→ 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
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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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