I’ve been writing Top 100 stuff (and making related phone calls) all week, so the only content I wrote that didn’t appear here on the dish was my review of the boardgame DOOM, an adaptation of the 1990s first-person shooter video game and an update of an earlier attempt to make a boardgame of it.
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And now, the links…
- The Guardian says turning Sherlock into James Bond is unacceptable, and I largely agree – this season’s first two episodes had too much action and gunplay and not enough Sherlockian deduction.
- Also, if you’ve seen the Sherlock season opener, the showrunners spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the surprise ending and their vision for the series.
- The Internet of Things leaves us all vulnerable to hackers in ways we don’t expect, like controlling cars remotely via malware or over wireless networks.
- Let’s talk vaccines. The Director of the Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Center wrote a garbage, anti-vaccine editorial on Cleveland.com that brought up the discreted vaccine-autism link. Why is anyone surprised, given the Cleveland Clinic’s embrace of other forms of woo like naturopathy?
- Donald Trump met with noted vaccine-denier RFK Jr., who is batshit insane on this topic, and conservative writer Ben Shapiro gave us eleven reasons why Trump is wrong to buy into this crap.
- Seth Mnookin looks at how RFK Jr. “distorted” vaccine science, although I’d call it flat-out lying.
- What can the vaccine-denial movement teach us about improving the public’s science literacy? Unfortunately, one of the author’s conclusions is that denialists manipulate parents with appeals to emotion like making it a “freedom of choice” issue, whereas scientists tend to avoid such irrational efforts.
- What’s behind the 2016 spike in mumps cases? One response might be to get a third dose of the MMR vaccine, as the mumps component may gradually lose effectiveness over 10-15 years.
- The Ringer looked at noted vaccine-denialist and all-around quack Dr. Joseph Mercola, who makes over $10 million a year from his so-called “alternative health” sites.
- Mercola’s site has “4,400 articles on the benefits of turmeric.” Too bad research on the benefits of turmeric (specifically curcumin) keeps coming up empty.
- This notice to parents from an Alabama pediatrics office is absolute pro-vaccine gold.
- WIRED has an oral history of the making of the ESPN documentary O.J.: Made in America, which seems likely to get least get a nomination for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Oscars.
- Shiva Ayyadurai, who claims he invented e-mail and files nuisance lawsuits against sites that dispute this, is now suing Techdirt for the same thing, a lawsuit that could put the site out of business. He’s backed by billionaire Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who also backed Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. Ars Technica has a little more detail on the suit, and on why Ayyadurai is wrong. Lots of folks responded to my tweet about this by saying, in essence, that Gawker got what it deserved, but 1) that’s irrelevant to this case and 2) Gawker only posted the Hogan video after a federal court ruled it was newsworthy, making the results of Hogan’s lawsuit hard to explain.
- Derrick Goold wrote about a novel type of elbow surgery that may bring Seth Maness back to the big leagues in about half the time it would have taken after Tommy John (ligament transplant) surgery. Maness’s tear was in the right location, near an attachment point, and the ligament was otherwise in good enough shape that he qualified for the new procedure.
- Rye bread – I mean real rye bread, the dark, nutty stuff, made with whole-grain rye or even rye berries, is making a comeback. It’s a lower-gluten relative of wheat, so breads made primarily or wholly with rye flour tend to be denser than wheat breads, but I think rye has a more interesting, complex taste than commercial whole wheat flours.
- I figure most of you have seen this, but just in case, GQ had a great longread on the diaries of a HS football player who killed himself after suffering from concussion-related CTE. He left detailed instructions for his parents to spread the story of what football did to his brain. It’s a wrenching read, and I wish someone would wallpaper Roger Goodell’s office with it.
- Have you seen those cheesy infomercials for MyPillow? Well, the owner may have broken the law with his neverending “buy one get one free” promotion, which also cost the company its BBB rating. It’s kind of a story of the owner’s arrogance, figuring that if something works for his business it must be OK.
- Princeton Professor Cornel West reflects on what he calls the sad legacy of President Obama. It’s worth reading, but the essence is that the practical results of Obama’s policies were not progressive enough for his supporters on the left.
- There’s real hope for the first time in the forty years since the island’s division that Cyprus could be reunited via a tripartite peace deal, although Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan later dismissed the possibility of a full Turkish troop withdrawal from the divided island. (Given the history of both the Turkish and Greek governments in Cyprus, I kind of don’t blame him.)
- Climate change is causing China’s largest desert to expand at an alarming rate, displacing people and turning thousands of acres uninhabitable.
- With climate-change denial the official policy of the President-Elect and the party that controls both houses of congress, a new group is trying to recruit scientists to run for office so that we get some rational thinking in our government.
- A North Korean boy who was abandoned by his parents and lived on the streets of Pyongyang shared his story with the BBC, including his eventual escape to South Korea.
- Russia’s parliament moved to decriminalize domestic violence this week.
- And now, to the outhouse … The Trump-Russia connection became more sordid and problematic this week, as the BBC’s award-winning Paul Wood explains in a measured piece that doesn’t quite go as far as BuzzFeed did in revealing the documents.
- Charles Pierce explains how no one knows what comes next. He compares Trump to Captain Ahab, but I think he’s more Captain Queeg.
- Trump’s plan to name his son-in-law Jared Kushner to a key advisory post is his first attempt to ignore the law, specifically a 1967 law that prohibits this sort of nepotism. My fear isn’t that he’ll do it, but that no one will challenge it.
- Betsy DeVos, a creationist nutjob who gave a lot of money to the GOP and coincidentally has been nominated to be our next Secretary of Education, conveniently “forgot” a $125,000 donation she made to support an anti-union ballot measure in Michigan.