Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.
Are Major League Baseball games too long? And is that hurting its viewership?
When the World Series rolls around, as it has again this year, there are statistics (wins, losses, E.R.A.s, strikeouts, errors) — and there are statistics (Nielsen viewer ratings, advertising revenue). It is this second type that has caused some discussion this year about the state of the game of baseball and its appeal to its many millions of fans.
Scientific American reveals some misconceptions about serial killers:
Much of the general public’s knowledge concerning serial homicide is a product of sensationalized and stereotypical depictions of it in the news and entertainment media. Colorful story lines are written to pique the interest of audiences, not to paint an accurate picture of serial murder.
The World Series and buying a hotdog—with an iPhone:
What is the worst part of buying something at a sporting event? At AT&T Park in San Francisco, I think it’s paying $11 for a beer. But for Apple, here (and eventually in other places) it’s using your credit card to do it. You know, that small piece of plastic that you need to lug around in your pocket, and that has a bunch of sensitive information in plain sight.
Facebook reinvents the wheel with new chat rooms:
Danielle Citron looks at Facebook Rooms and sees a nice middle ground in the battle over anonymity on the internet. Released last week, the new Facebook app is a place where you can chat with other like-minded people about most anything, from the World Series to 18th century playwrights, and because you needn’t use your real name when joining one of its chat rooms, you have a freedom to express yourself that you wouldn’t have on, say, the main Facebook app.
Red wine and powerful women on television:
At the onset of the new season of “Scandal,” ABC’s prime-time soap-drama, Olivia Pope, the lead character, has fled Washington, D.C., and world intrigue for exile on a tropical island with Jake Ballard, her sometime lover. The only evidence of the rest of the world is a boat that shows up with an important delivery.
I’m grateful to Father John O’Malley of Georgetown University and the Society of Jesus for taking the time to respond to my column this week on the doctrinal perils that (I argued) may soon face the Roman Catholic Church under Pope Francis. His comments deserve a much longer response than I’m going to offer here, but I imagine I’ll be continuing this discussion with various people across different forums in the weeks and months ahead, so some points can be saved for later. For now, I just want to address Father O’Malley’s comments on how Catholics who desire to be faithful to the church should think about what seems like a possible alteration in longstanding church teaching:
Copyright laws may favor Amazon a little too much:
I mostly agree with my colleague Matt Yglesias’s argument that Amazon is doing the world a favor by crushing book publishers. But there’s at least one way US law gives Amazon excessive power, to the detriment of publishers, authors, and the reading public: ill-conceived copyright regulations lock consumers into Kindle’s book platform, making it hard for new e-book platforms to gain traction.
When linguists talk about the historical relationship between languages, they use a tree metaphor. An ancient source (say, Indo-European) has various branches (e.g., Romance, Germanic), which themselves have branches (West Germanic, North Germanic), which feed into specific languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian). Lessons on language families are often illustrated with a simple tree diagram that has all the information but lacks imagination. There’s no reason linguistics has to be so visually uninspiring. Minna Sundberg, creator of the webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent, a story set in a lushly imagined post-apocalyptic Nordic world, has drawn the antidote to the boring linguistic tree diagram.
An explanation of The Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer for those who don’t know the comics:
But to someone who doesn’t have their nose buried in a comic book, it might be a little hard to understand what, exactly, is going on in this trailer and why comics fans are freaking out so much over, among other things, something called “Hulkbuster armor.” Here, then, is a brief guide to what comic book fans are so excited about in the Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer.
The book Go the F**k to Sleep read by none other than LaVar Burton:
Found via The Verge.