I’m still working on the top 100 prospects package, although at least I’ve got enough done that I’m not coiled up like a spring any more. The organization rankings piece will run on Wednesday, and the top 100 itself will run on Thursday, when I will also chat. The current plan is for one league’s top tens to run Thursday and the other Friday, but my editors haven’t finalized that.

And now, this week’s links…

• Longform piece from Vulture/NY Mag: Baohaus founder/chef Eddie Huang’s foul-mouthed tract on watching his memoir (and life) become a bowdlerized sitcom.
• From the increasingly indispensable British paper The Guardian why the modern world is bad for your brain. We think we can multitask, but we can’t.
• The Senate passed an amendment 98-1 affirming that climate change is not a hoax. What a world that we have to do this.
• Scientists slowed the speed of light. Of course, the particle theory of light is just a theory anyway.
• Munchies (at VICE) tackles the question of the California attempt to ban foie gras in a 41-minute video documentary. It’s remarkably calm and rational for a look at an issue that inspires more emotion than reason. I come down on the side of allowing foie gras production, because I don’t want any government body making choices about what I should and shouldn’t eat when I’m better capable of making those choices myself. Asking the government to stop antibioitic use in livestock is a matter of global health and safety; asking the government to protect ducks and geese who may not be suffering any harm imposes someone else’s views of animal rights on my plate.
  
  John Burton, now the Chairman of the California Democratic Party, comes off worse than the ducks in this documentary, swearing at the interviewer at least twice, dismissing a very reasonable question as “stupid,” appearing to have little familiarity with the issue at hand, even proudly defending the fact that he never visited the farm that his bill put out of business. I’m not a Californian, but if I were a Democrat and lived there I’d be livid that this was the man at least nominally in charge of the state’s party.
• Just because evolution is settled science doesn’t mean we’re no longer learning more about how it works. This week’s discovery: Evolution may be able to reverse itself, according to one study of the evolutionary process in birds.
• I tweeted this yesterday but it’s worth reposting – one chart that shows how effective and dangerous vaccine deniers’ efforts have been. And don’t believe them when they say it’s not a big deal, because getting the measles is horrible.
• Goofiness: How people in the small Swedish town of Ůmea say “yes.”

My take on the Evan Gattis trade is up for Insiders, and this week’s Klawchat transcript had some other thoughts on that deal and the Clippard/Escobar swap.

Lots of links this week…

• The Green Bay Packers love to play Settlers of Catan. But can we stop saying “a boardgame called Settlers of Catan?” It’s sold about 20 million copies worldwide. It’s well beyond some fringe obsession.
• Can an exiled, corrupt Russian oligarch take on Putin? This New Yorker longform piece doesn’t exactly make me feel better about the future of one of the world’s largest countries.
• Neither does this: Russia has listed transsexual and transgender people among those who will no longer qualify for driving licences. Remind me again why FIFA hasn’t pulled the 2018 World Cup yet?
• I tweeted this earlier in the week, but this EW story on the final season of Parks and Recreation is magnificent.
• My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward. A difficult read, and not one with which I entirely agree, but I still recommend it for the writer’s ability to capture the partner’s experiences in a situation where we typically hear about the patient’s.
• Another difficult read: A mother’s farewell to her daughter, who died at 36 on Christmas morning. Kate Gross fell to colon cancer, leaving a husband and five-year-old twins behind.
• Cooking dried beans? Don’t soak them. There’s no benefit, regardless of what the old wives tell you.
• Astronomers measured the space-time warp in the gravity of a binary star by using a neutron star just before it winked out of view.
• Why Ava DuVernay’s Oscar Snub Matters, from a decidedly not-left-wing outlet. When good work by people of color gets swept under the rug, we all lose.
• The Accidental Outing of Rwanda’s Most Powerful Troll. A podcast (with transcript) from August that is shocking for its exposure of how the Rwandan government harasses its critics via social media.
• And on a lighter note, Texas actually has a statute, Lauren’s Law, that allows parents to bring in cupcakes or other treats to school for their kids’ birthdays. It’s a sad day in America that such a law is necessary.

This is up a bit late, due to the holiday, travel, and a visit with family that includes seeing my grandmother, who is now in hospice after renal failure and is not expected to live more than a few more days. She turned 100 in June and in many ways was a third parent to me, there for most of the significant events of my childhood, the person I woke up to see when I was three years old and my mother had left for the hospital during the night to give birth to my sister. I’ve known this day would come for a long time, but it hasn’t made seeing her like this any easier.

I haven’t had any ESPN content this week, but my top ten new boardgames of 2014 ranking is up for Paste. There’s some overlap with my overall top 60 boardgames ranking from November, but the Paste list includes a few I hadn’t played enough to include in the global list.

This week’s links:

• Quantum physics just got less complicated. That might be overselling it – we’re not about to start teaching it in kindergarten – but the study discussed here claims that wave-particle duality (that a particle can behave like a wave, or a wave like light can behave like a particle) is just one manifestation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
• An amazing video collage of twisted snowmen from Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson’s strip was brilliant across the board, but I don’t think I enjoyed anything as much as Calvin’s demented snow sculptures.
• This woman collected all her trash from a single year and fit it into a mason jar. I think it’s amazing that anyone could cut down on her trash production to this extent, although the woman also clearly has no kids or pets, and she must go through a lot of water to clean all of the reusable cloths she has to use. It’s still a great thought experiment – you can recycle more stuff than you think, and you can absolutely cut down on your trash with some effort. I’d even argue, based mostly on my own experience, that the 80/20 rule applies: 20% of the effort will cut down on 80% of your trash. Composting, better recycling, and smarter shopping do it pretty painlessly.
• The science behind catnip’s effect on cats. The best part here was the embedded video of big cats getting high off the stuff.
• Twitter doesn’t think these rape/death threats are harassment. I love Twitter for a lot of reasons, but their response to obvious harassment of women is inadequate if not embarrassing. The company has every right to sweep these trolls right off their service, but they hide behind a vague concept of free speech. Save that stuff for anti-government activists fighting autocratic regimes, not for anonymous cowards trying to scare women.

The hot stove was cooking with gas this week, so I managed to get a fair amount of writing done about the various deals, such as …

* Friday’s three-way trade involving the Yanks, Tigers, and Dbacks
* The Andrew Miller contract with the Yankees
* The Nick Markakis deal with Atlanta, with smaller deals like the Happ/Saunders trade included in this post
* The Nelson Cruz deal with Seattle, maybe the worst of the offseason so far

I also posted a review of the two-player deckbuilding game Star Realms late Friday night.

This week’s links…

• Our Ability To Digest Alcohol May Have Been Key To Our Survival. The common ancestor we share with chimps and gorillas developed an enzyme, ADH4, about 10 million years ago, that enabled them to digest foods that had begun fermentation. You had me at “alcohol,” though.
• Also via NPR, Why did non-GMO versions of cereals lose their vitamins? Maybe the whole GMO/non-GMO dichotomy isn’t as clean and simple as the labeling advocates (with whom I tend to side) argue it is? Besides, I’ve pointed out before that no GMO foods will mean no more bananas some day soon.
• So much for the Big Bang’s afterglow, which confirmed the standard theory of cosmology so well that researchers are actually disappointed. By the way, did you know the Big Bang theory was first proposed by a Catholic priest, the Belgian George Lemaître?
• There were a lot of great (if infuriating) stories this week about hockey blogger/creeper Steve Lepore harassing women via Twitter DMs and Gchat, but this story from the Blonde Side was the best/most infuriating, because it happened so long ago and because Lepore’s boss/editor/some authority figure at the time just blew it off.
• This ThinkProgress piece argues that a 21st Circuit Court judge could appoint a special prosecutor in Ferguson and try to get a new indictment. I fully concede I’m not a lawyer and don’t know if this is accurate, but a fresh grand jury proceeding with an impartial prosecutor sounds like a good idea for the community. I’d love to hear some lawyers in the audience weigh in on whether this is a legitimate argument and/or whether it would be a smart move.