links — Page 29

→ October 28, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/28/17.

No new Insider content this week, as I was writing up the top 50 free agents package. That and a look at the offseason trade market will run the week of November 6th. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

I spoke with Arizona’s KJZZ about my book Smart Baseball and the rise of Big Data in the sport. You can find links to buy the book here.

I also run a free email newsletter with personal essays and links to everything I’ve written since the previous newsletter. If you’re already a subscriber, thank you, and yes, I’m overdue to send another one out.

And now, the links, with boardgame stuff at the end as usual…

I don’t know how anyone could have missed it, but it turns out a tiny Montana firm with ties to the Secretary of the Interior somehow got the biggest contract to restore power in Puerto Rico. Then the Daily Beast‘s Ken Klippenstein got a hold of the contract itself, with some sweetheart clauses to protect this little company from pretty much anything, like, say, getting sued for doing a bad job. And now the White House is slowly backing away from the deal. Drain the swamp, indeed.
The longread of the week was clearly the New Yorker‘s profile of the Sackler family, who’ve made billions by selling opioids, often to addicts rather than people in pain. I wonder if any institutions, including my own undergrad alma mater, will return the money the family donated or take its name off any buildings.
The Atlantic goes long on the potential negative impacts of increased personalization of news – that is, limiting what each of us sees based on what each of us seems to want to see. There are some positives from the algorithms behind these feeds, but newsrooms need the right people and technology to profit from them.
The New York Times looks at how an EPA stacked with former chemical industry officials is rolling back regulations on the use of chemicals where there’s strong evidence of harm to humans. Even more notable is the EPA PR official’s response to a request from the author here, which reads like a Facebook comment.
As more and more women come out against Harvey Weinstein, the women who’ve accused our current President of sexual harassment wonder why these accusations haven’t affected Trump at all.
North Carolina’s state legislature might be the most vile in the nation. The Republicans who control it are trying to rig the courts via gerrymandering after multiple judicial defeats.
Economist Paul Krugman says Trump’s proposed corporate tax cut amounts to $700 billion in foreign aid because of how much of corporate America is foreign-owned – and asks why on earth we would want to do that.
Media Matters argues that the Clinton/uranium investigation is “bullshit” promulgated by Breitbart and Sean Hannity.
The Environmental Defense Fund lists five environmental rules that industries have asked Trump to eliminate. As you might expect, they’re rules that attempt to protect consumers and/or the environment, but raise costs for certain industries.
Millennials are paying for news, contrary to every bit of nonsense you’ve heard about what millennials won’t do or what thing they’re ruining now. I wonder if some of this is a desire to get news from reliable sources given the prevalence of both fake news and highly biased ‘news.’
A Cornell professor who oversees a $22 million federally-funded program to improve school lunches has been accused of misinterpreting, omitting, and otherwise screwing up the data behind several of his studies, leading to at least three retractions by journals of papers he’s published. The New York Times explains one of those retracted studies, on kids and cookies. What I can’t find, shockingly, is any evidence the USDA might pull his funding.
Chef Dan Barber, author of The Third Plate, opened a pop-up in London called wastED, selling foods made from ingredients that would normally be discarded. He’s done it in NYC too.
A new Dark Matter coffee shop in Chicago will give 100% of its proceeds to suicide prevention while also serving as an outreach location that will provide support and training to the community.
Anthony Bourdain spoke candidly to Slate about his role in encouraging ‘bro culture’ in restaurant kitchens as the industry is dealing with the John Besh scandal (and surely more to come).
Amazon has been deleting unfavorable reviews for an anti-glyphosate book that has been accused of relying on weak or junk science, while also allowing reviews by associates of the author (a violation of amazon’s terms) to stay up.
Vulture (for whom I write occasionally) has oral history of the Seinfeld episode “The Contest”, which is particularly interesting for what went on with the network.
Paste (for whom I write more than occasionally) looks at the inherent violence within Castle Wolfenstein II, including the uncomfortable ‘storyline’ in the game.
Hillsborough wants to put the new Rays ballpark in Ybor City. Who’s going to pay for it? Are Florida voters dumb enough to fall for this trick yet again?
A man in Portugal beat his ex-wife with a nail-studded club and avoided jail because the Portuguese judges said his anger was understandable, citing an 1886 ruling and the Bible. A Portuguese politican called it “Sharia law in the Court of Porto,” a fair warning given the rise of hard-right theocrats, including Senate candidate Roy Moore, in the last two years.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has an agreement to develop a quayside neighborhood of Toronto, which a lecturer in the ethics of technology warns is a dangerous precedent.
Audio link: Richard Thaler, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, appeared on NPR’s The Hidden Brain to discuss the predictability of our unpredictability.
Author Patrick Tomlinson presented a thought experiment that he says puts the lie to anti-abortion arguments. Ben Shapiro, himself a pro-lifer, responded on his site, although I think at least two of his four points really miss the mark.
An Indian researcher and former English professor has worked for years to catalog the nearly 800 languages spoken in India, a number that may have dropped by 50% since 1960.
Boardgames! The Kickstarter for ROOT, a new asymmetric game from Leder Games, blew past its modest $24K funding goal in the first five days.
Asmodee announced Fantasy Flight Digital, a new division that will bring FFG titles to tablets and Steam. Fantasy Flight is best known for its Star Wars miniatures and dice games, Netrunner, Game of Thrones, X-COM, and new hit Legend of the Five Rings, but also has some straight Eurogames like Hey That’s My Fish and Ingenious.
Asmodee also released a teaser for the upcoming app version of the complex strategy boardgame Scythe.
The New Yorker looks at the ‘resurrection’ of Dungeons & Dragons, although I know the game never really went anywhere, and of course it inspired hundreds of later games, both RPGs and many tabletop games that integrate role-playing or dungeon crawl elements.
I don’t care for Scrabble or the knockoff Words with Friends, but enjoyed this Vice piece on how WwF essentially hacked the game via its user-generated dictionary.
Rama.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, boardgames, food waste, gmo, Languages, links, longreads, stick to baseball, taxes, the swamp, tv

→ 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 30, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/30/17.

My one ESPN column this week is a free one, covering my awards picks for 2017, excluding NL Rookie of the Year, the ballot I was assigned (again). I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

I reviewed Azul, one of my favorite new boardgames of the year, for Paste, which will be my last review for them until November. I will continue to post reviews here in the interim.

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. I also have a new book signing to announce: October 14th at Changing Hands in Phoenix.

And now, the links…

Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are disasters after Hurricanes Irma and Maria swept through the northern Caribbean. The New York Times has had several superb (if horrifying) articles on the islands, like the massive economic toll in the Virgin Islands or the devastation of Puerto Rican farms.
Meanwhile, Nero is fiddling, and San Juan’s Mayor is done being polite, and the U.S. Army general in charge of relief efforts says he hasn’t been given enough troops or equipment. The Washington Post documents how the government’s response was delayed while the President played golf.
Longread of the week: Nicole Chung, who was born here to Korean immigrants and then adopted by white parents, writes about what it means to be “American” and dealing with family members who voted for Trump. Some of what she’s gotten back from family members, including her adoptive parents, is just appalling; I doubt I’d ever speak to my parents again if I were in her shoes.
A pair of must-reads on the Kaepernick/NFL/protest story from the New Yorker: Jelani Cobb on “ungrateful” as the new “uppity,” and David Remnick on Trump’s race-baiting demagoguery on the issue.
A Colorado University study found that vaccine denialists are getting louder and more pervasive on Twitter. Those of us who live in the real world and rely on evidence need to be just as loud in our defense of vaccines – and to fight to eliminate non-medical exemptions for schoolchildren.
A nurses’ union in Boston is suing Brigham & Women’s hospital for mandating flu shots. If you’re not willing to get a flu shot – safe, effective, and important for health-care workers – perhaps find a field other than medicine?
Jezebel looks at a new denialist ‘documentary’ about fraudster Andrew Wakefield, who lost his medical license in the U.K. after fabricating data that he then claimed showed that the MMR vaccine causes autism (it doesn’t, just to be ab-so-fucking-lute-ly clear on the topic.)
A fake Boston “antifa” account accidentally outed itself as Russian-based this week, but that’s far from the only fake leftist account run by Russian trolls.
Wild Beasts’ Boy King was my #2 album of 2016, but it’s also going to be their last as the British quartet announced that they’re calling it quits, with a new EP of leftover Boy King tracks to represent their final release.
The headline: “A Southwest passenger complained about dogs on her flight. Police forced her off the plane.” The full story: She claimed she had a serious dog allergy but didn’t have the required medical certificate. All the news coverage I saw made Southwest Airlines the villain, but it seems to me that the passenger was unreasonable. (And the police, but that’s another matter.)
Iraqi Kurds voted overwhelmingly for independence, a referendum that was quickly denounced by the Iraqi government and the Turkish government, the latter of which has a decades-long history of oppressing the Kurdish minority and whose autocratic President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is already threatening to starve them. If the Kurds do declare independence, this could be a Timor-esque situation and potential genocide … and our current President has done nothing but express admiration for Turkey’s dictator. Oh, and one of his resorts hosted a Turkish Airlines golf event last week.
Justice Neil Gorsuch voted to uphold the death sentence of a man convicted by a racist jury. Slate points out here how Gorsuch lied in his confirmation hearing because that’s just how it goes these days: Say whatever it takes to get elected/confirmed, then do what you wanted to do all along afterwards.
Swamp update: Trump nominated a candidate to head the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance who has previously worked for a Church of Scientology-funded health “board”. It’s a con – all of Scientology is – and while it may qualify him for this administration, we shouldn’t hire fraudsters for the DoJ.
Trump’s tax “reform” plan includes eliminating the estate tax; Bloomberg wrote in December how repealing it would be a huge windfall for him, his family, and his Cabinet.
Keith Olbermann argued that the President is using the Pittsburgh Penguins as his own political pawns (video).
The unelected official known as Ivanka Trump is taking steps to hide which Chinese suppliers manufacture Ivanka merchandise.
A number of Harvard professors have come out to publicly criticize the University’s handling of Michelle Jones and Chelsea Manning, revoking Jones’ admission and Manning’s invitation to speak in apparent bowing to public pressure.
FiveThirtyEight’s Rob Arthur has a deeper look at the juiced baseball in MLB this season.
CBS Sports’ RJ Anderson looks at catcher concussions and MLB’s battle with head trauma.
Columbia Journalism Review looks at how “pivoting to video” doesn’t really pay off.
Ugandan President (who has been in power since 1986) spoke about how genetically modified organisms will be critical to meeting his country’s food needs. You can buy non-GMO if you want, but don’t be fooled: It’s not better for you, and we will need GMOs to feed the world.
Roy Moore is the Republican candidate to fill the open U.S. Senate seat from Alabama. He believes homosexuality should be a crime. He’s also probably going to win.
St. Louis police practices have come under fire recently, such as these sweep arrests that brought in many innocent people last week.
In the wake of Hugh Hefner’s death, the Washington Post revisited the murder of Playmate Dorothy Stratten, shot by her ex-husband after her career took off.
With the Law and Order brand name now applied to a true-crime miniseries, The Ringer looks at how the original format found success by avoiding challenge, and how that formula won’t work with this current iteration.
Some local news: A Delaware mom says she was never informed her son was bullied or got in a fight at Maple Lane Elementary School in Claymont, the town at the northeastern-most tip of the state. The school officials appear to have failed to fulfill their obligations under state law here, which, of course, makes me wonder if this is an isolated incident.
Cape Cod isn’t exactly known for good food, but the Chatham Bars Inn, a well-known luxury resort on the eastern edge of the Cape, has started its own farm a few miles away in Brewster.
This started a few weeks ago but I just caught it last Saturday – Iowa Hawkeyes fans have a new and wonderful tradition: After the first quarter of each football game, they turn and wave to watching patients at the neighboring children’s hospital. Hey Iowa, you may produce some of the worst politicians in the country, but I’m glad you’re nice to sick kids!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, harvard, links, Music, 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.

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 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 26, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/26/17.

The big piece from me this week was about GenCon, the massive annual boardgaming convention held in Indianapolis; I went from Thursday to Sunday and my wrapup post covers every game I saw or tried, with a ranking of my top 20. I even slipped in a mention of some upcoming boardgame apps of note.

My latest piece for Insiders was a minor league scouting notebook covering prospects from Pittsburgh (Mitch Keller), Baltimore (Austin Hays), Philadelphia, and Colorado’s systems. I also did my annual rankings of the top tools in the majors: the top hit, run, and power tools, the best pitches of each type, and the
top gloves and arms for catchers, infielders, and outfielders. I don’t particularly love writing these pieces, but readers seem to enjoy them. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I gave a Talk at Google last month, discussing my book Smart Baseball, which you should definitely buy if you haven’t already.

And now, the links…

My friend Will Leitch speaks sense when he says the ESPN/Robert Lee flap was “much ado about nothing.”
Sam Miller described a trick play in a Rhode Island high school baseball game called skunk in the outfield. The play took 2:32 to complete and includes former Red Sox prospect Ryan Westmoreland.
Texas’ Republican Party believes so much in suppressing the vote that they’ve been wasting taxpayer money for six years fighting the courts and repeatedly losing. If the current Administration gets to pick some more federal judges, however, such efforts may end up succeeding.
The Interior Department has killed a study into the effects of coal mining on the miners. Trump’s Administration is obsessed with coal, which is dirty, exhaustible, and not a part of our energy future.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudoscience site GOOP has been hit with formal complaints of deceptive advertising, mostly because they claim their bullshit actually works.
Stephan Neidenbach, a middle school teacher in Maryland and operator of the @welovegv (GMOs and Vaccines) twitter account, has used FOIA requests to find conflicts of interest and malfeasance from anti-GMO academics. Genetically modified organisms are safe, and academics who attack them do so in contravention of the evidence on the topic to date.
“Poland Spring … coming to you straight from the water main.” A lawsuit says it’s just tap water, not spring water as the company claims.
Former Google engineer James Damore claims he was “fired for telling the truth,” but the truth is that his now infamous memo was based on some seriously flawed beliefs about science.
Jess Luther exposes the deep ignorance of deposed University of Minnesota football coach Tracy Claeys, who still doesn’t think he or his players did anything wrong.
The Washington Post looks at what actual anti-fascist protestors, dubbed “antifa,” do and believe. You’ll hear the alt-right/neo-Nazi camp use “antifa” to try to draw some false equivalence between racist shitheads and those who oppose them. Don’t fall for it.
A British prisoner is now in year 11 of what was supposed to be a 10-month jail term under the bogus claim that it’s for his own protection, as he has a history of self-harm. Family members are trying to get him released before he kills himself in custody.
VICE’s Tonic has a first-person account from someone who got a staph infection from a hospital visit.
The civil war in Yemen has been going on for 29 months, but is rarely in our news because there’s little oil there. A Saudi-led airstrike in the capital of Sana’a killed at least 14 civilians, including children, but nobody seems to care.
Angola, another country you never think about – John Oliver would do a map joke here – just elected its first new leader in 38 yeras. It’s expected to be someone from the outgoing dictator’s party, and the elections have been anything but free. Still, it’s their first change in leadership since 1979, and given their atrocious economy and widespread poverty, any change has to seem like a chance for optimism.
TIME looks at how youth sports became a $15 billion industry. If your kid has talent, s/he doesn’t need to go pay to play at events for scouts or coaches. Save the cash and put it in a tax-deferred account for his/her tuition instead.
I’ll end with one feel-good story: The cloakroom girl at a British opera house had to step in when the soprano fell ill – and wowed the audience.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, gender issues, gmo, links, middle east, pseudoscience, Sports, stick to baseball, voter suppression

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