Weekend link dump for January 26

You can now use Bitcoins to buy basketball tickets. In Sacramento, anyway.

Pot legalization is the gay marriage of 2016.

It’s hard out here on an atheist.

“Having somebody to watch your kid(s) during the day opens a lot of additional options– for a second source of income, further education, or just general parental sanity. Whether it encourages the sort of beneficial individual changes in the kids that proponents claim, universal preschool would be an enormous boost to their families.”

The drought in California is going to be especially bad.

Has the concept of falsifiability reached the end of its usefulness?

“The new results […] reveal that dogs do not hail from the same lineage as modern wolves — a big surprise, said Novembre, who was hoping to see evidence for either a single domestication or multiple domestication events, where, for example, the Australian dingo would be most related to the Asian wolf and the African basenji would be most related to the Middle Eastern wolf. Instead, the dogs are all most closely related to each other. The pattern suggests that dogs arose from a now-extinct line of wolves.”

Young baseball teams without much talent usually try to compete, and to sell themselves, as being scrappy, hustling teams that manufacture runs on the basepaths. Even by that standard, the 2013 Houston Astros were a complete failure.

There is no TMI on the Internet. If you don’t want to see/read/hear something, there are tons of ways to avoid it.

Your cough medicine isn’t actually doing anything.

Fewer vaccinations = more disease outbreaks. It’s really that simple.

“And now, 46 years after the accident that left her a quadriplegic and 38 years after publishing the memoir that made her a household name among white evangelicals, Joni Eareckson Tada has become the public face of the very same far-right Christianist groups that have effectively blocked the U.S. from ratifying the international Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities.”

“No baseball player, no football player, no cyclist, no one has built more on a base of sports-drug use than has Schwarzenegger.”

Best wishes to Ezra Klein on his new media venture.

Sometimes, the Internet uses its power for good.

“Why do we ask these players (and coaches) questions so soon after they were under fiery hypnosis, so soon after they were smashing into each other and breaking bones, right as the adrenaline is draining and the pain is beginning to surface? And, more, why do we expect their answers to fit our expectations?”

We think we’re going to drive more than we have been lately, in one graph.

The moral argument about Obamacare, and its effect on Mitch McConnell.

Virgin births are more common – or at least, more commonly reported – than you might think.

The NFL has a contingency plan for the Super Bowl in the event of a snowpocalypse.

“There’s an obvious way for Republicans to escape this dilemma: They can stop caring about budget deficits. That is what happened the last time Republicans held the presidency, under George W. Bush.”

Mork and Mindy, together again.

“Have you seen a Sochi Coke-themed commercial in the US? I certainly haven’t.”

From the couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy files.

“Yes, the 1984 ad created an indelible brand image. But it was the wrong image. It was a memorable ad, but it wasn’t a good one.”

Uncle Sugar meets Aunt Flo.

Or to put it another way, please continue, Governor Huckabee.

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