Jack

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is under pressure to resign for his handling of Ray Rice, the former Baltimore Ravens running back who knocked out his then-fiancee in a casino elevator in March.

Rice was initially suspended for two games, in line with the NFL’s history of issuing shorter suspensions for domestic violence than for many other types of personal conduct violations — even though rates of domestic violence arrests are high among NFL players as compared with other crimes. Goodell announced changes to the league’s policy in August, introducing six-week suspensions for first-time domestic violence offenses and lifetime bans for repeat offenders. But the new policies were not applied retroactively to players like Rice.

Goodell came under renewed criticism this week after additional video of the casino incident was published by TMZ; it shows Janay Rice collapsing after the running back punched her. Ray Rice has since been released by the Ravens and suspended indefinitely by the NFL, but a number of reports have called into question Goodell’s claim that he had not seen the longer video at the time he decided on Rice’s initial two-game suspension.

Other reports imply that Goodell has the support of most of the league’s 32 franchises — in large part because of the NFL’s financial success. As Sports Illustrated’s Peter King wrote:

Goodell has so much goodwill in the bank in [the owners’] eyes that there’s no way—without definitive proof that the commissioner lied—they’d throw him, and his $44 million annual compensation, to the wolves. The goodwill includes a collective bargaining agreement with the players association through 2020 and lucrative TV contracts that pay each team about $150 million per year.

Indeed, the NFL is probably the most valuable sports league in the world. According to Forbes’s annual Business of Football valuations, its 32 franchises are worth a collective $45 billion. That’s nearly double that of Major League Baseball franchises, worth a collective $24 billion, and NBA franchises, worth $19 billion. (What about European soccer? The average NFL team is worth $1.4 billion dollars — more than all but four or five club teams in Europe.)

The NFL wasn’t always quite so dominant, especially relative to baseball. In 1991, when Financial World magazine issued valuations for the four major North American sports leagues (see Rodney Fort’s website for archived data), NFL franchises were worth an aggregate $6.5 billion (adjusted for inflation to 2014 dollars), not much more than the $5.5 billion for MLB teams. But NFL franchises have appreciated at an annual rate of 8.8 percent since then, compared to baseball’s 6.7 percent.

The bulk of that growth, however, occurred under Goodell’s predecessor, Paul Tagliabue. Since Goodell took over as commissioner in 2006, NFL franchises have risen in value by 32 percent, net of inflation, according to Forbes. That’s the lowest of the North American leagues by some margin. NHL franchises have increased in value by 114 percent, MLB franchises by 82 percent and NBA franchises by 65 percent over the same period (and Forbes is probably undervaluing the NBA, given recent franchise sale prices).

Broken down in terms of annual growth rates: NFL franchise values grew at an annualized rate of 11.7 percent from 1991 to 2006 under Tagliabue and just 3.5 percent per year since 2006 under Goodell.

The Forbes estimates aren’t perfect. All NFL franchises but the Green Bay Packers are privately held, and the league has very low rates of franchise turnover, with many teams having remained in the hands of the same family for decades. But the prices of recent franchise sales, like those of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Cleveland Browns, have closely matched the Forbes valuations.

The modest rate of franchise value growth under Goodell has come from a very high baseline — and perhaps some decline in the rate of growth was inevitable given how prodigiously they grew under Tagliabue. In absolute dollar terms — not percentages — NFL franchise values have risen by a collective $10.9 billion since 2006, compared with $11 billion for baseball, $7.5 billion for the NBA and $6.6 billion for the NHL. The NFL is still a hugely profitable business, and even poorly run franchises tend to make money because of the league’s aggressive revenue sharing and relatively favorable contractual agreements with players. According to Forbes, only the Detroit Lions lost money in 2013, and the league’s 32 franchises earned a collective $1.7 billion in operating income.

At the same time, the NFL did such a good job of expanding its reach and protecting its brand under Tagliabue and Pete Rozelle that even a mediocre commissioner could be in a position to look good. Compared to his predecessors and his counterparts in other leagues, Goodell’s value to the NFL’s bottom line hasn’t been quite so clear.

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Here’s Adam Ozimek:

Guest-posting at The Dish, Elizabeth Nolan Brown has an interesting piece up discussing prostitution and pornography that is worth ruminating on. She writes:

Last night, a close friend told me he had been reading my posts about decriminalizing sex work. “I’m sympathetic,” he said, “and I want to agree with you. But I just keep thinking, ‘what if it were my daughter?’ That’s, like, every father’s worst nightmare.”

Brown goes on to rebut her friend by pointing out that if your daughter did become a prostitute, you’d want it to be legal because that makes it safer. While she is right about that, I think it gives her friend’s argument too much credence. The more important thing her friend is missing is this: this is a country of free people, not your children.

Whether you’d want your kid to do something is a terrible, selfish, and self-centered way to think about policy.

Ozimek also links to Damon Linker:

There’s just one complication to this happy story: no one, or almost no one, actually believes it. People may say they see nothing wrong with or even admire Weeks’ decision to become a porn actress, but it isn’t unambiguously true. And our ease of self-deception on the matter tells us something important about the superficiality of the moral libertarianism sweeping the nation.

How do I know that nearly everyone who claims moral indifference or admiration for Weeks is engaging in self-deception? Because I conducted a little thought experiment. I urge you to try it. Ask yourself how you would feel if Weeks — porn star Belle Knox — was your daughter.

I submit that virtually every honest person — those with children of their own, as well as those who merely possess a functional moral imagination — will admit to being appalled at the thought.

Linker also has this to say:

None of this should be taken to mean that I favor banning porn or making it illegal to work in the industry that produces it. In the end, I’m a libertarian, too.

I can think of four ways of looking at the daughter test.  It will help to first consider a couple hypotheticals.  Say you and your family go back in a time machine to the late 1800s, but still have your modern 21st century attitudes toward behavior.  How would you feel about your daughter walking along the beach in a bikini? During the Victorian era that sort of behavior would be viewed as a disgrace, and your daughter would no longer be accepted in respectable society.

Also consider how you’d feel if your daughter dropped out of high school and spent her adult life cleaning toilets at Penn Station.

Now let’s form some categories:

1.  One might regard certain behavior as immoral, and favor making it illegal.  You wouldn’t want your daughter doing that.  Ms. Brown’s friend has that view of prostitution.

2.  You might believe certain behavior is immoral, but also believe it should not be illegal.  You wouldn’t want your daughter doing that.  Mr. Linker has that view of porn.

3.  You might believe certain behavior is not immoral, but wouldn’t want your daughter doing it because she would be shunned by polite society.  Others view it as immoral.  That’s my hypothetical of the 21st century father transferred into the Victorian era.

4.  You might regard certain behavior as perfectly moral and even necessary, but wouldn’t want your daughter doing that because society views the job as rather dirty, degrading and low class. That’s my example of cleaning toilets.

So I can think of at least 4 cases where someone might feel really upset to find out their daughter ended up in a certain career, each having very different implications.  In other words, I’m not a fan of the daughter test.  That’s not to say the test doesn’t occasionally reveal hypocrisy on the part of people, especially men, and especially about sex.  It does.  But it’s very hard to draw any implications from these intuitions, especially if you are a moral realist (which I am not.)  Indeed the Victorian era raises some uncomfortable issues for moral realists.

PS.  If you insist on asking parents what they would think of their children doing something, then FOR GOD SAKE DON’T ASK AMERICAN PARENTS.  Reason just ran this story:

A whopping 68 percent of Americans think there should be a law that prohibits kids 9 and under from playing at the park unsupervised, despite the fact that most of them no doubt grew up doing just that.

What’s more: 43 percent feel the same way about 12-year-olds. They would like to criminalize all pre-teenagers playing outside on their own (and, I guess, arrest their no-good parents).

Those are the results of a Reason/Rupe poll confirming that we have not only lost all confidence in our kids and our communities—we have lost all touch with reality.

“I doubt there has ever been a human culture, anywhere, anytime, that underestimates children’s abilities more than we North Americans do today,” says Boston College psychology professor emeritus Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn, a book that advocates for more unsupervised play, not less.

I’ve talked to both European and Asian parents about this, and both seem to think American parents are utterly insane in their attitudes toward leaving children unattended.  Do we really want to rely on the moral intuitions of crazy people?

In 2010, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa revealed in their book Academically Adrift that of the 2,300 undergraduates they had studied at a wide array of four-year colleges and universities, as many as a third demonstrated almost no progress at all in developing their critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills, and even those who did demonstrate some improvement demonstrated very little. Some critics dismissed their findings, arguing that because the standardized test they used to gauge student learning (the Collegiate Learning Assessment) had no real stakes attached to it, it should come as no surprise that most students performed
Read More ...

Though I often disagree with Justin Fox, I'm a fan of his writing. And so I was surprised by his recent discussion of Jake Rosenfeld's new lament for organized labor's decline, What Unions No Longer Do. I have yet to read Rosenfeld's book, and it's possible that there is a great deal that's been lost in the translation from the book to Fox's discussion of it. Just to be clear, I'm reacting to Fox's brief remarks and not to the book itself. The decline of unions in the U.S. has often been painted as inevitable, or at least necessary for
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It surely won't be the last theory offered, but a century and a quarter after the notorious crimes of Jack the Ripper, an "armchair detective" has employed DNA analysis on the blood-soaked shawl of one of the Ripper's victims, and has declared it in a new book an unambiguous match with Jewish immigrant Aaron Kosminski, long considered a suspect. Kosminski died in 1919 in an insane asylum. The landmark discovery was made after businessman Russell Edwards, 48, bought the shawl at auction and enlisted the help of Dr Jari Louhelainen, a world-renowned expert in analysing genetic evidence from historical crime scenes. Using cutting-edge techniques, Dr Louhelainen was able to extract 126-year-old DNA from the material and compare it to DNA from descendants of [Ripper victim Catherine] Eddowes and the suspect, with both proving a perfect match. (Also at The Independent.) It's not the first time DNA evidence has been used to try to pin down the identity of Jack the Ripper, but the claimed results in this case are far less ambiguous than another purported mitochondrial DNA connection promoted by crime novelist Patricia Cornwell in favor of artist Walter Sickert as the killer in a 2002 book. Update: 09/07 16:03 GMT by T : Corrected Sickert's first name, originally misstated as "William."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Associated Press

The Economist withdrew its review of a non-fiction book on slavery after being criticized for arguing that it's somehow biased to acknowledge that slaves were victims of ... slavery. In an editor's note the magazine said it "regret(s) having published this and apologise for having done so." 

Update 11:02 am: In an email to The Wire, Edward Baptist, the Cornell professor and author of the reviewed book — The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism — said he was disappointed that the review was taken down because it served as a reminder that people today still think slavery was okay, and slaves were treated well:

It is a rare gift when people reveal themselves for who they are and what they believe.  One of the challenges of writing a book about slavery is that a lot of the historians and journalists and students you talk to when you are writing the book are exactly the kind of people who can’t believe that anyone still thinks U.S. slavery was a mild, paternalist institution. Or that anyone still thinks slaves were “well-treated.”  But in fact those people are still out there. Many of them are powerful.  And their ideas still influence public policy and public discussion of race.  So it is a good thing to flush out the ideas and reveal them for what they are.

Of course, The Economist’s reviews are unsigned, so who knows who actually wrote it and how it got green-lit for publication.  I’m actually sorry that the review was retracted, both for the reasons I just mentioned, and because it inspired some brilliant takedowns of the piece in the Economist’s own comment thread.

On Twitter, Baptist thanked the Twitter historian community for its support and said it's been "interesting" watching this unfold:

So apparently @TheEconomist retracted their "review" of my book. Thx #twitterstorians and others. Watching this unfold has been interesting.

— Edward Baptist (@Ed_Baptist) September 5, 2014

In its review of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism published Thursday, The Economist argued that the book was one-sided because "almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains."

The Economist argued that Baptist's supposed one-sidedness wasn't "history" but "activism." It didn't help matters that the photo used to illustrate slavery was a still from 12 Years a Slave, with an equally inappropriate caption, as opposed to an actual photograph of an actual slave. 

This caused a huge backlash among people who are aware of what slavery was, for reasons that are hopefully obvious.

And to think this whole time we all had the wrong idea about slavery b/c they didn't interview any happy slaves. #notallslaveowners

— Zerlina Maxwell (@ZerlinaMaxwell) September 4, 2014

Slavery was also a strangely likable fever dream for "the blacks." @theeconomist

— Roxane Bey (@rgay) September 5, 2014

Subject I did not expect to be arguing about on the internet today: slavery.

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) September 4, 2014

It also prompted an #economistbookreviews hashtag, to give other historical villains a fair shot:

The Economist criticised a historian for being too anti-slavery. Twitter responded with superb #economistbookreviews http://t.co/MWr9gV7nfw

— Greg Jenner (@greg_jenner) September 5, 2014

By Friday, The Economist had retracted the review (which is still available here) with the following apology:

There has been widespread criticism of this, and rightly so. Slavery was an evil system, in which the great majority of victims were blacks, and the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of that evil. We regret having published this and apologise for having done so.

Why the West's response to Putin should draw bright lines without courting reckless war.

Last week, The New York Times’s Robert Gebeloff and David Leonhardt published an article, “The Growing Blue-State Diaspora,” which made the case that transplants from blue states are making red states purple. “This pattern has played an important role in helping the Democratic Party win the last two presidential elections and four of the last six,” they wrote.

It’s a fascinating hypothesis, but it’s overstated, in our view. The first problem is that the predominant political trend of the past two decades has not been consistently better performance by Democrats, but instead greater polarization across partisan and geographic lines. Remember, the GOP controls the House of Representatives, a plurality of state legislatures and a majority of governor’s mansions, and Republicans are slight favorites to take the Senate in November. Democrats have done well in recent presidential elections, but if Republicans take the Senate and hold the House, then by 2016 the GOP will have had control of the Senate for 12.5 of the past 24 years and the House for 18 of 24.

We’re not saying we’d rather have had Republicans’ hand to play. But the balance of power in the country has been reasonably equivocal, as it tends to be over the long run.

By contrast, the trend toward greater polarization has been clear and sweeping. It’s been clear in races for the House; there are far fewer swing districts than there once were, even after accounting for the effects of gerrymandering. It’s been clear in gubernatorial races, which now bear a much stronger correlation to presidential elections and other races for federal office. And it’s been clear in races for the presidency. In 1992, when Democrat Bill Clinton beat Republican George H.W. Bush, there were no states — none — where either candidate won by 20 or more percentage points. In 2012, there were 18 of them, 11 of which were won by Republican Mitt Romney. A few states (such as West Virginia and Colorado) have switched party loyalties, but for the most part, red states have gotten redder and blue states have gotten bluer; theories about the role played by migration need to reconcile with this evidence.

But this presents a challenge. It might seem to follow that if there’s more mixing of Americans across state lines, then everything might converge to a shade of political purple. Why have we seen the opposite pattern instead?

One part of the answer is straightforward: Interstate migration is not increasing. Instead, it has been on a downward trend since the 1980s; fewer Americans (as a share of the population) are relocating across state lines than a couple of decades ago.

The other part is a little more complicated. People who leave an area don’t necessarily resemble the ones who stay. Instead, there’s evidence that migrants’ political beliefs mirror those of voters in their new destination. Many people moving from a liberal state to a conservative state may be conservative, or may at least end up that way before long. People moving from a conservative state to a liberal state may be liberal.

Of course, there are certain states that attract certain types of voters when their job opportunities change — such as in North Carolina’s research triangle, for instance. But as the Times noted, a number of red states (such as Idaho and South Carolina) are home to many blue state transplants yet continue to vote reliably Republican. There’s little sign that’s changing.

If anything, movers generally have more extreme political views than natives: Those people moving to the West Coast or New England, for example, are more liberal than people who grew up there. Thus, the process of intra-country migration could be contributing to political polarization rather than making states more purple.

We can get a sense for this from the General Social Survey, a national biannual poll conducted by the University of Chicago. The GSS asks respondents to rate themselves as liberal or conservative. The GSS also asks which census division respondents live in, and which they lived in when they were 16 years old.

Using the GSS data, we can figure out the percentage of people who consider themselves liberal among different groups:

1. Long-term residents: people who lived in the region when they were 16 and remain there now;
2. Former residents: people who lived in the region when they were 16 and live in a different one now;
3. New residents: people who live in a region now but didn’t when they were 16.

This method is imperfect: Census divisions don’t overlay perfectly with political regions, and the GSS doesn’t drill down to the state level. Also, although we’ve gathered data from each version of the GSS since 2004, the sample sizes aren’t huge.

Still, the data is enough to suggest that the people moving away from a region are ideologically distinct from those who continue to live there. For example, the people who moved away from the South Atlantic region (which includes a number of fairly conservative states) are as liberal as the people who moved away from New England and other regions. This is despite the fact that only 22 percent of people who stayed in the South Atlantic division consider themselves liberal, compared with 27 percent of Americans overall.

Instead, movers have more in common with their new neighbors; liberals are attracted to liberal regions, and conservatives to conservative regions. As the next plot shows, the politics of long-term residents correlates reasonably well with the politics of new residents.

The relationship isn’t perfect (the correlation coefficient is .62), but the trend is reasonably clear. For example, the Middle Atlantic and Pacific divisions have relatively liberal long-term residents and relatively liberal new residents; the West South Central and East South Central divisions have conservative long-term residents and conservative new residents.

New England makes for an interesting case: It may be migrants who have made the region so blue. Whereas only 26 percent of people who were born and stayed in New England describe themselves as liberal — about the same as the national average — 49 percent of those who have migrated there do. Some of this may be a sample-size fluke (New England has the smallest population of any census division and therefore the largest margin of error). Still, it makes sense given how much bluer New England has become. Vermont was once a reliably Republican state.

Outside of New England, the importance of migration in reshaping political coalitions may be fairly minimal. Most people live in the same region where they grew up, and as we’ve mentioned, those who move tend to adopt the politics of their new homes (or they’ve had those politics all along).

In all census divisions but New England, the percentage of liberals among native residents is within a point or two of that among all residents (after accounting for moves to and away from the division). Other factors may be more responsible for the changing tones of the red-blue political map.

Still, to the extent migration has mattered, it has probably been in contributing to political polarization rather than blurring the country into shades of purple. This fits with the idea proposed in the book “The Big Sort”: People are increasingly living near those who are politically like-minded. A 18-year-old from South Carolina might go to college in Boston if she has liberal political leanings or stay in South Carolina if she’s more conservative. The patterns can be self-reinforcing. If liberal residents are more likely to leave South Carolina, that means a higher percentage of the ones who remain are conservatives.

The “Big Sort” hypothesis has its own problems; it’s unclear how the causality works, for example. Does the 18-year-old become more liberal once she gets to California, or is she more inclined to move to California because she was already liberal? (We’ve been a little slippery about this distinction here.) We’ll be on the lookout for further research, especially for data that looks at states rather than census regions.

But let’s not add the liberal diaspora to the emerging Democratic majority theory yet.

If you're feeling sleepy and want to wake yourself up — and have 20 minutes or so to spare before you need to be fully alert — there's something you should try. It's more effective than drinking a cup of coffee or taking a quick nap.

It's drinking a cup of coffee and then taking a quick nap. This is called a coffee nap.

It might sound crazy: conventional wisdom is that caffeine interferes with sleep. But if you caffeinate immediately before napping and sleep for 20 minutes or less, you can exploit a quirk in the way both sleep and caffeine affect your brain to maximize alertness. Here's the science behind the idea.

How a coffee nap works

(Claudia Merighi/Getty Images)

To understand a coffee nap, you have to understand how caffeine affects you. After it's absorbed through your small intestine and passes into your bloodstream, it crosses into your brain. There, it fits into receptors that are normally filled by a similarly-shaped molecule, called adenosine.

Adenosine is a byproduct of brain activity, and when it accumulates at high enough levels, it plugs into these receptors and makes you feel tired. But with the caffeine blocking the receptors, it's unable to do so. As Stephen R. Braun writes in Buzz: the Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine, it's like "putting a block of wood under one of the brain’s primary brake pedals."

Now, caffeine doesn't block every single adenosine receptor — it competes with adenosine for these spots, filling some, but not others.

But here's the trick of the coffee nap: sleeping naturally clears adenosine from the brain. If you nap for longer than 15 or 20 minutes, your brain is more likely to enter deeper stages of sleep that take some time to recover from. But shorter naps generally don't lead to this so-called "sleep inertia" — and it takes around 20 minutes for the caffeine to get through your gastrointestinal tract and bloodstream anyway.

So if you nap for those 20 minutes, you'll reduce your levels of adenosine just in time for the caffeine to kick in. The caffeine will have less adenosine to compete with, and will thereby be even more effective in making you alert.

Experiments show coffee naps are better than coffee or naps

(Greg Hirson)

Scientists haven't directly observed this going on in the brain after a coffee nap — it's all based on their knowledge of how caffeine, adenosine, and sleep each affect the brain independently.

But they have directly observed the effects of coffee naps, and experiments have shown they're more effective than coffee or naps alone in maximizing alertness.

In a few different studies, researchers at Loughborough University in the UK found that when tired participants took a 15-minute coffee nap, they went on to commit fewer errors in a driving simulator than when they were given only coffee, or only took a nap (or were given a decaf placebo). This was true even if they had trouble falling asleep, and just laid in bed half-asleep during the 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, a Japanese study found that people who took a caffeine nap before taking a series of memory tests performed significantly better on them compared to people who solely took a nap, or took a nap then washed their faces or had a bright light shone in their eyes. They also subjectively rated themselves as less tired.

Interestingly, there's even some evidence that caffeine naps can help people go for relatively long periods without proper sleep. As part of one study, 24 young men went without proper sleep for a 24-hour period, taking only short naps. 12 of them, who were given just a placebo, performed markedly worse on a series of cognition tests, compared to their baseline scores. 12 others, who had caffeine before their naps, managed scores roughly the same as their baselines for the entire day.

How to take a coffee nap

(James Lee)

Taking a coffee nap is pretty straightforward. First, drink coffee. Theoretically, you could drink another caffeinated beverage, but tea and soda have generally have much less caffeine than coffee, and energy drinks are disgusting. Here's a good database of the amount of caffeine in many types of drinks.

You need to drink it quickly, to give yourself a decently long window of time to sleep as it's going through your gastrointestinal tract and entering your bloodstream. If it's tough for you to drink a lot of hot coffee quickly, good options might be iced coffee or espresso.

Right after you're finished, immediately try to go to sleep. Don't worry if it doesn't come easily — just reaching a tranquil half-asleep stage can be helpful.

Finally, make sure to wake up within 20 minutes, so you don't enter the deeper stages of sleep, and you're awake when the caffeine is just starting to hit your brain.

Voila: the perfect coffee nap.

In Death Valley, there's a flat, remote area called Racetrack Playa with a truly bizarre natural phenomenon: hundreds of stones that appear to gradually move themselves over time.

The real answer involves vast sheets of ice

Each of the stones drifts a few inches per year, leaving a trail etched into the dusty ground behind it. Scientists have studied these "sailing stones" since the 1940s, proposing a range of mechanisms — including dust devils, flooding, and large ice sheets — that might be responsible.

Most recently, in 2011, Ralph Lorenz, a physicist at Johns Hopkins, suggested that small rafts of ice occasionally formed around the stones, lifting them up off the ground and allowing them to be blown by gentle breezes.

But now, Lorenz and a few other researchers have used time-lapse cameras and GPS sensors attached to the rocks to directly observe the stones moving for the first time — and in a paper published Wednesday in PLOS ONE, they explain that the real answer involves vast sheets of ice.

How the sailing stones move

(John Sullivan)

It turns out that a number of weather conditions have to align perfectly to lead to the stones moving. First, the playa needs to get drenched by a few inches of rain — something that happens only a few times per year in the arid region.

large ice sheets slowly push the stones across the watery mud

Next, nighttime temperatures need to dip below freezing, so the whole playa is coated in a thin sheet of ice. The following day, warmer temperatures and a steady wind need to break the sheet into large panes, floating atop a layer of water.

When these ice sheets are blown into the rocks, the researchers found, they can slowly push the stones across the watery mud, at speeds somewhere between between 5 and 15 feet a minute, for durations of 15 minutes or less.

"It's possible that tourists have actually seen this happening without realizing it," said Jim Norris, one of the paper's authors, told Phys.org. "It is really tough to gauge that a rock is in motion if all the rocks around it are also moving."

It's also extremely rare for all these conditions to align: the researchers estimate it only happens a few time per year. But when it does happen, large sheets of ice can push many rocks at a time, explaining why in some cases, different trails are strikingly parallel.

(Norris et. al. 2014)

In a single movement event on December 20, 2013, more than 60 different rocks moved on the same day. And what's remarkable is that even though the researchers were only on hand for a few weeks of the multi-year experiment, they were lucky enough to arrive just a few days before the rocks started moving.

Here's a sped-up time lapse of one rock moving on January 9th, made from a video released by the researchers. It can be a bit tough to make out, but there's a stone that starts at the center of the frame and is pushed from left to right by a large sheet of ice (which looks darker than the rippling water), then gets left behind as the ice pane keeps moving:

(Jim Norris)

Senators Bob Corker, Rand Paul, and Tim Kaine agree: Congress should be consulted before President Obama takes any more military action in Iraq or Syria. "This fight, and the threat posed by ISIL, is serious enough that Congress and the administration must be united on U.S. policy going forward,” Kaine said in a statement. “I urge the administration to use the next two weeks to clearly define the strategy and objectives of its mission ... then bring it to Congress for a debate and authorization vote.”

President Obama knows the Constitution demands that. Before taking office, he was a U.S. senator and a lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago, so he had expertise to draw upon when asked about the war power in 2007. "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation," he told the Boston Globe.

Yet twice in his present term, Obama has prepared to unilaterally order military strikes on Syria, in violation of both the law and his own previous notion of prudent policy. "History has shown us time and again that military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the Legislative branch," he declared in that same 2007 interview. "It is always preferable to have the informed consent of Congress prior to any military action."

Always.

The first time that Obama nearly ordered a strike on Syria without congressional permission, he was going to target the country's repressive dictator. He "abruptly changed course" at the last moment and sought legislative input. In doing so, he avoided an intervention that the American public did not support. The New York Times nevertheless characterized that act of deference to the Constitution as a "risky gamble" for the White House, as if the country was clamoring for a new war. As predicted, the public forgot about Syria as soon as it faded from the news, and Obama paid no political price for not bombing the country.

Today, the White House is once again signaling that war may be close at hand, though this time instead of striking Syria's dictator, there is talk of U.S. air strikes against ISIS, a radical Islamist group that Syria's dictator is currently fighting. Picking up on the hawkish shrieks of Chuck Hagel and John Kerry, The New York Times notes that "Obama has authorized surveillance flights over Syria, a precursor to potential airstrikes there," while Yahoo News reports that the White House has no plans to ask Congress for permission if it decides to start bombing.

That is scandalous, though many journalists don't seem to agree. "The White House maintains the president has the authority to act unilaterally in Syria and Iraq for now," Lauren Fox declared at U.S. News and World Report. "The War Powers Act gives the president 90 days to intervene militarily without congressional approval."

Incorrect! The War Powers Resolution does no such thing. Read it yourself:

The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to

   (1) a declaration of war,

   (2) specific statutory authorization, or

   (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.

The language is unambiguous. Absent a declaration of war or a statutory authorization from Congress, the president can't introduce the U.S. Armed Forces into hostilities save in "a national emergency created by attack upon the United States." If the president lawfully begins hostilities abroad due to such an attack, then he has 60 days to engage in hostilities without congressional approval. A 30-day extension can be obtained, but only if "the President determines and certifies to Congress in writing that unavoidable military necessity respecting the safety of United States Armed Forces requires the continued use of such armed forces in the course of bringing about a prompt removal of such forces." The War Powers Resolution is not a 90-day blank check for war! It's the same statute the Obama administration violated when it attacked Libya.

Obama should seek congressional approval before ordering any strikes on Syria because the law compels him to do so, but that isn't the only argument for a legislative vote:

• The legislature is in a better position than the executive branch to carry out the will of the American people, which ought to dictate United States foreign policy.
• A congressional debate can help to test the arguments for intervention, which may well be wanting given the dearth of public scrutiny they've gotten.
• Every two years, Americans decide whether to keep or oust their representatives in the House. Knowing where they stand on hugely consequential matters of national policy is integral to the American system functioning.
• A war to defeat ISIS would be a huge undertaking. Embarking without the support of the citizenry casts doubt on whether the country would see the effort through.
• It is dangerous to give a single man the power to take a nation to war without anyone being able to do a thing to stop him. It is, in fact, anti-Madisonian.

As I recently noted in my Orange County Register column, the fault here is not Obama's alone. Many legislators bear a large portion of the blame: "Taking a vote in favor of war, or against it, is a perilous act. They’re declaring themselves on a subject of great consequence. If they’re proven by later events to have judged poorly, they can be held accountable. As a result, many legislators abdicate their Constitutional responsibilities on matters of war and peace." Americans can nevertheless contact their congressional representatives and demand their position.

Some will argue, like Jack Goldsmith, that Obama can lawfully strike Syria if he wants to do so. Obama supporters shouldn't fool themselves about how such arguments are grounded. Goldsmith writes:

For what it is worth, the President is on firm legal ground in deploying force unilaterally against IS, without congressional authorization, for the self-defense of the nation.

There has been no published legal opinion on the use of force against IS, but a good summary of the authorities that the administration is relying on can be found in this once-much-criticized opinion by John Yoo, written on September 25, 2001. That opinion garnered many precedents to conclude that “the Constitution vests the President with the power to strike terrorist groups or organizations that cannot be demonstrably linked to the September 11 incidents, but that, nonetheless, pose a similar threat to the security of the United States and the lives of its people, whether at home or overseas.” This is precisely the logic of the current and planned use of force against IS.

Obama is, indeed, engaged in John Yoo logic, the very thing he repudiated to win election. Yoo's standard would effectively let the president go to war anywhere he wanted. Despite Goldsmith's embrace of Yoo logic, he adds, "the President can rely on the logic and precedents in Yoo’s opinion for quite a while. But domestic legal authority is not now what matters. What matters is domestic legitimacy, and for that the President needs, and should want, Congress’s support."

Shutterstock

“It’s such a smooth ride, you can sit there and drink your coffee going through six-foot swells." 

That's how one person recently described a trip on a newly patented stealth watercraft, Ghost. Ghost is a supercavitating boat—possibly the first in the world—which means it funnels a stream of air around its underwater propellers, enclosing them in a bubble. This drastically reduces drag, allowing the boat to achieve super-fast speeds. 

Pioneered in the 1960s by torpedo engineers, supercavitation is coming back into style among maritime tech developers, with mostly military applications in mind.

But headlines today announced Chinese scientists are working on a submarine that would use supercavitation not for defense, but civilian transportation. The researchers envision an underwater trip from Shanghai to San Francisco that would last about 100 minutes, where the supercavitational air bubble encloses not just the propellers (as with Ghost) but the entire vessel.

Manned supercavitional crafts have been a huge challenge in the past. To enable supercavitation, an object has to already be traveling at speeds that have still never been achieved by modern submarines. There's also the trouble of steering, since inside a bubble, the rudders and other navigational mechanisms would have no contact with the water.

Li Fengchen, a professor of fluid machinery and engineering, told the South China Morning Post that the team has created a fresh solution to those problems. He says they've successfully cut down on that minimum speed by showering a special liquid membrane on the surface of the craft during the beginning of its trip. As for steering, says Li, the issue could be solved by fine-tuning where the membrane coats the craft.

 

"Our method is different from any other approach," Li said. "By combining liquid-membrane technology with supercavitation, we can significantly reduce the launch challenges and make cruising control easier."

Such a drag-reducing advance would be a significant step for submarine technology, as today's fastest vessels top out at a meager 40 knots (about 46 mph). But just how feasible is that less-than-two-hour trans-Pacific journey? Well, don't hold your breath. That calculation was based on the fastest theoretical speed of any supercavitating bubble, which is to say, the speed of sound— about 3,600 mph. As Ryan Faith at Vice News clarifies, 

The difference between the speed at which physical laws of nature mandate your destruction and the ability to go anywhere near that fast is rather vast. Would it be possible to ride a submarine across the Pacific in 100 minutes? Sure, in much the same way it would be possible to ride an aircraft traveling at 90 percent the speed of light across the Pacific in a few hundredths of a second.

So maybe no civilian torpedo-sub for awhile. I never thought I'd say it, but we might actually see California's bullet train operating first.

This post originally appeared on CityLab.

Top image: iurii / Shutterstock.com

As Russia reportedly opens a new front in its battle against Ukraine, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko became the latest and most notable figure to call Russia's action an invasion of Ukraine. U.S. officials agree, telling CNN that as many 1,000 Russian troops have entered the country and are engaged in the actual fighting on Thursday.

Poroshenko's sentiments were echoed by his prime minister:

Ukrainian PM Yatsenyuk says Putin has 'unleashed war in Europe'.#Ukraine

— Gavin Hewitt (@BBCGavinHewitt) August 28, 2014

On Thursday, Poroshenko announced that is canceling a work trip to Turkey in light of the "sharp aggravation." 

Amid Russia's invasion in Novoazovsk, Ukraine's @Poroshenko cancels a visit to Turkey, called an emergency meeting of the Security Council

— Maxim Eristavi (@MaximEristavi) August 28, 2014

From a statement on the presidential website:

I have made a decision to cancel my working visit to the Republic of Turkey due to sharp aggravation of the situation in Donetsk region, particularly in Amvrosiivka and Starobeshevo, as Russian troops were actually brought into Ukraine."

Andrew Kramer and Michael Gordon are reporting on the new offensive by the pro-Russian rebels, anchored a "stealth invasion" by Russian forces:

The latest incursion, which Ukraine’s military said included five armored personnel carriers, was at least the third movement of troops and weapons from Russia across the southeast part of the border this week, further blunting the momentum Ukrainian forces have made in weakening the insurgents in their redoubts of Donetsk and Luhansk farther north. Evidence of a possible turn was seen in the panicky retreat of Ukrainian soldiers on Tuesday from a force they said had come over the Russian border.

Russia continues to deny any military involvement.

As we noted earlier, Poroshenko met with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week, a meeting in which no peace agreement was ironed out between the two leaders. Putin, who also says there is no direct Russian link to the actions of the Russian pro-separatists, put his devil-may-care approach to diplomacy on full display:

"We cannot discuss conditions for a ceasefire...This is not our business; it is a domestic matter for Ukraine itself." Putin, Minsk, Tuesday

— Shaun Walker (@shaunwalker7) August 28, 2014

 Meanwhile, the death toll is quickly growing in the months' long conflict:

At least 2,220 people, including 23 children, have died in the Eastern Ukraine conflict. http://t.co/vZghKLeT6M pic.twitter.com/dAei6AuqPp

— HSC (@HS_Centre) August 28, 2014

Kickstarter

Move over, smart watches and major motion pictures — the newest champion of crowdsourced Kickstarter funding is the Coolest Cooler, the hi-tech cooler with cooler than cool (ice cold, if you will) features like a built-in blender, a waterproof Bluetooth speaker, a USB charger, an LED lid light, and a bottle opener.

The Kickstarter campaign for Coolest still has two days to go, but it's already soaked up a whopping $11 million in funding from more than 52,000 backers. That's a whole million more than the previous winner, the Pebble smartwatch, which raised $10.3 million on the crowdfunding site.

Even cooler? The Cooler's creator, Ryan Grepper of Portland, Ore., only asked for $50,000 as his funding goal. Grepper had attempted a campaign in November 2013 that never reached the $125,000 he set, making his confidence "pretty low" going into a new round, he told CNN.

"I'm so overjoyed," he added. "I was overjoyed at day two — I'm so grateful for everyone coming on board."

Of course, the Coolest Cooler will still face some challenges once Grepper actually starts selling the product. Breaking the ice with the non-Kickstarter world is difficult (Kickstarter users tend to have particular tastes), and soaring expectations and lack of brand recognition could lead a Kickstarter success to ultimate failure on the open market.

On the other hand, Coolest Cooler's broad appeal (it's not just for techies, like the Pebble smartwatch) could mean wild success among picnickers and beachgoers everywhere.

Recently, I asked Lane Kenworthy, professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego, and author of Progress for the Poor (2011) and Social Democratic America (2013), to answer a few quick questions about what the United States can learn from poverty-fighting efforts in other market democracies, and he was kind enough to agree. Kenworthy is an advocate of a larger, more generous U.S. social safety net, hence his recent call for a "social democratic America." Yet he is also deeply interested in making U.S. public sector institutions more efficient and responsive, and I've long believed that conservatives can
Read More ...

Politico's Byron Tau and Kevin Robillard report that politicians, and particularly Republican politicians, are trying to associate themselves with Uber and other sharing services that have fought local regulators and incumbent industries to better meet the needs of consumers. Many on the right, myself included, see Uber as a vivid illustration of how "strangling regulations" and "unnecessary red tape" can stymie the emergence of innovative business models. I would go further. Consumer protection, the chief justification for the regulation of taxi services, is baked into Uber's business model, as drivers and passengers rate each other, and Uber doesn't allow drivers
Read More ...

More on police militarization, crime and Ferguson.

In The New Republic.  A tidbit:

1. Marries someone at least as wealthy or bequeaths all wealth to one child.
2. Consumes very little.
3. Avoids paying most taxes.
4. Contributes little to charity or politics.
5. Invests optimally while avoiding Bernie Madoff and his ilk.

It’s one of the great mysteries of the world. Why didn’t Gandalf just fly the darn eagles all the way to Mordor? Theories abound, but this one, it might be the best. In this Lego-fied explanation, we finally see what would have happened to our heroes had they taken the eagles all the way to their final destination.

See the video after the break.

(via Kotaku)

Robin Williams' wife has revealed that the actor was sober, but battling the early stages of Parkinson's disease at the time of his death.

In a statement released today, William's wife, Susan Schneider, said that her husband, who was found dead on Monday of an apparent suicide, was not ready to share with the public his Parkinson's diagnosis.

You can read Schneider's full statement here below [...]

The post Robin Williams Was Battling Early Stages Of Parkinson’s Disease At The Time Of His Death appeared first on Geeks of Doom.

There is much secrecy surrounding the plot details of Star Wars: Episode VII, director JJ Abrams' highly anticipated new installment in the Star Wars franchise. We know that the story will be set 30 years after the events of Return Of The Jedi and that original trilogy stars Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, and Peter Mayhew will reprise their roles, but those are all the good guys. What about the villains?

Latino Review has the scoop about who the villains will be -- yes, plural! Also, the site has a lot of spoilery scoops on other aspects of the film.

Spoilers below for Star Wars: Episode VII [...]

The post Who Are The Villains In ‘Star Wars: Episode VII’? appeared first on Geeks of Doom.

Conquest doesn’t pay, but political leaders don’t seem to care.

The days of impossibly thin models and botched Photoshop jobs may soon be behind us. Yesterday, ModCloth, an e-retailer specializing in vintage-inspired and independently created clothing and other accessories, became the first retailer to sign the “Heroes Pledge For Advertisers,” promising not to “change the shape, size, proportion, color and/or remove/enhance the physical features” of models in advertisements post-production.

New York City may be less liberal than you thought.

Free markets can’t solve all our problems. Just ask Toledo.

Announcing a new feature, and rebutting outrageous claims about "Guardians of the Galaxy."