math

→ October 21, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/21/23.

My second Arizona Fall League notebook went up on Monday, covering everyone of note whom I hadn’t written up in the first one. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I appeared on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about the League Championship Series and the Blue Jays, including prospect Ricky Tiedemann and the controversial decision to replace José Berrios with Yusie Kikuchi in what turned out to be their last playoff game.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has profited by spreading lies and half-truths about vaccines for twenty years now. A book his group, Children’s Health Defense, and his publishing partner Skyhorse put out about the COVID-19 vaccines used the photo of a 12-year-old who died when a malformed blood vessel burst in his brain on its cover, claiming he’d died from the vaccine. He was unvaccinated, and of course they used his photo without his family’s permission. This Associated Press story talks to several families hurt by Kennedy’s lies and his so-called activism.
A Koch-funded right-wing site, Cowboy State Daily, is injecting climate denial and transphobic rhetoric into Wyoming politics, crowding out legitimate news sites that adhere to basic journalistic standards. It’s part of the national Metric Media network, which has over 1200 sites across the country and also takes funding from the Koch family’s DonorsTrust foundation.
Arizona continues to deny native tribes water rights they were promised under a 1908 treaty with the federal government. A third of homes on the Navajo reservation do not have access to clean water.
The Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik looks at how anti-vaxxers are exacting a personal and professional toll on scientists, and we’re losing the war against such disinformation. Dr. Peter Hotez notes within the story the death threats, doxing, and other intimidation tactics he’s seen as a vaccine developer and advocate for vaccination and science in general.
Meanwhile, a new study in BMJ estimates that 27 would-be mothers in the UK died during the pandemic because of confusion over the safety of COVID-19 vaccines during pregnancy.
The Minnesota Reformer has a story on how small businesses in Minneapolis are pressured to hire off-duty cops as “security” in what sure sounds like a protection racket to me.
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen (R) owns a conglomerate of hog farms that are dumping huge amounts of nitrates into ground water in the state, but when a local journalist published an exposé in the Flat Water Free Press, Gov. Pillen attacked her personally by saying “the author is from Communist China. What more do you need to know?” I think I need to know when he’s going to clean up his hog farms, and I hope more journalists there put his pig’s feet to the fire.
Barbers Hill ISD in Texas suspended an 18-year-old Black student for wearing dreadlocks and is now forcing him to attend an alternative high school, despite the fact that Texas passed its own CROWN Act, prohibiting discrimination based on hairstyle, and the district already lost a lawsuit over the same issue in 2020. The district’s superintendent and deputy superintendent are both white, in case you were wondering.
Book-banning zealots in Iowa are having a field day by targeting any books with a ‘sex act,’ including numerous important works of literature like, ironically, the dystopian novels 1984 and Brave New World.
The federal government has begun distributing the $100 billion in funding for climate change mitigation projects under the Inflation Reduction Act, but it’s taking much longer than expected.
Trump, with the help of The Heritage Foundation, has a plan to gut the federal civil service and replace tens of thousands of employees with Trump sycophants in a return to the “spoils system” of the 1800s.
My friend Tim Grierson has a long, entertaining interview with Eddie Izzard on Cracked.com.
Scientific American looks at the “Sleeping Beauty problem” in probability, which has generated arguments like the Monty Hall problem and the question of that dress’s color.
A professor at UC-Davis tweeted a fairly overt threat against the lives of Jewish journalists, spurring an investigation by the university.
If ChatGPT can do much of the work in academic grant writing, does that tell us that the grant-writing process is broken?
Police in Newton, Iowa, have twice arrested a local resident for speaking out against the police at town meetings, so he’s suing them for violating his First Amendment (and other) rights.
The Azeri-Armenian conflict may move to Meghri, an Armenian town in a strip of land that separates Azerbaijan from its Nakhchivan exclave. Azerbaijan calls it the Zangezur corridor, and it borders Iran, which opposes any changes to the current structure, while Turkey and Russia appear to favor some alteration that would connect the two parts of Azerbaijan even at a reduction in Armenia’s sovereignty.
The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland argues that Benjamin Netanyahu has walked into Hamas’s trap, and Israel needs to remove him from power before the situation gets even worse.
Twitter Blue subscribers have become “super-spreaders” of misinformation about the Israel-Palestine conflict according to a brief analysis from the independent group NewsGuard, which attempts to rate the reliability of news sites.
The New York Times’ Katherine Miller writes about the rambling, repetitive speeches of Donald Trump as he pounds his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
St. Louis County police appear to have ignored erratic, threatening behavior from one of their own in the days leading up to him firing shots in the air at a trunk-or-treat event and shouting “you’re all going to die!”
Deepfake porn videos are spreading too fast for the available tools, and far faster than any government is moving to stop them. Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) did introduce a bill to ban deepfakes and step up enforcement, revising a similar bill she’d introduced in 2019, but it’s only at the committee stage and all sponsors are Democrats.
David Roth writes about how Michael Lewis was taken in by fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, as Lewis’ reputation continues to take hits after his cringy response to Michael Oher’s lawsuit against the Tuohy family. (Oher appears to have no dispute with Lewis over the book The Blind Side.)
The Chicago man who stabbed a 6-year-old Palestinian boy 26 times, killing him, and stabbed the boy’s mother as well appears to have been radicalized by right-wing media. The spread of disinformation and hate has real consequences.
Board game news: The Kickstarter for the roll-and-write game Merchants of Magick is 3x funded and still up for six more days.
This year’s Essen Spiel convention was the largest ever, bringing nearly 200,000 people to the German city for the biggest board game con in the world.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, anti-semitism, arizona, Armenia, board game news, environment, first amendment, iowa, israel, links, longreads, math, minnesota, nebraska, palestine, police, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, wyoming

→ January 22, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/21/23.

No new content for subscribers to the Athletic as I’ve continued writing capsules for the top 100 prospects ranking, which will run on January 30^th. Please stand by.

My podcast did return this week, with guest Seth Reiss, who co-wrote the screenplay for the film The Menu. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m planning to send out another issue of my free email newsletter on Sunday, now that I’m back on track with the prospect stuff. I was fairly stressed about it as recently a few days ago, but I’ve caught up enough that I can finish everything with a reasonable daily output of words.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A 17-year-old woman in Texas wanted an abortion. A judge decided she wasn’t “mature” enough to make that choice. ProPublica looks at the ramifications of that decision.

The BBC looks at the revolutionary TV show Homicide: Life on the Street on the 30^th anniversary of its debut. I can remember seeing it for the first time and being riveted. I’d never seen a TV show like that before.

The Ringer looks back at the Simpsons episode “Marge vs. the Monorail” on the 30^th anniversary of its first airing.

An epidemiologist and an emergency medicine physician debunk the whole “died suddenly” myth around COVID-19 vaccines. No, people are not dying suddenly of cardiac events from vaccines; we did see a jump in such cardiac deaths, but it came in 2020 and early 2021, due to COVID-19 infections.

New York’s Intelligencer explains how the theft of Ashley Biden’s diary might take down Project Veritas – but that the case is creating some surprising bedfellows for the right-wing hoaxers.

Also from Intelligencer, a longread on what it’s like right now at Twitter.

The San Francisco Chronicle has the heartbreaking story of a mother’s attempts to help her daughter, a 35-year-old opioid addict living on the San Francisco streets, touching on the city’s lack of services for addicts and for homeless people. There’s a sad baseball connection: The daughter’s boyfriend, Abdul Cole, was a Marlins minor leaguer for three years, but died last April.

A new research paper looks at decision fatigue in the context of baseball umpires.

The COVID misinformation-spreading Brownstone Institute is mostly funded by a small number of large, anonymous donations, and is led by a neo-Confederate advocate who has previously written for white nationalist sites.

LitHub has an excerpt from Dr. Henry Marsh’s new book, And Finally: Matters of Life and Death, as the 70-year-old neurosurgeon faces his own likely terminal cancer diagnosis.

Quanta looks at a 17-year-old who helped prove part of a theorem on the pseudoprimes known as Carmichael numbers, which are related to Fermat’s Little Theorem (not the more famous Last Theorem).

The School Board of Madison County, Virginia, voted to ban 21 books from its libraries, including The Handmaid’s Tale and four books by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, because Christian groups complained.

Meanwhile, two Christian activists in Crawford County, Arkansas, are trying to remove the library director and defund the system over the display of LGBTQ+ books, calling it an “alternative lifestyle.” Sexual orientation is not a lifestyle, or a choice. Gender identity is not a lifestyle, or a choice. Religion is a lifestyle, and a choice.

How does this shit happen? Because right-wing zealots have been pushing to take over school and library boards. The Christian nationalist group FlashPoint is even holding an event to train people to run for these positions.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) says that schools there cannot teach AP African-American History because of the state’s anti-anti-racism law.

And that same law has professors at universities across the state scrambling to avoid any possibility that their courses would be found to violate it. So a law that is supposed to prohibit “indoctrination” is increasing the likelihood students will receive indoctrination, but from the other side.

Iowa Republicans are trying to defund public schools by allowing parents to use vouchers for private schools, including religious schools, which would seem to violate the principle of separation of church and state. You can send your kids to a parochial school, but only without my tax dollars.

The City of Pittsburgh passed an ordinance prohibiting police from using secondary infractions as a reason to make traffic stops. The Chief of Police has told officers to ignore it.

Idaho Republicans are trying to “fix” the state’s anti-abortion law to avoid prosecuting women who have ectopic pregnancies, but within the article, you can see quotes from a legislator who wants to remove exemptions for cases of rape or incest and said that a woman who became pregnant after she was raped by a family member would view it “as the opportunity to have a child.” He also invoked Martin Luther King, Jr., of course.

Texas’s Supreme Court declined to block the state’s attempted takeover of the publicly elected school board in Houston.

Gregg Doyel says Tony Dungy should stick to sports and stop spreading anti-LGBTQ+ nonsense.

A couple of Eagles players recorded a Christmas album for charity, hoping to raise about $30,000. It raised $250,000 and will help fund two toy drives and a summer camp for Philly kids with serious behavioral problems. (We have a copy.)

Utah police investigated and then ignored complaints about child abuse from the daughter of the Mormon man who killed his wife, kids, and himself earlier this month. His 14-year-old daughter described serious physical abuse at her father’s hands less than three years ago, but no charges were filed.

Scottsdale has cut off a nearby town, Rio Verde Foothills, from its city water supply, leaving the residents to use rain water to flush their toilets. The subtext here is that the whole state is going to run out of water sooner rather than later.
A Republican candidate for the House in New Mexico was arrested for shooting at the homes of multiple Democratic legislators.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, arkansas, baseball, drugs, florida, guns, iowa, links, math, new mexico, pittsburgh, san francisco, social media, stick to baseball, texas, tv, utah, vaccines

→ May 14, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/13/22.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted a minor league scouting notebook, with comments on players from the Red Sox, Orioles, Rays, and Nats systems. My first mock draft for 2022 will go up on Thursday, May 19^th, and I’ll do some sort of chat or Q&A around it that afternoon.

At Polygon, I reviewed Ark Nova, the best new game I’ve played so far this year, a more complex title that draws heavily on Terraforming Mars but with streamlined rules and better art.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter yesterday, and I have to thank all of you who’ve sent such kind replies. I mentioned the possibility of an in-person event in London in August, and it looks like we’re going to be able to make that happen, with the help of a reader who works at a bookshop there. Speaking of books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

On The Keith Law Show, I got the band back together with Eric Karabell for a show last week. I was on the move most of this week (and then traveled again Thursday night) and didn’t have a recording window until Thursday morning morning, so I recorded next week’s episode with guest Jonathan Higgs of Everything Everything.

And now, the links…

The New York Times ran a multi-part series on how Tucker Carlson became the king of cable ‘news’ by leaning into white nationalism.
Far too many police departments are using far-right trainers to help teach their cops.
An Alabama OB/GYN explained what will happen to women’s health when the state’s theocrats finally get their wish and make abortion illegal, including a lot more maternal deaths, just like Jesus wanted.
AIPAC is working with the GOP to pour money into Democratic primary races to target anyone who might possibly at some point say something nice about Palestinian rights. You can support the progressive candidates they’re attacking here.
One of the more toxic figures in the board game (and sci-fi) worlds, Jon Del Arroz, was accepted as a member by GAMA, the Game Manufacturers’ Association and group that organizes the annual Origins board game convention in Columbus, and was immediately called out for his history of sexist and transphobic commentary. GAMA suspended him from their Facebook group, and now he’s threatening to sue them, as he’s done in other cases (including winning one suit where a group called him ‘racist’). It does remind me of a certain MLB pitcher’s tendency to sue or threaten to sue everyone…
The New Yorker looks at the strange life and disappearance of mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, one of the most important figures in the creation of the field of algebraic geometry.
The COVID-19 outbreaks in U.S. meatpacking plants in 2020 were the result of years of corporate safety violations and a coordinated effort with the Trump administration.
This 2019 piece looks at ethical and economic questions around a maize plant discovered on indigenous land in Mexico that can fix its own nitrogen (with the help of a symbiotic bacterium), which could be a massive boon to the global food supply. Who actually shares in this potential wealth?
I reviewed Honorée Fannone Jeffers’ incredible debut novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois earlier this week, and in the book she mentions “The Weeping Time,” a large slave auction held in Savannah in 1859 that was especially cruel to its victims. I wasn’t familiar with the story and found this 2014 Atlantic story on the largely forgotten tragedy.
Ticks are spreading across the U.S., abetted by increased (human & animal) mobility and climate change, and bringing new diseases with them.
The 2021 experiment where a biotech firm released genetically modified mosquitos in the Florida Keys has been a success, although proving its effect on long-term health outcomes will be difficult.
Amanda Makulec writes in the New York Times about how anti-vaxxer assholes used the death of her 3-month-old baby to try to claim the COVID-19 vaccines caused it so they could discourage pregnant women from getting these safe, effective vaccines.
The Tennessee nurse who was convicted of criminally negligent homicide after she accidentally adminstered the wrong medication to a patient received three years of probation but no jail time. Hundreds of nurses who were outside the courthouse protesting the prosecution cheered the decision. Prosecutions for medical errors are extremely rare, and criminalizing them is a dangerous precedent.
The women’s lacrosse team from Delaware State University, an HBCU in Dover, was racially profiled and threatened by a couple of good ol’ boy cops in Georgia. The school is filing a civil rights complaint.
PBS reports on the rise in lawn alternatives to grass, which requires a lot of water and chemical treatment to maintain.
Now Italy is investigating whether commentators on its news programs are being paid by the Kremlin to spread disinformation.
Marjorie Taylor Greene may have used campaign funds to buy herself a luxury car, according to FEC records. The grift goes on till the break of dawn…
Why do so many people think Amber Heard is lying? And why would any woman risk coming forward with stories of abuse given the treatment she’s received?
Margaret Atwood on how the Supreme Court is trying to make The Handmaid’s Tale a true story.
Derek Thompson writes about the death spiral of our culture wars.
Sounds like David Simon’s new limited series We Own This City is worth watching.
A brand-new third edition of Reiner Knizia’s classic game RA is already funded on Gamefound.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, environment, florida, food science, georgia, links, longreads, math, metoo, police, science, social media, stick to baseball, tv, vaccines

→ November 19, 2021
→ By keith

Infinite Powers.

I’m a sucker for a good book about math, but a lot of books about math aren’t that good – either they’re dry, or they don’t do enough to explain why any of this matters. (Sometimes it doesn’t matter, as in Prime Obsession, but the author did such a good job of explaining the problem, and benefited from the fact that it’s still unsolved.) Steven Strogatz’s Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe manages to be entertaining, practical, and also educational, as the author builds up the reader through some essentials of pre-calculus before getting into the good stuff, to the point that I recommended that my daughter check it out before next year when she takes calculus in school.

Calculus underlies everything in the universe; it is the foundation upon which the universe, and everything in it, functions. It is also one of humanity’s most remarkable discoveries, one that required multiple leaps of mathematical faith to uncover hidden truths about the universe. Physicist Richard Feynman quipped that it is “the language that God talks,” although he meant it in a secular sense, while mathematician Felix Klein said that one could not understand “the basis on which the scientific explanation of nature rests” without at least some understanding of differential and integral calculus.

The story of how both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz simultaneously discovered calculus in the late 1600s, doing so both with their own remarkable insights and by building on the discoveries of mathematicians before them, going back to the ancient Greeks, would by itself be enough for an entertaining history. Strogatz does start with that, and uses the history as scaffolding to bring the reader up from algebra through geometry and trigonometry to the mathematics of limits, which is the essential precursor to calculus, before getting to the main event.

Or I should say “events,” as differential and integral calculus, while two sides of the same analytical coin, were discovered at separate times, with separate methods, and Strogatz tells their stories separately before bringing them together towards the end of the book. Differential calculus is what we learn first in schools, at least in the United States. It’s the mathematics of the rates of change; the rate at which a function changes is the derivative of that function. Acceleration is the derivative of velocity – that is, the rate at which velocity is changing. Velocity, in turn, is the derivative of position – the rate at which an object’s position changes. That also makes acceleration the second derivative of position, which is why you see a ² in the formula for the acceleration of an object falling due to Earth’s gravity (9.8 m/s²): a position might be measured in meters, so velocity is measured as the change in position (meters) by time (seconds), and acceleration is the change in velocity (meters per second) by time (seconds, again).

Integral calculus goes the other way – given an object’s acceleration, what is its velocity at a given point in time? Given its velocity, what is its position? But Leibniz and Newton – I expect to hear from Newton’s lawyers for listing him second – conceived of integration as a way to solve an entirely different problem: How to determine the area under a curved function. Those two didn’t think of it that way – the concept of a function came somewhat later – but they understood the need to find out the area underneath a curve, and came up, independently, with the same solution, which broke apart the space into a series of rectangles of known heights and near-zero widths, giving rise to the infinitesimals familiar to any student who’s taken integral calculus. They aren’t real numbers, although they do appear in more arcane number systems like the hyperreals, yet the sum of the areas of this infinitesimally narrow rectangles turns out to be a real number, giving you the area under the curve in question. This insight, which was probably Leibniz’s first, opened the world up for integral calculus, which turns out to have no end of important applications in physics, biology, and beyond.

Strogatz grounds the book in those applications, devoting the last quarter or so of Infinite Powers to discussing the modern ways in which we depend on calculus, even taking its existence for granted. GPS devices are the most obvious way, as the system wouldn’t function without the precision that calculus, which GPS uses for dealing with errors in the measurements of distances, offers – indeed, it’s also used to help planes land accurately. Yet calculus appears in even less-expected places; biologists used it to model the shape of the double helix of strands of DNA, treating a discrete object (DNA is just a series of connected molecules) as a continuous one. If your high school student ever asks why they need to learn this stuff, Infinite Powers has the answers, but also gives the reader the background to understand the author’s explanations even if you haven’t taken math in a few decades.

Next up: David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: highly recommended, history of science, math, non-fiction

→ September 21, 2021
→ By keith

Seven Bridges.

Seven Bridges is a “stroll-and-write” game based on the famous mathematical problem, eventually proved unsolvable by Leonhard Euler: Can a pedestrian walk through the German city of Königsberg, crossing each of its seven bridges exactly once? Euler’s proof became a foundational one in the history of graph theory, but that’s beyond the scope of the game. (The game is currently unavailable, but I’ll update this post when Puzzling Pixel gets the next print run.)

In Seven Bridges, all players begin by marking in the same square on their pages, showing a grid map of the city with, indeed, seven bridges, along with thirteen ‘landmarks,’ some trees, lots of buildings, and numbers around the map’s edge. On each player’s turn, they roll the game’s six dice, which the players then draft, one at a time. The dice show seven different shapes of roads: a straight line, a cross, a T, an elbow, a half-street, a 2 with a straight line, or a 3 with a straight line. You must fill in roads on your map using the shape of the die you select, connecting one of the edges of the shape your existing network of roads. (In rare instances when you can’t legally do so, you may ‘downgrade’ to a less valuable shape.) The 2 | and the 3 | die faces mean you may draw a continuous line up to that many spaces long; you can go shorter than that, but you can’t break it apart or turn its direction. Each player gets to roll five times over the course of the game.

Passing landmarks, which are marked with single letters on the board, earns you the choice of eleven bonuses, seven immediate and four you can use later. The immediate bonuses match the shapes on the dice, so you can fill in one of those shapes on your board, following the usual rules. One of the extra bonuses allows you to fill in the handful of footpaths – bordered by dashed lines rather than solid ones – on the map. The other three are re-rolls, which either let you roll all remaining dice again, or stop the draft and distribute all remaining dice to players as you see fit.

You don’t have to cross all seven bridges to win this game, but you do get more points for crossing more bridges. You score for crossing bridges and passing by landmarks; the more of each, the more each subsequent one is worth. You score for the largest closed loop of roads/footpaths you completed by multiplying its number of bridges cross by the number of 90 degree turns in it; I think five is the maximum number of bridges you can possibly get, but you can absolutely get 8 or more right angles into a loop. You score a point for each building you pass, and for each tree you pass. You score for each road you take to the edge of the map, worth a number of points from 1 to 6 that is shown at that edge. And you score points for each bonus you received and used during the game, again from 1 to 6.

The game is kind of mathy under the hood, which strongly appeals to me; there’s a spatial relations aspect, and a clear push-your-luck aspect to the way you place your roads. You can go big, and end up without the shapes you need to complete a major route, or you can play it safe and hope no one else completes something larger. You can also head to certain areas of the map that are dense with trees but don’t promise you much in the way of other bonuses. There seem to be a lot of ways to win here, and just as many ways to screw it up.

I’ve only played this with two players, several times, however, and with a different opponent each time. Games took maybe 20-30 minutes, and if both players already know the rules, it could easily come in under 20. With two players, since you draft three dice on each roll, you only have ten total rolls over the course of the game. With the maximum of 6 players, you’d have 30 rolls, and that’s going to take some more time. Seven Bridges was first released at the very end of 2020, after my year-end list, so it qualifies for this year’s, and it has a very good chance to make my best of 2021 list. It’s quick to teach, offers very little downtime between turns, and does a fantastic job of bringing a mathematical puzzle into a board game format. It might be the best roll-and-write I’ve ever played.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, boardgames, highly recommended, math, roll and write games

→ October 17, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/17/20.

Just one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic as I work on the top 40 free agents ranking, which will run a few days after the World Series ends: Nick Groke, our Rockies beat writer, asked me a bunch of questions about Colorado’s farm system, and I dutifully answered them. Klawchat, board game reviews, and dish posts should return next week.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was my old partner-in-crime Eric Karabell, although Bias Cat did not make an appearance. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I’m due to send out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter this weekend as well. We’ll see how that works out for me.

As the holiday season approaches, I’ll remind you every week that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life.

And now, the links…

The New England Journal of Medicine has just weighed in on the election, urging Americans to vote Trump out of office, the first time it’s done so in its 208-year history. This comes on the heels of Scientific American and Nature doing the same. The Lancet published an editorial calling on governments to act now in accordance with the science, attacking the so-called herd immunity approach and supporting continued attempts to control the virus’s spread.

Now some longreads: ProPublica details the fall of the CDC, undermined from above by the anti-science Trump Administration and from within by craven, spineless leadership.

David Wallace-Wells writes for New York that there’s still no plan to stop the pandemic, a third crest is approaching, and we’re basically waiting until January – and hoping that brings a functional government – to do anything about it. Imagine how quickly this Administration would have committed a few billion dollars to responding if 200,000 Americans died from terror attacks rather than a virus.

The President and his children have turned the government into a sort of personal ATM, as exposed by this New York Times investigative piece, which you’d think would be the sort of thing to turn off the very voters who said they wanted him to drain the swamp.

Sara Benincasa’s essay “Fred and Me” is just wonderful and I won’t spoil it in the least.

Scientists confirmed that a Nevada man caught COVID-19 twice, requiring assistance breathing the second time around, which has some unpleasant connotations for the future of the pandemic and should end any discussion of a strategy based solely around herd immunity.

Why has Germany handled COVID-19 better than its neighbors? By following the science, including implementing widescale, frequent testing.

Earlier in October, a group of people who’ve lost loved ones to the pandemic set up 200,000 chairs on a lawn facing the White House to protest the government’s inaction.

One of those who’ve died from COVID-19 was a 44-year-old husband and father of two young children in northern New Jersey. He leaves behind a two-year-old daughter and a six-month-old son.

QAnon, the batshit-crazy hoax embraced by multiple alt-right figures and now our sitting President, is tearing families apart as people become sucked into this utterly false conspiracy theory and alienate family members with their nonsense.

A new complaint alleges that ICE is torturing Cameroonian immigrants to try to coerce them into signing deportation documents.

A six-year period of horrendous weather may have exacerbated the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic.

Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP candidate for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Chris Coons, appeared on white-nationalist, anti-immigrant hate site VDare last month, not long before saying the Proud Boys provide security at her events. She has no chance to win, but still, Delaware Republicans should revoke their endorsement of her.

Neal Karlen was a close friend of Prince and interviewed him many times over a period of about a dozen years earlier in the musician’s career. He’s written a biography of Prince called This Thing Called Life (natch) and this excerpt tells how Prince was the loneliest person he’d ever met.

Draining the swamp update: A former patent litigator became a federal judge and is openly advising patent trolls to come to his court. This lets those trolls abuse the patent system (which has its own problems, but still) for their own profit, and ultimately American consumers will end up paying the cost.

Project Veritas, the grift run by so-called journalist James O’Keefe, bribed the brother of a Minneapolis councilman to say he was harvesting ballots for Rep. Ilhan Omar, a popular target of Islamophobes.

There may be a new, more efficient method of answering the traveling salesperson problem, which makes use of the geometry of polynomials to improve the results. A truly efficient solution probably can’t be found in polynomial time, which refers to the P vs. NP problem described in the book The Golden Ticket.

HBO Max has a new series called Patria, based on the bestselling novel by Fernando Aramburu. The Guardian explains how a novel about Basque separatists’ decades-long terror campaign became a global success.

Paul Heaton, former lead singer for the Housemartins and the Beautiful South, made a large donation to help the staff of the shuttered music magazine Q.

Several people sent me this story from the New York Times on how local bookstores are struggling to survive in the pandemic and lockdowns.

Irina Slavina, a Russian journalist who reported on excesses of the government’s security apparatus, killed herself via self-immolation in front of the Interior Ministry headquarters earlier this month.

This 2018 piece from Smithsonian magazine details some of the science behind the flavors of chocolate.

Board game news: The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game is out and exclusively on sale at Target.

The Kickstarter for Flora, a “semi-cooperative” game based on the Voynich manuscript, launched this week.

Greenbrier Games’ cooperative story-based game Lost Ones funded its Kickstarter in the first day.

Cascadia, from the publisher and artist behind the game Calico (which I haven’t played but hear is quite good), has already blown past its tiny funding goal.

The role-playing game designer outfit Roll20 is holding a 3-day virtual gaming con with proceeds to benefit a charity focused on racial justice.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, bookstores, chocolate, coronavirus, delaware, hoaxes, links, longreads, math, Music, prince, russia, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ September 5, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/5/20.

I had three pieces for subscribers to The Athletic around the trade deadline, wrapping up the Padres’ three moves, the Blue Jays’ and Mets’ moves, and five other trades in separate columns. I also had two new episodes of The Keith Law Show this week, one featuring Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson, authors of the new book Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back (which you can buy here), and another one with Will Leitch, which we posted Friday morning so you’d have it before the holiday weekend.

On Friday night, September 11^th, I’ll be hosting a live talk with author Chuck Palahniuk about his new book The Invention of Sound through Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg. It’s a ticketed event, and with your purchase you’ll get a signed copy of the book as well as a link to the talk. (I just started reading the book about an hour ago.)

At Paste, I reviewed the tile-laying and set-collection game Succulent, and then ranked the five best tile-laying games I’ve played, which should include a few titles familiar to longtime readers.

I sent out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter on Friday, describing how I went from someone who hadn’t run in any meaningful way since 1985 to running 5 km without interruption in about four months.

And now, the links…

In a story since confirmed by other outlets, including Fox News, the Atlantic reported that President Trump referred to soldiers killed in action as “losers” and “suckers,” which, in a rational world, would end any support he received from current or former members of the U.S. military.

We will need a vast, coordinated effort to convince Americans of the safety of an eventual COVID-19 vaccine, or we will have too few people getting it to stop the pandemic. This assumes that Trump doesn’t coerce regulators into approving one before it’s adequately tested, and that very possibility is why we are where we are.

Kuli Kohli was born with cerebral palsy, and in the village in India where she was born her parents were encouraged to drown her. They eventually moved with her to the UK, where she’s now a poet, a mother, and a mentor to other women writers.

Daniel Thompson, the only full-time Black journalist at The Kenosha News, resigned his position to protest the paper’s use of an incendiary quote that cast protesters in an inaccurate light.

Larry Flynt wrote a “final farewell to the Falwells,” and it’s a more nuanced and thoughtful note than you might expect, with kind words about Jerry Falwell, Sr., with whom Flynt waged a very public battle over his First Amendment rights, and damning words about Falwell’s hypocritical son.

How did T. Denny Sanford, the richest man in South Dakota and a major Republican donor, get out of an investigation into his alleged possession of child pornography? ProPublica is asking for possible sources to come forward.

Online hoaxes, like the myriad ones about COVID-19, are making doctors’ jobs harder – and the blame falls primarily on Facebook and other sites that have let this misinformation fester.

Ars Technica reports that Facebook’s “plan” to combat election misinformation is the same as its plan for pretty much everything else that goes wrong on its site – doing nothing at all.

Philly Inquirer columnist Will Bunch says that Trump’s “reelection scheme of a civil war” is kicking into high gear as the election approaches. I was always skeptical of those who said Trump wouldn’t leave office willingly, but my view is shifting as his rhetoric changes, and the rest of his party continues to enable him.

Jean Guerrero, author of the new book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, writes about how writers and critics have questioned whether she, as a Latina journalist, is ‘qualified’ to write a book about a white man. It’s another example of the longstanding white-centric and male-centric views of mainstream publishing.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine called for the elimination of Daylight Savings Time, citing a large body of evidence showing that DST is harmful to our health.

If you’re looking for an alternative to dairy milk, but are also concerned about the environmental damage wrought by almond production, the Guardian says oat milk is your best choice.

Three mathematicians have solved a longstanding question about straight paths on the dodecahedron, one of the five Platonic solids and the only one for which this question remained unsolved.

Board game news: Climate Crisis, a cooperative game with an educational goal, is about to end its Kickstarter run tomorrow.

The Days of Wonder crossover game Small World of Warcraft is now out in stores and online.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, environment, links, math, social media, south dakota, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ July 25, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/25/20.

I wrote two pieces for subscribers to The Athletic this week – a season preview, with breakout candidates and team predictions; and a look at the top 100 prospects who made Opening Day rosters. I held a live Zoom Q&A via The Athletic’s Twitter account on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the new flick-and-write game Sonora, where players flick discs on to the same board, possibly knocking each others’ discs out of the way, and score on their personal scoresheets based on where the discs end up.

My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is out now. You can order it anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I’ll also resume my email newsletter this weekend.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: GEN looks at evangelical women who’ve left their churches and the Republican Party because they couldn’t reconcile Christian support for Trump with the ostensible tenets of the religion.
The New Yorker‘s Isaac Chotiner interviewed Thomas Chatterson Williams, one of the authors of the Harper’s letter decrying ‘cancel culture’ on the left; it’s an informative conversation, made better because Chotiner is unafraid to challenge Williams’ inaccuracies and to correct others in the final text.
The Jackson Free Press spoke to doctors and nurses at the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s dedicated COVID-19 ICU about how overloaded they are and how sick the victims become. The executive vice chair of emergency medicine, begging people to wear masks and keep distancing, says, “Please don’t make this worse.”
A SPLC Hatewatch investigation found that OANN employee Jack Posobiec went to Poland to meet with a Polish neo-Nazi party, promoting their messages through his popular Twitter account.
Customs and Border Protection is involved in far more cities than just Portland, and they’re not being transparent about their activities.
Florida’s former top coronavirus data scientist claims she was fired for refusing to manipulate data to make the pandemic there appear less serious than it actually was.
WIRED looks at the difficulty of calculating herd immunity requirements for COVID-19; the quick summary is that we need a vaccine to get there.
A group of over 100 scientists called for a rapid review system for research preprints so papers like the Stanford one that used highly questionable methods to claim that the rate of COVID-19 infection was 50 times higher in California than widely accepted don’t get widely reported before they’re further vetted.
To be a parent right now is to be a liar, writes Dan Sinker for Esquire.
Dave Grohl – yep, that one – wrote an op ed in the Atlantic in defense of teachers, saying we need better plans before we reopen schools.
Why have rates of premature births gone way down in some areas during the pandemic?
Here’s a list of all of the known QAnon supporters running for Congress this year, or who tried to run; fourteen have already secured spots on November ballots. Sixty-two of the 67 are Republicans. Meanwhile, Twitter has at least begun to ban or limit accounts promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory, on the grounds that the ‘movement’ is associated with increasing violence. Facebook needs to do the same.
Over 280 Wall Street Journal employees signed a letter to the paper’s new publisher asking for a clearer distinction between the news and opinion sections, something the paper reported on itself (subscription required).
A Philadelphia attorney who makes her living evicting people on behalf of city courts is married to a city eviction judge who doesn’t recuse himself from cases involving her.
Quanta has a pretty good, concise explanation of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.
Board game news: Renegade Game Studios announced the release of a new RPG, Kids on Brooms, that is itself a spinoff of the game Kids on Bikes.
Capstone announced the late 2020 release of Renature, from designers Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer, which I assume is a sequel to their 2017 game Reworld. The two are probably best known for their collaborations on Tikal and Torres.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, links, longreads, math, philadelphia, stick to baseball

→ February 16, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/16/19.

No ESPN+ content this week, but my entire prospect ranking package is now up for subscribers, including the top 100, farm system rankings, and in-depth rankings for all 30 teams, with at least 15 prospects ranked in each system. Before my vacation I wrote up the J.T. Realmuto trade. I also held a Klawchat this Thursday and another back on February 6th.

My most recent board game review for Paste covered the light, fun engine-builder Gizmos, by the designer of Bärenpark and Imhotep, a very family-friendly title with no text to worry about that takes the engine-builder concept and boils it down to a simpler game that plays in well under an hour.

I also resumed my email newsletter, so feel free to sign up for that if you just can’t get enough Klaw in your life.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Jessica Luther and Dan Solomon have a massive piece up at Deadspin looking at how Baylor football became a haven for sexual assault, building on their great work over the last few years at Texas Monthly.
The Verge interviews Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan, who has made millions of scientific papers available ‘free’ online, violating copyrights to do so – but should scientific research not just be copyrighted, but held behind prohibitive paywalls that may slow the progress of other research by denying people access? Should copyright laws, which predate the idea of research journals and existed to protect the rights of publishers and content creators, treat scientific papers the way they treat novels or films?
SkepticalRaptor has a long review of a bad book from last fall that claims the HPV vaccine isn’t safe. The book’s authors aren’t scientists, but two lawyers and a homemaker, so nobody with a science background, and it shows in the text.
Amanita phalloides, the deadly mushroom colloquially known as the death-cap, is spreading across North America.
My friends Tim Grierson and Will Leitch ranked every film that won the Oscar for Best Picture. I’ve probably seen only 20 or so of these, but I at least agree with their praise of numbers 1, 3, 6, 12, and 17.
Why don’t we have a vaccine for streptococcus A, the aftereffects of which, including rheumatic heart disease and sepsis, kill half a million people a year? It’s a combination of a regulatory screwup, successful medical interventions in developed countries, and the low profit margins of vaccines.
In a Guardian longread, Tom Yarwood writes about surviving being sexually molested by a music teacher when he was a child. He’s specific about the nature of the abuse, in case you might find this triggering.
The BBC looks at how Helsinki ended street homelessness through progressive policies designed to get such people off the streets into stable housing, even if they have substance-abuse problems.
Laura Snapes writes in the Guardian that the Ryan Adams allegations are just the start in a field where such “beta male misogyny” is rampant.
Measles is on the rise in Europe thanks to anti-vaxxers, and our state laws here need to keep up by eliminating all non-medical exemptions for schoolchildren.
Facebook’s role in spreading vaccine-denial bullshit has come under fire in two directions – the rise of closed groups that freely share false information against vaccines, and now anti-vaxxer groups using Facebook ad targeting to serve ads to pregnant women scaring them away from vaccines.
Some unvaccinated teens are now going around their parents to get vaccinated or doing so as soon as they’re of age. I’d drive any unvaccinated kid to the doctor if they had the legal side sorted out to get their shots.
There’s a measles outbreak in the Philippines, including the capital city of Manila, with nearly 13 million people in its metropolitan area.
Now some especially dumbshit parents are refusing the vitamin K shot for newborns. It’s essential to help newborns’ blood clot properly, so look for a bunch of babies bleeding to death needlessly because their parents are morons and the law lets them stay that way.
Climate change may melt most Himalayan glaciers in the next 80 years, which, I don’t know, sounds like a national emergency to me.
Scientific American looks at proposed policies to combat rising temperatures in Phoenix, although I notice water conservation, an outright failure of the city and state governments there, isn’t mentioned.
Math geeks may enjoy this paper (PDF) on the Sheldon Conjecture, based on an episode of the Big Bang Theory where that character says 73 is the perfect prime number – and it’s possible that the writers were more right than they knew.
Harvard professor Jill Abramson stands accused of plagiarism as well as inaccurate quotes in her latest book, and she seems to think she’s above the fray. I’ve emailed multiple deans at Harvard to ask for any sign they’re even aware of these problems – she teaches seminars on writing there, for crying out loud – but so far I’ve had no response.
Instagram “influencer” Rachel Hollis has also been accused of plagiarizing quotes on her social media account.
Bernie 2020? Not so fast, if you look at his history of embracing pseudoscience.
Julian Edelman’s title as Super Bowl MVP exposes our ‘selective morality’ on performance-enhancing drugs in sports, Hunter Felt writes for the Guardian.
Oh, we back on that again? New York’s City Council is considering a ban on foie gras, based again on a misunderstanding of how the delicacy is actually produced. I’m not a huge fan myself, at least not commensurate with its reputation among foodies, but this is a needless regulation, and shouldn’t be near the top of anyone’s priority list of rules on food production and sale.
I shouldn’t laugh, but I did: “Investors” in a cryptocurrency exchange might be out $137 million because the founder died and no one knows his passwords.
Jane Coaston wrote in Vox about conservative pundits’ bad faith arguments around Gov. Ralph Northam while also arguing that the governor, who appeared in blackface in a yearbook photo from his time in graduate school, should resign. I feel like we should just turn Virginia off and turn it back on again.
George Will argues in the Washington Post that Democrats can bail out Trump by nominating someone too liberal/progressive in 2020. I don’t agree, but I think Will makes a cogent argument about the center (without, I think, considering voters on the far left who might have abstained in 2016).
A great podcast from the BBC explains why we don’t care about the war in Yemen, which we support by funding our ‘friends’ the Saudis.
Two unrolled Twitter threads worth reading: Harvard professor Juliette Kayam depantsed Rep. Dan Crenshaw over border security and the wall.
Writer Anand Giridharadas was invited to fill in as guest speaker at a dinner, only to have the ‘liberal’ crowd defend the Koch brothers. The dinner took place at The Players, a private social club founded by Edwin Booth, which has also been accused of labor law violations (detailed within).
Board games! Floodgate Games’ Bad Maps is now available for pre-order.
The board game Evolution is now out as an app for iOS, Android, and Steam. I have a review coming for Ars Technica, but I’ll report here that it’s pretty great – it looks fantastic and I think it’s easy to read, learn, and play on a tablet screen.
Villainous: Wicked to the Core, is a new standalone expansion to last year’s hit game Villainous, and will be available exclusively through Target starting on March 3rd, with pre-orders through that link. I’ve played it five times already, and it’s more of the same but with better rules explaining each villain character’s unique powers and victory conditions. This comes with three new characters – the Evil Queen, Doctor Facilier, and Hades (no James Woods, thank goodness) – and may be combined any way you like with the six villains from the original game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, board games, climate change, frauds, links, math, metoo, oscars, vaccines, virginia

→ July 21, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/21/21.

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

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