science — Page 6

→ April 15, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/15/18.

Two new posts for Insiders this week, both on draft prospects I went to see: one on Ryan Weathers, Ryan Rolison, and Ethan Hankins; another on Kentucky’s Sean Hjelle and Tristan Pompey. All five are likely first rounders, although Hankins, coming back from a shoulder issue, could end up going to Vanderbilt if teams aren’t willing to pony up.

My latest board game review for Paste covers the dice-drafting game Sagrada, which is easy to learn but has very high replay value. Players choose dice from a common set, rolled each round, to fill out their personal boards resembling stained-glass windows. I’ve also been playing a ‘pre-alpha’ release of the Terraforming Mars app on Steam, and it looks fantastic.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! Buy a zillion copies for all your Linkedin contacts. You should also sign up for my free not-quite-weekly email newsletter, which has more personal essays and links to everything I’ve written.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Dayn Perry writes about the new White Sox ballpark that should have been but wasn’t, a tight stadium in Armour Park that would have preserved more of the neighborhood and allowed for more economic development. Instead, the city and state caved to team ownership, funding a monstrous stadium, forcibly removing hundreds of families from their homes, and failing to even charge the team rent for 18 years.
The BBC has a story written by an American man who was a schoolteacher for 17 years despite being illiterate. He didn’t learn to read until he was 48, and how he got as far as he did is incredible.
The Guardian‘s long read of the week looks at the ongoing debate over the minimum wage, which tends to be expressed solely in economic terms and often involves one side or the other rushing to claim victory based on a single study.
Author Junot Diaz (The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) revealed in a first-person piece for the New Yorker that he was raped by a family friend when he was eight years old, never got therapy or any kind of help, and spent the next few decades dealing with the consequences.
Also in the New Yorker, staff writer Adam Davidson looks at the Michael Cohen case, calling it the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency; I’m not so sanguine. The lawyerly folks at Popehat weighed in on what Monday’s raid on Cohen’s office implied.
A professor of social psychology and decision-making writes in Scientific American that targeted stories and fake news likely affected just a small percentage of voters in the 2016 U.S. election, but that small number was also more than enough to swing the overall result. The author also looks at why those stories were effective.
Adweek looks at the change in Facebook’s news feed is killing digital publishers. I’m still there with a public page for readers, but I get less traction there than on Twitter or via this site.
Franklin Foer writes in Atlantic about our new era of fake videos – not just the ‘deepfakes’ of the porn world, but the new potential for fake news videos or videos of politicians ‘saying’ things they never said.
Hamilton Nolan has an angry “guide” to how private equity firms are gutting companies for shareholder profits, which was in evidence recently at the Denver Post. A writer at the Boulder Daily Camera wrote an editorial about this very topic that the publisher refused to print, so he posted it on his own blog instead.
The former Texas Deputy DA who rejected a recommendation to pursue charges against Trump University just landed a nomination to a federal judgeship. I’m sure that’s all a coincidence, though!
The National Academy of Medicine is resisting efforts to expel a member who plagiarized and fabricated major parts of his C.V..
Australian novelist Tim Winton argues toxic masculinity in adults leads to the raising of misogynist boys as the latter are discouraged from showing empathy or tenderness to meet a one-sided standard of macho behavior.
The belief that people have different learning “styles,” usually categorized as visual or auditory, is not supported by any evidence. And folks have certainly tried.
Antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis is on its way, and North Korea may be its incubator, exacerbated by cuts to global funding (including sanctions by our current Administration) that will include money to try to fight the disease. While looking more into this I found an article from February 2017 explaining how human encroachment on rain forests leads to the emergence of new viruses, profiling one researcher trying to identify new pathogens before they start killing humans.
CMON Games announced the August 2018 (scheduled) release of a board game based on the Kick-Ass comic book series:

In 2018, @CMONGames will release Kick-Ass: The Board Game. Dudes on a map w/players managing social media, too. —WEM pic.twitter.com/vxOeKOfgsV

— BoardGameGeek (@BoardGameGeek) August 16, 2017

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board games, Economics, links, ptsd, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ March 26, 2018
→ By keith

The Beak of the Finch.

Winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction, Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time should have ended most of the inane arguments still coming from creationists and other science deniers about the accuracy of the theory of evolution. Weiner tells the story of the Grants, a married couple of biologists who spent 20 years studying Galapagos finches – the same species that Darwin spotted on his voyage with the Beagle and that helped him develop his first theory of adaptation via natural selection – and observed natural selection and evolution in action. This remarkable study, which also showed how species evolve in response to changes in their environment and to other species in their ecosystems, was a landmark effort to both verify Darwin’s original claims and strengthen them in a way that, again, should have put an end to this utter stupidity that still infects so much of our society, even creeping into public science education in the south and Midwest.

The finches are actually a set of species across the different islands of the Galapagos, with the Grants studying those on Daphne Major, an uninhabited island in the archipelago that has multiple species of finch existing alongside each other because they occupy different ecological niches. Over the two decades they studied these species, massive changes in weather patterns (in part caused by El Niño and La Niña) led to years of total drought and years of historically high rainfall, with various species on the island responding to these fluctuations in the environment in ways that affected both population growth and characteristics. The beaks of the book’s title refer to the Grants’ focus on beak dimensions, which showed that the finches’ beaks would change in response to those environmental changes. In times of drought, for example, the supply of certain seeds that specific finch species relied on for their sustenance might become more scarce, and there would be a response within a few generations (or even one) favoring birds with longer or stronger beaks that gave them access to new supplies of food. Many Galapagos finches crack open seed cases to get to the edible portions within, so if those seeds are rarer in a given year, the birds with stronger beaks can crack open more cases and get to more food, given them a tangible advantage in the rather ruthless world of natural selection.

Weiner focuses on the Grants’ project and discoveries throughout the book, but intersperses it with other anecdotes and with notes from Darwin’s travels and his two major works on the subject, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. He incorporates the discovery of DNA and how that has accelerated our ability to study and understand evolutionary changes. He goes into the famous example of the white English moth that found itself at a severe disadvantage in the polluted world of the early Industrial Revolution, and how a single gene that determined wing color led to a shift in the moth’s population from mostly white to mostly black (to match the soot covering trees near Manchester and London) – and back again after England finally took steps to clean up its air. This one example is especially instructive in our ongoing experience of climate change, which Weiner refers to throughout as global warming (the preferred term at the time), and opens up a discussion about “artificial selection,” from how we’re screwing up the global ecosystem to antibiotic resistance to the futility of pesticide-driven agriculture (with the targeted pests evolving resistance very rapidly to each new chemical we dump on our crops).

Although Weiner doesn’t stake out a clear position on theism, the tone of the book, especially the final third, goes beyond mere anti-creationism into an outright rejection of any supernatural role in the processes of natural selection and evolution. While that may be appropriate for most of the book, as such processes as the development of the human eye (the argument about the hypothetical watchmaker) can be explained through Darwinian evolution, Weiner does overstep when he discusses the rise of human consciousness, handwaving it away as perhaps just a simple change in neurons or a single genetic mutation that led to the very thing that makes us us. (Which isn’t to say we’re that different from chimpanzees, with whom we still share 99% of our genes. Perhaps David Brin was on to something with his “neo-chimps” in the Uplift series after all.)

The most common rejoinder I encounter online when I mention that evolution is real is that we can’t actually see evolution and therefore it’s “only a theory.” The latter misunderstands the scientific definition of theory, but the former is just not true: We do see evolution, we have seen it, and we’ve seen dramatic shifts in species’ characteristics in ordinary time. Some speciation may occur in geological time, but the evolution of new species of monocellular organisms can happen in days (again, if you don’t believe in evolution, keep taking penicillin for that staph infection), and natural selection in vertebrates can take place rapidly enough for us to see it happen. If The Beak of the Finch were required reading in every high school biology class, perhaps we’d have fewer people – the book cites a survey from the 1990s that claims half of Americans don’t accept evolution – still denying science here in 2018.

Next up: David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, among the favorites to win the Pulitzer for Non-Fiction this year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: evolution, highly recommended, non-fiction, pulitzer prize, science

→ March 3, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/3/18.

I’ve had one Insider post in the last week, this one on the MLB Draft, looking at Florida starters Brady Singer and Jackson Kowar, as well as several other prospects from the Gators and the Miami Hurricanes. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Chris Crawford and I did an impromptu podcast previewing Sunday night’s Oscars, looking at about a dozen categories with our picks of who should win and our very-much-outsider guesses on who will win. It looks like a few hundred of you have already indulged us by listening and we both appreciate it.

Smart Baseball drops in paperback in just ten days! Buy copies or see more details on HarperCollins’ site.

And now, the links…

Long reads first: Harvard blew off sexual harassment charges against a notable professor in 1982, allowing him to remain on faculty to this day and apparently discouraging other women from coming forward. They know now, but haven’t even responded to this article that I can see.
The Guardian looks at the link between processed meats and cancer that appears to come from the use of nitrates and nitrites in curing, which the author argues is about color and flavor rather than safety.
I’m surprised anyone takes Turning Point USA, a college conservative front group for some major right-wing donors, seriously, but it seems that it took a man in a diaper to alert anyone to the group’s bizarre and unpopular stances.
The Washington Post looks at the problems that arise from testing huge backlogs of rape kits, including widespread misunderstandings of what law enforcement must do in such cases.
The Huffington Post has the scoop on how the New York Times’ editorial page is justifying itself to the rest of the staff. This piece just reinforced my decision to cancel my digital subscription.
Alex Pareene wrote more about this for Splinter, saying that Bennet lacks an important qualification for his job as the Times‘ editorial page head: He can’t seem to understand readers’ reactions to the columns he runs.
Matt Martin, who served as an infantryman in Afghanistan, argues eloquently that arming teachers is insane. I thoroughly agree and would not want my daughter in a school with weapons already present. The hilarious idea of installing metal detectors at school entrances and then putting weapons INSIDE the building can’t make sense to anyone but the manufacturers of guns and metal detectors.
Vox looks at the lack of evidence or research on emotional support animals.
How did Melanie Trump land an EB-1, informally called the “Einstein visa,” to stay in the US back in 2001? (My favorite conservabot response to this is “she speaks five languages!” Honey, in Europe, they call that “average.”)
Alt-right news outlets ran with the claim that CNN “scripted” questions in its town hall show on gun control after one of the kids involved claimed they rejected his question. He was lying, of course, but I haven’t seen many corrections from those same publications.
The Dallas Observer covers Rangers broadcaster CJ Nitkowski’s latest meltdown, including his denial that he knew he was following a white supremacist group & liking their tweets. By siding with Nitkowski, the Rangers and their TV partner Fox Sports Southwest have made their preferences quite clear.
Several “Instagram stars” have taken substantial steps to hide their connection to noted racist Pamela Geller, whose comments have been labeled “hate speech” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. They’ve already lost a TV show on Verizon’s Oath channel, as a result of this piece and the discovery of anti-Islamic tweets they’d posted years ago. My main question: What on earth makes someone who just posts other people’s content an “Instagram star?”
Max Boot, now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, decries the decline in the conservative movement from intellectual roots to “owning the libs.”
Researchers believe they’ve discovered the pathogen responsible for acute flaccid myelitis, which has caused hundreds of cases of polio-like paralysis in the last few years.
A new book details how yeast made modern civilization possible, even in foods and drinks you don’t associate with the fungi, like chocolate and coffee.
Two posts to prep you for Sunday night’s Academy Awards ceremony: a list of important “firsts” among this year’s nominations, and how a rule change may have screwed independent animated films – giving Boss Baby a nod over better but less-known features.
I don’t think I’ve ever linked to an advice column before, but this answer on how to deal with a classmate who won’t stop touching you (in a non-sexual but still non-consensual way) is excellent, and I think can be generalized to a lot of situations where someone is doing something that makes you uncomfortable.
Please enjoy this too-perfect mashup of Ratt’s Round and Round with Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through the Grapevine.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: bacon, food safety, food science, guns, harvard, links, science, stick to baseball

→ February 24, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/24/18.

I’m pretty stoked about the game I reviewed this week for Paste: Charterstone, a competitive, legacy game that incorporates so many great things from other games, plays in just an hour, and changes the board, cards, and rules in each play.

I had Insider posts on this week’s three-team trade (AZ, NYY, TB) and the JD Martinez signing. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Smart Baseball comes out in paperback on March 13th! More details on the HarperCollins page for the book. List price is $16.99 but I imagine it’ll be less than that at many retailers.

And now, the links…

I posted this last Saturday night on Twitter, but it’s important enough to repost here: The BBC Inquiry podcast asks why is Cape Town running out of water? The reasons are obvious, yet authorities didn’t see this crisis coming, and the story has serious implications for cities in arid, warm regions around the world, including our own Phoenix and Tucson.
The Guardian‘s longread of the week looks at the rise of Italy’s proto-fascist movement CasaPound. The country is expected to lurch to the right in elections in two weeks; incumbent leader Silvio Berlusconi, a corrupt lecher with endless political lives, has embraced the far-right to try to stay in office.
The Washington Post has a long article about Rachel Crooks, whom Trump sexually assaulted in a Trump Tower elevator in 2006.
Ben Lindbergh wrote a great profile of sabermetrics pioneer Sherri Nichols, whose Defensive Average was the first great public defensive metric (and changed the way I thought about how we discuss defensive values).
Twitter cracked down on a bunch of alt-right trolls, including hoaxers claiming the Parkland kids were ‘crisis actors,’ and their general counsel explained the moves in a thread that deserves more attention. Yes, Twitter needs to do more, but this sweep was a big step.
One of the kids targeted by these hoaxers directly responded to his accusers.
My alma mater’s alumni magazine interviewed Tom Nichols on the death of expertise and the public’s rising refusal to listen to people who actually know things.
Digg has a piece on a disease I’d never heard of, one that causes thousands of deaths each year with just a 50% survival rate: melioidosis, a.k.a. Whitmore’s disease, a bacterial infection endemic in southeast Asia and northern Australia.
Author, astronomer, and atheism advocate Lawrence Krauss has been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, something that seems to be too common in the skeptic community (where Michael Shermer has also been accused of sexually harassing or assaulting multiple women). In a movement that prides itself on demanding and then accepting evidence, you’d think these women would find more support.
Pennsylvania Republicans are willing to dismantle the state’s democracy to retain power, moving towards impeaching the state judges who ruled against their gerrymandered map. They’re also suing yet again to stop the redistricting. One wonders what they’re so afraid of.
The great ProPublica gets a profile of how it’s taking its watchdog approach to Facebook, Google, and other tech giants.
Some good news on the vaccine front: Trump appears to have abandoned his vaccine-autism commission idea. The UK is having its own vaccine-denial problem, prompting the Guardian to also issue this editorial on how we need to hear parents’ fears, and make them immunize their kids anyway.
An Idaho group brought 183 small coffins to the Boise state house, one for each kid who died in the state because their parents were ‘faith healers,’ going back to 1970. You have a right to practice your religion, but you do not have the right to let your kids die for your faith. The latter is something you get with so-called “religious freedom” laws.
Kyle Lobner, formerly of BrewCrewBall, is starting a newsletter version of his Frosty Mug daily links roundups, aimed mostly at Brewers fans, and you can support his efforts via Patreon.
Sorry, but it turns out that Nigerians just don’t care about their bobsled team.
A brief post from the founder of the Environmental Voter Project argues that the NRA is effective because its voters show up, not because of money. The answer, of course, is to boost turnout of people opposed to the NRA’s agenda.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: guns, italy, links, metoo, science, south africa, stick to baseball, vaccines, water crisis

→ 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

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