stick to baseball

→ 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 17, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/17/18.

My one new piece for Insiders this week covered the top 30 prospects for this year’s MLB Draft, in advance of yesterday’s opening night in Division 1. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday. Unfortunately I did not recover enough from whatever ailment I had this week to make the trip to Myrtle Beach, but hope to be on the road next weekend.

I reviewed the board game Seikatsu, one of my daughter’s new favorites, here this week, with another review hitting Paste‘s site next week. Also, I never tweeted this link at all, but reviewed the Romanian-language film Graduation, from Oscar-nominated director Cristian Mungiu, on Wednesday.

Smart Baseball comes out in paperback on March 13th! Some readers have reported difficulty finding the hardcover version in stores, but it is still available on amazon at the moment.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Outline looks at Delaware’s opioid crisis, mentioning a high school in the district where we live (which has a local reputation for such things). Does any state not have an opioid crisis? And is there anything states can do to stop it without support from the federal government?
WIRED looks inside the last two years at Facebook as the company faces criticism from multiple sides for its part in promulgating fake news and, in the words of one former executive, “ripping apart the social fabric.”
Lawfareblog breaks down what the latest indictment from Robert Mueller’s office means — and what it doesn’t.
Buzzfeed talks to Aviv Ovadya, Chief Technologist at UMSI’s Center for Social Media Responsibility, about the imminent potential for technologies that can quickly create and disseminate new levels of fake news, including forged audio and video that could make it appear that world leaders said things they never said or did things they never did.
This November post from Rantt Media looks at how backpropagation, often mislabeled as “AI,” threatens millions of jobs, and what policy prescriptions we might enact to mitigate its effects. The idea that this is happening no matter what, so we should change our funding priorities, is very different from the “how do we stop this?” conversation that dominates instead.
An Indonesian province on the island of New Guinea that is home to the world’s biggest gold mine is home to a measles outbreak and widespread starvation among natives whose traditional environment and way of life has been destroyed by the mining companies with the full compliance of the Indonesian government.
Nigeria’s massive oil industry has long benefited foreign investors and a tiny local elite rather than enriching the country as a whole, which is the most populous country in Africa. The son of one of the country’s billionaires opened a window on how little the industry helps the Nigerian population when he tried to invest in European oil and gas assets, exposing how difficult it is for most Africans to participate in the wealth generated by natural resources. He’s no hero, but he inadvertently showed how badly the west takes advantage of former African colonies to this day.
EPA head Scott Pruitt, a climate change denier who is thoroughly unqualified to head the agency, has wasted tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on first-class travel … because taxpayers accost him over his disastrous policy decisions when he flies coach.
Have you seen tweets or reports that the Stoneman Douglas High School massacre was the 18th school shooting in the U.S. this year? It wasn’t. That number comes from a gun-control advocacy group that counts any gun-related incident on a school campus as a “school shooting,” even if there wasn’t a threat to students.
Of course, deaths by firearm are still one major reason the U.S. is the most dangerous of wealthy nations for a child to be born in.
This Paste op ed is from November but could run weekly without ever seeming out of date: Ban Assault Weapons, Idiots.
If you live in California, be aware that a group of cranks and pseudoscience advocates are pushing a ballot initiative to overturn the state’s mandatory vaccination law, remove fluoride from water, and more under the innocuous-sounding name “California Clean Environment.” All this would do is damage public health, especially for children, to satisfy a few charlatans who profit off the ignorant.
I know you’re shocked, but former Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria has been accused of hiding profits from Miami-Dade County, claiming a paper loss on the sale of the team (for $1.2 billion) that let him avoid paying a portion of the proceeds to the county.
Cobb County ripped off its taxpayers to fund a stadium for the privately-owned Atlanta Braves … and now the county can’t even fund its existing libraries. The county also opened a new $10 million “cultural center” despite lacking a sustainable operating budget for the facility.
West Virginia is run by industries busy destroying its environment, including the oil & gas industry. A Democratic candidate in the state’s 7th District tried to read the names of sitting state legislators with how much money they received from oil & gas companies and was physically dragged from the floor, especially since she dared point out that committee chairman John Shott (GOP) took $40K from First Energy. How crooked is West Virginia’s government? The governor hired a gas company board member for an undefined role in the state house that gives him 24-hour access to the Governor’s Office.
Marie Newman is a Democrat running in Illinois for a seat held by another Democrat, Dan Lipinski, because Lipinski has supported so many right-wing positions, including voting for a 20-week abortion ban, voting to extend the government’s right to warrantless spying, voting for a permanent ban on the use of federal funds for abortions, voting against a minimum wage hike, and voting to expand the death penalty. Lipinski has long enjoyed the support of labor unions in his gerrymandered district, but several broke with him in the last three weeks to support Newman.
The songwriters behind the 2000 3LW song “Playas Gon’ Play” sued Taylor Swift over the lyrics to her song “Shake It Off.” She won … because the judge ruled that the lyrics in question were too unoriginal to warrant copyright protection. I think this adequately burns both sides.
The Washington Post hired Koch Brothers mouthpiece Meghan McArdle to write for its editorial page, even though she got caught fabricating data to support an argument against the Affordable Care Act.
That wasn’t even the worst editorial page move of the week; the New York Times seems determined to drive itself into a ditch with recent hires and columns, including the hiring-and-immediate-firing of neo-Nazi apologist Quinn Norton. Justin Charity wrote for the Ringer about the paper’s seeming desire for self-immolation. I cancelled my digital subscription on Monday over the paper’s decision to run a column from climate change denier Bret Stephens that claimed the world is “smearing” Woody Allen, whose stepdaughter says he molested her.
Researchers at Rockefeller University may have discovered a new class of antibiotic compounds by sifting through dirt. Malacidins were effective in laboratories against many multi-drug resistant Gram-positive bacteria, including MRSA, by binding to calcium compounds that would eventually go into bacterial cell walls.
You can retain new material you learn more effectively if you take a short break of doing absolutely nothing after studying it.
Board game news: Calliope Games announced the long-delayed arrival of its three new Titan Series titles, including Ancestree, on retail shelves. Ancestree was among the best light games I played at Gen Con last year; it’s from designer Eric M. Lang, best known for heavier games like Blood Rage and the forthcoming Rising Sun.
Bezier Games released Palace of Mad King Ludwig to retail about three weeks ago; it’s a standalone sequel to Castles of Mad King Ludwig, but dispenses with the earlier game’s odd shapes and now has all players working on the same building with square tiles of differing values. Bezier’s site still says “pre-order” but it’s on amazon for $43.
Gen Con ticket sales are already outpacing sales from last year, with the event, held August 2-5 in Indianapolis, on course for its second straight sellout. I intend to be there the whole time, as I was last year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, baseball, board games, guns, links, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ 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

→ February 3, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/3/18.

My org reports and top ten prospect lists for all 30 teams are now up for Insiders, which concludes this year’s prospect rankings package:

• NL East
• NL Central
• NL West
• AL East
• AL Central
• AL West

I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday.
I’ve been selling some of my board game collection and donating the proceeds to charity, including the Food Bank of Delaware and hurricane relief efforts in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

With the prospects project done, I resumed my free email newsletter this past week. Also, the paperback edition of Smart Baseball comes out on March 13th; you can buy any of the editions through HarperCollins’ site.

And now, the links…

Damon Krukowski, formerly of the band Galaxie 500, has a long (and somewhat rambling) piece on the state of the music industry in the age of streaming, and how only the most popular artists are well served by the emerging model.
Undark looks at the debate over the debate over cell phone radiation safety, much of which hinges on the understanding of terms like “evidence” or “proof.”
Climate change is threatening coffee farms around the world; genetic engineering may be our best weapon to fight it, even though it’s a popular bogeyman of the anti-science crowd across the spectrum.
This piece was everywhere last weekend, but in case anyone missed it, the New York Times piece on the fake Twitter follower industry, in which they outed many heavy Twitter users who have bought followers – including former ESPN employee Britt McHenry, 90% of whose followers are ‘fake.’ (I have never bought any followers on any social media network, but I do have followers that independent sites tag as ‘fake.’)
Hackers from the Dutch intelligence service are a major reason we know about Russian interference in our elections.
The Sydney Morning Herald published an extract from an upcoming book about a tattooist at Auschwitz, a Slovakian Jew who becomes the camp’s Tätowierer to survive.
Stephanie Springer looks at pseudoscientific therapies on the rise in baseball, including “cupping,” which Bryce Harper has adopted.
The CEO of Oxfam America writes we must pass a real disaster relief package for Puerto Rico, and now. I can’t help wondering if Congress would move faster if Puerto Ricans 1) had actual votes in Congress 2) spoke English as their first or only language or 3) were white.
I’m a devoted Penzey’s customer because I think their spices and herbs are some of the best around, but it doesn’t hurt that they’ve taken a clear stand against bigotry and intolerance at a time when most companies avoid taking any kind of political stance.
NYC chef Elise Kornack writes about enforcing decency to make restaurants a better place for everyone.
Florida Representative Matt Gaetz brought a right-wing troll and Holocaust denier to the SOTU, and still brought him after he was informed of the man’s views.
The city of Philadelphia now has a daytime service center for the city’s homeless, including medical services for people with opioid addictions.
BBC Travel has a delightful photo/video essay on Monowi, Nebraska, population 1, the only incorporated municipality in the U.S. with just one resident.
The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank writes that Republicans have vacated their definitions of morality, accepting whatever Trump does and moving the line to condone it.
Paul Rosenzweig writes in the The Atlantic that dreams of Mueller indicting Trump are a fantasy, as it won’t be Mueller’s call to make.
There’s an unfortunate truth in this sarcastic rant: If Larry Nassar had been selling unauthorized T-shirts, Michigan State would have shut him down right away.
Farhad Manjoo argues in the NY Times that the online advertising model is the real problem with the modern Internet.
The Republican National Committee voted to define being transgender as “a disqualifying psychological and physical” condition, even though the American Psychological Association is clear that being transgender is not a mental disorder.
South Dakota Republicans have approved a bill out of a Senate committee to allow concealed carry without a permit.
Julian Assange is so desperate to help the GOP that he offered dope on Senator Mark Warner to a fake Sean Hannity Twitter account.
Also from Undark: Zooey Deschanel’s new web series peddles pseudoscience, even discouraging people who can’t afford organic produce – which is no more healthful for consumers than conventional – from buying certain fruits and vegetables at all.
Acram Digital, developers of the app versions of Eight Minute Empire and Martin Wallace’s Steam, announced that their next board game app will be the outstanding medium-weight strategy game Istanbul.
Eggerspiele announced their next release, Coimbra, a dice-drafting, heavy strategy game. (The link is in German but you can switch to English by clicking the flag in the upper right.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, links, organic agriculture, pseudoscience, 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 20, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/19/18.

I only wrote three things this week that you can see anywhere right now: Two posts for Insiders on the Andrew McCutchen trade and the Gerrit Cole trade; and a review of the movie Call Me By Your Name.

Everything else I wrote will go up next week as part of the top 100 prospects package. The top 100 itself is scheduled to run on Monday and Tuesday – I’m still working on the order – followed by the “just missed” column on Thursday and one page ranking all 30 farm systems on Friday, which means that last writeup will be more concise than last year’s. The org reports will run the week after. If you’re curious, I haven’t written anything besides the top 100 capsules yet. So, yeah, things are just great.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The Guardian looks at a Youtube host who fought back against revenge porn posted by her ex and eventually won.
The Detroit News has a lengthy investigation into Michigan State’s role in covering up Larry Nassar’s serial abuse. It is quite clear that MSU President Lou Anna Simon needs to step down. ThinkProgress has a shorter piece identifying his enablers, many of whom are still in the jobs where they protected a known child molester.
ESPN’s Outside the Lines and ESPN the Magazine also published a detailed report on the many institutional failures that allowed Nassar to prey on teenaged and preteen girls for decades.
Aly Raisman gave a victim impact statement on Friday and she took no prisoners.
WIRED looks at the search for new antibiotics in a drug-resistant age, combining old searches in the soil with new techniques from metagenomics.
Also from the Guardian: A profile of Social Chain, a British “meme factory” that advises firms on creating content that will spread across social networks.
Business Insider goes into depth on Yale’s failures to handle sexual misconduct cases, with an assist in incompetence from the New Haven Police Department.
Tom Nichols writes for the Washington Post that the Trump presidency is damaging our entire democracy, including aiding extremists on the left who wish to control the Democratic party.
A Boston Globe investigation argues that the Maine Republican Party is behind anonymous attacks on opposing candidates, pushing fake and misleading stories that cost at least one candidate a likely electoral victory.
Some alt-right trolls clipped a talk given by psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker to make it appear that he was praising the people in that cesspool, and the edited video quickly spread through social media, a new example of the harm that such networks can do to our collective intelligence.
A new rule proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services would allow doctors to refuse to treat transgender patients and to otherwise hide behind claims of religion.
A supposedly “independent” watchdog group in Chicago called Project Six is actually bankrolled by the far right according to a joint investigation by ProPublica and the Chicago Sun-Times.
The accusation against Aziz Ansari has spurred lots of thinkpieces, many of them terrible. I thought Vox’s piece gave a balanced, nuanced take on the story, which doesn’t fit neatly into the “sexual assault” or “harassment” buckets we’ve been filling to surfeit of late.
Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, asks in an essay on the #MeToo movement, “Am I a Bad Feminist?“
Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Poisonwood Bible, argues in the other direction that women need to ‘get ugly’ and voice their anger, asserting their rights and continuing to force these uncomfortable conversations about how men treat women in our society.
NPR looks at Italy’s disappointing response to the #MeToo movement, as the largely Catholic country still adheres to the idea that victims must have deserved or provoked their assaults.
Somaliland, a self-declared independent country in the northern part of what the international community still recognizes as Somalia, passed a law outlawing rape and banning rapists from marrying their victims as a way to escape punishment, while also giving life sentences to rapists who give their victims HIV.
The NCAA answers to nobody, so this story shouldn’t surprise anyone: A college basketball player player who was expelled from Findlay College after a false rape accusation was denied a waiver to play for Duquesne because the NCAA rules by divine right.
Billboard looks at the legal questions behind Radiohead’s copyright infringement claims against Lana del Rey.
The Four Barrel Coffee saga continues to twist, as the owners announced a name change and plans to become an employee-owned company, then a decision to keep the Four Barrel name, and a settlement to the harassment lawsuit that brought the company’s unacceptable environment to the light.
A Tempe “naturopath” (a practitioner of pseudoscience) is suing a blogger who called out her bogus claims about healing cancer, which include injecting cancer patients with vitamin C and baking soda, telling them to go sugar-free, and other stuff that won’t work … while also telling them not to undergo chemo or radiation therapy. The lawsuit is clearly a SLAPP attempt, and you can donate to the blogger’s defense fund set up by the Australian Skeptics. Noted debunker Orac calls the naturopath’s suit “legal thuggery.”
Greater than Games is running a series of raffles and promotions for their Multiverse Month. The publisher’s main titles include Bottom of the 9th, Sentinels of the Multiverse, and Spirit Island.
I can’t figure out if food writer Tamara Adler’s diary is real or satire, because if it’s real, it’s the most pretentious thing I’ve read in years.
At the Gates, one of the founding acts of the Gothenburg school of melodic death metal, announced its new album will be released in May. To Drink from the Night Itself will be the band’s first record without founding guitarist Anders Björler.
And finally, a video I rather enjoyed from Twitter:

?#PositiveNewsWeekend

I love these Strandbeests: wind-propelled kinetic sculptures created by Dutchman Theo Jansen. #art #beach #animals #fun pic.twitter.com/0fIsmpVnQx

— Alexander Verbeek ? (@Alex_Verbeek) January 13, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coffee, links, metoo, Music, pseudoscience, stick to baseball

→ January 13, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/13/18.

No new Insider content this week, as MLB appears to still be asleep and I was working on the top 100 prospects package, which is scheduled to start running on January 22nd. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Pandemic: Rising Tide, a standalone spinoff of the original Pandemic, this time pitting players against rising waters threatening to flood the Netherlands, so players must build dikes and pumps while trying to complete four hydraulic stations to win the game. We liked it, as it gives a new twist to the now-familiar cooperative mechanics of Matt Leacock’s various games.

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…

I Made the Pizza Cinnamon Rolls from Mario Batali’s Sexual Misconduct Apology Letter is everything I wanted it to be and more.
That “gay wedding cake” case that was in the news last month? The bakers, who lost in an appellate court, helped spur an ongoing harassment campaign against the gay couple they refused to serve, including posting the couples’ contact information. The couple claims to be Christian, of course, but I doubt Jesus would be doxing anyone.
The New York Times looks at a French woman who made propaganda videos for the Daesh, was captured when Raqqa fell, and now wishes to return home. The quandary of what to do with citizens who fought for or with terrorists in Syria and are now coming back is facing many European countries.
Electric vehicles require a lot of cobalt right now in their lithium batteries’ cathodes, but demand may soon outstrip supply for the metal, most of which comes from the barely functional Democratic Republic of the Congo, where mining for cobalt and coltan (also known as tantalite) has helped fund the last four decades of civil wars.
Pfizer announced it is folding its division working on treatments for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases after several failures in those two areas. It surprises me to see a major drug company walk away from a market that seems likely to grow in an aging world, although I suppose they could wait for a smaller company to develop one and buy the firm; Pfizer did announce they will start a venture fund for such efforts.
Grass-fed beef is trendy now, but the grass cows eat is getting less nutritious. The article cites a few reasons, but other research supports its claim that climate change is a major cause.
Speaking of (John B. McLemore accent) climate change, Grist argues that we need to get nuclear power back in the mix for our energy supply. It’s cleaner than fracking for natural gas, more efficient than wind or solar, and of course superior to coal in almost every way, yet cheap gas prices have made nuclear less economically viable and coal is taking nuclear’s place in markets where fear of nuclear power has made it politically toxic.
Climate change is one of several suspects behind the ongoing mass extinction of insect species, according to this long read from the Guardian.
Jeb Lund (aka @mobute) wrote that something racist fell out of the President’s shithole for 50 States of Blue. One aspect of this disaster I haven’t seen mentioned: Many of those countries Trump labelled with that epithet have natural resources, like cobalt, that we’re going to need. Maybe antagonizing them isn’t just racist or evil, but bad economic policy too.
While we were distracted with vulgarities and porn stars, Trump waived a punishment for Deutsche Bank, to whom he owes $130 million.
Also brushed aside by more lurid scandals was the report that Trump’s work day runs about seven hours. I wasn’t aware running the country was a part-time job.
The Trump administration rolled back an EPA proposal to take the pesticide chlorpyrifos off the market. Now scientists say the chemical is killing endangered salmon and the orcas that eat them. Previous research has found that chlorpyrifos can harm the brain of a human fetus or young child.
You will often hear commentators on the right decrying abrogations of free speech rights on left-leaning college campuses, but The Chronicle of Higher Education writes that conservatives are the ones truly threatening freedom of speech at American universities, including harassment of faculty members that has cost some professors their jobs.
Asmodee Digital officially announced the upcoming Steam port of Scythe, one of the best-reviewed heavy strategy board games of all time.
This WIRED story from 2015 looks at the underappreciated art of extreme metal band logos.
Vulture took a look at the backlash against Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri after the film won the top prize at the Golden Globes. I still have The Florida Project atop my personal 2017 rankings, with at least three major candidates still unseen.
I don’t know much about the game play, but Everdell, which already blew past its Kickstarter goal, might have the cutest board game art I’ve seen.
Restoration Games’ Justin Jacobson blogged about the development process behind Fireball Island, the next in their series of reissues of classic games. Past titles have included Stop Thief!, Downforce, and Indulgence.
Calliope Games has launched a Kickstarter for The Mansky Caper, a press-your-luck game with a robbery theme.
Jason Holt wrote a retrospective on helping write/translate the rulebook for Galaxy Trucker.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: apps, board games, climate change, environment, links, 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.

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

→ December 30, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/30/17.

Since my last links post, I’ve written three Insider pieces, on Colorado signing Wade Davis, Cleveland signing Yonder Alonso, and San Francisco trading for Evan Longoria.

On the board game front, I reviewed Photosynthesis for Paste, and ranked my top ten board games of 2017 for them too. Over at Vulture I did another Best of 2017 list, looking at the best light game, heavy game, board game app, expansion, and more.

The Wall Street Journal asked me to contribute to their annual “Who Read What” series, where 50 avid readers provide one or two books that really stood out for them in the preceding year. I was specifically asked to name one work of fiction and one of non-fiction, and chose The Erstwhile and Betaball.

As always, feel free to sign up for my email newsletter, which costs you nothing and won’t clog your inbox; I’ve only sent three total in the last two months, so if anything, I should probably be sending more. And, of course, thanks to everyone who bought Smart Baseball for themselves or as a Christmas gift.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica looks at the disastrous handling of criminal mental-health cases in Mississippi by focusing on one young man who spent four years in custody before receiving the requested psychiatric evaluation.
Tulum, a trendy vacation spot on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, is seeing violent evictions as part of land-grabs by wealthy developers looking to cash in on the coastal town’s newfound popularity among tourists looking for an ‘alternative’ getaway.
The Washington Post has been looking at the ongoing problem of teen suicides in the U.S.; this story of a 15-year-old boy’s suicide by cop was the most powerful in the series.
The Post also broke down how the Justice Department undercut a DEA investigation into McKesson’s role in the opioid epidemic, settling the case for a much smaller fine than expected and no facility closures or criminal indictments.
Automation is threatening blue- and white-collar jobs in the developed world, but in Sweden, workers don’t see it as a threat, thanks to the country’s social welfare system and a very different relationship between capital and labor.
The New Yorker exposes corruption, racism, and illegal activity at Turning Point USA, a conservative nonprofit active on college campuses, and one that is close to the Trump family.
Also from ProPublica, the explosive compound RDX is now polluting groundwater across the country near where it’s been manufactured. The Pentagon has fought efforts within the EPA to name RDX a “likely” carcinogen (up from “possible”) because it would produce substantial legal liability for the agency. Affected water supplies include Grand Island, Nebraska; Salt Lake City; Cape Cod; and sites in Virginia and California.
The Koch brothers are now funding legal efforts to fight government projects to roll out broadband, which can help address the problem of the digital divide, where people are locked out of job and educational opportunities if they lack sufficient access to the internet. It seems to be a philosophical issue for the Kochs, that the government shouldn’t be engaging in what I would at least consider an infrastructure investment.
The EPA is considering allowing a massive increase in the use of a bee-killing pesticide after a new application by the chemical’s manufacture, Syngenta. Thiomethoxam is a neonicotinoid, a class of pesticides suspected of playing a role in the ongoing collapse of bee colonies, impairing honeybees’ ability to fly and homing powers. No bees, no food.
The right-wing American Civil Rights Union, with help from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC, seen in an unflattering light in The 13th), is pushing state legislators to further crack down on voting rights by cross-checking voter rolls with jury duty summonses. This piece from the Memphis Daily News looks at Tennessee reps who appear to do ALEC’s bidding, pushing “model bills” in that state’s legislature.
Former sportswriter Lisa Olson writes for The Athletic about how the sports journalism world is long overdue for a sexual harassment reckoning. I doubt she knew when she wrote that piece that a photographer would tell the world Miguel Sano assaulted her in 2015. Deadspin’s Diana Moskovitz wrote just a week prior about her experiences working at the NFL Network, which has been hit with a sizable lawsuit over ongoing harassment of women in its workplace.
David Frum’s piece at The Atlantic was the best response I saw to the absurdity of the GOP tax bill, which appears to be a sop to party donors and a direct tax on Democratic constituencies while flying in the face of any economic theories on growth or job creation.
The current Administration has talked up reducing federal regulations as a way to boost the economy, which on the whole is a Bad Thing – I like clean water and air, for example – but the FDA is starting to look at regulating so-called ‘homeopathic’ remedies, which have previously been able to make all kinds of vague health claims without any proof. And they can’t prove any of it, because homeopathy is bullshit. If people want to buy this stuff anyway, that’s fine, but consumers deserve to know not only that the products don’t work, but that they can’t work.
An Australian mother and father have lost a court bid to prevent their three children from receiving vaccination against the measles. The father, who is apparently dumber than a pile of dogshit, claimed that because he had the measles as a kid, he’d passed on his “natural immunity” to his children.
Lab-grown meat is becoming a reality, as feeding seven billion people by raising livestock is just not a sustainable long-term solution. Will “real” beef become even more of a luxury good in the future?
Two more New York Times pieces of merit: how lawsuits are slowing research into health issues and technologies, and how unions are making inroads into digital media. I’m not a union member and I don’t believe anyone at ESPN is unionized.
This editorial asking why Americans don’t realize how poor their lives are is laughably awful. The author’s Europhilia has apparently distorted his views of that continent and of life in the United States.
A friend – okay, fine, it’s Chris Crawford – bought me a MoviePass, and I’ve already used it twice, saving almost what he spent for the three-month subscription. The movie theater industry is trying to figure out what to do with the new company, which lets you see one movie per day for free under the $10/month subscription.
I’m very excited for the upcoming board game adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel; The Player’s Aid interviewed the game’s designer, Brian Kelley.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, environment, links, mental health, mexico, movies, stick to baseball, sustainability, vaccines

Tags

Archives