→ December 26, 2015
→ By

Stick to baseball, 12/26/15.

I only wrote one new Insider piece this week, on Mike Leake contract with St. Louis, although I got a nice response from readers on my 2009 article on the shameful, insidious exclusion of Tim Raines from the Hall of Fame.

And now, the links…

  • Lots of vaccine-denier bullshit out there this week, like the mom in Texas who hosted an infection “party” for unvaccinated kids and said the illness is “meant to eliminate the weak.” Aside from how callous this is – one would presume she thinks her own kids are not among the weak – meant by whom, exactly? Did God send us the measles to wipe out a bunch of toddlers?
  • Meanwhile, a nurse and other vaccine-deniers in Australia have been ripping down vaccination posters in hospitals. If you catch someone doing this, stop them. Report them to security. Do whatever it takes. Idiocy like this breeds faster when rational people stay silent.
  • Some vaccine-denier tried to “argue” with me by citing the so-called “fourteen studies” on vaccine safety, a site and claim that originates with Jenny McCarthy. Well, as you might have guessed, it’s science-denying doggerel.
  • The Washington Post tried to name the country’s ten best food cities by sending its food critic to 30 20 13 cities this year. Yeah, I get that travel is expensive, but this would be like me listening to 108 songs and then giving you my top 100 for the year. Also, the list itself has a lot of very dubious opinions in it – the author goes out of his way to dump on New York City, which has about 8.5 million people in it, and dwarfs almost every other good food town in the country on sheer quantity. I asked the author on Twitter what he had at the amazing Cosme that didn’t impress him, but he hasn’t responded. If you don’t like Cosme’s food – the prices are another matter, but that’s Manhattan for you – I absolutely question your taste.
  • Iceland has an awesome Christmas tradition: giving and reading books.
  • The title of this thinkpiece, “We Are All Martin Shrkeli,” is rather clickbaity, but the message within, about how the modern pharmaceutical industry and its pricing structure deny critical medications to the poor and sick around the world.
  • The new Netflix series Master of None, starring Aziz Ansari and co-created by Ansari and Alan Yang (“Junior” of FireJoeMorgan fame, and MouseRat’s bass player), is phenomenal: funny, sweet, insightful, and different. One episode dealt with racism in Hollywood, and Ansari penned an editorial last month expounding on the same topic.
  • Slate has a somewhat scary piece on the evolution of creationism bills in state legislatures. If you live in a state where this garbage is legal, get active. Creationism and its Trojan horse of intelligent design are not science, and teaching them in any fashion in a public school violates the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the Constitution.
  • Boy does the Guardian ever do a number on Sepp Blatter and his corrupt fiefdom.
  • Speaking of corruption, the Las Vegas Review-Journal is embroiled in a scandal that combines plagiarism and a conflict of interest, which has led to more than one situation like this, where a longtime reporter has quit over these ethical violations.
  • Another thinkpiece, but a worthwhile one: What the Mast Brothers scandal really means to those of us reveling in it. I’m only in agreement with the author to a point; even if the victims are rich, or stupid, or both, does that make a particular fraud any less of a crime? It may color our opinions of the people who perpetrated it, but the nature of the fraud itself – in this case, Mast Brothers’ likely lie about how and where they sourced their chocolate – is unchanged.
  • The Atlantic discusses the schism within the Republican Party in a balanced way, without exulting in the party’s potential for self-immolation.
  • The New Yorker looks at the rise and ongoing fall of for-profit colleges, which takes advantage of our already horribly broken student-loan system.
  • Via a reader, Quartz gives us (and fixes) the most misleading charts and graphs of 2015.
  • My adopted hometown of Wilmington called in the CDC to help stem the gun violence epidemic. Of course, the CDC’s ability to help is limited because the NRA has essentially bought budget clauses that prevent the CDC from researching this topic too heavily or promoting anything that might lead to tighter gun control.
  • Tweet of the week – enjoy these fake yet highly credible thinkpiece titles:

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ November 14, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 11/14/15.

I have analyses up for Insiders on the Aaron Hicks-John Ryan Murphy trade, the Andrelton Simmons trade, and the Craig Kimbrel trade. I also held my weekly Klawchat here on the dish.

My various offseason buyers’ guides all went up this week:
• Catchers
• Corner infielders
• Middle infielders
• Outfielders
• Starting pitchers
• Relief pitchers

Plus, you all saw my ranking of my all-time favorite boardgames, right?

And now, the links…

  • One of the bigger surprises on Art Angels, the outstanding new album from Grimes (née Claire Boucher), is the presence of the female Taiwanese rapper who goes by the name Aristophanes. Fader has a little more info on her with some Soundcloud links.
  • The Atlantic has a good review of Art Angels that talks about Grimes’ emerging fame and choice of musical direction. I’ll try to get a review of the album up early next week.
  • Public schools in Louisiana are teaching kids Christianity and creationism, a blatant violation of federal law and of the students’ rights.
  • The New Yorker has an excellent piece up on using “free speech” to distract from discussions of racism, focusing on the protests at Yale and the University of Missouri. The Yale controversy has seemed particularly easy to parse to me: You don’t get to go around in blackface in a closed environment and then claim you’re exercising your free speech rights. You get expelled.
  • Pennsylvania has the second-worst student immunization rate in the nation, but there are bills pending in their legislature to end the “philosophical exemption” (that is, the opt-out for parents too stupid to understand basic science), while the state’s departments of health and education are working to end the “grace period” that allows kids to attend school before they’ve gotten all their shots. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette‘s editorial board supports these moves, as do I, not least because the state of Delaware told me building a border wall was too expensive.
  • Doctors need to do a better job of encouraging parents to give their kids the HPV vaccine, according to Aaron Carroll, Professor of Pediatrics at Kyle Schwarber’s alma mater (well, technically at IU’s Medical School). The problem, in Carroll’s view, is that it touches on ignorance about vaccines as well as the dirty dirty subject of teens having sex.
  • J. Kenji Lopez-Alt talked to NPR’s Here and Now, and the resulting interview includes three recipes from his new cookbook The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science.
  • The BBC has a quirky story up on a brand-new record store in Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia. And if all you know of Mongolia is “Mongolian barbecue,” well, that’s Taiwanese, sorry.
  • Last week’s links included a story on Elizabeth Holmes, the Stanford dropout whose blood-testing startup Theranos may have lied about its product’s capabilities. The Washington Post has a story on how the NY Times erased Holmes from a story on tech heroes, as well as failing to discuss a potential conflict of interest by that story’s author.
  • This story by a pro-science skeptical blogger about an vaccine-denier nut job is a bit inside-baseball, as the saying goes, but highly amusing.
Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ November 7, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 11/6/15.

My annual ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason is now up for Insiders, and I held my weekly Klawchat right after they were posted.

I reviewed the app version of Camel Up for Paste this week. Since I wrote that review, there’s been a minor update that cleaned up some of the issues I had with the graphics, notably the info available on screen to you. It’s available here for iOS devices or Android.

And now, the links…

  • Well this just sucks: Kevin Folta, scientist and advocate of genetic engineering of food crops and generally of the safety of food science, is removing himself from public debate. He’s been attacked by the FraudBabe and the dipshits at U.S. “Right to Know,” a group that uses the veneer of consumer rights to mask a blatant science-denial/anti-GMO policy. They’ve been using FOIA requests to try to scuttle legitimate research and discussion. The only solution I see is for more of us to speak up and out about science.
  • Peet’s Coffee has purchased a majority stake in Intelligentsia, their second such move into high-end craft coffee after their purchase of Stumptown. I don’t know what this means for the space; I don’t see a natural synergy here but fear it’s more a move to neutralize competition from a higher-margin competitor
  • We forget that the people pictured in certain memes are actual human beings, such as the skeptical Third World kid, so the BBC has done a story on that picture, finding the aid worker pictured but not the child.
  • Canada’s new government seems about as pro-science as it gets, including the creation of a new post, Minister of Science. Can you imagine any of the current Republican candidates for President doing such a thing? So many of them have staked out one or more denialist positions that this seems out of the question.
  • Some good sense from the Environmental Defense Blog on what the news about China’s coal consumption really means. Tip: Climate change is still real, and the CO2 measurements aren’t affected.
  • Thanksgiving is coming and it’s never too early to start cooking, at least when it comes to preparing stock, as Michael Ruhlman explains. I actually make a brown chicken stock instead, since I always have chicken carcasses in the freezer (bones and necks, and sometimes wings) but rarely have turkey.
  • “Smile You Bitch: Being a Woman in 2015” lives up to its provocative title. Rape culture is everywhere, and it’s ingrained in many young men from childhood.
  • Speaking of treating women like navel lint, I give you the NFL’s attempt to hush up Greg Hardy’s domestic violence case.
  • So the demise of Grantland led to a lot of thinkpieces (and a few readers telling me they were canceling their Insider subs, which, to be perfectly honest, just punishes all the wrong people here), but one I liked was from Fortune, talking about its implications for the business of longform journalism. I didn’t read a lot of Grantland’s stuff, but I do believe their mission mattered, and I hope the end of that site is just a blip.
  • From Forbes, a good piece looking at the limited research to date on pediatricians who turn away vaccine-refusing parents. That’s a lot better than the nonsense hit piece on Bryce Harper the same publication ran earlier last week.
  • I’ve often wondered about whether linking to Spotify in my music posts was helping or hurting the artists in question, but Cameron from the band Superhumanoids told me in September that it was the former, and now FiveThirtyEight has a piece supporting this with data.
  • The long-running TV series Mythbusters is ending after its next season, and the NY Times offers an appreciation, crediting the show with rising interest in STEM education and careers.
  • New research on the lizards called tuataras supports the theory that the penis evolved just once for mammals and reptiles and has just, well, hung around.
Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ October 31, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 10/31/15.

No Insider content this week, as I’ve been on vacation, but I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday. My AFL scouting notes from last week are here and here.

The app version of the cooperative boardgame Elder Sign is on sale right now for $0.99 for both Android (via amazon) and iOS. It’s absolutely worth it.

And now, the links…

  • No, bacon doesn’t really cause cancer, not in the way the media’s coverage of the WHO designation would lead you to believe. This was a case of mass science ignorance at work.
  • Chimeras are real! Well, again, not really, but there is a phenomenon in humans known as chimerism, where one of two twins in the womb doesn’t make it, and the surviving twin absorbs some of the lost sibling’s DNA. This led to failed paternity test last year which led to this significant scientific discovery.
  • The NY Times covers the fraying narrative around the medical startup Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes. My favorite quote in the piece, from another reporter, is, “People in medicine couldn’t understand why the media and technology worlds were so in thrall to her.” Uh, maybe because she’s 31 and blonde and pretty?
  • David Mitchell has a new book out, Slade House, and Wired has a piece praising it for being so beginner-friendly. I read Cloud Atlas this spring (that links to my review) and enjoyed it quite a bit. Still waiting for that second Luisa Rey mystery, though.
  • Tokyo will have a bookstore-themed hostel starting next week. I’m a bit old for hostel travel now but there’s something decidedly romantic about this whole concept.
  • SXSW is trying to undo the damage done by its earlier decision to cave to online harassers, now restoring panels on the problem of online harassment of women, although one of the panelists is himself accused of just such a crime.
  • All the news on China this week focused on the end of the one-child policy, but the NY Times has a long read on the country’s construction of seven new islets in the Spratly Islands chain, ownership of which has long been disputed among multiple countries. This is a highly aggressive move that seems like a play toward gaining more control over undersea resources in the region.
  • A small study in North Carolina found that parents’ vaccine-denial beliefs often preceded pregnancy, coming from cultural factors, often correlated with other anti-science beliefs.
  • Subway earned plaudits for its decision to switch to antibiotic-free meats, but they gave themselves ten years to do it, and the linked piece details some of the challenges for ‘suppliers’ (that is, the people who raise the animals). Humans started using antibiotics prophylactically on animals because it allowed them to crowd more and more of the creatures into smaller spaces without incurring the wrath of bacteria that spread quickly when conditions are tight. Such practices are, in my view, inhumane to begin with, but antibiotic resistance is the very real cost on which there should be no disagreement. Evolution’s real, and it has little regard for our species’ whims.
Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ October 24, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 10/24/15.

I had one Insider post this past week, covering Arizona Fall League prospects, and will have another one up this weekend now that my trip to the Valley is done. I also held my regular Klawchat on Thursday.

I’m taking vacation this upcoming week, so I’ll be off social media for a bit and won’t have any Insider posts after the second AFL dispatch goes up. I may still chat Thursday, however, now that those are mine and a bit more loose and fun.

And now, the links…

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ October 10, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 10/10/15.

I visited the Dominican Republic for the first time this week, and saw Eddy Julio Martinez, six other Cuban defectors, and a handful of Dominican teenagers who will be eligible to sign in 2016 and 2017; Insiders can read all of my scouting notes on those players. I also wrote some preview/notes pieces on the American League and National League Division Series, although my Blue Jays in four prediction is already dead.

I held my regular Klawchat here on Thursday. I think the new software, despite some tiny glitches, is working out well; if nothing else it works far faster on my end.

And now, the links…

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ September 26, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 9/25/15.

My Insider column this week was on players I got wrong, specifically those I underrated (or didn’t rate) when evaluating them as prospects or younger players. I also held my weekly Klawchat here on the dish, which, again, is where they live now.

I’ll try to get a review of the new CHVRCHES album, Every Open Eye, up in a day or so, but in the meantime here’s a synopsis: If you liked their debut, it’s extremely similar and similarly excellent.

And now, the links…

And this week, a great reader tweet on vaccinations:

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 19, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 9/19/15.

My Insider post this week named Astros first baseman A.J. Reed my 2015 Prospect of the Year, while listing other prospects who had fantastic years and highlighting Boston’s Andrew Benintendi for the best pro debut by a 2015 draftee.

I held my regular Klawchat here on Thursday. This upcoming week I may shift the chat and Periscope up by a day each, to Wednesday and Tuesday respectively.

And now, the links…

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ September 5, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 9/5/15.

I had two Insider pieces this week, one on hypothetical postseason award ballots and one on notable September callups, and then someone else I didn’t expect to see came up after the latter was posted so why do I even do anything.

Klawchats at ESPN.com are indeed dead, as are all chats there, but I think I’ve found a solution that will let me resume the chats here after Labor Day. I’m looking for a little help with a script to clean up the transcripts so I can post them after the fact for everyone to read, so if you’re handy with perl, Python, or the like, please let me know. I’ll keep doing Periscopes, but they don’t work for everyone, including my deaf readers, so I want to make sure I use both media going forward.

My review of the second edition of the boardgame Evolution plus its Flight expansion is up at Paste. You can buy the game for $48 on amazon.

And now, the links…

  • How “Big Egg” has used underhanded and possibly illegal tactics, with the help of the USDA, to try to sabotage Hampton Creek’s vegan mayonnaise. It’s incredibly sleazy.
  • Andrew Zimmern talks about the future of food, from synthetic food replacements to insects as a sustainable protein source.
  • Scientists have discovered a naturally-occurring protein that would help slow the melting of ice cream. I see a problem with this, though: Ice cream tastes better when it’s at the brink of melting, because our taste buds don’t detect flavors in cold or frozen foods that well. That’s why ice cream has to be high in sugar – otherwise it wouldn’t taste sweet.
  • A Chinese writer talks about how the “gross” immigrant food of her upbringing has been culturally appropriated as “trendy.”
  • The programmer adapting the board game Brass into app form has started a blog about the process.
  • Chef Rick Bayless – yep, that’s Skip’s brother – writes about his dismay over the unbanning of GMO corn in Mexico, using culinary and cultural arguments rather than (un)scientific ones.
  • An experiment among Israeli schoolteachers found unconscious gender bias in math grading, bias that affected those kids’ choices as they advanced to higher grades. I know some of you get on me for discussing bias (racism, sexism, etc.) where it isn’t immediately evident, but these issues still exist, especially racism within the white-dominated baseball industry, even though it’s rarely explicit any more.
  • Alton Brown talks to the New York Times about his attitudes about our attitudes about food.
  • A paid anti-GMO shill for the organic agriculture industry was “severed” from Washington State University. Particularly notable are the undisclosed conflicts of interest, the same violation of which the anti-GMO side is accusing Kevin Folta.
  • Why is Missouri executing one death-row prisoner a month?
  • Vaccine denier Dr. Bob Sears – whose license to practice medicine still hasn’t been stripped, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom – is continuing to push his looney-toon, law-breaking agenda on gullible parents.
Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ August 29, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 8/29/15.

My main Insider piece this week was on sustainable MLB breakthroughs in 2015. I meant to include Rougned Odor on this list, and somehow just plain forgot him when I sat down to write the piece. Anyway, this is my mea culpa and statement that I believe his improvement at the plate is real, sustainable, and only the beginning for him.

I also covered the Metropolitan Classic high school tournament that’s hosted and organized by the NY Mets, writing about the top 2016 and 2017 draft prospects there.

And now, this week’s links…saturdayfive

  • The nationwide rise in the popularity of authentic barbecue has left black pitmasters behind, even though that style of cooking has roots in African-American culture.
  • An excellent longread from the BBC on the forced repatriation of Chinese sailors in the UK after World War II, with the story of one woman whose biological father was one of those deported.
  • Baseball is on the rise in Uganda, believe it or not. It’s a sport that requires a long gestation period when it manages to take hold in a new region or country, but it seems to be growing well in the small sub-Saharan African nation, where it’s still against the law to be gay.
  • A chemistry decoder to send to that idiot friend from high school who keeps posting FoodBabe links on Facebook.
  • A personal post from a woman whose son nearly died from the flu. It’s just about flu shot season, too.
  • Another sugar (sucrose) substitute, the natural but uncommon sugar allulose, may be moving toward the marketplace, but like sugar alcohols, it passes right through the upper GI tract and can cause some problems further on down the line.
  • Kevin Folta, a scientist at the University of Florida, is under attack by the tin-foil hat crowd because Monsanto provided $25,000 for an educational outreach program, covering his travel costs. The personal nature of the attacks and the ignorance of how corporate funding actually works in academic research result in a deeply disturbing application of the genetic fallacy.
  • Longtime reader Tom Hitchner has a good post up on why teams keep getting sweetheart government-funded stadium deals. It’s happening in Milwaukee, and it’s happening in disgusting fashion in St. Louis, where a law prohibiting such deals was overturned by a judge as “too vague.”
  • TV critic extraordinaire Alan Sepinwall asks if there’s too much good television right now. I say yes, there is, and I have little to no hope of watching most of it.
  • U.S. tennis pro Mardy Fish had to quit the sport due to anxiety, but he’s back, and he’s talking about his affliction.
  • Mental Floss assembled a group of clever airline safety videos from around the world. The two Delta ones are both funny and effective; the first time I saw each this year I had to put down my book to watch them.
Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,