Links for 2011-01-06

  • Serial killers just aren’t the sensation they used to be. They haven’t disappeared, of course. Last month, Suffolk County, N.Y., police found the bodies of four women dumped near a beach in Long Island. Philadelphia police have attributed the murders of three women in the city’s Kensington neighborhood to one “Kensington Strangler.” On Tuesday, an accused serial stabber in Flint, Mich., filed an insanity plea.
    But the number of serial murders seems to be dwindling, as does the public’s fascination with them. “It does seem the golden age of serial murderers is probably past,” says Harold Schechter, a professor at Queens College of the City University of New York who studies crime.
  • “This newfound attention to the relationship between Congress and the Constitution is thrilling and long overdue. Progressives, as Greg Sargent points out, are wrong to scoff at it. This is an opportunity to engage in a reasoned discussion of what the Constitution does and does not do. It’s an opportunity to point out that no matter how many times you read the document on the House floor, cite it in your bill, or how many copies you can stuff into your breast pocket without looking fat, the Constitution is always going to raise more questions than it answers and confound more readers than it comforts. And that isn’t because any one American is too stupid to understand the Constitution. It’s because the Constitution wasn’t written to reflect the views of any one American.”
  • “There are 20 seconds left on the clock. Your team is down by 2 points such that a field goal would win it. The ball is spotted on the hash mark at the 15 yard line and it is first down. What to do? Should you call a run play so that the ball is in the center of the field? Or should the ball be kicked from where it is?

    So there is the question. Is it better to kick the ball from an angle or move back and kick it head on? Let me just look at one aspect of this situation. What is the angular size of the goal post from the location of the kicker? I am not looking at the height of the horizontal goal post – I will assume the kicker can get the ball over this.”