→ April 11, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 4/10/15.

My ranking of the top 50 prospects in this year’s draft class went up on Friday for Insiders; I also had a draft blog post specifically on Nate Kirby and Kyle Funkhouser, and I broke down the Craig Kimbrel/Melvin Upton trade. I held my regular Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the excellent baseball-themed deckbuilder Baseball Highlights: 2045, which is currently $32 over at amazon. My daughter, who doesn’t have much interest in the actual baseball thing, even asked me last night if we could play it again this weekend.

Amazon is having a huge sale on strategy games today in honor of International Tabletop Day, with almost half off Splendor, 7 Wonders, Five Tribes, and King of Tokyo.

And now, the links:

  • A repost from my social media accounts this week: Why the “Food Babe” is full of shit. The shame is that she could marshal her small group of followers to make meaningful changes to our food supply, like pressuring vendors to stop buying meat from animals raised with antibiotics, but instead propagates ignorance and anti-science sentiment.
  • More on the FraudBabe: A post from September on the harm such pseudoscience quacks can cause in their followers. And followers they are, much like those of a cult leader.
  • One baseball link, from my colleague Stephania Bell: What we’ve missed about Tommy John surgery, with a focus on why some pitchers require a second transplant surgery soon after their first one.
  • Longread of the week: Vanity Fair delves into the deterioration of NBC’s news department that culminated in the Brian Williams debacle. Shorter version: This was the end of a long decline.
  • The health of our bodies is related to the health of the trillions of bacteria that live in our GI tracts; one gene in the mother may affect the composition of bacteria in a newborn’s gut.
  • Children with maple syrup urine disease, an organic acidemia similar to the one my daughter and I have (3-MCC), can only be cured via a liver transplant. Now their discarded livers can be transplanted into other patients who might not qualify for a liver from a “healthy” (meaning dead but not diseased) donor.
  • This excerpt from Masha Gessen’s The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy on the death of one of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s friends at the hands of the FBI poses some uncomfortable questions about the nature of policing in an endless war against terror.
  • Cops are much more likely to stop black drivers than white drivers for investigatory (that is, non-safety) reasons. And that’s how you get situations like the murder of Walter Scott. (Confession: When I saw #WalterScott trending, I started thinking of Waverley jokes or something I could tweet in Scott’s variety of the Scottish dialect, only to discover what the trend was about and stop myself from being horribly insensitive.)
  • Daniel Vaughn, aka @BBQSnob aka Texas Monthly‘s barbecue writer/editor, went to Phoenix’s Little Miss BBQ and loved it. I feel validated by this. I like the slaw more than he did, and I’ve had better sausage there than he got, but otherwise we’re on the same page.
  • Vice has some ominous news for almost everyone on the Internet: Your porn is watching you, or, more specifically, it would be rather easy for someone to reveal any online porn viewer’s habits if they were to compromise any major site’s server logs. There’s some skepticism, but I think the larger point about our lack of privacy online (porn or not-porn) is valid.
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→ March 28, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 3/28/15.

My Insider posts this week covered:

* Masahiro Tanaka, Rafael Montero, and Mike Foltynewicz
* Potential #1 overall pick Dillon Tate

This week’s Klawchat transcript is up as well.

saturdayfiveI’ve read a few books lately that I just won’t have the time or patience to review in full, but this seems like as good a place as any to mention them. I was very disappointed in Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald’s Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, which takes a very narrow look at its topic and lacks enough prescriptive measures for readers who want to correct their own biases. The authors focus on implicit biases, truly just subconscious prejudices based on race, gender, or age, without expanding in any way to discuss such unknown (to ourselves) biases in all aspects of our lives. While I understand that their research was limited to those interpersonal prejudices, the cognitive processes behind those and behind other biases – entrenched opinions on groups or classes that skew the decisions we make – are probably related, if not identical, and I would have appreciated a broader take on how to identify and correct biases in my own thinking.

I also read two anthologies in the last few weeks, one of which I recommend highly: The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014, edited by Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket). The book runs the gamut of writing, from essays to short stories to poetry (most of it terrible) to comics, with many of the works amazing and creative and unlikely to have come across my desk (or lap) in any other form. My favorite piece was Nathaniel Rich’s “The Man Who Saves You From Yourself,” about cult deprogrammer David Sullivan, who died one day after the piece was first published in Harper’s. The anthology also includes a superb interview with Mona Eltahawy, a clever and haunting short story from Pulitzer Prize-winner Adam Johnson, and the delightful comic “Have Tea and Cake with Your Demons” from Yumi Sakaguwa.

I was less entertained by The Best American Travel Writing 2014, which included far too many ponderous pieces that put the author ahead of the subject or the destination. The two standouts were Amanda Lindhout’s Twelve Minutes of Freedom” and Gary Shteyngart’s “Maximum Mumbai,” the first harrowing and emotional, the second witty and charming.

Lots of links this week and this wasn’t even everything, just what I remembered to post:

  • A mother in Australia describes the “Agony of seeing my girl fight for life after contracting whooping cough.”
  • Meanwhile, some real science on the causes of autism: It’s not vaccines or GMOs or circumcision, but your genes.
  • Thanks to some added rainfall, Costa Rica filled all its power needs for 75 days using only renewable energy sources. That’s not a poor country using tiny amounts of energy, either.
  • Fans of The Wire will want to watch this conversation between show creator David Simon and President Obama about the drug war and the vicious cycle of incarcerating drug users.
  • Six tips for using your slow cooker via Tasting Table. The yogurt-making idea definitely appealed to me, given how much of the stuff I eat.
  • Following on my Paleofantasy review, here’s a similar op ed from the Guardian that calls the “paleo” diet a dangerous ideology. This is the money quote:

    The paleo diet is premised on a false image of stasis and harmony projected from an entirely arbitrary point in the long history of human evolution.

    When you also add in that the arbitrary point isn’t even historically accurate, you’ve got a weak foundation for massive dietary changes.

  • Related: Eating whole grains may help you live longer. I hope so, since I consume a lot of oats and oat products.
  • Andrew Zimmern interviewed chef John Mirabella on eating the invasive lionfish.
  • A beautiful post from Smithsonian on Via Margutta in Rome, a tiny street that’s appeared in numerous films.
  • I doubt the University of North Georgia meant for their 2015 catalog to reinforce how women and minorities still come up short in business. White Privilege Studies, anyone?
  • Want to know why the “religious freedom restoration” acts aren’t really just about religious freedom? The site RFRA Perils tells you why, and how those laws go well beyond the First Amendment protections for freedom of worship. These laws were always bad policy, but it’s even more egregious today.
  • The language here is very NSFW, and if you’re a gun owner you might not appreciate it, but I laughed often and loudly at Jim Jefferies’ routine on gun rights in America.
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→ March 14, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 3/14/15.

Happy π day! May all your infinite series converge.

My Insider content this week included a post on Danny Salazar, Kendall Graveman, and others from a Cleveland/Oakland spring tilt, and a draft blog post on Kolby Allard, Lucas Herbert, and Kyle Molnar. My weekly Klawchat transcript is up.

My latest boardgame review over at Paste covered the Kennerspiel des Jahres-nominated strategy game Rococo, where players run haberdasher/dressmaking firms in a game that combines deckbuilding, resource management, and worker placement mechanics.

And now, this week’s links…saturdayfive

  • If you’re interested in eating parakeet, muskrat, or pigeon, head to Amsterdam, where the The Kitchen Of The Unwanted Animal food truck serves up all kinds of non-traditional meats, including a horse burger called the My Little Pony.
  • A study published in Molecular and Cellular Oncology found that oleocanthol, a phenol compound found in extra virgin olive oil, killed cancer cells by breaking down their membranes, yet left neighboring non-cancer cells alone.
  • The New Jersey Senate is moving to tighten the “religious exemptions” to vaccination requirements. These exemptions are bogus, unenforceable, and unnecessary even under the First Amendment (you retain the option to home-school your children if you’re still too ignorant to vaccinate). My only issue with this piece is that the writer, Susan Livio, didn’t qualify or question the claim of one mother who said her child was injured by a vaccine – and Livio got huffy with me on Twitter when I pointed this lack of verification (kind of a big deal in journalism) out.
  • More vaccine stuff: A strong overview of the scientific evidence that vaccines do not (and can not) cause autism, passed along by former big leaguer Chuckie Fick.
  • The evolutionary case for how man ate his way to “world dominance.”
  • This Man Legislates, a new Tumblr dedicated to elected officials who saw or do horrible things – racist/sexist remarks, spousal abuse, giving away an adopted child to a man who later molested her. You know, the kind of behavior we’ve come to expect from the people who write our laws.
  • A famous Hillary Clinton quote was never actually uttered by the former First Lady; it’s from Erin Gloria Ryan, writing about Hillary for Jezebel in 2012. (And her main point, that a woman’s looks should not be part of any discussion of her policies or her suitability for office, remains true no matter who said it.)
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→ March 7, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 3/7/15.

I’ve had two draft blog posts in the last week, one on Kyler Murray and one on UF shortstop Richie Martin, with some other players included in each piece. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday, my last before heading off to spring training, which will make chat times irregular for the rest of the month.

The University of Chicago Press has published a new edition of the essential baseball book The Hidden Game of Baseball: A Revolutionary Approach to Baseball and Its Statistics, with a foreword by … oh, hey, that’s me. The original came out in 1984, which I know is before many of you were born, but it remains one of the great gateways into understanding the sport on a rational level. I own a copy of the original, but I’m thrilled to get and to be part of this update.

And now, this week’s links…saturdayfive

  • Dr. Paul Offit, who invented the rotavirus vaccine and is one of the most ardent and erudite advocates for universal vaccination, on how the modern vaccine-denial movement is putting our children at risk.
  • Meanwhile, Representative Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, who chairs a House science subcommittee, didn’t get his kids vaccinated. There’s no justification for having him anywhere near a science policy-making body, and he just feeds right into the whole children-as-property fallacy with his comments.
  • From the New York Times: Is most of our DNA just junk? It turns out the question of whether noncoding DNA serves any useful purposes is tied up in debates over genetics research and has even drawn in the cranks who push creation “science.”
  • Speaking of creationism, the irreducible complexity fallacy gets a good slap upside the head at the National Center for Science Education’s blog in a post tearing up that misconception. Evolution doesn’t favor increasing complexity, and, as the post asks, what exactly do you mean by “complexity” in the first place?
  • Radley Balko, who keeps churning out great investigative pieces, on as bad a case of police and DA corruption as you’ll see. A process server who served papers to a police officer ended up arrested and charged with assaulting the officer, with seven corroborating witnesses, most or all cops, backing it up … but the alleged assault never happened. And as far as I can tell, none of those cops has been charged or suspended in the case.
  • The man credited with bringing farm-to-table to Dallas long before that was even a term passed away last week at 58. Tom Spicer supplied produce to many of the Metroplex’s finest restaurants.
  • What purpose is served by a law that prevents a woman whose baby is almost certainly nonviable from terminating the pregnancy? That’s the very real case of a North Carolina woman, Whitney, who had to head two states away to have an abortion because North Carolina has banned all abortions past twenty weeks. This seems to me to be a medical issue, not a right-to-life vs. reproductive rights question, and therefore one best determined by the patient and her doctor.
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→ February 28, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 2/28/15.

My ranking of the top 20 prospects for 2015 impact went up on Tuesday for Insiders. I also wrote some words about Boston signing Yoan Moncada.

Over at Paste, I recapped what I learned about recent and upcoming boardgame releases from my visit to Toyfair.

saturdayfiveAnd now this week’s links, heavy on the anti-science as it was a good week to be stupid…

  • Jimmy Kimmel and a bunch of actual medical doctors have something to say to vaccine deniers. Meanwhile, look at these idiots in Arizona who exposed a whole town to measles after all three of their unvaccinated kids caught it at Disneyland … and the mom still can’t take full responsibility for her actions. How is denying your children essential medical care like vaccinations anything but child neglect?
  • Meanwhile, there’s a vaccine out there that can largely prevent several forms of cancer, and lots of parents aren’t getting it for their children. It’s Gardasil, which provides immunity to most strains of the human papilloma virus (HPV), which is transmitted through sexual contact and can cause cervical, anal, vulvar, oral, and oropharyngeal cancers. Gardasil also protects against strains of HPV that cause genital warts. Yet we have vaccine deniers claiming it’s unsafe (it’s quite safe, thank you science), and I think we have a lot of parents refusing to acknowledge that their daughters are sexually active.
  • Senator Sheldon Whitehouse puts the smack down on the Senate’s most anti-science member, Jim Inhofe, over the latter’s climate change denial (and ignorance, really). This is on the heels of the Idaho lawmaker who thought the vagina was connected to the digestive system and the Nevada lawmaker who said cancer is caused by a fungus and can be cured with baking soda. Science literacy matters, folks, especially among people who might be making laws and such.
  • A rather harrowing blog post from writer Desi Jedeikin about a childhood memory of seeing her father nearly kill her mother. It’s a repost from xojane in 2012, but she put it on her tumblr this past week, which is where I first saw it. She’s also one of the only comedians/comedy writers I’ve ever encountered who can do very crude humor well.
  • Also from the Harrowing Links Dept., a long read from the Wichita Eagle on the struggles of the daughter of Dennis Rader. You might remember Rader as BTK, the serial killer who terrorized Wichita over the course of about two decades and ten confirmed murders. The piece does contain some disturbing details of the murders.
  • A new study says that babies who eat peanut-containing foods are 80% less likely to develop peanut allergies. Another study, this one in Sweden, found that children in households where people hand-washed dishes are about 40% less likely to develop allergies, a little more evidence in favor of the “hygiene hypothesis,” the idea that we have more allergies today because everything is too clean and our immune systems aren’t challenged by enough germs when we’re little.
  • I’m not going to link to her page, since she’s an anti-science fraud, but the self-styled “food babe” is now targeting the food additive cellulose (and various derivatives of it), which is generally made from wood pulp. Although that sounds weird – and that’s just the fallacy TFB is exploiting here, the argument from personal incredulity – there are two significant problems with her “argument.” One is that cellulose is among the most common chemical compounds in the plant world. If you eat celery, you eat cellulose. The fact that the food additive version comes from wood shouldn’t matter any more than you should care that cochineal and carmine come from bugs. The FraudBabe’s second problem is that we all eat wood already: Cinnamon and its knockoff cassia come from the barks of two trees found mostly in south and southeast Asia, and that wood isn’t processed to be un-wood to anywhere near the extent that industrial cellulose is.
  • Finally, also in the science-fraud department, the guy behind the junk-science juggernaut NaturalNews posted this gem late last week:

    That’s right: A seven-year-old leukemia survivor is just a shill for Big Pharma. Welcome to the fantasyland of science deniers.

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→ February 21, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 2/21/15.

My only new baseball post in the last week was last Saturday’s post on draft prospects Kyle Funkhouser, Kyle Tucker, and Jake Woodford; my trip this weekend didn’t happen because USAirways cancelled my outbound flight and couldn’t get me to Santa Barbara in time. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

saturdayfiveMy latest boardgame review for Paste was on Evolution, one of the bigger Kickstarter boardgame success stories (non-Exploding Kittens division). I’ll have another piece for them next week, summarizing my afternoon at Toyfair NYC earlier this week.

I’ve also been thrilled by all of your reactions and responses to my essay on my peculiar, obsessive reading habits. I’m still wading through them all, but please know that I’ve at least seen your comments even if I haven’t replied directly.

A lot of links this week…

  • First, an actual baseball piece: My friend Alex Speier has an outstanding article on Boston’s use of “neuroscouting” tools, like a computer program to measure a player’s hand-eye coordination. I’ve heard about this tool before, and I know a few other teams that use it or tools in the same vein, and while their competitive advantage is temporary (soon everyone except the Phillies will adopt it), it’s quite significant.
  • A fantastic BBC interview with actress Jamie Brewer, now the first woman with Down Syndrome to walk the catwalk at Fashion Week. Termination rates for fetuses diagnosed with Down Syndrome range from an estimated 67% in the US to over 90% in Europe, and of course that issue came up in the news recently with the story of the Armenian woman who divorced her New Zealand-born husband rather than keep their baby, born with Down Syndrome, although the precise details of that are unclear.
  • A longread from the New Yorker on the Apple industrial designer who might be the most important person in the company.
  • How Parks and Recreation got Bill Murray to play Mayor Gunderson. The final season has had its misses (the Johnny Karate episode), but the way they’ve circled back to every significant side character and still added more amazing guest appearances like this one has made it more than just a cursory victory lap, but a season worth remembering. If you’re a fan of the show, or just enjoyed the #humblebrag phenomenon, you should also read Aziz Ansari’s tribute to writer/comedian Harris Wittels, who died of an apparent drug overdose this week. Wittels, who also played Animal Control Brett on P&R, was just 30 years old.
  • This week in vaccination: Jeb Lund (aka @Mobute) has a superb piece in Rolling Stone on how vaccine deniers’ bad decisions hurt others, not themselves. Meanwhile, here in Delaware, my representative in our lower house is introducing a bill to tighten the “religious exemption” loophole in vaccination requirements. I think we should repeal that exemption entirely, but this is at least a good first step. Also, Forbes ran a great three-part piece debunking myths about vaccine deniers. I disagree with one thing – these people are pretty much all delusional idiots – but her points are crucial in the fight against such ignorance. One thing we can’t forget, though: Those of us who understand the facts that vaccines are safe and effective must keep speaking up, telling our representatives in government, our school boards, our principals, everyone in a position of authority that we want our children protected.
  • Oliver Sacks wrote a difficult-to-read (and probably more so to write) piece on learning his cancer has returned and metastasized.
  • Also from the NY Times, an op ed on how added vitamins paper over the low quality of our food supply.
  • Settlers of Catan: The Film! This is going to be terrible.
  • Two good pieces from the Washington Post. The first, from earlier this month, on how it’s never too early to teach children about boundaries, which I think might help not just with preventing abuse and molestation but might also reduce the pervasiveness of rape culture among young men. On a related note, the second piece, from this Thursday, discusses the abuse that’s driving some feminist writers offline. You know who’s a major culprit in this? Twitter. Their lack of enforcement of their own harassment policies is by far the worst thing about the site. You can quite literally threaten to rape or kill someone, directly @ their account, and face no consequences even just within the confines of the site itself. Come on, Twitter. Be better.
  • I agree wholeheartedly with this message, which refers to the movie The DUFF (Designated Ugly Fat Friend):

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→ February 14, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 2/14/15.

The draft blog is live again, with my first post on Jacob Nix’s outing on Thursday and UC-SB’s mishandling of Dillon Tate; I’ll have another post up this evening on Kyle Funkhouser. I had a quick post earlier in the week on the James Shields signing. My chat with Colin Cowherd today on what WAR is and why we need it is available in mp3 form.

My review of the very good Days of Wonder boardgame Five Tribes is up at Paste.

saturdayfiveThis week’s links:

  • It’s time to stop using the r-word. A stunning piece on a word that should have died long ago, written by former NFL offensive guard Kasey Studdard, himself the target of that word when he was a kid due to a learning disability.
  • What Would Jesus Do About Measles? He’d tell you to vaccinate your children already, that’s what he’d do.
  • Via Kelly Oxford – one of my favorite follows on Twitter because I think she’s a riot – a piece from last year from Mother Jones that argues that you can’t change an anti-vaxxer’s mind. That piece makes vaccine deniers’ situations seem like a mental illness – a delusion from which they can’t escape.
  • Quantum equations say the universe has no beginning. Or no end, which is theoretically good news, except that all the stars will eventually wink out of existence. Anyway, the whole hypothesis depends on the existence of gravitons, massless quantum particles that may just be fictional. I just want to know when I get my jetpack.
  • The BBC’s World Book Club this month discussed William Gibson’s seminal debut novel Neuromancer, featuring a 55-minute Q&A with the author himself.
  • I tweeted this link earlier in the week, but now that I’ve posted my review of The Handmaid’s Tale it’s worth reposting – Salon‘s excellent story of Margaret Atwood’s visit to West Point, where she had lunch with first-year students and took many of their questions about the book.
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→ February 7, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 2/7/15.

The last bit of my top 100 prospects package, ranking the top ten prospects by position, went up on Wednesday. I didn’t chat this week, as I was in Bristol for ESPN’s annual baseball summit; the guest speaker was Rob Manfred, better known as the new Commissioner of Major League Baseball, and I was extremely impressed by his candor, his enthusiasm, and the intelligence evident in how quickly and thoughtfully he answered a broad number of questions posed to him by our writers, some on the record and some off. I won’t agree with all of his policies – at the end of the day, he’s still paid by the owners and has an obligation to them – but I do think the sport is great hands under him.

My Top Chef recap was a bit late for this week for the same reason, but I posted it on Friday evening. I should be on time, or closer to it, with my recap of the finale on Thursday morning.

saturdayfiveAnd now, this week’s links…

  • Let’s hit the vaccination stuff first. I agree with this Gizmodo piece that we should ridicule and shame the anti-vaccination movement, although I’m fine with a little humiliation thrown in, because the ends (wiping out diseases that kill infants, the elderly, and the immune-compromised) justify a lot of means here. Also, a British blog dedicated to autism science points out, via a CNN piece, that a huge chunk of vaccine denialism is paid for by the Dwoskin Family Foundation. In anti-science, as in politics, just follow the money – and, if you see where it’s going, try to stop it. If you know of sources taking ad money from the Dwoskins or their puppet groups like the NVIC (the most prominent vaccine denier organization in the U.S.), contact them and ask them to stop. I’ve done so with one company that has been running an ad from the NVIC, and am hopeful based on our early conversations that they’ll pull the ad now that their corporate headquarters is aware of it. All that is needed for the triumph of selfish, ignorant science deniers is for the rest of us sane people to do nothing. (Side note: The Dwoskin foundation’s offices are around the corner from my house. I’m not sure what, if anything, I can do based on that knowledge, though.)
  • If you’re here, you probably like baseball, so this Baseball Prospectus article on their new mixed-model approach to estimating catcher framing values is a must-read. I think most of us hate that catcher framing exists, but as long as it exists, we need to understand it, and BP continues to lead the way in showing us how to do so.
  • This half-hour audio program from the BBC is worth the time investment: An extensive interview with Vietnamese writer Le Ly Hayslip, who fought for the Viet Cong as a teenager, was captured three times, married an American man, moved to California, and has since started a foundation to help rebuild the village where she grew up. Her story was the basis for Oliver Stone’s 1993 film Heaven and Earth; he’s interviewed as well.
  • Meanwhile, in Oregon, a judge ruled that a man who took upskirt photos of a 13-year-old girl in a Target didn’t commit a crime. Not that we’d want to consider evidence that he’s a potential sexual predator or anything.
  • I went to Narcissa in Manhattan with a friend on Wednesday night, and we had their famous slow-roasted, crisped beets, which was easily the best beet dish I’ve ever had, one of the best vegetable dishes I’ve ever had, period. That link describes how the dish is made, with twenty photos, although I don’t think the picture of the interior of the beets does their texture justice.
  • NPR’s The Salt blog, normally about food, delves into the science of nitrate runoffs in Iowa agriculture, and why it’s not so simple as blaming too much nitrogen-rich fertilizer.
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