science — Page 4

→ October 5, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/5/19.

Nothing new from me this week other than a Klawchat and a Periscope video as I try to finish off the first draft of my upcoming book The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, now available for pre-order. My next ESPN+ column will be a dispatch from the Arizona Fall League.

And now, the links – fewer than usual, for the same reasons, but these should get back to normal by the end of the month:

Longreads first: This New York Review of Books review of Tim Alberta’s book American Carnage doubles as a look at how the Republican Party was heading for this Trumpian moment for a half-century.
Haruki Murakami writes about memories of his father and their declining relationship for the New Yorker.
Deadspin has the inside scoop on how TheMaven plans to gut Sports Illustrated by turning it into a lousier version of SBNation or SI‘s own FanSided.
GQ takes readers inside the brutal dictatorship ruling Burundi, a tiny country in the heart of Africa, the southern neighbor of Rwanda. Burundi’s sectarian violence hasn’t become a global story like the Rwandan civil war and genocide did, but that doesn’t make its current regime’s crimes any less heinous.
The American Prospect looks at the novel campaign of West Virginia gubernatorial candidate Stephen Smith, which focuses more on philosophy than the candidate himself.
The BBC has a not-quite longread on the international heist of Saudi jewels, including the “blue diamond,” that has caused a rift between Saudi Arabia and Thailand, and that ultimately involved multiple murders.
Nestlé, whose products you should already think about avoiding given their exploitation of water resources, is now complaining that they don’t want to comply with Australian requirements to report on whether they rely on slavery in their chocolate supply chain, claiming it would cost consumers more money in the end. I mean, I’m good paying another dime for chocolate if it means the cacao wasn’t harvested by an eight-year-old slave in Côte d’Ivoire.
Susanna Clarke, author of one of my all-time favorite novels in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, will release her second novel in September of 2020, sixteen years after her bestselling, critically-acclaimed, Hugo-winning debut.
Plastic tea bags release billions of plastic microparticles into your tea. I’ll stick with loose leaf teas at home, thanks.
Two women in New Zealand lost their pregnancies because they contracted measles. Remember that when someone tells you that measles is a benign childhood illness.
From 2017, the chief of the Guardian‘s Melbourne bureau, Melissa Davey, wrote that we need to teach science and health literacy in schools so those kids don’t grow up into gullible adults who fall for pseudoscience and anti-science myths they read online.
An “Actually Disabled” person penned an open letter to Andy Richter about the dangers of assuming someone who looks able-bodied is feigning a disability.
Why are Customs and Border Protection agents harassing journalists as they re-enter the United States? Probably for the same reason the U.S. has fallen to “problematic” on the World Press Freedom index.
Board game news: Reiner Knizia’s Yellow & Yangtze, which he calls his “spiritual successor” to Tigris & Euphrates, is coming to digital platforms and just hit Early Access on Steam. It’s from Dire Wolf, who did such great work on digital ports of Raiders of the North Sea and Lanterns.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, board game news, british literature, chocolate, food safety, longreads, murakami, science, stick to baseball, west virginia

→ June 29, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/29/19.

I had two ESPN+ pieces this week, my annual look at the top 25 players under 25 (which has an error in it around German Marquez’s contract status, sorry) and a scouting blog post on Grayson Rodriguez, Deivi Garcia, Alec Bohm and more. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

This piece went up a little while ago but I waited to post it until some small editing mistakes were corrected: I listed eight of my favorite noir and neo-noir films for Caavo and my friend Desi Jedeikin.

I’ll be at the MLB Futures Game in Cleveland on July 7th, and I’m staying in the area Monday night to give a talk and sign books at the Hudson Library and Historical Society at 7 pm. I hope to see many of you there.

I’ll send out the next copy of my free email newsletter this weekend, so feel free to sign up for more of my words.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Deadspin had a peculiar story on a man in 19th century England who became a professional pedestrian.
Grub Street has an oral history of Serious Eats, a site that went from a collection of very niche blogs to the go-to destination for dedicated chefs interested in a science-based approach to cooking.
The President of the United States was credibly accused of rape – again – and his response was that his accuser was not his “type.”
Why is it always Alabama? Well, an Alabama woman who was shot has been charged with manslaughter for the death of the fetus she was carrying, while the shooter was not charged at all.
Why is it always Alabama? Well, after a Covington County Sheriff lost a bid for re-election, he went on a spending spree with public funds, with tens of thousands of dollars of equipment or cash now missing – on top of the over $100,000 of military equipment that went missing during his tenure. (And why the fuck does a rural county sheriff need a hundred grand worth of military equipment?) ProPublica found nine incoming sheriffs across Alabama who reported similar experiences with their predecessors looting public funds.
The argument over whether to call the active concentration camps on our southern borders “concentration camps” is a counterproductive distraction from the actual harm being done in the concentration camps.
Four scientists tried to replicate a frequently-cited research result from a paper published in Science in 2008, but failed to achieve the same results. Science refused to publish their new paper, arguing that the “field had moved on,” rather than accepting that, hey, sometimes a single study turns out to be wrong.
An app appeared briefly this week that allowed users to create fake nudes of nearly any woman by using a type of neural-networking algorithm that works similarly to that behind “deepfake” videos.
Above the Law points out that the proposed two-city solution for the Rays is a legal impossibility, based in part on this piece Sheryl Ring wrote for Fangraphs about the Rays’ obligations to St. Petersburg.
“Vaccine skeptic” just means anti-vaccine. So does “pro-safe-vaccine.” Don’t let denialists’ obfuscations confuse you: These people are pushing dangerous misinformation that will worsen the health of the general public.
A four-day workweek would go a long way to reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, more so than popular but low-value solutions like banning plastic straws. (Also, banning plastic straws hurts people with certain disabilities; encouraging people to use them less often is a better idea.)
I had no idea that sand mining was a thing, or that sand, critical to much of the world’s construction industry, was a scarce resource, but in India, it’s a corrupt industry rife with labor abuses, causing massive environmental damage.
Employees at one location of Seattle third-wave coffee purveyors Slate Coffee resigned en masse in response to a “toxic” work environment. The owners of Slate responded to the story on Instagram (included in the link).
Maine Senator Susan Collins (R) now has a challenger in Democrat Sara Gideon, currently speaker of the Maine House. Gideon appears to be explicitly targeting Collins over her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh after the justice was accused of sexual assault.
I didn’t watch the debates among the ninety-four candidates vying to be the Democratic nominee for President in 2020, for the same reason I almost never watch debates: They reward the pithy and superficial, and they treat political discourse as if it were a sporting event. Jeb Lund argues much the same, and says this structure and mindset helped put Trump in the White House in the first place.
Board game news: Dire Wolf has two new titles out – the social deduction game Game of Thrones: Oathbreaker and the expansion Clank! Upper Management Acquisitions Incorporated pack, which comes with four characters from the Penny Arcade universe that you can use in the dungeon crawl board game Clank!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, coffee, india, links, longreads, science, vaccines

→ May 18, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/17/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers this week, my look back at the 2009 draft went up, with a redraft of the first round and a look at the first-round misses. I also wrote a scouting post on some Orioles, Royals, Yankees, and Blue Jays prospects, including the top prospect in each of the first three organizations coming into the year. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian looks at the ongoing and now renewed investigation into the assassination of Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister who was shot and killed on a Stockholm street in 1986.
The New Yorker goes deep on the question of land ownership and redistribution currently roiling South Africa, which has some of the greatest economic inequality in the world.
Also from the Guardian‘s Long read program, why depression is not merely a disease of affluent countries, and how developing nations need more resources to focus on citizens’ mental health.
New York looks at how the wildfire season in California has become unending thanks to climate change.
Dr. James Hamblin explains the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, and why it doesn’t mean vaccines are unsafe, at The Atlantic. The VICP is a favorite talking point of anti-vaxxers, who refuse to understand how the program works or that it exists because litigious parents nearly drove vaccine manufacturers out of the market.
Alabama’s new abortion ban is akin to torture, mimicking a popular war crime we’ve seen recently in Bosnia and the Congo. I said on Thursday that I will not cover the SEC tournament this year or in the near future because of this law.
Austin, Fort Worth, and Houston are all at risk of measles outbreaks thanks to the hard work of anti-vaxxers (and their friends in the extreme religious right, like state Rep. Jonathan Stickland).
Members of a closer anti-vaxxer group on Facebook are calling for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government in response to rational, science-based laws that make it harder for parents to refuse to vaccinate their school-aged children.
Former evangelical Christian Sara Olson writes of learning about science after growing up in a denialist household.
Truthdig examines how an innocuous BBC interview exposed the vacuous nature of Ben Shapiro, who accused the conservative host of being a bias left-winger before abruptly ending the interview.
A sci-fi author showed how not to deal with someone about to publish a negative review of your book.
The recent imbroglio at my alma mater over a law professor being removed from his post as Winthrop House faculty dean involves far more serious charges than the Harvey Weinstein narrative implies. Prof. Ronald Sullivan joined the legal defense team for Weinstein, which did spur some outrage by students, but his removal comes after a long series of allegations of inappropriate behavior on his part as head of the upper-class student house.
A white Tennessee pastor raped his adoptive daughter for several years, but a white male judge sentenced him to just twelve years, rather than the 72 years prosecutors sought – even though the now-convicted rapist continues to deny guilt in the face of her allegations and DNA evidence.
San Francisco pie shop Mission Pie has refused to do business with food delivery services over their high surcharges, which they would have to subsidize by raising prices for customers dining in-store.
Virginia Del. Danica Roem (D) has ended up in the spotlight after her surprise win in 2018, and she’s using it to try to help other Democrats across the state get elected.
Anti-gay, anti-Semitic, totally American preacher Steven Anderson was denied entry to Ireland under a previously-unused immigration statute, with the Irish Minister for Justice citing “the interests of public policy.”
Israel’s ruling party is in turmoil over claims Prime Minister Netanyahu is trying to reduce their Supreme Court’s power to protect himself against three ongoing corruption cases.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who churns out policy proposal after policy proposal, has also proposed a 2% wealth tax above $50 million and an additional 1% on wealth over $1 billion. If enacted, it will likely be challenged as unconstitutional, and the outcome of such a case is an open question.
Monsanto has now lost three straight jury trials over glyphosate (the main ingredient in Roundup) despite a lack of any scientific evidence that the chemical is harmful to humans; David Bernstain of the Volokh Conspiracy (at Reason) explains why these verdicts are so outrageous.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, gilead, harvard, links, longreads, mental health, science, stick to baseball, sweden, texas

→ April 13, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/13/19.

I’ve had four ESPN+ posts this week. On the draft blog, I covered last week’s NHSI tournament + Elon RHP George Kirby, then scouted West Virginia RHP Alek Manoah and Texas Tech 3b Josh Jung. I’ve heard Jung’s name pronounced a few ways, but I think it has to be either Josh Jung or Yosh Yung, for consistency’s sake. On the pro side, I looked at the most prospect-laden minor league rosters this year, and finally saw Luis Robert play against the Royals’ high-A squad. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Architects of the West Kingdom, the newest game from Shem Phillips, who got a Spiel nomination for 2015’s Raiders of the North Sea. Architects is a busy worker-placement game, but has a few fun quirks like capturing your opponents’ meeples and selling them to the prison, or trading reputation to steal tax money or go to the black market.

And now, the links:

Longreads first: Anne Boyer writes in the New Yorker about what cancer takes away from you even if you survive it.
Adjunct professors are the minor-league baseball players of academia: overworked, underpaid, and often living on the edge of poverty. The Atlantic looks at one such adjunct who died because she couldn’t afford basic medical care that might have saved her.
Hampshire College has long had a reputation as a ‘hippie’ school, loose on the academics, maybe heavy on the substances. The college may be on the verge of extinction as it seeks a partner or buyer.
Forbes looks at deadbeat billionaire Jim Justice, the current governor of West Virginia, a man who doesn’t pay his bills and ignores state regulations that don’t suit him.
I’ve written quite a bit here about antibiotic resistance and the need for aggressive, science-based policies to combat it. Well, fungi can also make us sick, and now Candida auris has evolved resistance to antifungal drugs, too – and it’s hard to kill even outside the body. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (PA-06), an engineer by training, had a tweet thread about this topic after the article ran. Guess her party.
Kyle Korver, who sources tell me is a professional basketball player, wrote in The Player’s Tribune about learning to understand his own privilege.
Isaac Chotiner interviewed writer Bret Easton Ellis for the New Yorker, and Ellis said some things that didn’t play particularly well online, for good reason. I’m not linking this to dunk on Ellis, but to praise Chotiner: Look at how consistently he probes when Ellis dissembles, and how he refuses to let Ellis off the hook for saying something wrong. This is how the media should interview people in power.
ScienceNews has a follow-up piece to a link I posted last week that profiled fossil hunter Robert DePalma and the possible discovery of a fossil record from immediately after the Chicxulub impact.
Chik-Fil-A continues to pour money into nonprofit groups fighting LGBT rights across the country. I haven’t set foot in one of their restaurants in at least a decade, for this precise reason, but J. Kenji Lopez-Alt shows you how to recreate their famous chicken sandwich at home.
WIRED explains why the robocall problem will never truly be fixed.
Elizabeth Warren may not be faring well in early polls or fundraising, but Moira Donegan writes in the Guardian that Warren is the intellectual powerhouse of the Democratic Party, producing practical policy proposals where others purvey platitudes.
This week’s Hidden Brain podcast episode looks at how societal views of gay rights changed so dramatically inside of fifty years.
Stand your white ground: An Alabama woman who shot and killed the man who violently raped her and then assaulted her brother is now facing life in prison. Don’t get mad when people stereotype the south while this shit still happens in your backyard.
In Missouri, two legislators – guess which party! – are pushing anti-vaccine bills and conspiracy theories.
Another WIRED piece argues that our health laws have failed the public good when it comes to vaccines, making it too easy for idiots and the ignorant to opt out.
Amidst the furor over US-Israeli relations, we’re losing track of the various despots Trump is propping up around the world, including the rising dictatorship in Egypt.
Why am I including a link to a press release about a single-malt whiskey’s launch in India? You’ll see if you read it.
The New York Times crossword puzzle Twitter account got into a bizarre beef with another twitterer over what was pretty obviously a joke.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, gay rights, links, missouri, science, vaccines, west virginia

→ March 8, 2019
→ By keith

T. rex and the Crater of Doom.

I read and greatly enjoyed Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs back in the fall, and made a note to pick up a book to which he referred many times, Walter Alvarez’s delightfully titled T. rex and the Crater of Dooooooooom (I may have added a few o’s there). Alvarez, an earth sciences professor at Cal Berkeley, developed the hypothesis that a massive impact of a non-terrestrial object wiped out the dinosaurs and ended the Cretaceous period in what is now known as the K-Pg or K-T extinction event. Along with his father, Luis, and numerous other scientists from multiple disciplines, Alvarez worked on the hypothesis and led the search for evidence, eventually finding enough evidence that the hypothesis is considered the correct explanation for the mass extinction. In this quick 150-page book, Alvarez retells the story of the development of the hypothesis and the global hunt for proof as well as the scientific fights over this specific hypothesis and the challenge it posed to the previous orthodoxy of uniformitarianism – the idea that changes to the earth were gradual and not caused by catastrophes like an asteroid or comet impact.

The scientific consensus on the K-T extinction event is well-established now, and Alvarez begins the book with a description of what likely happened the day that a giant rock, around 10 km in diameter, slammed into the northwest portion of what is now the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, creating the Chicxulub crater on land and beneath the Gulf of Mexico. The impact took place 66 million years ago, so in the interim it had been largely covered by additional layers of sediment and rock on land, and thus its discovery was delayed until someone was actually looking for it in the first place. The Chicxulub impact was catastrophic on a scale unimaginable to us today; a rock that was wider than the height of Mount Everest slammed into the earth, releasing a billion times more energy than that created by the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This impact was so powerful it vaporized gypsum in the earth, created tektite glass nodules, led to seismic waves in the rock itself, and would have killed anything living within several hundred miles of the impact site through heat or fire. The impact also kicked up enough dust, including the iridium that would settle in a consistent layer around the planet, to lead to a year or more of a de facto winter where sunlight was blocked enough to halt photosynthesis and devastate the global biosphere.

The hypothesis itself was controversial because of that previous orthodoxy that all changes to the earth occurred gradually, which dated back to Charles Lyell in the early 1800s and influenced the work of Charles Darwin. Alvarez’s heresy, that a single, massive, external catastrophe permanently altered the shape of the earth’s surface and the course of life on the planet – wiping out the dinosaurs and creating a massive ecological void that would be filled by large mammals, including us – encountered immediate pushback, some of which persists today even though the evidence in favor of the impact hypothesis is substantial. Alvarez walks through the history of the development of his hypothesis, including why it was never taken seriously before, and the scientific battle that followed it up through the 1990 discoveries that led to the conclusion that the impact that caused the Chicxulub crater was the same one that killed the dinosaurs.

Alvarez’s writing is on the dryer side, unsurprising given his background as scientist, but the story itself carries the book through – this was an earth-shattering (pun very intended) discovery, and it shook the foundations of an entire field of science. It’s a worthy read on its own but also a great reminder of the power of entrenched thinking, and how many earth scientists and geologists continue even to this day to fight against the preponderance of evidence that Alvarez’s hypothesis is correct. (We know the crater exists, so we know something very large hit the earth there, but there are arguments that, for example, the impact didn’t cause the global iridium layer, even though nearly all iridium in the earth’s crust came from extra-terrestrial sources.) He also makes sure to credit many, many other scientists who helped along the way, emphasizing that the search for evidence to support or contradict the hypothesis was a multi-disciplinary effort that spanned the globe and took over a decade, which is a kind gesture but did tend to slow the story down for me. It’s a short enough book that this was never really a problem, although I think Brusatte does a better job of explaining the Alvarez hypothesis for the lay audience than Alvarez himself does here in more academic fashion.

Next up: Still reading Iraj Pezeshkzad’s very funny novel My Uncle Napoleon.

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

→ January 26, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/26/19.

I had one ESPN+ piece this week, on the three-way trade that sent Sonny Gray to Cincinnati. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday. The 2019 top prospects package begins its rollout on Monday.

At Paste, I reviewed the cooperative game Forbidden Sky, from Pandemic designer Matt Leacock, who adds a fun STEM element to the same framework he’s used in Pandemic and the other Forbidden titles.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Longreads site has The Hunt for Planet Nine, spending time with two astronomers scrutinizing the skies for a ninth planet, beyond Neptune, that would explain the presence and behavior of several bodies in our solar system – but that no one has been able to find yet.
The Atlantic cancels Brian Singer with a litany of stories about sexual assaults, mostly of young, often underage, vulnerable men, usually involving a lot of alcohol and drugs. It’s an awful read, but it should really be the end of Singer’s career, and, I hope, the end of any talk of Bohemian Rhapsody winning Best Picture. In a short, related story, Queen’s Dr. Brian May tried the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ trope for Singer but had to apologize and walk it back.
The Guardian‘s Long Read looks at the endless hunt for a single, long-lasting flu vaccine, an excerpt from an upcoming book on influenza, here also looking at the history of vaccination and why countries differ in their vaccine recommendations.
Also from the Guardian, the Rwandan government may have killed the country’s exiled spy chief in a story reminiscent of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi Arabian government.
This excerpt from an upcoming book on the micronation of Sealand is just delightfully nuts. I first heard about Sealand through HavenCo, a short-lived “data haven” colocation company which Ars Technica remembered in a condensed history back in 2012 after its demise.
The New Yorker‘s Isaac Chotiner interviewed one of the scientists claiming that ‘Oumoamua is from an alien race, a sort of real-life Rama, and the interview kind of goes off the rails as it progresses.
Several good links on the Covington Catholic students’ actions at the March for Life last weekend: Father Edward Beck, a Roman Catholic priest, writes that MAGA hats do not belong on Catholic school trips. The Atlantic‘s Ian Bogost implores us to stop trusting viral videos. A Republican PR firm in Louisville played a key role in helping – or protecting – the privileged white students of the school.
Then there are pieces on the video itself. Reason‘s Robby Soave, who I think it is fair to characterize as a contrarian writer, argued that the ‘full’ video exonerated the students. Cartoonist Matt Bors of the Nib vehemently disagreed. So did Rewire editor Jodi Jacobson, who said There is a longer video. And it’s worse.. I don’t even know who wrote this piece tying the revisionist takes to the our disinformation age, but I thought it was spot on.
My friend Will Leitch says the upcoming Stephen Soderbergh film High Flying Bird is the most radical sports film he’s ever seen.
Israel’s Health Ministry is considering sanctions against eight anti-vaccine doctors. (Link requires subscription; it was free when I first read and saved it.) This should be policy everywhere. Doctors who tell patients not to vaccinate are as bad as doctors who sell useless supplements or fraudulent treatments – maybe worse, because the failure to vaccinate hurts more than just those patients.
The New York Times‘ editorial board argues for ending nonmedical exemptions to vaccination laws and improving pro-vaccine messaging to counteract anti-vaxxer bullshit. There are measles outbreaks everywhere in the U.S. now, even though the disease was eradicated in the entire hemisphere less than 20 years ago. As many as 19,000 people were exposed to measles at a Portland Trail Blazers game recently. You should be mad enough to call your state rep and your state senator and demand that they eliminate religious and philosophical exemptions.
Curiosity explores what “travel to origin” means for things like food or coffee and why you should care about it.
Eater asks if white Yelpers demanding ‘authenticity’ are hurting non-white restaurant owners and chefs because the customers don’t know what authentic means in those contexts and tend to substitute their own prejudices.
Arizona, you never cease to disappoint me: Gail Griffin (guess) proposed a tax on watching pornography to pay for a border wall.
Meanwhile, a federal judge found that people who were leaving water and other supplies for people trying to cross the desert to enter the U.S. illegally guilty of ‘abandoning personal property’ as well as using a motor vehicle in the area without a permit.
Senator Jodi Ernst revealed that she was raped in college, and is now leaving her abusive husband. It is hard to square her history of traumatic experiences with her refusal to believe the women who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. That said, I have great respect for Sen. Ernst for coming forward with a private memory that must still be very painful to discuss.
The new Los Angeles County Sheriff reinstated a deputy who had been fired for domestic abuse and stalking.
Sudan’s people are rising up against their longtime dictator, and the regime is cracking down, but George Clooney and his compatriots are nowhere to be found this time when the former object of their attention needs their help.
I guess the American “Rooster” sriracha isn’t what Thai people expect from the condiment.
Board games! Tom Lehmann’s game The City will get its first English-language edition and it’s currently on Kickstarter.
Next Move Games is holding a contest around its upcoming game Tuki to win a free copy of the game.
Finally, the tweet of the week contains a not very well-known clip from Martin Luther King, Jr.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, astronomy, board games, links, longreads, los angeles, science, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ December 15, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/15/18.

This week’s MLB winter meetings weren’t great, but I did write up a few moves: Cleveland’s trades for Carlos Santana & Jake Bauers, the signings of Joe Kelly and Jeurys Familia, the Lance Lynn signing & Tanner Roark trade, the Rays’ signing of Charlie Morton, and the Phillies’ signing of Andrew McCutchen.

On the board game front, I wrote up every game I tried at PAX Unplugged for Paste, and reviewed the Terraforming Mars app (on Steam) for Ars Technica.

I resumed my free email newsletter this week, after a longer break than I wanted due to those same stupid meetings and stupid prospect calls getting in the stupid way, but you should join the over 5000 current subscribers for even more of my words.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: At the Hardball Times, Stephanie Springer writes about scouting makeup in an era where some teams are eliminating scouting jobs. I’m quoted in the piece.
The Washington Post details how the Bradford pear tree became an invasive species after its sterile fruit became fertile through proximity to callery pear trees.
The Atlantic‘s George Packer asks how the Republican Party got so corrupt, doing whatever it possibly can to maintain power even after crushing electoral losses last month.
Attorney and former federal prosecutor Ken White wrote that “Individual 1” is in grave (legal) danger, based on the contents of memos released by the Mueller investigation on December 7th. Womp womp.
A Baylor student drugged and raped a woman but was allowed to plead guilty, paying a $400 fine, without having to register as a sex offender. Meanwhile, Cyntoia Brown, a Tennessee woman who was trafficked and killed the man who ‘bought’ her as a sex slave, must serve 51 years in prison for the killing. Do you feel safer?
Prion diseases, including “mad cow disease,” are terrifying enough. Now scientists have learned that these nearly indestructible proteins seed victims’ eyes. Prions aren’t alive, but they can self-replicate, and the diseases they are known to cause are all incurable.
An archaeology team working in Azerbaijan found a 4000-year-old board game carved into the earth.
Food52 writer Eric Kim discusses how an annual trip from NYC to Maine helps him deal with his depression.
Scientists are examining the ice core on remote Bouvet Island to learn about the past wind patterns and sea ice extensions from Antarctica, in part to figure out if man’s actions are changing them.
Yet another study has shown that GMOs do not cause cancer, part of a €15 million response to a junk study published in 2012. The resulting years of further research has wasted time, money, and the lives of thousands of rats.
One major reason I sold my house in Arizona and moved back east was my belief that climate change and profoundly stupid state & local governments would lead to serious water shortages in the not-too-distant future. Well, the Phoenix City Council justified my fear by voting down a modest hike in the city’s low water rates, the proceeds of which were supposed to go to improving infrastructure and allowing the city to draw more water from existing ground supplies, rather than the depleted Colorado River.
Speaking of the profoundly stupid local governments in Arizona, the Phoenix City Council was also set to subsidize the Phoenix Suns’ arena renovations before public outcry set in and they delayed their vote. You may have seen 90-year-old Greta Rogers tearing into the Suns’ owner as she spoke at a public hearing on the deal; the Phoenix New Times then interviewed her, and it’s wonderful.
Democrats are trying to further gerrymander New Jersey in a naked power grab that would fit with the current Republican playbook in Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina. There’s at least some pushback within the Democratic Party, but not enough so far to stop this antidemocratic effort.
West Virginia voted for Trump in 2016, but their economy has gotten much worse under his reign, including a spike in the state’s already high poverty rate.
The Trump Administration wants to make it easier for corporations to pollute waterways and destroy wetlands, because fuck the planet.
The EPA is now supporting that effort by circulating an editorial from a newspaper owned by climate-denying GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson, whose wife just happened to get a Presidential Medal of Freedom last month. I’m sure that’s all coincidental!
North Carolina’s 9th District election, plagued by electoral fraud committed by a GOP operative, is such a mess that both parties may agree to hold a new election. The question will then be whether the Republican who won the tainted poll, Mark Harris, would be allowed to run again, even though the allegations – the operative appears to have illegally collected absentee ballots and then failed to submit them to try to suppress votes for Harris’ opponent – are connected to his camp.
We all know Fox & Friends operates in some sort of alternate universe when it comes to facts, but claiming Obama paid off mistresses just like Trump did seems like a new low. (To be clear: He didn’t.)
Russian spy Maria Butina pled guilty on Thursday to conspiracy charges, and her partner, a GOP operative, suddenly registered as a foreign agent, as did a former colleague of his who’s on the NRA’s board of directors.
An Irish TD (legislator) has proposed a bill that would ban ads telling cancer patients that medical treatment is unnecessary so they can sell those patients quack treatments instead.
Americans use way too many paper towels.
Bread is just not bad for you, unless you’re among the ~6% of the population with celiac disease or a wheat allergy. Anyone claiming it causes “wheat belly” or “grain brain” does so in contravention of the available scientific research on bread consumption. And whole grain breads are good for you.
The flailing New York Times tweeted a request for travelers’ stories of experiencing crime in London, but dry Brit wit hijacked their futile endeavor.
The Department of Homeland Security posted a message in favor of the border wall that was strangely devoid of definite or indefinite articles, as if the message had first been written in, say, Russian.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board games, bread, environment, gmos, links, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, west virginia

→ November 24, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/24/18.

My one ESPN+ post this week covered the James Paxton trade, which included one of my favorite pitching prospects in the minors, lefty Justus Sheffield. I didn’t hold a chat this week due to the holiday.

You don’t have to sign up for my free email newsletter, but you’re missing out on lots of words.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The best thing I read this week was this Washington Post article that tells two narratives in parallel: a liberal satirist who baits right-wingers with insane (fake) stories, and a retiree who believes all of it is true.
The New Yorker‘s Bill McKibben looks at how climate change and its extreme weather effects are shrinking the planet, reducing the habitable and arable land through rising sea levels, increasing temperatures, and water shortages. He also looks at the ongoing fight to “muddle” public opinion on climate change, spearheaded by Republican officials, oil change executives, and pollster Frank Luntz.
WIRED looks at the shady business of paid influences on Instagram and Youtube.
A survivor of the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in Guyana spoke to the BBC about surviving the cult and mass suicide, and living with that memory for the last four decades.
An author complained that he had a hard time publishing his (apparently not very good) novel because of sexism against men or something. Wonkette tears his rather naïve complaint to shreds. It’s hard to get a novel published unless you’re already published or otherwise famous, and gender bias or political correctness have nothing to do with that.
A Vancouver, Washington, man broke Indian law and died while trying to ‘bring Jesus’ to the North Sentinelese people, one of the last uncontacted tribes on the planet. His questionable religious intentions aside, visiting an isolated population with all of your developed-world germs is unbefuckinglievably irresponsible. The natives likely have no antibodies for many of the pathogens he was carrying.
A nurse working at a hospital in the path of the California wildfires called her two daughters to say goodbye as the flames approached.
Researchers may have discovered evidence of somatic gene recombination in the human brain, a process of retranscription that appears to occur in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s, although the authors were explicit that they can’t say this is a cause of the disease.
One of the country’s largest oil refiners has donated over $1 million to Mitch McConnell’s dark-money group One Nation.
In 2015, Ohio Congresswoman Marcia Fudge (D) wrote a letter to defend the character of a judge who beat his wife badly enough for her to require reconstructive surgery on her face, saying that it was a one-time event and not the man she knew. Last weekend the judge stabbed his ex-wife to death. The revelation appears to have ended Fudge’s bid to replace Nancy Pelosi as the lead Democrat in the House; it should also end her tenure in Congress.
Seven women are suing Dartmouth, alleging serial harassment and sexual assault by three professors in the psychology and brain sciences departments.
There’s a chicken pox outbreak in very liberal Asheville, North Carolina, a stronghold of anti-vaxxer morons.
And there’s a measles outbreak among the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, thanks to a group calling itself Parents Teaching and Advocating for Children’s Health that has been going to residents’ homes and scaring parents with hoax stories about vaccines.
The mother of a child who has survived cancer tweeted about what exposure to measles meant for her child during chemotherapy, when her immune system was compromised.
America’s new political backwater is Georgia, where the Governor-elect oversaw his own election and purged over a million voters from rolls, many of them persons of color. I have no idea why everyday Georgians are tolerating this subversion of their civil rights.
A dark-money group posted ads on Facebook, using Bernie Sanders’ image, to encourage Democrats to defect to the Green Party on election day. The group in question failed to file required paperwork with the FEC, and Facebook refused to remove the ads when Sen. Sanders’ office requested that they do so. The group’s Facebook page is still active as of Friday night.
Several companies have asked Republican Senate candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith to refund their contributions after she joked about public hangings. She’ll face Mike Espy (D) in a runoff election on Tuesday in Mississippi, where African-Americans make up the largest percentage of the population of any of the fifty states.
Speaking of Mississippi, federal judge Carlton Reeves struck down its abortion ban as unconstitutional, and he had some shit on his mind about the “pure gaslighting” of state legislators over this law and the state’s long history of oppression of women and minorities.
Mumbai-born Garima Amora, a chef in Bangkok, became the first Indian woman to win a Michelin star this month for her work at the restaurant Gaa.
And finally, Our Dear Leader made some utterly ridiculous statements about Babe Ruth – everything short of calling him a black man – but Toronto Star writer Daniel Dale was there to set the record straight.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, frauds, links, mississippi, north carolina, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 17, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/17/18.

My one piece for ESPN+ subscribers this week looked at some major names on the trade market this offseason. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

I appeared on the Pros and Prose podcast to talk about Smart Baseball and other topics related to the book and reading/writing in general.

I’m back to sending out my free email newsletter every week to ten days or so, as the spirits move me. The spirits usually include rum, of course.

And now, the links…

The Guardian long read looks at the new backlash against plastics, notably against the use and creation of plastic microbeads, which have quickly become pervasive in our environment.
Bloomberg investigates how 7-Eleven is using ICE raids to battle its own franchisees, with lawsuits in both directions, all in the wake of the guilty plea of a Long Island franchisee in 2013 to wire fraud, harboring illegal immigrants, and stealing parts of their wages.
Baltimore County used something called “exceptional clearance” to mark a statutory rape case as successfully closed despite failing to even charge the 29-year-old assailant, who went on to rape another underaged girl in Wisconsin. The practice is common across police departments nationwide.
The Cut has the strange story of “The Watcher,” a stalker who hounded a family out of a million-dollar New Jersey house by writing threatening letters. The writer hasn’t been caught, while some neighbors indulged in conspiracy theories that the victims wrote the letters themselves.
Kevin Alexander writes about the effect best-of lists can have on small restaurants after the burger joint he wrote was the best in the United States closed just five months after the list went up.
Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale has made it his mission to document all of the lies President Trump tells, amounting to thousands just since the vulgar talking yam took office. Dale writes in the Washington Post that fact-checking these lies is easy, since Trump tells the same lies over and over, and uses the same bad rhetorical devices when telling them. Dale also calls out U.S. news outlets for still falling for the same shit over and over again.
The terms of the subsidies Amazon will receive for its two new headquarters locations are out, and they’re quite generous given how profitable the company is. What I have not seen yet is an analysis of whether, say, New York City would be better off if they took the $1 billion in subsidies they’re giving amazon and plowed it into a less exciting investment like upgrading its subway system. Meanwhile, NYC gave amazon land that would have gone to affordable housing instead.
An L.A. musician concocted an elaborate scheme to schedule a European tour for his barely-real band, posing as a promoter, buying Facebook followers, and editing together concert footage to make it appear that his band was playing to big, raucous crowds.
A 19-year-old woman won election to the New Hampshire legislature this month, two years after an old, white, male legislator mocked her efforts to raise the minimum age for marriage in the state (which, I must add, Republicans keep blocking).
A 31-year-old speech therapist got so mad watching Betsy DeVos bumble through her confirmation hearings that she ran for the Superintendent of Schools job in Arizona as a Democrat – and won. She replaces Dingbat Diane Douglas, who wanted to introduce creationism into the public school science curriculum, and becomes the first Democrat in this job in over 25 years.
This month’s Blue Wave in the Midwest could mean a 2007 agreement for midwestern states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions gets a new lease on life.
Former naturopath Britt Hermes, who realized that naturopathy was bunk and blogs about bogus treatments in that field, won this year’s John Maddox Prize, given annually to one or two people for their efforts in standing up for science in the public sphere. She shared it with a researcher who documented the effects climate change and ocean acidification are having on coral reefs.
A new study found that eating less protein may improve the bacterial population of your gut, although the researchers caution that it’s just a single study and needs further confirmation. That said, most of us consume more protein than our body needs, and growing enough animal protein to feed the U.S. has deleterious effects on the environment.
The EPA refuses to enact a proposed ban on a dangerous paint remover that has killed more than 50 people over the last 40 years, but retailers are voluntarily choosing not to carry these products.
The BBC podcast The Inquiry asked how we messed up antibiotics as we head into a post-antibiotic future.
The Polish legislature rejected a “citizens’ bill” that would have abolished rules requiring schoolchildren to be vaccinated against infectious diseases, a bill that would have led to the deaths of hundreds of Polish kids had it passed. Warsaw is suffering from a measles outbreak due to foolish parents who skipped the MMR vaccine. Of course, major autism sites hailed the bill when it was introduced, despite mountains of studies showing no link between vaccines and autism.
Peter Hotez, author of the new book Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, looks at the map of U.S. counties with the most kindergarteners who skipped vaccinations. The maps of states and counties he shows are interesting, but the county map tracks population a little too well – highlighted counties include the third, fourth, thirteenth, and fifteenth-most populous in the U.S.
Vice-President Mike Pence stood up for Burma’s Rohingya minority, condemning State Counsellor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi for failing to stop or oppose ethnic cleansing efforts by the military government against the Muslim minority.
MLB is butting heads with regional sports networks over the rights and payments around in-market streaming of live games, potentially bad news for baseball fans who just want to watch their home teams’ games and are willing to pay for that right.
Andrew Zimmern of Bizarre Foods spoke to a Taiwan blog about the Taipei food scene.
Someone used fake social media accounts to give the impression of fan support for the Ottawa Senators in the wake of a controversy around players who were filmed mocking the team and its coach.
Tasty Minstrel games has a Kickstarter up for a reissue of Luna, a Stefan Feld game from 2010, in a new “deluxified” edition.
There’s also a Kickstarter for a new game based on the animated series Oddbods, aimed at kids 7 and up.
Finally, the tweet of the week is probably not a true story, but I want it to be:

OH MY GOD ?? pic.twitter.com/CHh24Xy13A

— Daniel Pryor ? (@DanielPryorr) November 16, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board games, climate change, environment, frauds, links, longreads, new hampshire, pseudoscience, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 4, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/4/18.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I ranked the top 50 free agents this offseason. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday, before a brief vacation to Disneyworld to help my parents celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.

I’ve been better about sending out my free email newsletter, which isn’t to say the content is better, just that I’m sending it more often.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Washington Post has a long investigation by writer Radley Balko into the rot inside the Little Rock, Arkansas, Police Department that led to an incompetent, racist cop shooting an unarmed 15-year-old black kid, lying about it, and escaping conviction in two trials. The cop in question, Terry Hastings, was hired over the objections of another officer, who pointed out that Hastings had attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting – normally a disqualifying event, but Hastings’ father was also on the LRPD force.
This Atlantic longread by a writer whose grandfather was ostracized for a failed attempt to solve a major physics problem also delves into deeper questions of what drives geniuses and how orthodox institutions treat apostasy.
A Harvard researcher has a new theory of mitochondrial function and evolution that may help lead to new treatments for diseases of mitochondrial dysfunction, including many fatal muscular diseases.
Stalwart indie bookstore The Strand is unionized, making it a bit unusual in the bookstore world, but the store’s very wealthy owners have fought modest pay raises and benefits increases. The Strand is a wonderful store with knowledgeable employees and an enormous selection of new, used, and rare books, but this column says much of its revenue comes from renting out its space rather than the sale of books.
The Washington Monthly has a longread accusing writer Salena Zito, whose pieces cover Trump voters out in rural America, of fabricating quotes and stories and manipulating quotes, as well as other journalistic sins, even as her conservative employers look the other way. She has taught at least one seminar at Harvard’s Kennedy School, but the school hasn’t responded to my request for comment yet.
Was Friends homophobic, ahead of its time, or both? This essay on LitHub argues both sides of it, and explains why the show was too cautious on LGBT issues even as it gently expanded the boundaries of what was shown on network television.
Facebook ignored warnings about Russian interference in Ukraine via troll farms, part of the company’s general unwillingness to look at information warfare outside the U.S. that could have tipped the company off to what Russia did here in 2016.
The white man who shot up a Tallahassee yoga studio, killing two women, was an ‘incel’ who had twice been charged with assaulting women as well as a history of posting misogynistic and homophobic content online. He was still able to buy an AR-15.
President Trump barely works at all, high irony after years of the right criticizing Obama, by all accounts a workaholic, if he dared to take an afternoon to play golf.
The self-immolation of white nationalist Twitter troll Jacob Wohl to smear Robert Mueller is lovingly detailed by The Cut.
Many western billionaires have invested in ‘doomsday’ properties in New Zealand, arguing that its isolation makes it ideal in case of a global pandemic, war, or other apocalypse. They don’t all sound terribly sane to me.
CRISPR gene editing has been long on promise but light on results so far, but a new research effort found it might help treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Transgender neurobiologist Ben Barres died last year of cancer; his autobiography just came out and Nature has a very positive review.
The Supreme Court refused to block a lawsuit demanding that the US government act on climate change. You know my views on the subject, but do we have a constitutional right to a clean environment?
Fourteen teachers at a Middleton, Idaho, elementary school are on paid administrative leave after wearing racist Halloween costumes, as well as dressing up as the border wall with the MAGA slogan on it. I don’t have much hope under this administration, but it seems like a federal civil rights violation took place here.
A pediatrician in California rails against bogus vaccine exemption letters written by doctors who rely on genetic quackery. There is no such thing as a genetic predisposition to vaccine injury. Doctors who claim they have found these cases in children are merely profiteering and should lose their licenses to practice medicine.
The Daily Beast writes that vaccine denial is now a Republican epidemic. Voting for science increasingly means voting Democrat./
ThinkProgress talked to experts who explained that the claims about Bitcoin’s future energy consumption are bogus.
Ethiopia now has a female President, its first in the country’s history. The position is ceremonial, but she is still the sole female head of state in Africa right now, and her selection is more evidence that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who set up a cabinet where half the posts were filled by women, is a great progressive hope for a country that has lived under tyrants since World War II.
The President sputtered out a false claim that he could revoke birthright citizenship by … I don’t know, tweeting about it, which is ironic since his Florida property does big business with Russians who want to give birth on U.S. soil to secure American citizenship.
Haaretz details Trump’s lengthy history of using anti-Semitic rhetoric and tropes to stir up his base, and how that contributed to last weekend’s massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue.
Jewish leaders there told Trump he wasn’t welcome in their city until he disavowed white nationalism. He showed up anyway, and of course has blamed the deaths of eleven Jews in the shooting on the lack of armed guards at the temple.
The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer points out that the inane story of the migrant caravan contributed to the shooting, part of yet another bullshit campaign from the GOP (“but her emails”), this time with anti-Semitic underpinning and violent consequences. As Serwer points out, this caravan is a threat to exactly nobody, and is still weeks away from reaching our border – if it even gets that far.
One other reason the caravan story is codswallop? There aren’t enough people in Central America to matter to U.S. immigration numbers.
Indiana Law Professor Ian Samuel writes in the Guardian that Republicans are close to an invincible grip on power, even as a clear minority party, thanks to vote-rigging, voter suppression, and some favorable SCOTUS rulings. The money quote: “For the first time, a president who lost the popular vote had a supreme court nominee confirmed by senators who received fewer votes – nearly 22 million fewer – than the senators that voted against him.”
Need another reason to vote blue on Tuesday? Global warming is more advanced than we thought, as the oceans have absorbed far more heat than we realized. The oceans absorb that heat, and carbon dioxide, and become more acidic, which leads to the deaths of coral reefs, and that in turn ripples up the food chain and threatens human diets.
The Arizona Board of Education rejected outgoing Superintendent Diane Douglas’ plan to push creationism in public schools, which was just going to lose in court anyway, but what a waste of everyone’s time.
Proof that evolution is real is right before us in antibiotic resistance, which British Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies said last week threatens to take us back to the dark ages.
In a bit of good news, residents of Southampton, England, formed a human chain to help a small community book store relocate, with 250 volunteers passing the 2000 books person to person from the old location to the new one.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-semitism, arizona, arkansas, biology, bookstores, climate change, evolution, frauds, idaho, links, longreads, physics, racism, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, tv, vaccines

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