded 3 stars by the Michelin Guide be allowed to withdraw its entry from the critical publication? The chef-owners say they want to cook their style of food without worrying about meeting someone else’s standard or maintaining the rating.
A neo-Nazi was walking around Seattle wearing a swastika armband and screaming at people on the street; various people, some of whom identify themselves as “antifa,” used social media to spread the word and find him, after which one of the activists knocked him unconscious with one punch.
Pete Wells of the New York Times named Razza in Jersey City as New York’s best pizza, which resulted, according to my sources, in a three-hour wait this past Wednesday night.
The late John Saunders, also of ESPN, wrote in his memoir of how his abusive father turned his best day into one of his worst.
Is The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness author Nassem Taleb a racist using flawed beliefs to justify investing in the Syrian regime? There’s some background to this, including links from within that piece, that was new to me; I thought Taleb was still a darling of pop-intellectual circles since his first two books became bestsellers. (I read The Black Swan and enjoyed it.)
Some white dude on Facebook, a friend of a friend of mine, posted a meme about how blacks owned slaves in antebellum America, so stop claiming it’s all racism or some such nonsense. The thing is it’s a lot more complicated than that, as Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates wrote in a 2013 post at the Root. Even better was the other white dude who responded that “slavery ended 150 years ago. Get over it!” Easy when those weren’t your ancestors in chains, I suppose.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, environment, florida, india, links, Music, pizza, pork, racism, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, video games

→ September 16, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/16/17.

For Insiders this week, I wrote two pieces, one on eight top 100 prospects who had disappointing years in 2017, and my last minor-league scouting notebook of the season, covering Yankees, Pirates, Nationals, and Cardinals prospects. I held my regular Klawchat on Thursday. My next column for ESPN will be my annual “players I got wrong” piece; if you have suggestions, throw them in the comments. I try to stick to players who’ve beaten expectations for more than just one season, although sometimes I waive that if there’s a particular story I want to tell.

Over at Paste I reviewed Yamataï, the new boardgame from Days of Wonder, which hasn’t fared that well critically or commercially but which all three members of my family really liked. It’s also a gorgeous game, which never hurts around here.

I have a ton of links from the NY Times this week, which requires a subscription above a certain number of free articles. I normally try to spread my links out across many sources, but the NYT had so much great content this week that I stuck with it. I’ve tagged a few of them as such for those of you who don’t subscribe (I do, obviously). And now, the links…

I stand with Jemele Hill, absolutely and unequivocally. The coverage of this – and ESPN’s handling of it, with which I do not agree – has been extensive, but Charles Pierce had the best piece I saw, with Dave Zirin’s a close second.
Professional douchebro “Pewdiepie,” who has a history of anti-Semitic behavior in his videos, dropped the n-word this week, and Garrett Martin explains at Paste why this has nothing to do with free speech. (Garrett is my editor at Paste as well.)
Meanwhile, the robotic responses of Trump supporters earned mention in the NY Times this week, notably how so-called “evangelicals” are fine forgiving unethical behavior by their President. This may be related to the Administration’s fervor for enacting regulatory policies favored by evangelicals (also NY Times), in spite of claims that they’d be a “hands-off” government.
Hard to avoid contrasting the Administration’s response to Hill’s criticisms with Canadian politician Jameet Singh showing how to handle a heckler who can’t even figure out that he’s not Muslim.
Longread: White residents of Alabama towns are seceding from their integrated local school districts, primarily to get their kids away from black students. (NY Times)
The leader of the DC-based group Smash Racism says Nazis shouldn’t feel safe in public. This is the kind of idiocy that allows neo-Nazis and their friends to talk about how the violence and hatred is “on both sides.” It doesn’t help that Newsweek tabs the founder of one tiny group as “a leader of the antifa.”
Politico wrote that Democrats’ attacks on Trump aren’t working according to polls and focus groups. Are those the right barometers here? I feel like polls and focus groups led most experts astray in November.
Meanwhile, a soi-disant Catholic politician in England has argued that abortion should be strictly outlawed, even in cases of rape or incest; the Guardian argues that this has nothing to do with faith and everything to do with the religious right’s obsession with sex. (Ted Cruz almost had this right!)
The Virgin Islands were hit particularly hard by Hurricane Irma, with St. John, which is mostly covered by a national park, absolutely devastated by the storm.
My alma mater had a tough week in the news. First, the rescinding of an admissions offer to convicted murderer Michelle Jones (NYT) earned the university criticism, but the coverage seems to dismiss the stated reason for the change – that Jones glossed over the fact that she beat and starved her son to death, focusing instead on the process by which she was accepted and then rejected. I’m not saying Harvard was right or wrong here, but that the story is complicated and opens a lot of questions about what we expect of people who’ve committed violent crimes but served long prison sentences and appear to be rehabilitated.
Then Harvard disinvited Chelsea Manning to be a visiting fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, sparking former CIA director Michael Morell’s resignation as a fellow there. Manning has implied strongly that this is about her being a trans woman, but that’s disingenuous at best; again, it’s complicated, and that papers over the real questions of when someone is truly acting as a whistleblower and when they’re putting their country at risk.
The least-covered major story of the week was the revelation that Brazilian miners slaughtered ten members of an ‘uncontacted’ Amazonian tribe. The broader issue here is that the Brazilian government has slashed funds and efforts to protect these indigenous groups.
This old mental floss post resurfaced this week but I think it’s worth sharing – it contains several good, simple tips for making better coffee at home. The one thing I would add, however, is to buy better beans: The time between roasting and grinding can be a matter of days or a matter of months, and there’s a huge difference between the two.
Nestle is buying a majority share in specialty coffee company Blue Bottle (NYT), which makes my favorite espresso blend ever – the sweetest-tasting coffee (in the literal sense) I have ever had. I feel like this probably isn’t good news.
And one reason of many is that climate change is hurting global coffee production. So as artisanal coffee roasters expand, the supply of quality beans is shrinking. Also, if you like coffee you should make sure you vote for candidates who accept that climate change is real and plan to do something about it.
Climate change is also making plants less nutritious for us. This exacerbates an existing trend, where Big Ag has bred plants for higher yields and aesthetic qualities, rather than flavor or nutrition. The article includes a quote from science-denier Lamar Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science, showing that he couldn’t science his way out of a paper bag. So, we should eat less meat overall because most meat production contributes to climate change, but climate change is making plants less nutritious for us to eat.
There’s a new type of chocolate called ruby chocolate, developed by Swiss chocolatier Barry Callebaut (NYT), with a different, sweet-tart flavor … and the color of Spam. Really, look at those pictures and tell me that doesn’t look like some sort of extruded raw pork product.
Chefs love to use sea salt and praise it over ordinary table salt, even though I’d guess 99% of people, chefs included, couldn’t tell the difference in blind taste tests. New tests show that sea salt is contaminated by microplastics too. Since one argument for sea salt over table salt has been the latter’s inclusion of iodine, I’m not sure this is good news for salt snobs.
Animal feed is helping spread antibiotic-resistant genes around the world.
Denmark reduced food waste by 25% thanks in part to the efforts of one woman, who emigrated from Russia to Denmark and was appalled at how much food was produced and trashed.
The failed state of Venezuela tried to tell residents to raise and eat rabbits so they’d have enough food to eat, only to find residents keeping the rabbits as pets. The country is devolving into a western Somalia thanks to the extreme socialist policies of its dictator, who, along with his predecessor, nationalized all industries, fixed the money supply, and pretended that oil prices would never drop (they have).
This Phoenix New Times editorial, written by a Phoenix native who moved to Portland, Oregon, argues that Phoenix is the better food town of the two.
Speaking of Phoenix, Motel 6 operators in the area appear to be providing ICE with lists of their guests to aid in arrests and deportations. Do they leave the light on for you after you’ve been sent to Mexico?
Siddhartha Mukherjee, who won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, writes in the New Yorker how looking at how the body may help cancer take root and grow may present a new approach to fighting the disease.
FiveThirtyEight shows, yet again, that September performance doesn’t matter in baseball any more than performance in any other month does. There is no “momentum” in baseball, there’s no “peaking early,” and there’s no benefit to “finishing hot.” Stop it.
I missed this when it happened a few weeks ago, but a Brewers minor leaguer, Julio Mendez, suffered a heart attack when he was hit by a pitch.
Julie DiCaro writes in the Washington Post about saying goodbye to youth football because of the risk of serious brain injury.
A man whose wife left him because he was abusive killed her and seven of her friends in Plano last week. When you hear someone ask why an abuse victim “doesn’t just leave,” well, here’s one reason.
Metallica’s Kirk Hammett told The Hub in Boston that Soundgarden’s Louder than Love inspired the “Enter Sandman” riff.
The Cassini spacecraft ended a successful 13-year mission by crashing into Saturn this week. The craft was originally only supposed to operate for three years, but went a decade longer and sent back over 400,000 photos of the sixth planet, its rings, and its many moons.
Boardgames! Two big new titles on Kickstarter this week. Cerebria, one of the best new titles I saw at GenCon, hit Kickstarter on Tuesday and surpassed its funding goal in the first 24 hours.
Greenbrier’s fantasy/tabletop game Champions of Hara has also beaten its funding goal, with 12 days left in the campaign.
Also, the boardgame Evolution is heading to your computer in videogame form.
Codito is updating some of its great iOS boardgame apps for the 64-bit OS, and has put their titles on sale for 99 cents each, including Tigris & Euphrates, Le Havre, and Reiner Knizia’s Ra. I recommend all three, especially at that price.
A Pennsylvania state legislator said he’d be fine killing a protester who was blocking his path on the road.
Academics claim to have rediscovered thirty “lost” English words, such as quacksalver, rouzy-bouzy, and the very relevant sillytonian.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: apps, baseball, boardgames, climate change, coffee, food waste, links, phoenix, science, stick to baseball

→ September 9, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/9/17.

I wrote two Insider pieces this week, naming ESPN’s 2017 Prospect of the Year (hint: it’s Vlad Jr.) and covering and on the strange saga of Juan Nicasio over the last ten days. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Last week, I wrote about the major Game of Thrones-themed boardgames for Vulture. My next boardgame review for Paste will come this week.

And now, the links…

This week’s top longread is one of the longest I’ve posted, and it seems likely to garner a slew of awards for the Houston Chronicle: They told the stories of five Houston residents through Hurricane Harvey, from prelude to aftermath as the storm dropped over 51 inches of rain on the country’s fourth-largest city.
Jacobin forecasts a Republican-led attempt to remake state government, schools, and the social support system in Texas in the wake of Harvey, and they don’t like what they see.
That article discusses Betsy DeVos’ war on public schools, and the Atlantic looks deeper at myths that poison our view of public education in America.
At the other end of the spectrum, New York City public schools will now offer free lunch for all students. Given the connection of adequate nutrition and caloric intake to students’ long-term success, this isn’t just compassionate – it’s sound educational and social policy. We should see enough savings and/or economic growth in the long run to more than pay for this program.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The First White President” piece was deservedly trending this week. Our President is a de facto white supremacist, and one of our two major political parties is going along with it so they can get the tax breaks they want.
A two-decade campaign by “conservative” science-denial groups fueled the U.S. exit from the Paris climate accord earlier this year.
Richard Branson owns Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands, and his home there was completely destroyed by Hurricane Irma. If a luxury home, likely built with top-end materials and to a sophisticated design, gets wiped out by the storm, what chance did lesser structures on other islands stand?
I tweeted this link last night, but it’s worth repeating: Tim Duncan wrote asking Americans not to forget the U.S. Virgin Islands, two of which (St. Thomas and St. John) were devastated by the storm. (St. Croix is far enough south that it escaped the worst impact.)
I linked to Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s profile of Dylan Roof a few weeks ago, and this week she appeared on the Longform podcast to discuss it. The conversation is enlightening for the first 2/3 but loses some speed, and I was surprised to hear Ghansah misuse or mispronounce so many words.
From May, Jalopnik posted this hard-to-believe story about a man who became “addicted” to buying BMWs, to the point that he embezzled money from his employers and lost his job, house, family, and freedom.
A youth hockey coach who stood accused of raping one of his former players is going free after the player in question died of a drug overdose. This story is more about the former player, David Gove, and how the abuse led him into a descent of heroin addiction and homelessness, but the world needs to know that this accused predator remains at large.
A former Florida State professor who lost her job for blowing the whistle on favoritism granted to football players in their so-called “classes” died of an accidental drug overdose, the result of a mix of medications for pain after back surgery and anti-depressants she was taking in the wake of FSU officials damaging her career.
FiveThirtyEight looks at the U.S./North Korea war of tweets (and missiles) and decides it’s time for some game theory.
New York is about to vote on whether to hold a Constitutional Convention. If they don’t do so, their next chance to hold one will come in 2037.
Two House Republicans say they only signed an anti-gerrymandering amicus brief by mistake and later removed their signatures from it. How bad is our climate when a politician can endorse gerrymandering like that and suffer no consequences?
Eater profiles Milk Bar CEO and mastermind Christina Tosi as she and David Chang try to take the dessert-bar brand to other markets.
Forbes profiles a 23-year-old woman who makes $60K a month as an online consultant and claims she has advice to help others do the same. The counsel she offers is trite, she almost certainly started life with some huge advantages, and the whole thing reads like unintentional comedy to me.
The Nib gives us a graphic essay in defense of Twitter. I agree with the positives the author identifies here; Twitter has been tremendous for my career, and several people I now consider close friends were originally Twitter acquaintances.
Malaria had been considered eradicated in Italy, but a four-year-old girl died there from malaria last week. The biggest concern here is that climate change may allow the spread of disease-bearing insects to latitudes previously unaffected by those pathogens.
Chaldean-Americans in Michigan, who voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, are now at risk of deportation due to his policies.
Aeon goes into the information-theory work of polymath Claude Shannon, whose insights on the probabilistic nature of much information paved the way for modern data-compression techniques.
The Broward County Republican Party Secretary refuses to resign even after officials discovered he tried to kill a girl in 2007. I’d love to know how he managed to plead out to a misdemeanor on this. Maybe because his grandfather was rich and well-connected?
Chinese law says that a woman can’t have a C-section without her family’s permission; when one very pregnant woman didn’t get that permission, she killed herself in the hospital. The U.S. hasn’t been tough on China’s human rights violations in decades; it’s certainly not going to get any better under the current Administration, given the Trump family’s business dealings in the autocratic state.
The Economist looks at the toxic relationship between Angola and the D.R. Congo, where the smaller, oil-rich former Portuguese colony can’t stop meddling in the larger, failed state that separates Angola from its main oil-producing region of Cabinda.
I linked last week to a story about Google pulling funding from a think tank that published opinions contrary to Google’s interests in European antitrust matters; Gizmodo ran a related piece after that, from a writer who says Google pressured her to pull a critical column, saying she had violated an NDA her bosses had signed before the meeting. She claims the NDA didn’t exist. It’s unclear what the whole story is here, but the subject of her original article doesn’t reflect well on the company regardless of whether it should have been published.
The New Yorker managed to dig up Jared Kushner’s Harvard admissions essay!

Boardgame news will return next week; I know of two significant Kickstarters to launch on Tuesday, but at least one of them is currently covered by an embargo so I can’t talk about it just yet.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, climate change, dessert, links, math, stick to baseball

→ September 8, 2017
→ By keith

Half-Earth.

Biologist E.O. Wilson has won two Pulitzer Prizes for Non-Fiction, including one for, of all things, a textbook on ants, along with numerous other awards for his lengthy bibliography of popular and scholarly works on evolution, sociobiology, ecology, and conservationism. His 2016 book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life falls into the last category while drawing on multiple fields of expertise to make his case that we should preserve half of the area of the planet for conservation to maintain biodiversity and fight climate change, but for a work by a great scholar and professor, Half-Earth feels half-hearted, as if Wilson knows what he wants to argue but couldn’t be bothered to support his side sufficiently to sway the unconvinced.

The idea of preserving half of the planet, land and sea, for conservation isn’t new nor is it Wilson’s; he credits Tony Hiss with coining the term “half-earth” to describe the concept in a Smithsonian magazine article in 2014. And there’s little doubt that man’s impact on the planet – its environment and the millions of other species on it – has been a net negative for everyone but man, with the pace of change only accelerating as we continue to alter the compositions of the planet’s atmosphere, soil, and water supply. Wilson does well when describing what we might lose or have already lost as a result of our mere presence or our industrial activities, talking about habitats we’ve razed or species we’ve driven to extinction deliberately, through the introductions of invasive species, or through other changes to the environment. But he assumes that the reader will see these losses as significant, or even see them as losses, without sufficiently detailing why it matters that, say, we’re wiping out the world’s rhinoceros population, or various island birds and rodents have been exterminated by the introduction of non-native snakes.

What’s missing even more from the work, however, is a consideration of the costs of an endeavor like the one Wilson is proposing. Man is fairly well distributed across the planet, and setting aside 50% of its land mass for conservation would require resettling hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, many of them members of indigenous populations who live in the least-altered environments on the planet. Crowding the planet’s seven billion people (and rising) into less of the space will trade some environmental problems for others, as various forms pollution rise with population density, and many large urban areas already struggle under the weight of their people, with third-world megacities paralyzed by traffic and its attendant problems. Relocating people is expensive, difficult, and traumatic. There’s also the very real question of feeding those seven billion people and supplying them with fresh water, which we’re already struggling to do; if you reserve half of the world’s land and half of its oceans for conservation, those tasks become more difficult and likely more expensive – a cost few people will be willing to bear directly. It might be necessary, but Wilson glosses over the practical problems his solution would create.

There is, however, one good reason to read Half-Earth right now, at least in the United States, where the current federal administration is rolling back environmental protections left and right, including cutting funds for wildlife area acquisition and management. But I thought Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-winning book The Sixth Extinction made the same general case more powerfully and thoroughly, describing the current, anthropogenic mass extinction that could rival the K-Pg event for sheer number of species exterminated if we don’t do anything about it. Kolbert goes into greater depth with more concrete examples of how man’s activity has altered the planet and moved species around to extinguish some species and threaten others, including a lengthy discussion of chytrid fungus, a thus-far incurable ailment that is killing off tropical frog species with alarming speed.

I think Wilson also fell into the trap that William Easterley (among others) has identified in charitable and other “good intentions” efforts – aiming impossibly high, so that you can never meet your stated goal. You want to end world hunger? That sounds great, but it’ll never happen, and the only outcome will be the creation of a giant organization that absorbs donations without ever accomplishing much of anything. Micro-efforts yield more tangible results, and increase accountability for workers and donors alike. So while saying “let’s reserve half the planet to save it” is an admirable goal, and may even be the right strategy for the long term, it ain’t happening, and talking about it doesn’t get us any closer to solutions. If you want to help save the planet, work towards small, achievable goals. And right now, that probably means working for change in Washington.

Next up: Nina George’s 2013 novel The Little Paris Bookshop.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, environment, evolution, history of science, non-fiction, science

→ September 2, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/2/17.

For Insiders this week, I wrote four pieces. I broke down the Astros’ trade for Justin Verlander and the Angels’ trade for Justin Upton. I put up scouting notes on prospects from the Yankees, Phillies, Jays, and Rangers. And I looked at five potential prospect callups for September. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

At Vulture this week, I looked at five major Game of Thrones-themed boardgames, not just reskinned games but several original titles like the excellent GoT Card Game. For Paste, I reviewed the Tour de France-themed boardgame La Flamme Rouge, which is light and good for family play. And here on the dish I reviewed the strong app version of the two-player game Jaipur, a steal at $5.

I’m trying something new this week, and if you find it useful I’d appreciate your feedback. I get a lot of press releases on boardgames from publishers, so I’m including the best of those at the end of this run of links along with boardgame-related news items. These will include Kickstarter announcements that look interesting to me, and if I’ve seen a game at all I’ll indicate it in the blurb.

This is your regular reminder that my book Smart Baseball is available everywhere now in hardcover, e-book, and audiobook formats. Also, please sign up for my free email newsletter, as my subscriber count is down one after I removed that one guy who complained about the most recent edition and called me a “tool.”

And now, the links…

Longread of the week: GQ sent essayist Rachel Kaadsi Ghansah to South Carolina to look for answers in the background of mass murderer Dylan Roof, although I don’t know that she found any. This was a severely mentally ill man with a criminal background who was allowed to purchase a gun.
Another longread from Lapham’s Quarterly, published a few years ago: On the brief career and unsolved disappearance of Barbara Follett, a child novelist who published two novels and wrote two more before her still-mysterious vanishing at age 25.
A German mathematician claimed he has solved the P vs. NP problem, and done so with the negative (but most likely correct) answer that P does not equal NP – that is, that there are some computational problems (NP) that cannot be reduced to equivalence with other problems (P) that we know can be solved in polynomial time. Norbert Blum has since posted a comment on the proof’s page saying “The proof is wrong,”, so perhaps we’re still not there yet.
The planet is warming, including the oceans, and that latter temperature increase could lead to much smaller fish.
Consumers are increasingly demanding antibiotic-free meat, including chicken, but can chicken producers “afford” to make the switch? Of course they can, and maybe meat will cost more in the end, but the cost of doing nothing – of continuing prophylactic use of antibiotics and dealing with the multi-drug resistant bacteria that will result – is far greater.
Eight of the 28 members of a DHS advisory panel on cybersecurity quit en masse last week, arguing that the President is ignoring threats to critical infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to fill the swamp with political appointees, often taking people from industry and putting them in regulatory positions overseeing those businesses, as ProPublica continues to investigate these unreported hirings.
Presidential adviser (and son-in-law) Jared Kushner is hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to foreign investors on a building he sort-of owns in Manhattan. Bloomberg investigates Kushner & associates’ attempts to solicit new investments from foreign sources as well as the troubled finances of his real estate firm.
A reader passed along this 2007 study of New Orleans residents who chose not to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina hit, looking at reasons why they didn’t leave. The “Perceived Barriers to Action” section of the conclusions is the money part – literally, as financial barriers were a significant issue.
Jay Caspian King looks at why some new sports stats catch on and others don’t for the NY Times. I think he undersells the point in his last paragraph about our obsession with round numbers, though.
One of my colleagues, Ed Cunningham, walked away from his job as a football announcer because he was concerned about the impact of brain injuries in the sport.
Awful Announcing looks at Joe Sheehan and his subscription-only newsletter, and how he’s managed to make a living charging for content in an era where free content was still king. Disclaimer: Joe’s a good friend of mine dating back to the early days of Baseball Prospectus.
A Yemeni social media star who’d reported on and criticized both sides in that country’s devastating civil war has been abducted by Houthi rebels, the forces loyal to Yemen’s deposed dictator. The civil war has led to countless deaths and a cholera epidemic.
Parents of autistic children have become targets for a host of unproven or dangerous “treatments” for the genetic condition, a situation exacerbated by what the writer calls “online filter bubbles” of shared junk science stories.
The University of Tampa fired a professor who suggested Hurricane Harvey was karma for Texas Republicans. I can’t blame them – it was stupid, insensitive, and obviously false. You can have those thoughts, you may even be entitled to share them in your classroom, but once you put that on social media for the world to see, you’ve changed the stakes.
Speaking of Harvey, the Washington Post asked Texas Republicans who voted against aid for victims of the ‘superstorm’ Sandy in 2013 to defend their votes; only one answered, and he did so with a lie about the Sandy bill. The Republicans also failed to answer the Post‘s questions about Harvey and climate change.
Trevor Noah offered a ridiculous, specious criticism of the “antifa” movement in what seemed to me like some sort of weak-ass attempt to satisfy a fairness doctrine. In fact, law enforcement authorities, including the FBI and CIA, appear to place the blame for so-called “antifa” attacks on Trump himself, due to the “inflammatory rhetoric and policies” he’s espoused as candidate and now president.
A size-10 model has returned her beauty pageant crown after the event organizers told her to lose weight. There are several pictures of the woman in the article, and if that woman needs to shed some pounds, then I’d say 99% of the planet is obese.
A first-time author appears to have gamed the NYT Bestseller list largely through bulk sales of her own book. The author, Lani Sarem, has denied any shenanigans. I found it surprising that the Times‘ bestseller lists are still assembled in such an ad hoc fashion more than 20 years after the music industry went to hard sales data collected by SoundScan.
The Guardian asked three authors to discuss their favorite Philip K. Dick novels ahead of this fall’s release of a sequel to Blade Runner, which was based on Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I was surprised none of them discussed The Man in the High Castle, my favorite PKD novel and his lone book to win the Hugo Award.
The Guardian also ran an op ed this week arguing that Google, Facebook, and amazon should be “nationalized” because of their quasi-monopoly status. This is a pretty terrible idea across the board.
But it does appear that Google dropped the hammer on a think tank it supports, leading it to fire several of its experts, as one of the deposed academics writes in the Washington Post. This seems to go against Google’s “don’t be evil” policy.
The NY Times ran a quirky op ed this week in praise of memorizing poems. This used to be common practice, and it’s evident if you read novels from across the last 150 years or so that the practice has gone away, as quotes and allusions to classical poetry have declined.
Also from the Grey Lady, editorial writer Bret Stephens shared fifteen tips for aspiring op ed writers – but most of these are just good tips for writers, period.
I’ve never tried the video game franchise Overwatch in part because I hear it’s a lot of first-person shooting, and Paste opines that it’s time for the designers to give players something else to do. I never cared for the earliest generation of FPS games, like Castle Wolfenstein or Doom, and that’s around the time I started to fade out of video gaming.
Boardgame news: Kotaku looks deeper at Photosynthesis, one of the biggest buzz games at GenCon this year. I ranked Photosynthesis seventh on my list of the best new games at GenCon.
Playing boardgames with other people can make you a nicer person with better relationships.
There’s a new virtual reality version of Catan coming out for the holidays. I’m really not sure what the market for this is; how will VR add to the Catan gaming experience?
Plan B Games, founded by former Z-Man owner/head Sophie Gravel, announced Azul, an upcoming game with a Moorish theme and artwork, due out in October. They didn’t have this out at GenCon, so it’s new to me as well.
Greenbrier Games has reopened its Kickstarter for the fantasy/adventure boardgame Champions of Hara, which will also include some miniatures and upgraded artwork.
Greater than Games announced a Legends of Sleepy Hollow boardgame (PDF link), with a Kickstarter beginning on October 17th.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, chicken, climate change, links, math, philip dick, stick to baseball, unsolved problems, writing

→ August 16, 2017
→ By keith

Not a Scientist.

Dave Levitan’s 2017 book Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science couldn’t have come at a better time … or a worse one, I guess, if you’re at all rational-minded and believe that science is real and should inform policy decisions on science. Levitan’s book looks at the various ways our elected officials – really, our elected Republican officials in nearly every example in this book – either ignore science to suit their goals or twist it to justify bad decisions. He wrote the book last year, but it was published this spring, so while our Dear Leader doesn’t figure much directly in the meat of the book, Levitan has added an introduction to at least address the topic of anti-science, which is only growing in importance as the United States continues to cede any leadership role on global issues like climate change and ocean acidification.

This quick read will be pleasant enough for right-minded people who accept facts as they are, but it won’t tell you much you don’t already know. Levitan identifies about a dozen different tricks pols use to ignore scientific realities that interfere with their plans, and you won’t be surprised at the names that appear or the topics under discussion. Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe – I’d identify these guys as Republicans, but you know they all are – makes various appearances for his climate denial, since he’s in the pocket of the oil and gas industries and gladly ignores the evidence that man-made activities are warming the planet or that fracking is harmful. Trump and Michelle Bachman both appear for their vaccine denialism. Marco Rubio and Mike Huckabee also appear on climate denial. Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell both pushed the “global cooling” hoax – which was never a scientific consensus or proven hypothesis of any sort – as part of their denialism. Mo Brooks (Alabama) pushed some anti-science nonsense about immigrants spreading deadly diseases to justify his xenophobia. Rick Santorum appears for his bogus arguments against an EPA standard aimed at reducing mercury pollution in the water and air. George W. Bush gets quite a bit of ink here for the reasons he used for cutting funding for basic research. There are, to be fair, a couple of Democrats in here, including former DEA head Chuck Rosenberg, who threw out some serious bullshit on the topic of marijuana to try to rationalize the government’s treatment of it as a drug as dangerous as cocaine or meth. Even Barack Obama gets a little smackdown, although in his case, his error was overstating the benefits of a scientific endeavor, the Human Genome Project.

The readers who would really benefit from Not a Scientist are the folks least likely to read it: The politicians I just mentioned and all of the people who vote for them. Science is not subject to your personal approval. Vaccines work, life evolved from a single common ancestor, the climate is warming and it’s our fault, GMOs are safe, chemtrails are fake. You don’t get a vote on any of this – but you do get to vote every November, and many people (probably not many of you specifically) vote for candidates who publicly disavow or attempt to discredit settled science, all in the name of pursuing other policy goals. Their words and actions put everyone at risk – literally everyone, when it comes to climate change, and more than just humans, but coral reefs, tropical frogs, even many microorganisms whose roles in the global ecosystem we don’t even yet understand. This stuff matters, much more than whether two men living 2500 miles away from you get a piece of paper that says they’re married, but the Republican Party of 2017 has got everyone convinced that gays and ISIS are the real threats and climate change is some sort of progressive hoax. People who don’t get this, who vote for Inhofe and McConnell and Brooks and Rubio and of course the guy in the White House, need to read Not a Scientist. But they won’t, and their celebrations last November and this past January were just another nail in our collective coffins.

If this stuff bothers you as much as it does me, check out 314 Action, a new nonpartisan science-advocacy group that encourages more STEM professionals to run for political office so that we get voices in Washington DC and every state capital who speak out in favor of science and fact.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, climate change, denialism, non-fiction, politics, science, vaccines

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