→ February 28, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 2/28/15.

My ranking of the top 20 prospects for 2015 impact went up on Tuesday for Insiders. I also wrote some words about Boston signing Yoan Moncada.

Over at Paste, I recapped what I learned about recent and upcoming boardgame releases from my visit to Toyfair.

saturdayfiveAnd now this week’s links, heavy on the anti-science as it was a good week to be stupid…

  • Jimmy Kimmel and a bunch of actual medical doctors have something to say to vaccine deniers. Meanwhile, look at these idiots in Arizona who exposed a whole town to measles after all three of their unvaccinated kids caught it at Disneyland … and the mom still can’t take full responsibility for her actions. How is denying your children essential medical care like vaccinations anything but child neglect?
  • Meanwhile, there’s a vaccine out there that can largely prevent several forms of cancer, and lots of parents aren’t getting it for their children. It’s Gardasil, which provides immunity to most strains of the human papilloma virus (HPV), which is transmitted through sexual contact and can cause cervical, anal, vulvar, oral, and oropharyngeal cancers. Gardasil also protects against strains of HPV that cause genital warts. Yet we have vaccine deniers claiming it’s unsafe (it’s quite safe, thank you science), and I think we have a lot of parents refusing to acknowledge that their daughters are sexually active.
  • Senator Sheldon Whitehouse puts the smack down on the Senate’s most anti-science member, Jim Inhofe, over the latter’s climate change denial (and ignorance, really). This is on the heels of the Idaho lawmaker who thought the vagina was connected to the digestive system and the Nevada lawmaker who said cancer is caused by a fungus and can be cured with baking soda. Science literacy matters, folks, especially among people who might be making laws and such.
  • A rather harrowing blog post from writer Desi Jedeikin about a childhood memory of seeing her father nearly kill her mother. It’s a repost from xojane in 2012, but she put it on her tumblr this past week, which is where I first saw it. She’s also one of the only comedians/comedy writers I’ve ever encountered who can do very crude humor well.
  • Also from the Harrowing Links Dept., a long read from the Wichita Eagle on the struggles of the daughter of Dennis Rader. You might remember Rader as BTK, the serial killer who terrorized Wichita over the course of about two decades and ten confirmed murders. The piece does contain some disturbing details of the murders.
  • A new study says that babies who eat peanut-containing foods are 80% less likely to develop peanut allergies. Another study, this one in Sweden, found that children in households where people hand-washed dishes are about 40% less likely to develop allergies, a little more evidence in favor of the “hygiene hypothesis,” the idea that we have more allergies today because everything is too clean and our immune systems aren’t challenged by enough germs when we’re little.
  • I’m not going to link to her page, since she’s an anti-science fraud, but the self-styled “food babe” is now targeting the food additive cellulose (and various derivatives of it), which is generally made from wood pulp. Although that sounds weird – and that’s just the fallacy TFB is exploiting here, the argument from personal incredulity – there are two significant problems with her “argument.” One is that cellulose is among the most common chemical compounds in the plant world. If you eat celery, you eat cellulose. The fact that the food additive version comes from wood shouldn’t matter any more than you should care that cochineal and carmine come from bugs. The FraudBabe’s second problem is that we all eat wood already: Cinnamon and its knockoff cassia come from the barks of two trees found mostly in south and southeast Asia, and that wood isn’t processed to be un-wood to anywhere near the extent that industrial cellulose is.
  • Finally, also in the science-fraud department, the guy behind the junk-science juggernaut NaturalNews posted this gem late last week:

    That’s right: A seven-year-old leukemia survivor is just a shill for Big Pharma. Welcome to the fantasyland of science deniers.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ January 10, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 1/10/15.

No new Insider content this week, as I’ve been hard at work (really) on the top 100. It’s all phone calls at this point; I’ll start writing at the end of this upcoming week, most likely, although that depends on me getting through my list of calls too. I did chat on Thursday, and posted my Top Chef recap yesterday.saturdayfive

And now, the links …

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ December 14, 2014
→ By

Saturday five, 12/13/14.

My Insider content from this week’s activity in San Diego, which was the best setup I’ve ever seen for the winter meetings and resulted in more trades and signings than any meetings I can remember covering:

* The Jimmy Rollins trade
* The Mat Latos and Alfredo Simon trades
* The Matt Kemp trade
* The Rick Porcello/Yoenis Cespedes trade
* The Wade Miley trade
* The Howie Kendrick/Andrew Heaney trade and Brandon McCarthy signing
* The Dee Gordon trade
* The Jon Lester signing
* The Francisco Liriano re-signing
* The Miguel Montero trade
* The Jeff Samardzija trade (and David Robertson signing) and Oakland’s return
* The Jason Hammel signing
* The Brandon Moss trade

Outside of ESPN, my review of the boardgame Concordia is up at Paste. I’ll have my top ten games of 2014 up for them next week.

Here on the dish, I posted my top 100 songs of 2014 and top 14 albums of 2014, as well as this week’s Top Chef recap.

And now, this week’s links…

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ November 29, 2014
→ By

Saturday five, 11/29/14.

I know a lot of you are new to the dish – welcome, thanks for stopping by – so here’s the point of this post. On most Saturdays, I put together two sets of links, one to everything I wrote for my day job over the last seven days, and another to interesting articles (originally just five, but that’s more of a minimum now) from the same period, usually about non-baseball topics like science or food. Comments are welcome as long as everyone’s civil, and I’m always taking suggestions for links for the next post.

I was as busy with baseball posts as I’ve been during any previous Thanksgiving week, with five over the last five days:

* The Josh Donaldson trade
* Arizona signing Yasmani Tomas
* Boston signing Pablo Sandoval
* Boston signing Hanley Ramirez
* The White Sox’ and A’s’ signings from last weekend

I’ve also been updating my offseason guides/rankings, with the top 60 boardgames ranking before I went dark on Twitter and the favorite cookbooks guide right after.

And now, the weekly links:

  • At this time of year, many people with disposable income will think about giving money to charity – it’s the holiday spirit, or maybe just advice from the accountant. NPR’s The Salt has a great piece up on what goods to donate to food pantries. A little thought goes a long way. Food pantries can always, always use money, which, since I seldom buy canned foods anyway, is my preferred method of helping – and since food pantries focus on small, achievable goals, they’re among the best places to donate.
  • Two good pieces I read this week about Ferguson, Missouri, and the murder of Michael Brown: This piece by Prof. Carol Anderson from the Washington Post, arguing that the core issue is “white rage” against racial progress; and a piece from the British left-wing paper The Guardian, annotating the grand jury decision with critical notes on subtext.
  • The Embryo Project at Arizona State tweeted me this link to their site, on Charles Darwin’s study of embryos as part of his argument in favor of evolution as the mechanism behind the origins of species. Speaking of which, this graphic plotting countries’ GDP against what percent of their populations believe in evolution is distressing. But there’s good news – ornithologists discovered a new bird species on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
  • A little basic for this crowd, but this Washington Post piece reminds you not to ask for antibiotics when you have a cold.
  • A powerful piece from the New York Times by a mother, remembering the Thanksgiving her then two-year-old son spent in intensive care.
  • Maybe it was buried by Ferguson and the holiday, but the news that Alaska’s Mount Pavlof went boom again this past week should have gotten a lot more play. The eruption column reached nine miles; by comparison, the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which was so powerful that it lowered global temperatures for the next year-plus, reached twelve miles.
Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,