vaccines — Page 26

→ March 26, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/25/16.

My one Insider piece this week covers my breakout player picks for 2016. I also reviewed the simple abstract strategy game Circular Reasoning for Paste. I was unable to chat this week due to travel and attending games in Florida.

And now, the links…

Well this is some bullshit: The Tribeca film festival is screening a vaccine-denial “documentary” directed by Andrew Wakefield. Yes, Wakefield, the guy who faked the MMR/autism study that helped land us in this mess in the first place. Fuck you, Robert Deniro, for being a denialist and spreading this garbage.
Meanwhile, Uganda will jail parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids.
Drew Magary on why he’ll never quit Twitter. It’s the same reason I probably won’t either: We have audiences there, and tweeting to those audiences gets people to read our writing.
Patrick Saunders of the Denver Post wrote a piece on Tyler Matzek and how they’re both battling anxiety disorder.
Under Crazy Scott Walker, the state of Wisconsin gutted tenure at public universities, which led to foreseeable yet unforeseen consequences at UW-Madison. Tenure is a bad system, but Wisconsin replaced it with something worse.
The Atlantic points out how the Republican party, which professes to be the party of business, passed a law businesses hate this week, just to screw with gay people. If your bigotry runs that deep, then you’re not the party of business – and you’re going to let the Democrats, long seen as the party of higher taxes and more regulations, seize some of that reputation.
There might be a vaccine for dengue fever – which kills over 10,000 people each year – on the horizon, and that in turn could lead to a vaccine for the related Zika virus.
I loved this NY Times profile of both Natasha Gregson-Wagner and her mother Natalie Wood. I remember watching the atrocious Two Girls and a Guy and finding it totally ridiculous that Gregson-Wagner was supposed to be playing the unattractive (or at least less attractive) girlfriend.
Reader Reggie passed along this interesting piece on our brains’ evolution may be related to anxiety, in that our brains evolved (he uses the “were designed for” phrasing, which isn’t scientifically accurate) to handle a different type of stress than we typically face today. I also recommend the site Sick Not Weak, founded by TSN personality Michael Lansberg to promote understanding of mental illness, including depression and anxiety.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 19, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/19/16.

I had a big scouting blog post from Arizona for Insiders this week, leading with Dodgers outfielder Yusniel Diaz, plus a draft blog post on UVA’s Connor Jones and Matt Thaiss, including thoughts on why the Cavaliers have never churned out a big league starter. My weekly Klawchat transcript is up as well.

I reviewed the simple abstract strategy game Circular Reasoning for Paste.

And now, the links…

Jessica Jensen put together a series of tweets recommending female voices on baseball to follow if you’re looking for some diversity in your Twitter feed. Baseball Twitter is indeed very white male dominated (says the white male).
Why big-name chefs are getting into the coffee game. It’s not a huge profit center, but I do think it’s a way for chefs who are passionate about coffee to share that with their clientele.
The biggest junk science stories of 2015 includes more shots at the so-called FoodBabe, whose ignorance and fraud reached bigger levels than I’d realized.
No, vaccines do not lead to more food allergies, no matter what the Internet tells you.
Stella Parks, aka bravetart on Twitter and Instagram, shows you how to make real Irish soda bread, which is nothing like the crap usually labelled with that name.
I keep linking to School of Seven Bells stories because Alejandra Deheza is such a good interview; here’s one from WNYC on her work to finish the album after her partner died.
Andrew Wiles just won the Abel Prize for his mid-1990s solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem, a story that has always fascinated me because it seems impossible that Fermat himself had the solution he claimed to have. I recommend Amir Aczel’s slim book on the topic, Fermat’s Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem.
The Zika virus preferentially kills developing brain cells in utero. Lovely.
A Rockland County, New York, high school censored the swastikas for a school production of The Producers, although the school’s superintendent says the school’s actions were mischaracterized.
The chief U.S. district judge for Washington D.C. faces an allegation that he raped a 16-year-old woman in 1981. It’s not statutory rape, because the age of consent in Utah at the time was 16 (good job, Utah!). The judge submitted his letter of resignation after the news of the victim’s lawsuit emerged.
I don’t agree with the melodramatic conclusions here, but it certainly presents food for thought: how “deep learning” may put more and more people out of work. It’s certainly true that many jobs long reserved for people will be better done by computers, and preparing for that shift should be a priority for our education systems, public and private, over the next twenty years. I don’t think that a computer learning to play Go, which, despite incredible complexity is still a game with specific rules and thus predictable outcomes, means that three quarters of our workforce is about to become obsolete.
A Chinese fraudster uses a puppet “news” site to defame his critics, including Bloomberg journalist Dune Lawrence, then tries to hide behind the First Amendment. He’s facing criminal charges related to securities infractions, but his manipulation of Twitter and Google as well as his 1A defenses should be worrisome to anyone whose career takes him/her online.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coffee, links, math, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 12, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/12/16.

Couple of Insider blog posts this week from Arizona, one on Kenta Maeda, Jose De Leon, and Sean Manaea, and on Cody Ponce, Casey Meisner, Daniel Gossett, and Trent Clark. I also held my weekly Klawchat from the Cartel Coffee Lab location in Tempe. Many thanks to the barista with purple hair.

I appeared on Tor.com’s Rocket Talk podcast, discussing science fiction, the Hugo Award, and a little baseball.

My most recent boardgame review for Paste covers the fast-moving deckbuilder Xenon Profiteer.

And now, the links…

A vaccine-denier couple in Canada let their baby die of meningitis rather than get him medical attention, choosing instead to give him natural treatments like maple syrup. They’re now facing criminal charges, as they should, but they’re claiming they’re being persecuted for being anti-vaccine morons. Adults who contract viral meningitis usually recover on their own, but infants are at serious risk and require medical intervention and sometimes must be hospitalized. The article doesn’t specify how their child ended up with meningitis, but it can be caused by a number of viruses, some of which – like measles, mumps, and influenza – are vaccine-preventable.
The BBC asks if Starbucks can succeed in Italy, where espresso is ingrained in the culture. The answer is of course they can, because Starbucks doesn’t really sell coffee: They sell highly caloric coffee-flavored drinks, food, wifi, clean bathrooms, but coffee is just a tiny part of the business. And what they’re selling more than any of that is a brand that has global cachet despite the poor quality of their products.
Also from the BBC, feeding young children peanuts reduces the risk of peanut allergies. So that naturalist vaccine-denier cousin of yours who didn’t give her baby peanuts till he was six probably increased the chances he’ll end up with a serious peanut allergy. Whomp, whomp.
Guardian sportswriter Marina Hyde with some highly intelligent fire-dropping on Maria Sharapova and why we shouldn’t believe her story.
Nancy Reagan died this week at age 94; her legacy includes the failed “Just Say No” campaign and associated war on drugs, as well as her part in encouraging her husband to cut funding for AIDS research as the disease was spreading fast in the U.S. Buzzfeed ran a piece from last year on how she turned down Rock Hudson’s plea for help just a few weeks before he died. The Guardian also recounts the Reagans’ refusal to commit resources to fighting the disease.
The New York Times with an excellent piece on the debunking of a fake CIA analyst who appeared on Fox News. While the fraudster himself, Wayne Simmons, is fascinating, the bigger question is how Fox let this guy go on air so often, saying so many inflammatory things, without anyone suspecting that his resume was inflated. We’re all susceptible to believing people who tell us what we want to hear.
The lawyer who controls Harper Lee’s estate – and has been accused in recent years of manipulating the author to her own benefit – has informed the publisher of To Kill a Mockinbird that the estate will no longer permit the publisher to produce the mass market paperback version. That’s the cheapest version of the novel, the one most schools and schoolkids bought. Does anyone else think Harper Lee would never, ever have permitted this? Yet I see no legal recourse, unfortunately.
Lot of Downton Abbey recaps, remembrances, and thinkpieces this week; this piece on Lady Mary as the series’ strongest and most central character was my favorite.
I did not care for this Sports Illustrated feature story on Blackhawks star and accused rapist Patrick Kane, but I will post the link here for you to judge for yourselves. I thought that it underplayed the seriousness of the accusations, and the fact that the lack of charges was due to procedural issues and the difficulty of proving rape cases rather than exonerating evidence, and didn’t sufficiently debunk the ‘theory’ it broaches about the connection between the incident and his career year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coffee, downton abbey, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ December 26, 2015
→ By keith

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:

pic.twitter.com/y2KpPUncN0

— Kill Tim Faust (@crulge) December 19, 2015

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: evolution, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ November 14, 2015
→ By keith

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: 2015 in music, links, saturday five, vaccines

→ November 7, 2015
→ By keith

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: anti-science, climate change, coffee, evolution, gmo, links, saturday five, vaccines

→ October 31, 2015
→ By keith

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: food safety, links, saturday five, vaccines

→ October 24, 2015
→ By keith

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…

The Guardian helpfully points out that you are probably wrong about almost everything. Granted, they’re talking about public ignorance of issues around immigration and religion, but still, the headline holds true for you (and, yes, for me too).
From Wired, Julianne Ross writes that the growing myth that online life isn’t “real” or authentic is both false and harmful.
On World Polio Day, the General Secretary of Rotary International talks about how engagement and education can fight vaccine denial. Polio is still endemic in only two countries, along the shared border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
If you live in Oklahoma, well, I’m sorry, but you can do something useful: Call your legislators and, if they’re on the Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee, demand that they pass the measure to eliminate non-medical exemptions for childhood vaccinations. Don’t let the “vaccine choice” term in the article fool you: that’s pure, unadulterated science denial.
Food allergies are real, so please don’t pretend you have them if you don’t, at least when eating out.
There’s a hamlet – that’s fancy New York speak for “podunk” – on eastern Long Island where homeowners can only sell their houses to purchasers of primarily German descent thanks to a Nazi-era compact designed to keep the community German, and, one would assume, not Jewish. The lawsuit currently in process seems like a slam-dunk discrimination case.
There’s a Kickstarter live now for a reissue and update to Kill Doctor Lucky, a sort of anti-Clue boardgame from 1996.
Russ Parsons of the LA Times writes about the best cookbook in the world, which isn’t one book but varies depending on where you’re asking the question.
Mindfulness may increase your susceptibility to false memories, according to a single study published in Psychology Science. I wouldn’t stop meditating just because of one research project, especially since the benefits of mindfulness vastly outweigh this potential negative.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: cookbooks, links, saturday five, vaccines

→ October 10, 2015
→ By keith

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…

The United Nations – the one joke that makes everyone in the world laugh – caved to Saudi Arabia by removing LGBT rights from its “sustainable development goals” list. Why anyone would listen to a repressive dictatorship that still refuses to grant its women basic human rights is beyond me. Of course, the Saudis have a seat on the UN’s Council on Human Rights, which shows you how well that whole idea works.
NPR has a sad, brutal story on girls dying and disappearing in El Salvador.
Can’t make this up: Vaccine denial group Safe Minds is mad that a study they funded showed no link between vaccines and autism. Science is beautiful.
Texas 14-year-old falls pregnant after getting a flu shot. Go ahead and read it. I’ll wait here.
Joe Posnanski is a national treasure and he lays waste to the Hall of Fame’s “Segregation Era” Committee in a post for NBC Sports.
Los Angeles has enacted the nation’s strictest ban on plastic microbeads, which appear in many shampoos and other soap products but pass through industrial filtration of water waste.
The Atlantic asks what happens to digital content we’ve bought if the sellers should go out of business? Those Kindle e-books you “bought” aren’t quite yours, not the way a physical book would be.
The BBC reports that 2015 has been a very bad year for coral, which is undergoing a massive global bleaching as a result of the ocean acidification from our overproduction of carbon dioxide and deforestation.
Also from the BBC, a very entertaining podcast that discusses the science in science fiction, especially movies. Is accuracy necessary, or even better?
The New Yorker looks more at the daily fantasy sports “scandal” that has, in my view, received disproportionate news coverage. The so-called “insider trading” is far less of an issue than the firms’ insistence that regular joes are signing up and winning money when the bulk of the winnings go to a small number of sharks instead.
MIT Technology Review looks at the successes and challenges of implanting electrodes in the brain to treat neurological and mental illnesses.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, links, mental illness, saturday five, science fiction, vaccines

→ September 26, 2015
→ By keith

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…

One last piece on the Ahmed Mohamed story – which reached ridiculous proportions with a “truther” movement emerging – from Popular Mechanics on why we need more tinkerers like him.
Journalist Stacy May Fowles with a potent piece on why online harassment of women led her to keep her Twitter account private.
And here’s exhibit A: Journalist and former attorney Julie DiCaro, who’s been among the leaders in coverage of the Patrick Kane rape allegations, has received threatening tweets for doing her fucking job.
This is very silly but kind of on point – the duo Fleece did a rather perfect parody of an alt-J song.
The indispensable J. Kenji Lopez-Alt debunks five myths about Southern cooking. His book, The Food Lab, is out now.
Some good news for lovers of dead-tree editions, like me: print books aren’t dead as e-books sales have slipped.
A health-care researcher in DC writers about why she had an abortion at 21 weeks.
The Martin Shkreli drug price-gouging story didn’t have a lot of smart takes, but I thought Vox’s brief op ed that the story brought some needed attention to drug pricing was spot on.
From the “ain’t that some shit” department: A woman in Oklahoma was sentenced to 30 years for failing to protect her kids from her abusive boyfriend, who only got two years for actually abusing them, and her parole request was denied. The parole board’s chair admitted to not knowing “the facts of [her] case.” Good job, Oklahoma.
Uber, but for helicopters? The New Yorker looks at an app and service that came in handy this week, when you literally couldn’t cross Manhattan east-west.

And this week, a great reader tweet on vaccinations:

@keithlaw my daughters doctors office. pic.twitter.com/0AuxczicMM

— Ica (@IcaMouse3) September 18, 2015

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: links, saturday five, southern cooking, vaccines

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