science — Page 6

→ February 10, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/10/18.

My one new piece for Insiders this week covers the Cubs signing Yu Darvish to a six-year deal. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I reviewed the new, light strategy board game Majesty: For the Realm for Paste this week.

I’ve been sending out my free email newsletter a bit more regularly now that the prospect work is over. Also, Smart Baseball will be out in paperback on March 13th; you can pre-order it on amazon or elsewhere, although at the moment the hardcover version is about $1 cheaper.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This New Orleans Times-Picayune story on a photographer’s friendship with former NFL player Jackie Wallace, who has intermittently gone missing due to his ongoing substance abuse problems, is beautifully written and devastating at the same time.
This 20,000-word piece profiling the Resnicks, the biggest farmers in the United States, manages to touch on water shortages & fights, how companies treat their employees, and the marketing of food in a wide-ranging and brilliant article that doesn’t directly take sides.
A Georgia con artist failed to fulfill a FEMA contract to deliver hot meals to Puerto Rico and is now suing the agency for $70 million. Tiffany Brown had no disaster relief experience, but got the contract anyway, even though you can see on Yelp that she’s been accused of small-scale fraud.
The New Yorker looks at SHIFT, a massive, ongoing research project on sexual behavior on campus located at and funded by Columbia. The goal is to find small, structural changes they can make to student life to reduce the incidence of unwanted sexual contact.
Michael Lewis looks at the Trump Presidency from inside and without, including spending time with a thoroughly unchastened Steve Bannon, in a long piece for Bloomberg News.
Can technology help reduce the sugar in gelato and other desserts? More importantly, why would we want to?
The Asheville Citizen-Times reports on the huge rise in children entering foster care because their parents are hooked on opioids, a problem particularly affecting western North Carolina and other parts of the Appalachian Highlands. The issues range from infants born with up to eight different drugs in their systems to older children dealing with untreated or undertreated post-traumatic stress disorder.
Climate change may release tons of mercury into the atmosphere, well beyond previous projections, because permafrost soil – which may not be so “perma” after all – contains more of the metal than earlier estimates held.
A record number of scientists are running for office this year, spurred by the federal government’s unconscionable, irrational lurch towards denialist policies on everything from climate change to clean water.
Geothermal energy is gaining increased attention as a renewable energy source, which means the current Administration will likely target it with tax hikes and tell us more about “clean, beautiful coal.”
A Pennsylvania Republican is trying to impeach state Supreme Court justices who struck down the state’s gerrymandered map for Congressional seats. Cris Dush, who represents a rural part of western PA, says it’s not about their ruling, but their process. The state’s Democrat governor discussed the gerrymandering ruling with the Washington Post.
Pennsylvania is no isolated case; the Republican Party is benefiting from a long-range, planned effort to gerrymander states across the country to try to hold power in Congress even though they consistently lose the popular vote.
Want to hear a Polish joke? The country passed a law making it illegal to say Polish people collaborated with the Nazis, part of a rising tide of anti-Semitism across Eastern Europe. The country’s president signed the law, drawing a rebuke from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
An Alabama high school teacher compared Obama to Hitler and assigned an overwhelmingly conservative summer reading list, including Liberalism is a Mental Disorder.
Over 100,000 people protested in Athens … because they don’t like the name of the country Macedonia. I suppose in a country with a 21% unemployment rate, it’s not like these people have anything better to do.
Paul Ryan’s office tweeted about a woman thanking him for a tax cut that gave her an $1.50 a week … and then deleted it in the face of widespread criticism and mockery. The tax cut gave a disproportionate benefit to higher-income earners, even though it’s far from clear that this will do anything to stimulate the economy; there’s a competing school of thought that savings and/or consumption do more to drive growth.
Slate ran a junk-science article claiming backpackers don’t need to filter or treat stream water before drinking it; Discover had one of the best rebuttals of this nonsense, although it still wasn’t enough to convince Slate to correct or take down its post and the dangerous advice therein.
A publicly-funded college in Ontario is launching a diploma program in the pseudoscience homeopathy.
My current home state of Delaware reported its fourth flu death of the season last week, as new flu cases for the last full week of January were double those of the same week last year.
A Colorado man whose rape conviction was overturned after he spent 28 years in prison is suing the state … and the state’s Attorney General is fighting his $1.9 million request.
A new Kickstarter for the board game CO2: Second Chance, an update and reissue of a climate-change themed game from 2012, blew past its funding goal in the first few days last week.
Asmodee’s acquisition binge continued this week with the announcement that they’re acquiring Mayfair Games and Lookout Games. Mayfair, which announced it was shutting its doors after 36 years in business, was the longtime publisher of Catan, while Lookout published Uwe Rosenberg’s biggest titles, including Agricola and Patchwork.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, delaware, links, longreads, pseudoscience, science, stick to baseball

→ January 27, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/27/18.

My annual prospects package began this week, with about half of it running already and the rest to come next week:

• The top 100 prospects in baseball, split into two parts: numbers 1 through 50 and numbers 51 through 100
• A list of ten guys who just missed the top 100
• My ranking of all 30 farm systems (prior to the Yelich trade)
• My thoughts on the Christian Yelich trade, focusing on the prospects the Marlins got back

I also held a prospect-focused Klawchat on Thursday, answering about 150 questions. The team-by-team org reports will start to run on Monday, beginning with the NL East.

Over at Paste I reviewed Wasteland Express Delivery Service, which made my top ten games of 2017 list but hadn’t gotten the full breakdown.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Think Progress looks at Louise Mensch, Eric Garland, Seth Abramson, and other anti-Trump conspiracy theorists whose claims and prognostications have repeatedly been proven wrong.
ProPublica found that the Red Cross fired an exec for sexual harassment but helped him land a job at Save the Children. Do not give your money to the Red Cross the next time there’s a disaster, even if it’s as easy as texting a word. They won’t account for how they use funds, and this is just more icing on that cake.
Cambodian dictator Hun Sen is using Facebook to push fake news while he jails critics, including an extensive effort to game Facebook’s algorithms so sites favorable to him dominate the news feed.
The Guardian examines new technologies to help those who lose the ability to speak, including one Boston-based firm that records a person’s voice (such as prior to surgery that affects speech) to help recreate it digitally. So much of our identities are tied up things we think about every day – your hair color, your complexion, your height and weight – but your voice is probably not something you’ve considered because you expect to always have it.
Vanity Fair weighs in on the potential regulatory disaster facing Facebook as its power continues to grow … and some people opt out of one or more social media services. The Economist looks at the question from the regulators’ side, arguing that Facebook and Google resemble trusts and the law must adapt to this new environment (subscription required).
A proposed HHS regulation would allow doctors to hide behind religious beliefs when declining to treat patients because they’re transgender or need an abortion or any other cockamamie reason. You have a right to worship as you please; you do not have the right to refuse to serve a customer on that basis. This should be even more true for first responders, doctors, and nurses.
WIRED looks at Google’s internal battle over diversity, including attacks on trans & queer employees, as well as attempts to harm the careers of people who speak out in favor of diversity and/or against the kind of insidious bigotry in fired engineer James Damore’s memo.
The neo-Nazi behind the Daily Stormer site is trying to skate on charges of organizing threats against a Jewish woman in Monday by using Holocaust denialism as his defense.
David French writes in the National Review how Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr. has beclowned himself with his tortuous, hypocritical defenses of Trump’s behavior.
Why is ICE asking people to prove their citizenship at a Bangor, Maine, bus station? Because they’re allowed to do so within 100 miles of any of our national borders. The ACLU is investigating. If you’re not at a border crossing, you do not have to disclose your citizenship or immigration status.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is defying state law by refusing to call for special elections to fill vacant seats in the state’s legislature. The people in these districts should be out in the streets demanding such elections, as they will otherwise be without representation until January 2019.
That’s not all Wisconsin Republicans are doing to try to cling to power; they’ve gerrymandered the state and passed laws to restrict voting rights, part of what Rolling Stone‘s Ari Berman calls a nationwide party attempt to rig elections (another longread). And ThinkProgress also uses the r-word in describing Trump & the GOP’s plan to make Congress whiter even as the population becomes less so.
Common Cause has filed a complaint alleging that hush money paid to Stormy Daniels violated campaign finance laws.
Northampton County, Pennsylvania, flipped to red in the 2016 Presidential election, and despite job losses in the area and no evidence of economic growth, most voters there still seem to support him, according to this Guardian piece.
Arizona voters in Trent Franks’ district will get one of these winners as the Republican candidate to replace him (video). The very first candidate to speak opens his remarks by bragging about his A+ rating from the Russian-funded NRA and saying teachers should carry weapons in schools, even though the question had nothing to do with school shootings; around 5:42, all five candidates say they don’t believe in human-caused climate change, with one dingbat blaming the sun and another moron saying the cold winter in the east (BTW, it’s 55 here today) disproves it. The primary for the special election will take place on February 27th, and the special election itself will occur on April 24th.
Despite a growing body of evidence that marijuana, or at least something in marijuana, may be useful in treating symptoms of PTSD, the VA is refusing to study any of this because of some reefer madness bullshit.
Missouri Senate candidate Courtland Sykes said women’s rights were nothing this week in a rant about how feminists have “snake-filled heads” and that he expects his girlfriend to have dinner ready for him every night. Did I forget to include his party affiliation?
Scientists from around the world collaborated on a paper that proposes redefining how research papers measure statistical significance, a response to another paper that argued for lowering the P-value required to use that term.
Jon Heyman wrote about how the Expos found the prospect Vlad Guerrero, talking to the scout who signed him off a brief tryout for a bonus of less than $10,000.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, first amendment, links, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ January 6, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/6/18.

I’ve had no new content off the dish this week, as baseball is boring, and I’m working on my top 100 prospects package, which will run later this month. I will have a new board game review up on Paste next week, however.

Feel free to sign up for my email newsletter, which costs you nothing and totters somewhere between occasional and infrequent. And, of course, thanks to everyone who bought Smart Baseball for themselves or as a Christmas gift, or as a Christmas gift for themselves.

And now, the links…

Longreads: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, whose book The Food Lab I’ve recommended a few times around here, will open his first restaurant, Wursthall, in the next few weeks, and expectations are very high.
BBC News tells the story of a woman whose father, a Catholic priest, doesn’t even want to know her.
The Guardian looks at why paper hasn’t disappeared in a digital world.
In local news, the Delaware River Valley Commission has proposed a permanent ban on fracking in the region, but would still allow the dumping of fracking wastewater in the river basin.
The UK is experiencing a measles epidemic because of anti-vaxxer scaremongering. The MMR vaccine does not cause autism; it is both safe and very effective.
Meanwhile, in California, there’s a network of doctors willing to issue bogus medical exemptions to the state’s vaccination laws. The group is led by Bob Sears, who has profited handsomely from selling the lie that vaccines are harmful, including pushing an “alternative” vaccine schedule (with no benefit, just increased risk of exposure), and is facing a licensing hearing over one such exemption he issued. The state’s board of licensing needs to clamp down on these doctors abusing their privileges.
Computer science pioneer Barbara Simons wants an end to electronic voting because she believes such machines can’t be as secure as paper ballots. I guess she hasn’t seen Election.
Ad targeters are now pulling data from your browser’s password manager – all the more reason to not use that feature.
Women constitute nearly half of Iceland’s Parliament, so it’s no surprise that they passed a law making it illegal to pay women less than men.
Science-Based Medicine offers the top ten signs your ‘detox’ program might be a scam. There’s only one real detox or ‘cleanse’ program that works, and it’s happening in your liver already.
The EPA has hired a guy banned for life from the banking industry to oversee the Superfund program. As much damage as we’re seeing to our country’s institutions across the board right now, it pales compared to the massive rollbacks in environmental protections, which will take years and probably cost billions to clean up if and when we get the chance to do so. Yet another example: A tax on crude oil that generated $500 million per year to fund oil-spill cleanup efforts expired last week, a huge windfall for oil producers.
“Swatting,” the practice of phoning police with prank calls that lead authorities to send a SWAT team to someone else’s house, turned deadly last week with a man in Kansas getting shot by police after someone in LA made just such a bogus phone call. The suspect had a history of calling in false threats.
Coffee stuff: Is pour-over dead? Probably not, but I do expect to see more third-wave shops offer faster drip-coffee options for folks who don’t want to wait the 5+ minutes for hand-poured.
Four Barrel Coffee has long been among my favorite third-wave roasters in the country. Four former employees have said Four Barrel co-founder Jeremy Tooker sexually assaulted or harassed them.
Coachella’s owner, Philip Anschutz, gave nearly $200K to anti-LGBT and anti-abortion candidates in 2017, which seems at odds with the political stances of many of the artists who play the event.
National Review‘s Kyle Smith wrote that the publication’s support of stop and frisk was wrong. There’s still a bizarre swipe at New York Mayor Bill De Blasio for merely appearing in the same parade as a paroled Puerto Rican terrorist.
I enjoyed this Filipino teenager’s video explaining relativity in simple terms, which won her $400,000 in the annual Breakthrough Junior Challenge.
FiveThirtyEight gets it right by calling Tom Brady out on his pseudoscience bullshit.
People are getting very sick from taking rattlesnake pills. Today I learned that there is such a thing as rattlesnake pills, which are indeed made from ground-up rattlesnakes.
David French of the National Review wrote last week about how concerns over Trump’s mental state aren’t just about ‘tone’ or ‘style,’, which seems prescient in light of the President’s tweets Saturday morning.
In the wake of the release of Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s instant best-seller about the first year of this Administration and the chaos within, James Fallows writes for The Atlantic that none of this is news to anyone in Washington.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coffee, environment, links, pseudoscience, science, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ January 4, 2018
→ By keith

On Immunity.

Eula Biss’ brief 2014 book On Immunity: An Inoculation takes a novel angle on the subject of childhood vaccinations by weaving the science around the subject into her personal experiences as a first-time mother hearing all of the nonsense anti-vaccine arguments out there and finding herself bombarded with information. Biss makes it clear that she is pro-vaccine and pro-science, and that she did get her son vaccinated, but her essay-like style puts the reader on the ground with her as she’s navigating the uncertainties and fears that come with parenthood, which may also give some readers a new window on how new parents get bamboozled by the many charlatans and frauds out there telling them not to vaccinate.

When my daughter was born, vaccinating was never a question for us … but we were shocked to learn that they vaccinate newborns for hepatitis B, a viral infection that is probably best known as a sexually transmitted disease but that can also be transmitted through many other bodily fluids, including blood, so it’s possible for a child to get an infection through exposure from another kid in school or day care. We made the mistake of looking online for information on the hep B vaccine, and found the website for the so-called “National Vaccine Information Center,” a dangerous anti-science group that spreads misinformation about vaccines and, of course, presented horror stories from parents who claimed the hep B vaccine harmed or even killed their babies. (We vaccinated anyway.)

Biss’ recounting of her own meanderings through the world of vaccine information and bullshit felt very familiar to me, as she obviously understands science – her father is a doctor, and she refers to him frequently in the text – but also gives real credence to the fears of the new parent, and how overwhelming all of the information coming at new parents can feel. Biss hits all of the notable cranks, from the NVIC to Andrew Wakefield to Bob Sears (who has been accused of selling medical exemptions for California kids) to well-meaning but clueless parents who talk about “toxins” or “natural” or “organic” as if those terms really mean anything when it comes to health. She walks back through the history of vaccinations, to Edward Jenner’s experiments with cowpox and previous awareness in non-European societies of inoculation techniques, and the associated history of anti-vaxers, a group that once at least had a legitimate complaint because vaccines weren’t regulated for safety or efficacy; in 1901, two separate batches of vaccines caused deadly tetanus outbreaks in St. Louis and Camden, New Jersey. Now, such groups just capitalize on the public’s science ignorance – and fear – to make a few bucks from selling books or “alternative” therapies. (Note: There is no such thing as “alternative medicine.” If it works, it’s medicine.)

Fear is just as much a theme of On Immunity as science, and Biss, unlike many writers (myself included), has quite a bit of empathy for parents who hear (bogus) horror stories of vaccine “injuries” or who see that vaccines contain aluminum (in adjuvants, which make the vaccines more effective) and waver on vaccinating their kids. Failing to vaccinate puts your kids at risk, but also the community as a whole; Biss discusses herd immunity, which was first identified nearly a century ago, and the societal cost of failing to vaccinate, as well as the risk posed to vulnerable populations who can’t be vaccinated, such as newborns, the elderly, or the immune compromised. This understanding tone makes it a better read, I think, for folks who are on the fence about vaccinations; she was essentially preaching to the converted with me, while hardcore denialists won’t bother with the litany of facts she includes or the blithe knockdowns of anti-vax tropes.

Biss is a “professor of instruction” in Northwestern’s English Department and has garnered praise both for On Immunity and her 2009 essay collection Notes from No Man’s Land; she writes here like an essayist, with a strong first-person perspective that allows her to bring the reader inside her head, so to speak, as she became a mother and experienced all of the typical anxieties and moments of panic that come along with new parenthood. It makes the brief book both readable and engrossing, almost as if Biss wanted to slip in a little education – a dash of history, a pinch of immunology – along the way. And the resulting work may do as much or more to address new parents’ fears of vaccines, fears that are unfounded, irrational, but still quite common, as direct attacks on anti-vaxer falsehoods.

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

→ December 9, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/9/17.

For Insiders, I had four pieces this week (and may have another before the day is out). I wrote about what Shohei Ohtani’s deal with the Angels means for them and the AL West, Seattle’s trade for Dee Gordon, the signings earlier this week of Kevin Maitan, Mike Minor, and Miles Mikolas, and deals involving Welington Castillo, Aledmys Diaz, and Brad Boxberger. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Ars Technica, I looked at the upcoming virtual reality adaptation of the board game Catan.

If you missed them here on the dish, my annual cookbook recommendations, gift guide for cooks, and top 100 board game rankings are all up.

Also, here’s your weekly reminder to buy my book Smart Baseball for everyone on your holiday list.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian looks at the ongoing controversy over ‘shaken baby syndrome’, which has sent many parents to jail but probably doesn’t even exist.
Bloomberg documented the quest of one victim of a debt-collection scam to track down the con artists hounding him, which also brought to light this entire shadow industry of people trying to collect on debts that were either already paid off or weren’t real to begin with. It’s a con that preys on vulnerable people who may not know their rights or understand that the calls might be fraudulent.
The Virginia Quarterly Review looks at the ‘Slenderman’ attempted murder, when two 12-year-old girls stabbed their friend 19 times and left her to die because they were trying to please that fictional character. The essay compares this crime to the murder of Honorah Parker by her daughter and a friend in New Zealand, the basis for the Peter Jackson movie Heavenly Creatures.
A VICE writer and provocateur gamed the system to make his backyard shed the top-rated restaurant on TripAdvisor, which led to all kinds of hilarity when people tried to call and make reservations at a restaurant that wasn’t real.
What do we mean when we speak of “freedom of speech?” The Atlantic looks at two competing definitions of the term as we grapple with the spread of white supremacists on the airwaves and touring college campuses.
Tim Grierson wrote about how some late-night talk show hosts have come of age by leading the criticism of the current Administration, notably Seth Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel.
Southeast Asian nations are now dealing with artemisinin-resistant malaria, meaning that the parasite responsible for the illness has evolved resistance to the first treatment option for people with the mosquito-borne disease. Meanwhile, the Administration has proposed a 44% cut to funding for the President’s Malaria Initiative.
Anti-vaxxer parents are overly concerned with notions of ‘liberty’ and ‘purity’, while pro-vaccine messaging tends to revolve around fairness and the harm of vaccine-preventable diseases. A new study shows that may be a factor in the rise in vaccine denialism: the cranks are hitting the right moral points in their comments, while the truth loses out.
The New York Times has a photo essay on Norilsk, the northernmost city with over 100,000 inhabitants, home to one of the most significant polluters in the world, MMC Norilsk Nickel. The Atlantic also ran a piece on Norilsk last month, featuring an 11-minute documentary called My Deadly, Beautiful City.
The Economic Policy Institute, which focuses on issues related to low- and moderate-income Americans, argues that there is no evidence that corporate tax cuts will lead to higher wages and will end up costing lower-income taxpayers more in the long run.
I found this Ars Technica beginner’s guide to bitcoin useful and well-written without condescending to an audience that might not grasp what “cryptocurrency” means or how a currency can exist without a government behind it. Point 7, about the massive amount of energy consumed by bitcoin’s blockchain, seems to be rising in prominence now that the speculation in the currency has brought its value into five-digit territory. I don’t own any bitcoins, though – my entire 401k is invested in tulips.
The death toll in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of two category five hurricanes is likely 16 times higher than the official tally, while the Administration tries to claim success in the recovery and restoration efforts there.
A former Catholic priest has been convicted of killing a young woman who came to him for confession in 1960, while he was still a member of the clergy in McAllen, Texas. The Catholic Church stands accused of helping cover up the murder.
Facebook is blocking women who call men “scum” under the guise of its policies about hate speech … but they don’t do much, if anything, about men harassing or threatening women on their site, and I’ve found they aren’t even very good or consistent about the hate-speech policy.
This post about a Newfoundland woman’s bread recipe, which really isn’t much of a recipe at all, was particularly interesting for its description of a touton, a local version of an English muffin where leftover bread dough is fried in butter.
A biochemistry major at Plymouth State University is now fielding calls from modeling agencies after a random photo of her, taking at Howard University’s homecoming event, went viral on Instagram.
Native American tribes are banding together to fight an Administration proposal to shrink the Bears Ears national monument by over one million acres, a move encouraged by a Canadian-owned uranium mining firm.
The teenagers in New Zealand metal band Alien Weaponry sing (or shout) their lyrics in Te Reo Māori to try to encourage listeners to learn the language and more about the Māori culture. There’s a very heavy Bay Area thrash influence to their music too.
Kim Davis made national news in 2015 for violating a federal judge’s order to issue same-sex marriage licenses. Now one of the men whose license she refused to issue is running against her for her seat as county clerk.
Boardgame news! Ancestree, one of my favorite games of GenCon 2017, has arrived at the warehouse and is shipping to Kickstarter backers. It should appear in stores shortly afterwards.
Rather Dashing Games announced a March release of Wakening Lair, a cooperative dungeon-crawl boardgame that promises an RPG-lite experience in under an hour.
IDW Games announced Masque of the Red Death, a deduction game based on the Edgar Allen Poe story.
My own ranking of the top ten board games of 2017 will be up this upcoming week at Paste; in the meantime, here’s a solid top ten from Smithsonian magazine, with two titles that’ll appear on my list and one more, Raiders of the North Sea, I would have ranked but found out it was originally released in 2015, so I dq’d it.
Fantasy Flight Interactive announced this morning that they’re developing a digital version of the Lord of the Rings card game (video), a Living Card Game™ from FFG in the same vein as Android: Netrunner and Arkham Horror.
Two lighter videos to end this dreadful week of news: An Australian MP proposed to his boyfriend from the House floor during the country’s same-sex marriage debate. Marriage equality was signed into law in that country this week, but the straight couple who said they’d divorce if same-sex marriage was legalized have reneged on that promise.
Canada’s absolutely true news outlet The Beaverton documents a new way doctors are convincing parents to vaccinate.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: bread, Economics, environment, first amendment, links, metal, science, stick to baseball, taxes, vaccines

→ November 25, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/25/17.

The biggest piece I wrote this week was actually right here, the tenth annual ranking of my top 100 boardgames, including a list (at the bottom) of my favorite titles for two players. And you’ll see in the comments there are still plenty of good games out there I haven’t played.

For Insiders, I broke down MLB’s penalties for Atlanta, looking at the players set free and the impact of the league’s actions for the long term, and also looked at how the top few free agents might end up overpaid this offseason. My next scheduled piece will cover Shohei Otani and will run December 2nd, the day he hits the market for real, assuming there isn’t another roadblock between now and then.

No Klawchat this week on account of the holiday.

Buy Smart Baseball for all your loved ones this holiday season! It makes a great gift. By which I mean it’s great for me when you give it as a gift.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times found that civilian casualties from the U.S. airstrikes against ISIS are much higher than reported. I can’t shake the notion that the last fifteen-odd years of bombings, especially by drone, are merely incubating a new generation of potential terrorists who hate us.
Buzzfeed blew the doors off the Congressional fund that pays off sexual harassment complaints against legislators and certain other federal employees, with $17 million paid out over 264 complaints. There’s so much wrong here, including the allegations against Rep. John Conyers (who needs to resign immediately), including the fact that taxpayers are covering this expense, and that settlements aren’t automatically made public.
The Washington Post interviewed 25 North Korean defectors about life under the current dictator, Kim Jong Un, who has slightly liberalized the economy while further cracking down on any semblance of individual rights. The biggest takeaway for me: It’s no longer famine driving people to defect, but an increased awareness of the freedom of the world outside of North Korea’s borders.
The Guardian has a long, entertaining, and wide-ranging look at the British prepared sandwich industry, which is a much bigger deal than I realized. The lack of time to eat a proper meal, however, is an issue here and in many other developed economies, even though it’s probably hurting our physical and mental health.
Forbes, that bastion of liberal economic thought, says the current GOP tax bill “will be the start of a decades-long economic policy disaster unlike any other that has occurred in American history.” I rarely discuss economic policy here, feeling rather unqualified to do so, but I will say that I think this bill is a poor facsimile of a failed macroeconomic policy proposal, trickle-down economics, that instead is merely a massive transfer of wealth to the highest income earners. I might actually benefit from the bill, depending on the fine print, but I thoroughly oppose it, because it will make so many people worse off and drag our country into a length economic malaise it will be tough to escape. (Also, tax breaks on private jets? What possible rationale is there for that?)
The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center’s analysis also shows the bulk of the benefits going to higher income brackets, with the biggest gainers those in the 95th to 99th percentiles for income.
Fake news in action: You’ll see many alt-right accounts (bots) and sites pushing the story of a Saudi princess whose tell-all interview with Le Monde revealed tales of orgies, white slavery, and other debauchery among the Saudi ruling class. The problem, according to Le Monde, is that the interview never happened (article in French). The fabrication is so pervasive that the esteemed French newspaper felt compelled to author a refutation, blaming the Iranian news service and a Sri Lankan paper for promulgating the lie.
People with diabetes are dying because they can’t afford insulin, a situation created by the current nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar. While Azar headed up Eli Lilly, he more than tripled the cost the company’s insulin product over ten years, even though the product’s patent expired. The company is also under investigation for price-fixing, and settled a set of cases over off-label marketing of its drug Zyprexa for over $1.4 billion.
The Administration and the conservative wing of the Republican Party are trying to pack the courts with conservative judges, a threat to civil liberties and more for decades, even after the current occupant of the White House is out.
The Attorney General of New York says the commenting process on net neutrality was compromised, and the FCC won’t provide the documents to help him investigate it. One researcher claims over a million of the comments were fake. It doesn’t really matter; Ajit Pai, the new FCC head, was going to axe net neutrality regardless of the public reaction. One of the minority Democrats on the FCC board wrote a piece imploring the public to keep the pressure on by contacting other board members. We should all do this, but you’ll have to forgive my cynicism: if the three conservative board members can physically get to the vote on December 14th, net neutrality is dead.
Media consolidation erodes the myth of “liberal” media as large conglomerates pull major outlets to the right, according to Poynter.
The Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan has banned all gay assemblies in the capital, Ankara, including forums, festivals, and film screenings, part of an ongoing crackdown on LGBT rights in the supposedly secular nation. Also, our current President loves Erdogan.
Another tyrant, Robert Mugabe, has resigned after ruling Zimbabwe since its independence in 1980. The problem is that his successor was implicated in one of Zimbabwe’s deadliest massacres. The new boss is the same as the old boss.
The hell is wrong with western Canada? One family of anti-science nutters lets their kid die of meningitis without seeking medical treatment, and they’re still raving about their rights. Now another mother is going to jail for failing to get medical help for her son, who had strep throat – easily treatable with antibiotics, as Streptococcus doesn’t readily develop resistance – and died after she treated it with bullshit. Yes, the story says “holistic remedies,” but there is no such thing, and the Tribune Media Wire author(s) behind the piece should be fired. Meanwhile, a “naturopathic doctor” (no such thing, folks) in Medicine Hat is pushing the “sanitation and hygiene” crap while ranting against vaccines on Twitter. I don’t know Canadian law, but if there’s a licensing board in Alberta, someone should ask them to strip his.
Conservatives and the highly religious are more likely to endorse myths about rape, including victim-blaming, disbelieving accusers, or saying it’s only rape if the victim fought back. Pro tip: If your religion tells you that a woman can ask for rape, or that date rape is acceptable, then it’s time you found a new religion or none at all.
The “Church” of Scientology covered up the rape of one of its members by actor Danny Masterson, telling her it wasn’t rape because they were in a relationship. I’d say this is yet another point in favor of stripping the cult of its tax-exempt status.
I reviewed Ed Yong’s wonderful book I Contain Multitudes, about the microbiome in our ecosystem and all over our bodies, back in March. In a later chapter, he discusses the proposal to release male Aedes albopictus mosquitoes infected with a strain of the Wolbachia pipientis bacterium into the environment; when they mate, the eggs laid by the female mosquitoes won’t hatch because of the bacterial infection. Earlier this month, the EPA approved a proposal to do just that in 20 states and Washington DC. It could prove a game-changing advance in the fight against mosquito-borne diseases like yellow fever, Zika, dengue, and chikungunya. (Malaria is transmitted by a different genus of mosquito, Anopheles.)
Coral researchers are coping with the effects of watching the reefs they cover die out as a result of ocean acidification and climate change.
Three cups of coffee a day may have health benefits. I could confirm this, but I’d be in the bathroom all day long if I tried.
If you know someone who’s both celiac and anti-GMO, ask them if they’d eat gluten-free flour made from genetically modified wheat that can’t form the key proteins that appear to trigger celiac disease. The genetic modification comes via CRISPR rather than gene transfer from an unrelated species.
I travel quite a bit every year, enough to get premium status on at least one airline, and I’ve begun carrying a refillable water bottle on every trip now that many airports have refilling stations of filtered tap water, including the Philadelphia airport, which doesn’t have a ton to recommend it but does have a lot of these fountains.
A leader of the Indian ruling party, as a bit of an overreaction to the forthcoming film Padmavati, has offered a bounty for anyone who beheads the star actress and the film’s director.
The FBI and Department of Justice are investigating the St. Louis police force’s conduct during protests in September after the acquittal of a white officer who killed an unarmed black man in 2011. The police department is also under a temporary order blocking the use of chemical agents and dispersal orders, pending mediation.
The Baseball Project is a supergroup comprising five well-known musicians who happen to be big baseball fans, including REM’s Peter Buck and Mike Mills and two former members of the Dream Syndicate. The fifth member, Scott McCaughey, had a significant stroke earlier this month, and there’s a GoFundMe to help cover his medical expenses. McCaughey is/was also a member of the Minus Five and the Young Fresh Fellows.
The Verge looks at an ongoing Venmo scam that has netted the crooks over $100K, largely because the victims hear a chance to get a guaranteed, immediate profit, and don’t demand cash or use a more secure payment system.
Bad headline, good piece: A NY Times editorial examines the increasing desire to find balance between our digital and analog lives.
WIRED profiled one of New York’s most successful professional Dungeon Masters, known to D&D players as a “DM.”
At PAX Unplugged last week, I met with a rep from a company called Shapeways that allows you to create your own meeples and dice.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, coffee, Economics, Food, links, rpgs, science, stick to baseball, taxes, vaccines

→ October 21, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/21/17.

I wrote two scouting posts for Insiders from my week in the Arizona Fall League, which you can read here and here. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I reviewed the card/dice game Valeria and its new expansion here on Friday; my next boardgame review for Paste will go up in early November. I also posted about a big boardgame app sale going on right now from Asmodee Digital.

The schedule for PAX Unplugged, a new boardgaming con to be held in Philadelphia in November, is now up. I’ll be signing copies of Smart Baseball there on November 18th and plan to attend the entire event.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Climate change is warming the Alaskan permafrost, affecting residents and potentially releasing an enormous amount of sequestered CO2 into the atmosphere, thus further accelerating global warming.
Meanwhile, Kiribati, an island nation in the central-south Pacific, may cease to exist due to climate change and rising water levels.
ProPublica investigates a new white supremacist group that espouses violence but isn’t on authorities’ radar, at least not yet, despite their involvement in multiple violent incidents.
The drug industry lobbied Congress heavily to emasculate the DEA so they could sell more opioids, and Congressional Republicans (with the help of at least two Democrats) were more than happy to oblige, even as opioid addictions and deaths continue to surge.
The National Review‘s Kevin Williamson weighs in on the “white minstrel show” that has replaced traditional, values-based conservatism with an opportunistic blend of populist anti-elitism and an abdication of personal responsibility.
Mother Jones argues that voter suppression tipped the scales in Wisconsin and possibly in the entire election. Voting rights are under attack in most of the south and midwest despite a lack of any evidence of systemic voter fraud.
The New Yorker looks at what a Mike Pence Presidency might look like, given his ultra-conservative views on pretty much every topic.
The media reaction in Italy to director/actress Asia Argento revealing that she was sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein has revealed how backwards the country is when it comes to women’s rights. Many writers have blamed her, or said she should be grateful to Weinstein, or argued she must have consented because she wasn’t injured. It’s right out of the 1970s.
Deadspin writer Lindsey Adler asks why this time would be any different from previous revelations of serial sexual abusers’ actions, like Bill Cosby just a year or so ago.
Victims of Michigan State & US Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar spoke up for 20 years, and no one did anything about it. Even now, he’s going to jail on child pornography charges, not on the dozens of sexual assaults he committed against mostly children.
Chef Jose Andres has been working tirelessly in Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria devastated the island, serving nearly 1.5 million meals to hungry residents.
Meanwhile, the federal government is sending beef jerky and cheese-flavored crackers to Puerto Rico and calling them meals.
Budding theocrat Roy Moore, removed from the bench for refusing to accept the separation of church and state (on gay marriage, displaying the Ten Commandments, and so on), now has a large lead in the Alabama Senate race to fill the seat vacated by Jeff Sessions.
The Columbia Journalism Review argues that media outlets’ restrictions on reporters’ social media activity will backfire, failing to convince readers that the reporters are unbiased while also reducing the value of social media itself.
Irony alert: Anti-fascist (or just plain old anarchist) protesters disrupted a UCLA event focused on civil discourse and free speech co-sponsored by the Holocaust Museum. Perhaps irony isn’t the right word; ignorance may fit better.
A mother shares her grief after her 5-year-old died from the flu and is channeling it to urge people to get the flu shot.
An epidemiologist explains why a recent British article arguing against the flu shot was dead wrong.
A Georgia lawmaker & former anesthesiologist suggested quarantining people with HIV, further underlining how utterly science-ignorant many of our elected and appointed officials are. It’s yet another reason to support 314 Action, a group dedicated to encouraging more scientists to run for office.
The first oral treatment for sleeping sickness is nearing approval in Europe, potentially replacing an expensive, difficult intravenous treatment. Sleeping sickness is spread by tsetse flies, and is found in sub-Saharan Africa, with over 2000 new cases a year and the last major epidemic lasting nearly two decades. It’s fatal without medication.
I didn’t realize InfoWars, the fake news empire led by hoaxer Alex Jones, profited by selling supplements to gullible viewers. It turns out two of their supplements contain dangerously high levels of lead, which can cause brain damage.
Nestle pays $200/year to bottle clean water in Michigan, just 120 miles away from Flint, where residents can’t drink their tap water due to lead contamination and pay over $200/month to the water utility.
Mexico is trying to cope with the invasive species they call “the devil fish” by cultivating a taste for this variety of catfish, which has squeezed native species out of its waterways.
Italian scientists are working to understand the supervolcano located just west of Naples.
A Los Angeles restaurant was caught selling reheated Popeye’s chicken as its own.
St. Helena, one of the world’s most isolated islands and a place best known as the place of Napoleon’s exile and death, now has its first commercial airline flights. Dubbed “the world’s most useless airport” by critics, the island’s small airstrip cost the UK government over $300 million to build.
This story has been well-covered, and it’s still ongoing, but I can’t get over the President of the United States insulting a dead soldier in a call to his mother. “He knew what he was signing up for?” Even if true, which I doubt, what a heartless thing to say to a grieving parent.
Boardgame news: There’s a new expansion for the Uwe Rosenberg game Fields of Arle, called Tea & Trade.
The upcoming co-op game Sleepy Hollow hit Kickstarter this past week and is already on the verge of hitting its funding goal.
Asmodee sent a copy of its upcoming game When I Dream, due out here on 11/23, up into the stratosphere on a helium balloon.
Europeans find our gun culture utterly baffling, as they should. A Dutch comedy program aired a segment describing the condition known as Nonsensical Rifle Addiction. It appears to have no cure.
This Atlantic story about a catfishing case that led to a happy ending seems too cute to be true, but let’s just go with it because we could all use some decent news.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, climate change, first amendment, fish, links, science, stick to baseball, vaccines, voter suppression

→ October 14, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/13/17.

For Insiders this week, I posted my first batch of scouting notes from the Arizona Fall League, covering prospects from the Cardinals, Yankees, Brewers, Orioles, Padres, Cubs, Rockies, and Twins. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

Later today (Saturday) I will be at Changing Hands in Phoenix, at 2 pm, to talk about and sign copies of Smart Baseball. I’ll also be signing books at PAX Unplugged, a new boardgaming convention that takes place in Philadelphia the weekend before Thanksgiving.

And now, the links…

Longread of the week: The New York Times on the rise of severe anxiety among American teenagers. The piece doesn’t really get at the question of why we’re seeing more cases, but does explore various treatment options and explain various signs of anxiety for parents to know.
As Puerto Rico’s humanitarian crisis deepens, with hospitals still without power and short of medicine and clean water, the President is threatening to pull FEMA and military support from the U.S. territory. Meanwhile, the 100,000 American citizens on the Virgin Islands are also largely without power and water several weeks after Hurricane Maria.
The New Yorker asks how many Puerto Ricans will move to the mainland given the awful conditions and awful federal response on their island. The money quote, from a Puerto Rican man whose house was destroyed by a Maria-induced mudslide: “All (Trump) brought to Puerto Rico were those napkins. And you know what everyone’s wondering? What we’re expected to wipe with them: our asses, or our tears.”
And the President, whose own Secretary of State called him “a fucking moron,” may be mentally unraveling, according to Gabriel Sherman for Vanity Fair.
DeAndre Harris, who was beaten by white supremacists in Charlottesville in August, was himself arrested on a dubious charge, as one of the racists did an end-run around police and convinced a (white) magistrate to issue an arrest warrant for Harris. The Washington Post has more on this story.
An Indiana lawmaker introduced a bill requiring journalists to be licensed by the state police. If you live there, maybe call your state reps and remind them of the existence of the First Amendment.
Video: A Connecticut man, angry after the Paris attacks of 2015, shot up a local mosque (after dark, while it was empty). Then he met the Muslims who worshipped there, and everything changed.
A terrorist tried to blow up the Asheville airport last week, but the media coverage has been virtually nonexistent.
A new study from the Food Climate Research Network at the University of Oxford found that grass-fed cattle don’t fight or reduce climate change. Previous theories held that grazing cattle would encourage carbon sequestration in the soil, but this study found the cows still … um … toot too much for that to matter. (Of course, grass-fed beef may taste better, may be more healthful for us to eat, and might be nicer to the cows themselves, since they’ve evolved to eat grass, not corn or soybeans or, worst of all, animal flesh.)
The Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry is retracting a junk-science anti-vaccine study mere weeks after publishing it. The study’s authors are familiar with the retraction process, having submitted a similar pseudoscientific paper to Vaccine in 2016, only to find it pulled back.
Gene therapy was hailed as the next great advance in medicine in the mid-1990s, but couldn’t delivery on its promises in that timeframe. Now its time might have arrived, as an FDA panel endorsed a gene therapy protocol to treat a rare form of retinal dystrophy, an inherited disorder that causes blindness in children.
Senate candidate Roy Moore, the Ayatollah of Alabama, claimed for years he wasn’t compensated for his work for a local non-profit when in fact he was receiving $180K a year for part-time work for the organization.
The University of Wisconsin has passed a new student conduct rule that threatens students who disrupt or interfere with others’ free expression with explusion. In other words, if a UW student group were to invite, say, white nationalist Richard Spencer to speak on campus, and a student disrupted his speech, that student could be suspended or expelled for it. The ACLU opposes the policy.
Shake Shack is introducing automated kiosks to take orders, possibly a response to rising minimum wage laws. I hate seeing low-wage jobs eliminated for automation, but as a fan of Shake Shack, I would say my #1 issue with the chain is the frequency of incorrect orders.
Bananas have been under threat for decades from a fungus that causes fusarium wilt (also called Panama Disease), which renders entire plantations incapable of producing fruit. Australian scientists might have a new banana that resists the fungus – but it’s genetically modified, which many people believe, incorrectly, is a Very Bad Thing.
Asmodee Digital just released an app version of the boardgame Smash Up, which is available for iOS devices, Android, and Steam.
Videogame developers are increasingly including pay-to-play loot boxes in games to try to counteract the industry’s punishing economics. The tabletop industry hasn’t had that problem yet, as consumers in that space seem more willing to pay $40-plus, even $100, months after a game has been released.
Sony plans to make a Settlers of Catan movie, which sounds like a really terrible idea.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anxiety, boardgames, climate change, first amendment, food science, links, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, videogames

→ September 16, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/16/17.

For Insiders this week, I wrote two pieces, one on eight top 100 prospects who had disappointing years in 2017, and my last minor-league scouting notebook of the season, covering Yankees, Pirates, Nationals, and Cardinals prospects. I held my regular Klawchat on Thursday. My next column for ESPN will be my annual “players I got wrong” piece; if you have suggestions, throw them in the comments. I try to stick to players who’ve beaten expectations for more than just one season, although sometimes I waive that if there’s a particular story I want to tell.

Over at Paste I reviewed Yamataï, the new boardgame from Days of Wonder, which hasn’t fared that well critically or commercially but which all three members of my family really liked. It’s also a gorgeous game, which never hurts around here.

My book, Smart Baseball, is out and still selling well (or so I’m told); thanks to all of you who’ve already picked up a copy. And please sign up for my free email newsletter, which is back to more or less weekly at this point now that I’m not traveling for a bit.

I have a ton of links from the NY Times this week, which requires a subscription above a certain number of free articles. I normally try to spread my links out across many sources, but the NYT had so much great content this week that I stuck with it. I’ve tagged a few of them as such for those of you who don’t subscribe (I do, obviously). And now, the links…

I stand with Jemele Hill, absolutely and unequivocally. The coverage of this – and ESPN’s handling of it, with which I do not agree – has been extensive, but Charles Pierce had the best piece I saw, with Dave Zirin’s a close second.
Professional douchebro “Pewdiepie,” who has a history of anti-Semitic behavior in his videos, dropped the n-word this week, and Garrett Martin explains at Paste why this has nothing to do with free speech. (Garrett is my editor at Paste as well.)
Meanwhile, the robotic responses of Trump supporters earned mention in the NY Times this week, notably how so-called “evangelicals” are fine forgiving unethical behavior by their President. This may be related to the Administration’s fervor for enacting regulatory policies favored by evangelicals (also NY Times), in spite of claims that they’d be a “hands-off” government.
Hard to avoid contrasting the Administration’s response to Hill’s criticisms with Canadian politician Jameet Singh showing how to handle a heckler who can’t even figure out that he’s not Muslim.
Longread: White residents of Alabama towns are seceding from their integrated local school districts, primarily to get their kids away from black students. (NY Times)
The leader of the DC-based group Smash Racism says Nazis shouldn’t feel safe in public. This is the kind of idiocy that allows neo-Nazis and their friends to talk about how the violence and hatred is “on both sides.” It doesn’t help that Newsweek tabs the founder of one tiny group as “a leader of the antifa.”
Politico wrote that Democrats’ attacks on Trump aren’t working according to polls and focus groups. Are those the right barometers here? I feel like polls and focus groups led most experts astray in November.
Meanwhile, a soi-disant Catholic politician in England has argued that abortion should be strictly outlawed, even in cases of rape or incest; the Guardian argues that this has nothing to do with faith and everything to do with the religious right’s obsession with sex. (Ted Cruz almost had this right!)
The Virgin Islands were hit particularly hard by Hurricane Irma, with St. John, which is mostly covered by a national park, absolutely devastated by the storm.
My alma mater had a tough week in the news. First, the rescinding of an admissions offer to convicted murderer Michelle Jones (NYT) earned the university criticism, but the coverage seems to dismiss the stated reason for the change – that Jones glossed over the fact that she beat and starved her son to death, focusing instead on the process by which she was accepted and then rejected. I’m not saying Harvard was right or wrong here, but that the story is complicated and opens a lot of questions about what we expect of people who’ve committed violent crimes but served long prison sentences and appear to be rehabilitated.
Then Harvard disinvited Chelsea Manning to be a visiting fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, sparking former CIA director Michael Morell’s resignation as a fellow there. Manning has implied strongly that this is about her being a trans woman, but that’s disingenuous at best; again, it’s complicated, and that papers over the real questions of when someone is truly acting as a whistleblower and when they’re putting their country at risk.
The least-covered major story of the week was the revelation that Brazilian miners slaughtered ten members of an ‘uncontacted’ Amazonian tribe. The broader issue here is that the Brazilian government has slashed funds and efforts to protect these indigenous groups.
This old mental floss post resurfaced this week but I think it’s worth sharing – it contains several good, simple tips for making better coffee at home. The one thing I would add, however, is to buy better beans: The time between roasting and grinding can be a matter of days or a matter of months, and there’s a huge difference between the two.
Nestle is buying a majority share in specialty coffee company Blue Bottle (NYT), which makes my favorite espresso blend ever – the sweetest-tasting coffee (in the literal sense) I have ever had. I feel like this probably isn’t good news.
And one reason of many is that climate change is hurting global coffee production. So as artisanal coffee roasters expand, the supply of quality beans is shrinking. Also, if you like coffee you should make sure you vote for candidates who accept that climate change is real and plan to do something about it.
Climate change is also making plants less nutritious for us. This exacerbates an existing trend, where Big Ag has bred plants for higher yields and aesthetic qualities, rather than flavor or nutrition. The article includes a quote from science-denier Lamar Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science, showing that he couldn’t science his way out of a paper bag. So, we should eat less meat overall because most meat production contributes to climate change, but climate change is making plants less nutritious for us to eat.
There’s a new type of chocolate called ruby chocolate, developed by Swiss chocolatier Barry Callebaut (NYT), with a different, sweet-tart flavor … and the color of Spam. Really, look at those pictures and tell me that doesn’t look like some sort of extruded raw pork product.
Chefs love to use sea salt and praise it over ordinary table salt, even though I’d guess 99% of people, chefs included, couldn’t tell the difference in blind taste tests. New tests show that sea salt is contaminated by microplastics too. Since one argument for sea salt over table salt has been the latter’s inclusion of iodine, I’m not sure this is good news for salt snobs.
Animal feed is helping spread antibiotic-resistant genes around the world.
Denmark reduced food waste by 25% thanks in part to the efforts of one woman, who emigrated from Russia to Denmark and was appalled at how much food was produced and trashed.
The failed state of Venezuela tried to tell residents to raise and eat rabbits so they’d have enough food to eat, only to find residents keeping the rabbits as pets. The country is devolving into a western Somalia thanks to the extreme socialist policies of its dictator, who, along with his predecessor, nationalized all industries, fixed the money supply, and pretended that oil prices would never drop (they have).
This Phoenix New Times editorial, written by a Phoenix native who moved to Portland, Oregon, argues that Phoenix is the better food town of the two.
Speaking of Phoenix, Motel 6 operators in the area appear to be providing ICE with lists of their guests to aid in arrests and deportations. Do they leave the light on for you after you’ve been sent to Mexico?
Siddhartha Mukherjee, who won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, writes in the New Yorker how looking at how the body may help cancer take root and grow may present a new approach to fighting the disease.
FiveThirtyEight shows, yet again, that September performance doesn’t matter in baseball any more than performance in any other month does. There is no “momentum” in baseball, there’s no “peaking early,” and there’s no benefit to “finishing hot.” Stop it.
I missed this when it happened a few weeks ago, but a Brewers minor leaguer, Julio Mendez, suffered a heart attack when he was hit by a pitch.
Julie DiCaro writes in the Washington Post about saying goodbye to youth football because of the risk of serious brain injury.
A man whose wife left him because he was abusive killed her and seven of her friends in Plano last week. When you hear someone ask why an abuse victim “doesn’t just leave,” well, here’s one reason.
Metallica’s Kirk Hammett told The Hub in Boston that Soundgarden’s Louder than Love inspired the “Enter Sandman” riff.
The Cassini spacecraft ended a successful 13-year mission by crashing into Saturn this week. The craft was originally only supposed to operate for three years, but went a decade longer and sent back over 400,000 photos of the sixth planet, its rings, and its many moons.
Boardgames! Two big new titles on Kickstarter this week. Cerebria, one of the best new titles I saw at GenCon, hit Kickstarter on Tuesday and surpassed its funding goal in the first 24 hours.
Greenbrier’s fantasy/tabletop game Champions of Hara has also beaten its funding goal, with 12 days left in the campaign.
Also, the boardgame Evolution is heading to your computer in videogame form.
Codito is updating some of its great iOS boardgame apps for the 64-bit OS, and has put their titles on sale for 99 cents each, including Tigris & Euphrates, Le Havre, and Reiner Knizia’s Ra. I recommend all three, especially at that price.
A Pennsylvania state legislator said he’d be fine killing a protester who was blocking his path on the road.
Academics claim to have rediscovered thirty “lost” English words, such as quacksalver, rouzy-bouzy, and the very relevant sillytonian.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: apps, baseball, boardgames, climate change, coffee, food waste, links, phoenix, science, stick to baseball

→ September 8, 2017
→ By keith

Half-Earth.

Biologist E.O. Wilson has won two Pulitzer Prizes for Non-Fiction, including one for, of all things, a textbook on ants, along with numerous other awards for his lengthy bibliography of popular and scholarly works on evolution, sociobiology, ecology, and conservationism. His 2016 book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life falls into the last category while drawing on multiple fields of expertise to make his case that we should preserve half of the area of the planet for conservation to maintain biodiversity and fight climate change, but for a work by a great scholar and professor, Half-Earth feels half-hearted, as if Wilson knows what he wants to argue but couldn’t be bothered to support his side sufficiently to sway the unconvinced.

The idea of preserving half of the planet, land and sea, for conservation isn’t new nor is it Wilson’s; he credits Tony Hiss with coining the term “half-earth” to describe the concept in a Smithsonian magazine article in 2014. And there’s little doubt that man’s impact on the planet – its environment and the millions of other species on it – has been a net negative for everyone but man, with the pace of change only accelerating as we continue to alter the compositions of the planet’s atmosphere, soil, and water supply. Wilson does well when describing what we might lose or have already lost as a result of our mere presence or our industrial activities, talking about habitats we’ve razed or species we’ve driven to extinction deliberately, through the introductions of invasive species, or through other changes to the environment. But he assumes that the reader will see these losses as significant, or even see them as losses, without sufficiently detailing why it matters that, say, we’re wiping out the world’s rhinoceros population, or various island birds and rodents have been exterminated by the introduction of non-native snakes.

What’s missing even more from the work, however, is a consideration of the costs of an endeavor like the one Wilson is proposing. Man is fairly well distributed across the planet, and setting aside 50% of its land mass for conservation would require resettling hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, many of them members of indigenous populations who live in the least-altered environments on the planet. Crowding the planet’s seven billion people (and rising) into less of the space will trade some environmental problems for others, as various forms pollution rise with population density, and many large urban areas already struggle under the weight of their people, with third-world megacities paralyzed by traffic and its attendant problems. Relocating people is expensive, difficult, and traumatic. There’s also the very real question of feeding those seven billion people and supplying them with fresh water, which we’re already struggling to do; if you reserve half of the world’s land and half of its oceans for conservation, those tasks become more difficult and likely more expensive – a cost few people will be willing to bear directly. It might be necessary, but Wilson glosses over the practical problems his solution would create.

There is, however, one good reason to read Half-Earth right now, at least in the United States, where the current federal administration is rolling back environmental protections left and right, including cutting funds for wildlife area acquisition and management. But I thought Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-winning book The Sixth Extinction made the same general case more powerfully and thoroughly, describing the current, anthropogenic mass extinction that could rival the K-Pg event for sheer number of species exterminated if we don’t do anything about it. Kolbert goes into greater depth with more concrete examples of how man’s activity has altered the planet and moved species around to extinguish some species and threaten others, including a lengthy discussion of chytrid fungus, a thus-far incurable ailment that is killing off tropical frog species with alarming speed.

I think Wilson also fell into the trap that William Easterley (among others) has identified in charitable and other “good intentions” efforts – aiming impossibly high, so that you can never meet your stated goal. You want to end world hunger? That sounds great, but it’ll never happen, and the only outcome will be the creation of a giant organization that absorbs donations without ever accomplishing much of anything. Micro-efforts yield more tangible results, and increase accountability for workers and donors alike. So while saying “let’s reserve half the planet to save it” is an admirable goal, and may even be the right strategy for the long term, it ain’t happening, and talking about it doesn’t get us any closer to solutions. If you want to help save the planet, work towards small, achievable goals. And right now, that probably means working for change in Washington.

Next up: Nina George’s 2013 novel The Little Paris Bookshop.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, environment, evolution, history of science, non-fiction, science

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