physics

→ May 17, 2025
→ By keith
→ 1 Comment

Stick to baseball, 5/17/25.

I had one piece for subscribers to the Athletic this past week, a minor league scouting notebook on some Yankees, Nats, Rays, and Orioles prospects; it’s rained just about every day since then, so I haven’t been to a game since Sunday (despite trying, twice, only to have the games cancelled after I was at or nearly at the park).

I did finally send out a new issue of my free email newsletter this past week, and I’m going to try to get back to doing that weekly now that my spring travel appears to be done. I think I ended up in 15 different states this spring, seeing over 70 guys who are legitimate draft prospects along the way, and of course I’m still annoyed at a few I missed (like Gavin Kilen, who was hurt the weekend I went to Knoxville).

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Trump Administration pressured African countries to give more business to Elon Musk, according to this report from ProPublica. All of the other stuff is a distraction – all of the funding cuts, the hate laws, the executive orders are there to suck up the oxygen so we don’t notice that they’re using the power of the federal government to enrich themselves. Like with this Amtrak project that Musk’s Boring Company is probably going to “win.”
Meanwhile, Musk’s attempt to take over the Copyright Office flopped because of opposition from conservative media companies and content creators, who, as it turns out, do have some principles when it comes to protecting their own bottom lines.
A preprint that appeared last fall that claimed that materials scientists who had access to AI tools were substantially more productive – and that received publicity from credulous reporters at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere – was almost certainly a complete fabrication. MIT issued a press release this week saying they had “no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper” and that the author, former graduate student Aidan Toner-Rodgers, was no longer affiliated with the school. The link above argues that the paper was full of red flags, including impossible access to corporate data and too-good-to-be-true results.
Alex Shephard says in the New Republic that Trump is the most corrupt President the U.S. has ever seen.
Political scientists who study the decline of democracies say that the United States is sliding towards autocracy in the way that other previously-free countries like Hungary and Turkey have done in the last twenty years.

A pharmacist at Oak Valley Health in the Toronto area turned out to be one of the people behind the now-shuttered MrDeepFakes.com, one of the biggest sites for nonconsensual pornography. May he never know another moment of peace.

Another tick-borne disease is on the rise in the U.S., including the mid-Atlantic. Babeosis mimics malaria symptoms and is carried by the same species of tick that spreads Lyme disease.

Moderna’s combination COVID and flu shot outperformed current vaccines against both viruses in trials. Will the denialist in charge of HHS stop its distribution in the United States?

Doctors at CHoP & Penn Medicine used gene therapy to cure a newborn of a rare, often fatal metabolic disorder called CPS1 deficiency. It’s the first successful application of a new type of gene-editing protocol that could save thousands of lives if it can be adapted for broader use.

Bad headline, good story: Scientists are trying to figure out why the universe didn’t annihilate itself due to the interaction between matter and anti-matter in the moments right after the Big Bang. If it had, though, maybe we wouldn’t be keeping a dead woman on life support to comply with a theocratic abortion law.

A prison guard in New York admitted that he cleaned up the blood after his colleagues beat inmate Robert Brooks to death. This week was the first I’d even heard about the story.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: frauds, health, links, longreads, medicine, physics, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ May 10, 2025
→ By keith
→ 5 Comments

Stick to baseball, 5/10/25.

I posted my first mock draft of 2025 this week for subscribers to the Athletic, and took questions from readers about that and other prospect matters on Friday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Finspan, the new fish-themed spinoff to Wingspan that features simpler rules and a faster teach.

I’m about to send out the first new issue of my free email newsletter since February, before my travel schedule went nuts; I’ve been to fourteen states to see players, just via air, plus two more around here.

A short list this week, for no particular reason, but here are the links…

Longreads first: Automakers are going back to physical buttons and moving away from touchscreens, like the massive billboard-sized screens in Teslas, as consumers prefer the physical buttons and touchscreens are associated with much-reduced reaction times. I rented a car with physical buttons and no touch screen recently, and it took me all of about 30 seconds to figure it out.

Current Affairs has a detailed takedown of the Douglas Murray, who wrote a book on the Israel-Palestine conflict and self-described expert, but whose writing appears to omit or misrepresent facts that don’t support his (pro-Israel) conclusions. I haven’t read Murray’s book, though, and would be curious to hear from any of you who have.

At Futurism, Maggie Harrison Dupré spoke with an AI “sloperator” who floods Pinterest with fake recipe links and home décor posts, and who says he’s specifically targeting women over 50 with his content.

The Pulitzer Prize board chose to give the Fiction award to Percival Everett’s James, overriding the selection committee, which recommended three other titles. I just started one of the three, Mice 1961, because I want to see if I agree with the choice. I thought James was incredible.

Trump threatened to withhold $3 million in USDA funding from Maine schools because their Governor, Janet Mills, refused to comply with his extra-legal demand that they ban trans girls from playing girls’ sports. The USDA caved. If you don’t comply in advance, they back down. There’s still an ongoing court case over trans athletes in Maine, but the funding is restored.

Trump’s entire process for finding people to fill out executive branch jobs seems to be picking the worst purveyors of misinformation on Twitter: He made Vinay Prasad, a massive COVID and vaccine denier, in charge of the FDA’s vaccine regulation arm; and now he’s nominated a grifting “wellness influencer” without a medical license to be his Surgeon General.

The Trump family cryptocurrency offering – I’d call it a scam, but I think all crypto is a scam – has enriched them by nearly $3 billion.

ICE agents arrested Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka at their “immigration detention center” in his city, a facility that he says is not properly permitted and should not have been allowed to open.
New Yorkers are about to make a huge mistake if they elect Andrew Cuomo, he of the numerous sexual harassment cases and $60 million use of taxpayer funds, to be their next mayor, writes Alex Shephard in the New Republic. The man is walking ethical disaster.

Côte d’Ivoire had been one of the democratic success stories of Africa in the last decade-plus, but the recent court ruling that the leading candidate to oppose three-term incumbent President Alassane Ouattara is ineligible because of a technicality. The “little-used post-independence law” says that Tidjane Thiam, who was born in Côte d’Ivoire, should have lost his Ivorian citizenship automatically when he accepted French nationality, something he already had had through his father.

Mainstream media outlets seem loath to credit independent journalists for scoops and stories, as happened last week when multiple big-name sites failed to even name Marisa Kabas when she was the first to report on Trump’s deal with Rwanda to deport an Iraqi refugee to the central African nation.

A new preprint argues that it is nearly impossible that we live in a simulation because the energy required to ‘run’ the universe as a simulation is beyond the energy we see anywhere in the universe.
The Guardian has a wonderful interview with my favorite Doctor, David Tennant.

Rock Manor Games, whose owner, Mike Gnade, is a friend and frequent gaming opponent, has a new Kickstarter up for a reprint of Seas of Havoc, their top-rated game on BGG.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, board game news, links, longreads, maine, new jersey, new york, physics, pulitzer prize, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ March 24, 2025
→ By keith

Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them.

Prof. Antonio Padilla is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at the University of Nottingham who has also appeared numerous times on the Numberphile Youtube series, including this incredibly popular video where he shows how the sum of all natural numbers (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + … ?) is actually -1/12. It’s ridiculous – Padilla concedes that it looks like “a bit of mathematical hocus-pocus”, but the pudding is in the proof, or something, and he points out that 1) this only works if you’re adding all of the natural numbers, which means you don’t stop at any point, and 2) this sum appears in physics, where we don’t see infinities (and if we do, it’s a problem).

Padilla describes the interplay between physics and some numbers at both extremes of the mathematical scale, both the very small and the very large, in his book Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Journey to the Edge of Physics, an intense but mostly accessible book that runs through nine distinct numbers, from zero to a googolplex to 10^-120 to infinity, and uses them to explain some key concepts or findings about the nature of everything. He waltzes through the history of math – just about every famous figure there makes an appearance at some point, which will make you realize just how many great mathematicians ended up losing their marbles – and just about always finishes up somewhere in the realm of quantum physics, whether it’s things we know or things we think we know, or occasionally things we still don’t know. There’s even a chapter on the cosmological constant, which was in the news just this past week with the revelations that dark energy isn’t as immutable as we believed, which implies that the cosmological constant is, in fact, inconstant.

When Padilla is talking physics and cosmology, at either end of the scale, he’s engaging and by and large easy to follow, other than perhaps near the end of the book when he’s introduced the panoply of particles that populate the quantum world – all the quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons that we know or think exist – where keeping any of them straight was a bit more than I could handle. It doesn’t end up mattering much to the narratives of those chapters, as Padilla’s point is the relevance of the numbers in question, although I ended up a little frustrated that I didn’t entirely know what was going on at some points.

It’s the mathy stuff where Padilla struggles to communicate in a way that a typical reader might follow, and perhaps that’s just a function of the size of the numbers he’s discussing. The chapter on the number TREE(3), which is so large that we can’t even notate it, let alone comprehend it, ultimately lost me not in its prose but in its sea of notation. TREE(3) is much larger than the number of atoms scientists believe exist in the entire universe (around 10⁸⁰, itself a number that we can’t easily envision), a number so big that the universe won’t “allow” it to exist – according to the Poincaré recurrence theorem, at least, which says that the universe will “reset” before TREE(3) happens in any sense of the word. Padilla uses TREE(3) to explain that theorem and the possibility that the universe is a hologram, that we live in two dimensions and only think we perceive the third, but by the end of that chapter I didn’t understand why TREE(3) got us there in the first place. (It doesn’t help that Padilla discusses all of this several chapters before he gets into string theory, which underpins the holographic principle, so we’re walking without a net for a while.)

Padilla is a gifted communicator, clearly, and his enthusiasm for the subject comes through everywhere in the book – it’s just that the topic itself is abstruse and assumes some familiarity with physics and/or with some branches of math like infinite series and set theory. He’s better at explaining concepts like particle spin, which he points out isn’t spin like what we’re talking about in baseball but an innate characteristic of a particle (any more than red or green quarks have those actual colors), than at explaining concepts like the nested powers of TREE(3) or Gödel’s incompleteness proof. It all left me with the sense that I’d enjoyed the book, but that the audience for it might be very narrow – you have to know enough to follow him through his various rambles through math and physics, but not so much that you already know all of this stuff. I was at least lucky enough to mostly be in the first camp, even though I got lost a few times, but that’s just because I love these topics and have read a lot of books about them. It’s not the physics I learned in high school, and not really the math I learned there either.

Next up: Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide, winner of the 1991 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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

→ March 22, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/22/25.

I’m back from Arizona, and wrote five scouting notebooks while I was out there: on the Mariners-Guardians Breakouts Game (plus some Brewers notes), on the Giants-Rangers Breakouts Game (plus some Rockies/Angels notes), on the White Sox-Rockies and Reds-Brewers Breakouts Game (plus some Dodgers notes), on some Dodgers & Guardians prospects, and on some Royals & Rangers prospects. I wanted to do a Klawchat on the flight home but we were delayed an hour-plus and then I fell asleep a few minutes after takeoff.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Teen Vogue’s cover story is a profile of Vivian Jenna Wilson, who happens to be the estranged daughter of Elon Musk, and who has some interesting things to say about her father and on the fight for basic rights for trans people.

The Guardian’s long read explains how an extremist, bigoted rabbi who died over 30 years ago holds sway over leaders at the top of the Israeli government.

M. Gessen, a trans immigrant to the United States, wrote in the New York Times about the “hidden” motive behind Trump’s war on trans rights – which isn’t that hidden, as it’s one of the first steps in the totalitarian playbook: Find a vulnerable minority and demonize them, casting them out of the polity, and then move on to the next one. One time it was the Jews (okay, more than one time). One time it was the Tutsis. One time it was the intellectuals. This time it’s trans people.

One more – The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last rants about how it was never about trans women in sports, and how we should just leave trans people alone.

A 6-year-old girl died of the measles in Texas, because her parents are part of a religious cult that has largely rejected vaccines. The anti-vaccine movement has pounced and is using the death to further press their own dangerous bullshit.

Columbia University bent the knee to President Trump over $400 million in funding. Their endowment, by the way, is about $15 billion. This is an active choice, not a financial necessity.

Prof. Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist and professor of bioethics at Columbia, coincidentally, wrote an editorial for Nature calling on scientists to stand up against the war on DEI.

Three prominent conservatives were arrested just this past week for child sex crimes. The issue is not trans people. It was never trans people. Here’s more on the Minnesota Republican, who spoke out against teaching kids about sexual orientation and gender identity back in 2016. (It’s not limited to right-wingers, though; a Democratic party official in Florida was arrested a few weeks back for the same.)

The Mississippi Free Press reports on deaths and injuries resulting from no-knock raids in that state.

Dark energy might be weakening, challenging cosmologists’ understanding of the way it works and threatening the standard model of the universe.

SpaceX’s Starship ships keep blowing up – and it will never work because of Elon Musk, according to journalist Will Lockett.

I watched Flow at home a couple of weeks ago, and my dog, who almost never looks at any screen at all, seemed to be watching it. Turns out I might not have been imagining it after all – dogs like that movie.

From my colleague Carson Kessler: MLB may be ending its Diversity Pipeline Program to try to comply in advance with the new Administration’s anti-DEI crusade.

A math problem known as the Kakeya Conjecture has been solved after 117 years.

Two board game Kickstarters to highlight this week – Pirates of the High Teas, a light strategy game from a small publisher that tries to bring diverse designers into the space; and Misfit Heroes, a card-crafting game from Phil Walker-Harding.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, israel, links, longreads, mississippi, physics, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines

→ June 17, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/17/24.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my annual ten-year redraft, looking back at the 2014 draft class, plus the annual column on first-rounders from that class who didn’t pan out.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new deduction game Archeologic, which I thought was too easy to solve and didn’t offer any new mechanics to make me want to play it more.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter last week, detailing my misadventures with travel and phone alarms.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Washington Post is in crisis, but their investigative reporters are still doing good work, this time with a report on police officers who have sexually abused children yet avoided punishment or even prosecution and sometimes retained their badges. They found over 1800 such officers, and in 40% of cases where the officers were convicted they received no jail time.

Back to ProPublica, which reported on how Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is using the state’s consumer protection laws to target organizations whose views he doesn’t like. ProPublica also revealed that Justice Clarence Thomas received at least three more free trips from billionaire Harlan Crow, then admitted he should have disclosed all of these junkets. There will continue to be no consequences for any of this.

Mother Jones’ Kiera Butler reports on how Samuel Alito and his comrades are trying to make the Supreme Court, and the country, more explicitly Christian. Lawdork had a post last month on the Alito problem and Chief Justice Roberts’ refusal to confront it.

Microbe.TV has a nearly two-hour episode debunking that awful New York Times op ed by explaining why we know that SARS-CoV-2 didn’t come from a lab.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) personally solicited a contribution from FirstEnergy CEO Chuck Jones back in 2018, after which the firm gave $500,000 to DeWine’s dark-money PAC. DeWine has denied any knowledge of the contribution, but text messages show him actively asking for more cash.

A Justice Department investigation found that the Phoenix Police Department used excessive force and violated the civil rights of numerous residents of the city. Meanwhile, a woman whose jaw was broken by deputies of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and whose son served in the Army is now facing deportation.

This Washington Post column from Sophia Laurenzi (which appears to be unlocked) about how she became a death row investigator to try to make sense of her own father’s suicide is beautifully written and avoids any pat answers to these difficult questions.

Some Texas cities have tried to fight poverty by giving money to people in need, with no strings attached, a policy that many economists have advocated for decades, but of course conservatives are fighting it, just like Jesus would have.

The American institute for Economic Research has a short post explaining how stadiums are not “magic” when it comes to urban development.

Meanwhile, the Economic Development Director for Charlotte is falsely claiming that a proposed subsidy for the Panthers’ stadium wouldn’t go to billionaire owner David Tepper.

Violent crime is dropping at historic rates, according to data from the FBI, even though a majority of Americans believe crime is up.

Conservative columnist David French wrote about how his church “cancelled” him for his divergence from the views of the modern Christian nationalist movement – notably their unwavering fealty to Trump and opposition to LGBTQ+ rights.

These countries are the most dangerous for LGBTQ+ travelers, and perhaps places you don’t want to spend your money if you’re trying to be an ally.

CEOs who met with Trump found him meandering and incoherent, which shouldn’t be news to anyone who’s seen video of him speaking at any point in the last year. I imagine they’ll still fund him and vote for him, though, because taxes.

Astrophysicists have discovered evidence that the Earth collided with a vast interstellar cloud about 2-3 million years ago, which may have affected the development of life on our planet.

Disgraced singer Gary Glitter, in prison again for violating terms of his parole for previous convictions for sexual abuse of multiple children, has been ordered to pay over 500,000 to one of his victims.

The four members of R.E.M. were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and sat down with CBS’s Anthony Mason to discuss the honor, their careers, their opposition to a reunion, and more.

One AI lobbying group is asking Congress to pass a law banning deepfakes and protecting artists’ rights to their likeness.

The British Medical Journal published a paper that appeared to blame COVID-19 vaccines for a higher excess mortality rate in the last three years, but the employer of the paper’s authors has already come out against the paper’s conclusions.

Ha’aretz reports that Israel’s government is considering allowing detention without trial for accused terrorists – but only for Arabs.

Stanford is shutting down its Internet Observatory, which reported on online misinformation and election interference, after attacks from House Republicans and lawsuits from conservatives claiming “censorship.” Renée DiResta, who worked at the SIO, wrote in the Atlantic about her experience at the center of a right-wing conspiracy theory.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, charlotte, crime, israel, lgbt rights, links, longreads, misinformation, ohio, phoenix, physics, police, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, suicide, vaccines

→ June 1, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/1/24.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic, but I have a top 50 pro prospect rankings update slated for Monday the 3^rd.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the roll-and-write game French Quarter, from the designers of Three Sisters and Fleet: the Dice Game. I think it’s fantastic, although it’s harder than any of their previous games to play well.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET for Diamond Dreams and somewhere in the 2:30 pm show Unpacked for one more segment. We’ll discuss some of my new rankings on the first show and have an interview with Colt Emerson lined up.

A million bonus points if you know what today is, by the way. I’ll accept two answers, although one is more obvious than the other.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: You’ve probably seen this Guardian longread on the so-called “pro-natalist” family who, among other things, think nothing of physically abusing their children in the name of “discipline.” My issue with the piece is this: The parents claim that their parenting is “evidence-based,” yet they then do many things, including smacking their children, that are unequivocally contrary to all available evidence – and the piece’s author does not push back in any way. That is your job as a journalist.

This New York Times retrospective on Cass Elliot and the vicious hoax about how she died is an empathetic and thoughtful look at a major figure in pop music history who was, unfortunately, best remembered for that false rumor.

WIRED has the story of Jane Willenbring, the victim of sexual harassment by disgraced Professor David Marchant while they worked in Antarctica, whose willingness to come forward led to Marchant’s firing and the renaming of the glacier that once bore his name.

Two stories on the 19^th century state of Mississippi: In DeSoto County, a hospital transfers some patients to jail while they await mental health treatment, with the results you would expect. Meanwhile, Mississippi Today also obtained transcripts of WhatsApp messages from the soi-disant “Goon Squad” of racist, abusive cops who terrorized a central Mississippi County – including torturing two Black men and shooting one in the face – for a generation.

A new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found a strong positive correlation between public school expenditures and Black student achievement during school and later in life. They used data from that same backwards country of Mississippi, which has been busy trying to find ways to spend less on education.

A new paper in Nature shows how researchers used machine learning to help explain how insect wing hinges work. We know of four separate times when a species has developed the ability to fly, but insects are the only case where flight evolved without muscles or nerves in the wings.

Quanta has the story of two groups of physicists using machine-learning to try to understand the nature of the ‘missing’ dimensions required by superstring theory.

Splinter’s Jim Vorel looks at the slow death of QAnon and the even more virulent strains that have replaced it. There’s a strong sense of “When Prophecy Fails” here – when people realized they believed in a con, they don’t just come to their senses; they look for another con to believe.

Greenpeace sided with the anti-science crowd and blocked the introduction of the nutritious Golden Rice variety into the Philippines, claiming, among other things, a “human health risk” that has never been demonstrated with any genetically-modified foodstuff.

A nurse at NYU’s Langone Health hospital mentioned the genocide in Gaza during her speech accepting an award for her compassion in caring for mothers who’d lost their babies. The hospital fired her. They’ve said she was warned before “not to bring her views on this divisive and charged issue into the workplace.” The hospital took its name from Republican billionaire donor Kenneth Langone, who has previously compared critics of rising income inequality to Nazis.

UC-Irvine law professor David Kaye writes in the New York Times that we should allow the International Criminal Court to do its job after the Court announced charges against the leaders of Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. The U.S. has remained outside of the ICC for twenty years, even though we could do the most good by accepting its tenets and supporting its efforts to pursue war-crimes charges – as we have asked the ICC to do against Vladimir Putin.

Many students walked out of Harvard’s commencement last week, spurred by the University’s corporate board’s decision to overrule a faculty vote that would have allowed 13 students to graduate after they’d been suspended for their actions in the campus protests over the Israeli war on Gaza.

Even before Friday’s verdict, Greg Sargent noted that Trump’s anti-media rhetoric had turned more dangerous with the convicted felon’s apparent endorsement of a rant about how he’ll “get rid of all you fucking liberals.”

The Washington Post sat on the story of Samuel Alito hanging pro-insurrection and pro-nationalist flags at his house for several years. The New York Times has been reporting on the story now, including this very measured piece on what seems to have happened, including disputes over the order of some of the events in the neighborhood dispute.

The Republican candidate for Governor in North Carolina is a QAnon-touting, Holocaust-denying, antisemitic, anti-LGBT conspiracy theorist. Will he cost Trump a swing state he won in 2020?

A passenger on a United flight into Fresno this week has tested positive for measles. This should be a criminal offense – they put many, many other people at risk through their actions, like driving drunk.

Michael Hiltzik writes in the LA Times that now Democrats are just as bad at Republicans in putting political concerns over science, as Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) continues his sham hearings promoting the debunked lab-leak hypothesis.

RFK Jr.’s turn into vaccine disinformation came after he spoke to and then totally ignored Dr. Paul Offit, co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine.

Pope Francis apologized for using the Italian equivalent of the f-slur and saying there was too much of that in the priesthood when arguing against allowing celibate gay men to take orders. I think there’s too much emphasis here on the word choice and nowhere near enough on pretty much everything that lies behind it.

Two board game Kickstarters of note this week: 25^th Century Games (who published French Quarter) just put up a new crowdfunding effort for a four-pack of smaller games that you can back as a bundle or individually.

Luthier is the latest complex game from Paverson Games, publisher of last year’s excellent heavy game Distilled. There’s a full site up for the game but the crowdfunding link isn’t open yet. I saw Luthier at PAX Unplugged; it’s gorgeous and huge, but my guess is it’s too long a game for my personal tastes and attention span.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, board game news, environment, gaza, harvard, links, longreads, measles, metoo, mississippi, physics, police, religion, scotus, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 25, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/25/24.

One new post this week for subscribers to The Athletic, my ranking of the top 100 prospects in this year’s MLB Draft class. The Vance Honeycutt defenders have logged on, but they always seem to log back off when I explain why they’re too high on their guy.

I’ll be back on Stadium, in studio again, but on Tuesday this week due to the holiday and some travel on my end. Diamond Dreams airs at 2 pm ET, and I’ll likely do one segment as usual on Unpacked around 2:40. Both shows re-air often during the week, usually twice a day as far as I’ve been able to tell. You can watch via the app or with certain subscriptions to Youtube, Fubo, Roku, etc.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter this week, talking about my longtime hobby of playing the guitar and how beneficial I find it even though I’m usually playing for nobody but myself, as well as a little note on the adult I have successfully created after 18 years of hard work.

And now, the links…

ProPublica has the story of how a scientist within 3M showed decades ago that perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, known as PFAS, was a “forever chemical” that stayed in our bodies and the environment, but the company lied to her and the public about its effects.

Writing in the Boston Review, UCLA History Professor Robin D.G. Kelley exposes how the university stood by while peaceful pro-Palestine protesters were assaulted by white supremacists and so-called Zionists, along with outside agitators, and then charged the students with crimes. He also claims that UCLA Chancellor Gene Block has presided over a culture of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment while stifling any speech, including in the classroom, that might be considered derogatory of Israel. Block testified in a sham hearing before Congress, where Rep. Ilhan Omar (D) pointed out that he chose not to act to prevent the violence.

Some new data has changed cosmologists’ views on the nature of dark energy and the eventual fate of the universe.

NBC’s Brandy Zarozny goes inside the truly broken worldview of Nicole Shanahan, the VP candidate on RFK Jr.’s quixotic Presidential campaign.

Nature looks at the growing problem of harassment of scientists and how institutions are ill-equipped or unwilling to fight it. One solution I don’t see employed enough: Threats of physical violence are illegal in the United States, usually as federal crimes. Put resources into tracking those people down and prosecuting them.

A panel of experts on international law published an op-ed in the Financial Times supporting the ICC’s decision to pursue charges against Israel and Hamas for war crimes.

From March, this video from Rabbi Daniel Bogard looks at why American Jews feel connected to Israel; it’s part one of a very informative series on American Jewish culture and identity at a time when that has become incorrectly equated with Zionism.

Will Bunch writes that in the war on our democracy, we’ve already lost Texas. Marc Elias goes further, pointing out that we have no excuse when Trump has warned for years that he wants to take our democracy down.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) claims that she “support(s) babies, moms, and families,” but ProPublica details just how much she has denied support to those same groups – while, of course, killing her dog for not being the goodest boy.

OpenAI’s brazen appropriation of Scarlett Johanssen’s vocal likeness “gave away the game” on AI, according to The Atlantic’s Charlie Wetzel: AI advocates will do whatever the hell they want, and we can’t stop them.

Thousands of kids were prescribed the utterly useless and often harmful HCQ and ivermectin for COVID-19 infections, with Arkansas and Oklahoma doctors leading the way.

International negotiations on a treaty to try to prevent the next pandemic broke down due to nationalist and anti-science sentiments. The World Health Organization’s Global Health Law director argued that “Donald Trump is in the room” and if Trump wins he’d likely “torpedo” any future negotiations.

Police in Fontana, California, used “psychological torture” to get a man who reported his father missing to confess to stabbing and killing him … except his father was still alive and unharmed. The city will now direct nearly $900,000 of taxpayer money to Thomas Perez, Jr., for the pain and distress inflicted on him, during which police also told him they were killing his dog and led him to try to hang himself in custody. What I don’t see is whether any of these officers were fired or even disciplined.

A public safety officer at the College of Staten Island has been suspended for saying on camera “I support killing all you guys” to pro-Palestinian protesters.

Theresa Claiborne, the first Black woman to fly in the U.S. Air Force, retired this week from her job as a pilot for United Airlines. Note her comments on how children would react to seeing her in uniform in airports. Representation matters.

Two board game crowdfunding efforts of note: Stupor Mundi, the newest title from the designer of Darwin’s Journey and Newton, funded in about four hours; it looks like it might be a little lighter in weight than Nestore Mangone’s previous releases.

And Feudum, a 2018 game with a listed weight on Boardgamegeek of 4.58 out of 5 (!), has a crowdfunding page for a new edition that is over $300K raised. I actually hadn’t heard of this game, probably because anything of that weight and a playing time over two hours is of little to no interest to me.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, environment, gaza, israel, links, longreads, new york, physics, police, south dakota, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ April 28, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/28/24.

Nothing this week from me at the Athletic, but I need to write up a couple of minor-league games I’ve been to so there will be something in the next few days.

I reviewed the board game Ancient Knowledge over at Paste; it’s pretty clever, but I found the title and theme didn’t connect to the game play at all.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET on Diamond Dreams and on their new collectibles show at 2:30 for one segment, all to talk about prospects. You can watch via the app or if you subscribe to Roku, Youtube, or some other sites; I have figured out that the shows re-air all week, but you can’t just watch an archived version.

I also sent out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter on Saturday, talking about … death. Wait, that’s only the cat.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica explores how a lack of funding and organization at a VA clinic in Chico, California, led to two preventable shootings, including one where a veteran shot and killed her own mother. If you want to support our troops, instead of just standing and clapping at a ballgame, vote for candidates who’ll fully fund the VA and its indispensable resources for our veterans.

Climate change is driving us towards a “coffee apocalypse” as the growing regions for the plant shrink and the plant itself tries to migrate to higher altitudes.

A tech bro wants to “ethnically cleanse” San Francisco, in his own words. Balaji Srinivasan has worked at Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, and the genetic testing firm Counsyl (which he co-founded). He sounds insane.

A prosecutor in Texas has asked the courts to clear the conviction of a woman he helped put on death row. Melissa Lucio’s two-year-old daughter died after falling down a flight of stairs, but she was convicted of capital murder and spent 16 years behind bars.

The LA Times’s Michael Hiltzik excoriates the cash grab in Nevada, where state legislators are trying to hand hundreds of millions in taxpayer money to the Oakland A’s’ billionaire owner in a climate of increasing voter resistance.

Another relief agency has accused Israel of targeting its vehicles: the International Development and Relief Foundation says that the IDF deliberately bombed its trucks delivering water to Gazans.

Columbia barred a student protester who said that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” from its campus. Khymani James was active in the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia. This seems like a pretty simple case of someone crossing the line and the university responding appropriately – in contrast to the preponderance of stories about protests on campuses across the country.

A Jewish student at Columbia wrote on Mehdi Hasan’s new site Zeteo that the news coverage of antisemitism on campuses is inaccurate and distracts from actual threats, like outside groups that dox Jewish students.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch wrote in praise of the student journalists covering the protests and the university responses at Columbia and beyond.
Will the “cancel culture” pundits say anything about USC’s decision to cancel its Muslim-American valedictorian’s commencement speech? Don’t hold your breath, writes Arwa Mahdawi in the Guardian.

Transphobes have latched on to the dubious “Cass Report” as further evidence of … I don’t even know, it’s all just bigotry and trans panic, but the interesting bit here is that Dr. Hilary Cass herself is already distancing herself from the report’s conclusions, saying HRT and puberty blockers should be made available to trans teens. The same newsletter reports on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) saying that he wants to “end” trans and gender non-conforming teachers in the state.

Tennessee Republicans passed a law arming teachers over loud opposition from parents and students. How long until the first “friendly fire” death in a Tennessee school?

However, the state GOP’s attempt to ram through a school voucher bill and strip funding from the state’s already poor public schools failed.

The risk of cardiomyopathy to young men from mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 actually decreases after the third dose, although the risk is always higher from even a single infection with the virus.

Jay Bhattacharya has been a major purveyor of disinformation around COVID, from masks to vaccines to other public-health efforts, and he’s built a huge following. Now he’s about to get a big cash windfall from a large right-wing foundation. The grift is profitable.

A new firm that includes disinformation reporter Ben Collins as as CEO bought the Onion from the turkey vultures at G/O Media.

Iowa universities are closing their DEI programs after Republicans there passed a bill banning such endeavors.

Measles cases are rising in the U.S. and it’s a big, underreported problem.

The PEN literary awards’ annual ceremony has been cancelled after a large number of authors requested that their works be removed from consideration.

2023 ended with a surge in book bans, according to PEN America, but the children’s publishing world has responded by flooding the market with new titles representing diverse perspectives.

The Atlantic has an appreciation of John Sterling (tied, a bit tenuously, to AI). My confession: Even when I was an ardent Yankees fan, I didn’t care for Sterling’s style, which always seemed to put himself front and center over the game he was calling.

The Guardian interviewed Lauren Mayberry on going solo and the misogyny she experienced online.

Also in the Guardian, a profile of two professors teaching the Gullah language, one of the only creole tongues based on English, including Harvard’s Sunn m’Cheaux (who is a great follow on Threads). Gullah is still spoken on some of the islands off the coast of South Carolina, and you may be familiar with it if you’ve read Pat Conroy’s book The Water is Wide.

There’s finally been some movement to pass legislation banning deepfake nudes, with over 20 states doing so or at least considering bills to do so, and the impetus is teenage girls who often find themselves the targets.

A former model decided to listen to some online wellness influencers rather than her doctors, choosing an all-juice diet to try to treat her stage 3 cancer. She nearly died before doctors convinced her to go the medicine route – but only after she kept refusing for several days while in intensive care.

Time flowed five times slower right after the Big Bang. Imagine all the extra board games you could have played!

Some light reading: Here’s the complete genome for SARS-CoV-2.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, book banning, coffee, death penalty, gaza, iowa, Languages, links, longreads, nevada, physics, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, trans rights, vaccines

→ April 13, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/13/24.

I’ve got some new content coming up this week, with a new draft ranking due to run on Thursday and a draft scouting blog probably running Monday or Tuesday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the collectible card game Star Wars: Unlimited – Spark of Rebellion, which I enjoyed even though I’m not generally a fan of deckbuilders.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, detailing a rather ridiculous dinner I had at the bar at The Publican, an acclaimed Chicago restaurant where, to say the least, one does not belch as loudly as one can.

I’m going to be on a new TV show, Diamond Dreams starting on Monday, April 15^th, on the streaming channel Stadium. The show is a half-hour look at prospects around the minors and for the draft, and will be followed by a show on collectibles where I’ll also offer some comments on the prospects they’re discussing. You can watch via the app on pretty much any platform.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: How Elon Musk convinced MAGA partisans that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was a treatment for COVID-19 – which it absolutely is not – and set off four years of online misinformation around the pandemic.

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in the New York Times about how “colorblindness” has been hijacked by the white-grievance movement, in direct opposition to the original intent of the term, which meant ending racial discrimination against people of color.

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about how the Key Bridge disaster demonstrated the importance of immigrants to our society.

A hardcore conservative group is making it harder for Idaho school districts to renovate or upgrade their facilities.

There’s a big scam going around that has tricked a number of content creators into ceding control of their Facebook pages. It starts with what seems to be an invitation to appear on a big podcast, which of course is very appealing to most people trying to build their online audience.

Over half a million Arizonans signed a petition to put codifying abortion rights on the ballot this November. It’s part of a Democratic strategy to drive voters to the polls in purple states – and also, by the way, a basic human right. This comes on the heels of the GOP-packed Arizona Supreme Court reinstating the state’s 1864 abortion ban – yes, a law that predates Arizona’s statehood by almost 50 years.

The Guardian revealed that Boise State Professor Scott Yenor ran Action Idaho, an extreme right-wing site that attacked LGBTQ+ rights and accused Republicans of being insufficiently conservative. Yenor now also works for the Claremont Institute and just a month ago wrote a piece for the Federalist that said DEI had to die for Western civilization to survive.

ProPublica explains how authorities are trying to crack down on gift-card crime rings, where consumers often end up buying gift cards that appear new but that have already been drained of value by crooks.

Maria Bustillos writes in The Nation about the rise of journalist-owned news outlets amidst the ongoing bloodletting in the industry.

David Chang’s Momofuku company is trying to trademark the generic term “chili crunch” to describe a staple Chinese condiment best known as chili crisp – and they’re suing smaller firms to try to have their way.

Why is Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R – and not the former pitcher) doing the bidding of Elon Musk by suing Media Matters for reporting on Twitter’s failure to police hate on their site?

Voters in Enid, Oklahoma, removed Judd Blevins (R) from the city council after his ties to white supremacist groups were exposed.

The BBC has a first-person narrative from a woman who found deepfakes of herself online – and eventually learned it was a close friend of hers who made them.

This Twitter thread has some solid details on the IDF’s attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy in Gaza that killed seven WCK volunteers. I don’t know why those seven deaths should lead to more calls for a cease-fire when the 30,000+ Palestinian deaths before that haven’t … of course I do, let’s not kid ourselves.

Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket reposted a piece from the Kansas Reflector critical of Meta’s ad policy around climate change, and moments later, Meta removed all links to both sites from Facebook and Threads. After an outcry, Meta reversed the decision and blamed a “security error,” but, come on.

Landfills emit far more methane than previously believed, more bad news for the planet as methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Before voters wisely rejected a stadium tax proposal to replace the two perfectly fine sports facilities outside of Kansas City, the KC Studio had a sensible op ed on what a waste tearing down Kaufmann Stadium would be.

Former SCOTUS justice Steven Breyer wants everyone to get along, like his former colleagues on the high court, even though some of those colleagues are busy destroying Americans’ basic civil rights, writes Elie Mystal of The Nation.

The BBC reports on exploitation of workers in Brazil who harvest the common ingredient carnauba wax, bordering on slavery.

Cleveland Plain-Dealer editor Chris Quinn explains why the paper treats Donald Trump differently from other politicians & candidates. Hint: It’s because he lies.

The Atlantic’s David Graham describes the “Trump two-step:” say something outrageous, claim that’s not really what he said or meant, and then quietly embrace the original statement.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent details just how entrenched election denial, January 6^th denialism, and other insane conspiracy theories are within the Republican party right now.

Mehdi Hasan wrote in the Guardian that Justice Sonja Sotomayor needs to retire from the Supreme Court so President Biden can appoint a replacement, avoiding the possibility that Trump would get to appoint a fourth justice and give the court a 7-2 majority that would likely last decades. I’m not sure if I agree, but he at least offers a solid argument.

Fox News and several right-wing podcasters, including beanie-wearing Tim Pool, are now facing a lawsuit from a man they all falsely identified as a mass shooter. The man’s lawyer previously represented two Sandy Hook parents in their lawsuit against Alex Jones for his false claims that that mass shooting didn’t happen. Fuck ’em up, Socrates.

The Tampa Bay Times published a rare editorial pointing out that public subsidies for sports stadiums don’t work out for taxpayers, as the Rays try once again to soak Floridians for a new facility.

Here’s a great summary and index of economic research showing how consistently these sports stadium deals fail to live up to economic promises. If you’re writing about the topic, or know a journalist who is, this is invaluable, because the pro-stadium forces will always trot out fabricated numbers from consultants who give them what they want.

The PEN America awards are in a bit of a shambles after a number of high-profile authors withdrew their works from consideration or declined prizes in protest of the organization’s perceived bias towards Israel. The authors include Lorrie Moore, who just won the National Book Critics Circle’s Fiction award for I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home.

A senior editor at NPR wrote a bad-faith, error-filled critique of the public radio outlet on Bari Weiss’s blog. NPR responded, defending its hiring practices and its philosophy. You can find many takedowns of Uri Berliner’s original piece, but one fact that got me was that he accused NPR of downplaying or ignoring the lab-leak theory behind COVID-19’s origins, even when the evidence in favor of a zoonotic spillover kept mounting.

WFLA has the story of a young boy with autism who can no longer receive health services because Florida kicked him off Medicaid. We need more stories like this, showing everyday people getting badly hurt by state policies that cut funding for essential services like health care, education, and even school lunches for underprivileged people.

A former youth minister at a Baptist church in Bixby, Oklahoma, has been charged with sexual exploitation of a minor as well as possession and distribution of child pornography. No drag queens were involved.

Chicago police killed Dexter Reed during a traffic stop where he fired first, injuring one officer, after which the cops fired 96 rounds in less than a minute. The Sun-Times reports that the five officers involved in the incident have been investigated a total of 41 times since 2019, and that the area where they stopped Reed has a disproportionate number of traffic stops. The cops have said they pulled Reed over because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt.

The brightest cosmic explosion scientists have ever seen has now led to new questions about how some of the universe’s heaviest metals are formed. The supernova occurred about 2.4 billion years ago in a galaxy far, far away, producing a huge burst of gamma rays but none of the elements like gold or platinum that scientists expected to find.

Delaware State Senator Sarah McBride is running to be our at-large Representative, vying to become the first trans person elected to Congress. She’s one of at least three Democrats hoping to win the primary, which is tantamount to winning the election in our very blue state. Full disclosure: I’ve met Sen. McBride and we often see each other at our local Brew Haha coffee shop.

Is social media really driving a surge in mental illness among teenagers, as Jonathan Haidt claims in his new book? The evidence is mixed at best, according to this review in Nature.

Eric Hovde, who is running for Senate in Wisconsin as a Republican, is now facing backlash over his comments from a previous campaign where he called for cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits, attacked single mothers, said alcohol should never have been legalized, questioned whether farmers work hard, and lots of other great stuff.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, chicago, climate change, delaware, Economics, election denial, florida, gaza, idaho, links, longreads, Media, mental illness, misinformation, missouri, physics, police, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, wisconsin

→ October 7, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/7/23.

I’ve had one post up for subscribers to the Athletic since the last roundup, with my hypothetical postseason awards ballots for 2023. I do have another story filed for Sunday, so keep an eye skinned for that.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Votes for Women, a (mostly) two-player, asymmetrical game about the fight for women’s suffrage. It’s fantastic, and I also love that this review went up the week that Glynis Johns turned 100.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was MLB’s Sarah Langs, talking about the season that was, who she would vote for in the various awards, and what excited her about this year’s playoff teams. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Rolling Stone’s Sean Williams writes about being conned by a con artist who tried to get the journalist to write a long profile/feature on him to further a movie deal, only for Williams to discover that the fraudster had as many as 200 victims of various romance and other scams over the last forty years.
The Washington Post looks at how climate change increases the demand and need for air conditioning, which in turn contributes more to climate change. Cooling a world that’s getting hotter requires increasing levels of energy, and we still rely far too much on energy-production methods that pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
An effective vaccine against tuberculosis would save millions of lives; it’s the deadliest infectious disease in the world, killing 1.6 million people a year. When pharmaceutical company GSK developed a vaccine for it, they chose instead to use the technology for a shingles vaccine, keeping the TB vaccine off the market for years.
Workers in California who cut stone countertops are coming down with silicosis, an incurable and terminal disease.
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull gave a very candid interview to the San Diego Union-Tribune ahead of the band’s concert last month in that city.
Dr. Peter Hotez warns that antiscience conspiracy theorists are growing in power and organization, threatening public health and the scientists working on projects like new vaccines – such as the brand-new vaccine against malaria, potentially one of the biggest global health breakthroughs in decades.
SARS-CoV-2 infects coronary arteries and arterial plaque, which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke in people who have or had COVID-19.
NBC News’s Ben Collins may have found a clue to why Elon Musk bought Twitter only to destroy it. Musk also wiped out the company’s election integrity team and cut the group targeting disinformation on the site.
Rumble host Stew Peters called for the execution of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Media Matters found ads for the NFL appearing on Peters’ Twitter account, including one near a link to the video of his death threat.
Fact-checking had a big moment between the 2020 election and the pandemic, with news organizations hiring more fact-checkers and more independent groups combating misinformation online, but nothing has really changed and now the effort has stalled.
Italy’s right-wing government has moved to erase LGBTQ+ people, especially parents, from their society.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has spent millions of taxpayer dollars defending his “anti-woke” laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights, public education, Disney, and more, only to lose repeatedly in the courts.
Harris County, Texas, taxpayers are in a similar boat, having paid over $1 million to people roped into County DA Kim Ogg’s (D) prosecutions of public officials with whom she’s feuded.
Republicans in North Carolina passed a bill to grab power from the Governor so they can control elections in the state, which already has a gerrymandered legislative map. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) vetoed Senate Bill 749, but the body is set to override his veto on Tuesday.
Delaware became the 17^th state to ban the “gay panic” defense, where a defendant accused of a violent act claims the act is justified because their victim was LGBTQ+.
A city commissioner in Anchorage, Alaska, who had a previous history of fraud, has been indicted for fraudulently taking $1.6 million in COVID-19 relief funds. She and her husband are accused of using the money to buy cryptocurrency, pay taxes, and for other personal matters.
The mayoral race in Franklin, Tennessee, got even more bizarre last week when a bunch of self-proclaimed white nationalists showed up to support candidate Gabrielle Hanson at a campaign event.
People of Praise, the extreme Catholic group that counts SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett as a member, is facing an FBI investigation into a cover-up of sexual abuse in the sect.
A rare bit of good news on the environment – Antigua & Barbuda has transformed the nation’s uninhabited third island, Redonda, from a lifeless rock into a thriving fountain of biodiversity.
An activist group is suing the EPA on behalf of a largely Black community in West Virginia’s “Chemical Valley,” arguing that the agency hasn’t done enough to protect residents from ethylene oxide pollution from a Union Carbide plant there.
The capitalists will let you drown. There’s money for cops and sports stadiums, but not for housing, or for infrastructure that might have prevented the flooding that plagued New York City eight days ago.
Speaking of which, just ten New York City cops were responsible for $68 million in payouts to victims of their misconduct, yet all ten are still on the public payroll.
A cop in Pennsylvania tried to strangle his ex-girlfriend and then used his authority to have her involuntarily committed.
The conservative newsletter/site The Dispatch argues that Trump and his supporters in office are devoid of moral leadership, and as Trump’s rhetoric worsens, too few people in his party seem to notice or care. Indeed, Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, and it barely made a ripple.
Did Hasan Minhaj go too far in fabricating autobiographical details in his standup routine? Brian Logan, comedy critic for the Guardian, says he did. The controversy seems likely to cost Minhaj a shot at the hosting job for the Daily Show.
Your brain sees winning streaks everywhere, even in random sequences. Scientific American looks at why.
Did the James Webb Telescope discover galaxies older than the projected age of the universe? Maybe, explains astrophysicist Katie Mack.
Some board game Kickstarters of note: Diatom is a tile-laying, pattern-making game based on an old Victorian art form.
And there’s a Kickstarter for the roll-and-write Merchants of Magick game, which is in the same universe as Set a Watch, along with two new expansions.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alaska, antiscience, board game news, climate change, cognitive psychology, delaware, environment, florida, frauds, health, italy, lgbt rights, links, longreads, Music, north carolina, physics, police, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, vaccines

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