My ranking of the top 100 draft prospects for 2015 is now up for Insiders, and I held a Klawchat afterwards to answer questions about it. I’ll be at UConn’s game today (Saturday) against Cincinnati to see Ian Happ before I head home for Mother’s Day.
And now, the links…
- A grieving yet proud mother writes about losing her 29-year-old daughter to mental illness.
- The New Republic offers a hopeful piece on the imminent decline of pseudoscience.
- What’s the best way to fight science denial? This piece argues that it involves showing other pieces of science denial first.
- A thirty-year study by the Rodale Institute found that organic agriculture beat conventional methods for energy efficiency, water quality, soil health, and other important variables. Organic produce probably isn’t any more healthful than conventional, there’s limited evidence that it’s more nutritious (that seems to be a function of the soil itself), and there’s minimal risk from pesticides on conventional stuff. But organic ag is way better for the soil and the water, and it should use far less fossil fuels as well.
- From last week, a reader sent along this rejoinder to the pro-TPP link I included in that post.
- Kickstarter is behind lots of success stories, including many acclaimed boardgames, but what happens when a crowdfunded startup goes south?
- I haven’t followed football at all since the 1980s, but I couldn’t stop reading this New York Times “where are they now?” piece on the first-round picks from the NFL’s 1990 draft.
- Excellent piece from the Washington Post on one woman’s 400-mile drive to end a pregnancy. Women who seek abortions are not merely heartless babykillers, and reducing access to abortion services doesn’t do anything to reduce the demand, only to increase the hardships for women who need them.
- Scientists have found feathered fossils of birds from 130 million years ago, about 5 million years older than the previous hypothesized date for the first birds to appear on earth. Those scientists, man. They keep doing stuff.
- You probably caught this one going around, but a school in Texas that taught abstinence-only sex education had a chlamydia outbreak. I’m sympathetic to parents who believe the choice to teach kids about sexual morality should be theirs, not the school’s, but there’s a public health aspect to the question too, and, more importantly, a growing body of evidence that abstinence-only education doesn’t work.
- Turns out that getting vaccinated for the measles reduces your susceptibility to a bunch of other illnesses to which the measles would make you more vulnerable.
- They didn’t have this class when I was there: Harvard engineering students spent a semester building the ultimate brisket smoker.
- Speaking of barbecue, Aaron Franklin of Franklin BBQ in Austin (and of those AmEx commercials) became the first pitmaster to win a James Beard “best chef” award. If you’ve had his brisket, and I have, he deserves all the awards. Like, even the Nobel Prize for Economics, which is kind of a made-up thing anyway.