"Why not raise the rim, to restore basketball to its proper form?"

"I am a purist at heart for this game, and it galls me to see the players today lack the proper fundamentals in passing, cutting, shooting, setting screens and, above all, proper spacing."

But consider this:

One of the unique aspects of the game, as created by Naismith, was the height of the baskets: when peach baskets were nailed to the railing of the running track at the Springfield, Mass., Teachers College one day in 1891, they were hung at 10 feet -- because that was how high the railing was. There was no more thought given to it than that.

Which way does that cut? You could say the baskets should be raised, because the original height was just happenstance, and nothing profound. Or you could say they should not be changed, because they were never calibrated to the height of the players in the first place.

The Althouse Amazon portal: provides warmth and reduces drag for faster shopping.

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want and – while paying nothing extra – make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. And even if somehow you forget to invoke your 5th amendment privileges we have no way of knowing it's you.

From the May 19, 2013 to May 20, 2013 Amazon Associates Report:

Blueseventy Skull Cap

"Woman Finds Dog Lost During Tornado While Being Interviewed."

"Top IRS official will invoke 5th Amendment."

"Lois Lerner, the head of the exempt organizations division of the IRS, won’t answer questions about what she knew about the improper screening — or why she didn’t disclose it to Congress, according to a letter from her defense lawyer, William W. Taylor III."

Is it legal to...

Here's how Google tried to complete the search for me:

Is it legal to carry a knife in Wisconsin
to make moonshine in Iowa
to make moonshine
to flip off a cop
to own a fox

Is that special for me? In fact, none of those guesses is correct. I'd say "own a fox" is closest. Photos coming soon will reveal what my question was, and I would not actually do what I was wondering about.

ADDED: We've got a turkey that seems to be taking up residence in our backyard:

"Boruch Spiegel, one of the last surviving fighters of the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943..."

"... in which a vastly outgunned band of 750 young Jews held off German soldiers for more than a month with crude arms and Molotov cocktails, died on May 9 in Montreal. He was 93."

“We didn’t have enough weapons, we didn’t have enough bullets,” Mr. Spiegel once told an interviewer. “It was like fighting a well-equipped army with firecrackers."....

At the Weeping Redbud Café...

.... let's do the lavender twist.

What does it mean to say that one case is a "far cry" from another?

Here's the unanimous opinion written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in Metrish v. Lancaster, released yesterday, which dealt with a principle of due process that I won't try to summarize. (There's a summary here, at SCOTUSblog.) I only want to talk about the expression "a far cry," used in Metrish to say something lawyers and judges often have reason to say: one thing is very different from another.

[W]e consider first two of this Court’s key decisions: Bouie v. City of Columbia, 378 U. S. 347 (1964), and Rogers v. Tennessee, 532 U. S. 451 (2001)...

This case is a far cry from Bouie, where, unlike Rogers, the Court held that the retroactive application of a judicial decision violated due process....

This made me curious about the expression "a far cry." This is one of these expressions that we use because it has a metaphorical feeling, even though we don't think too concretely about what the metaphor is. (This is what George Orwell called a "dying metaphor" in his famous essay "Politics and the English Language.") What is the image in "far cry"? I picture Lancaster, Bouie, and Rogers standing on hilltops in a landscape and see Lancaster — it's Burt Lancaster, by the way — hollering over to Rogers and Bouie on their respective hilltops, and Rogers can easily hear him but Bouie can barely hear him. That's a colorful alternative to saying Lancaster is much closer to Rogers than to Bouie.

Let's whip out the out the old (and unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary:

within cry of: within calling distance. a far cry  : a long way, a very long distance.

1632   W. Lithgow Totall Disc. Trav. (1682) ix. 396   Villages and Houses..each one was within cry of another.
1819   Scott Legend of Montrose iv, in Tales of my Landlord 3rd Ser. IV. 72   One of the Campbells replied, ‘It is a far cry to Lochow’; a proverbial expression of the tribe, meaning that their ancient hereditary domains lay beyond the reach of an invading enemy.
1850   Tait's Edinb. Mag. Feb. 75/1   In those days, it was a ‘far cry’ from Orkney to Holyrood; nevertheless the ‘cry’ at length penetrated the royal ear.
1885   Athenæum 18 Apr. 498/3   It is a far cry from the ascidian to bookbinding and blue china, yet it is a cry that can be achieved by Mr. Lang.

The ascidian — I had to look it up — is a sea squirt, and it's not yelling out to bookbinding and blue china, so this metaphor has been dying since at least 1885.

3 Pinocchios for White House aide's assertion that Republicans "doctored e-mails... to smear the president."

WaPo's Fact Checker Glenn Kessler looks at something Dan Pfeiffer said on 3 Sunday talk shows relating to the development of the talking points that Susan Rice delivered on 5 Sunday talk shows last fall.

[T]he reporters involved have indicated they were told by their sources that these were summaries, taken from notes of e-mails that could not be kept. The fact that slightly different versions of the e-mails were reported by different journalists suggests there were different note-takers as well.

Indeed, Republicans would have been foolish to seriously doctor e-mails that the White House at any moment could have released (and eventually did). Clearly, of course, Republicans would put their own spin on what the e-mails meant, as they did in the House report. Given that the e-mails were almost certain to leak once they were sent to Capitol Hill, it’s a wonder the White House did not proactively release them earlier.

The burden of proof lies with the accuser. Despite Pfeiffer’s claim of political skullduggery, we see little evidence that much was at play here besides imprecise wordsmithing or editing errors by journalists.

"Academic freedom and a reasoned debate are essential to our academic community."

"However, the Harvard Kennedy School cannot ethically stand behind academic work advocating a national policy of exclusion and advancing an agenda of discrimination."

A petition with 1,200 signatures collected by Harvard students, who seem to want an investigation targeting this one case, because the conclusion offends them. It seems to me the investigation ought to be much broader, into what the general standards are at the school. The students have a big interest in whether the degree means what it's supposed to mean, but the one dissertation they loathe ought to be presented as evidence that the school has low standards, and the investigation ought to range across the political spectrum. But the students are speaking in terms of which policies are ethical, and that sounds like they want a political standard to restrict research, which, ironically, would not be an ethical policy.

"But maybe he should have asked before the gallery opens. Everybody’s talking about it."

Well, if "everybody's talking about it," then the artist made a great decision.

[T]he residents of a glass-walled luxury residential building across the street had no idea they were being photographed and never consented to being subjects for the works of art that are now on display — and for sale — in a Manhattan gallery.

Key word: luxury.

A middle-class value — privacy — is challenged. But it's built into the scheme that only the rich have had their privacy invaded. The artist — Arne Svenson — gets his publicity in the major media. And to top it all off:

Svenson’s apartment is directly across the street, just to the south, giving him a clear view of his neighbors by simply looking out his window.

Easiest art project ever.

“For my subjects there is no question of privacy; they are performing behind a transparent scrim on a stage of their own creation with the curtain raised high,” Svenson says in the gallery notes.  “The Neighbors don’t know they are being photographed; I carefully shoot from the shadows of my home into theirs.”

"Apple used a 'complex web' of offshore entities — with no employees or physical offices..."

"... that allowed it to pay little or no taxes on tens of billions it earned overseas, according to a Senate investigation unveiled Monday."

While the practice of using foreign operations to avoid U.S. taxes is legal and common among multinationals, Apple’s scheme was unprecedented in its use of multiple affiliates that had no semblance of a physical presence, Senate staffers said.

Why wouldn't Apple do what is legal to avoid taxes?

“Apple claims to be the largest U.S. corporate taxpayer, but by sheer size and scale it is also among America’s largest tax avoiders,” [Senator John] McCain said.

Isn't that exactly what you would expect?

"You know what has excellent continuity and no appreciation for story?"

Reality.

Linked by a comment to the Metafilter discussion the very funny "Star Trek Into Darkness: The Spoiler FAQ."

"The president’s approval rating, at 51 percent positive and 44 percent negative, has remained steady..."

"... in the face of fresh disclosures about the IRS, the Benghazi attack and the Justice Department’s secret collection of telephone records of Associated Press journalists as part of a leak investigation."

"Travel nightmare: Dakar, Dhaka — what's the difference? A wrong airport code sends travelers to the wrong continent."

"The code for the airport in Dakar, capital of Senegal, is DKR. The code for the airport in Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, is DAC...."

Dhaka is 6,900 miles from Dakar. The first leg of the flight got them to Istanbul, where the screwup took place:

"When the flight attendant said we were heading to Dhaka, we believed that this was how you pronounced 'Dakar' with a Turkish accent"....

"Why is Facebook blue?... It’s because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green color blind..."

"... blue is the color Mark can see the best."

That factoid begins an article about the use of color in branding, which does not otherwise involve the topic of designing color images with knowledge of how it looks to people who see some but not all colors. The article gets into assertions about what women like and what men like. Both respond to blue and green and are repelled by orange and brown, but women go for purple, which men don't like, and men like black while women dislike gray. That's sort of interesting, but it's much softer information than the hardcore physical reality of red-green color blindness.

Is there software that lets you check what your design looks like to someone who's red-green color blind? One answer, I guess, is stick to blue. But it seems to me that there are many blues, including blues that lean toward red (before you'd say purple) and blues that lean to yellow (before you'd start calling it green). A person who's not red-green color blind might think that's a really lovely blue at the very point where it might look ugly to a person with red-green color blindness.

I've been thinking about this topic a lot because I've been losing my sense of smell, to the point where I'm smell-blind — anosmic — in some sectors of the sense of smell. It would be one thing to have no sense of smell at all, like complete color blindness. But when you have partial perception, you care about the part that you have, but you'd like a good experience with it, but other people, who may be providing the experience, don't know what it's like for you.

Nate Silver is #1 on Fast Company's "100 Most Creative People in Business 2013."

Here's the whole (nicely displayed) list. Here's the big article on Silver:

Nate Silver is now trying to see what's coming next for him. He has just turned 35. His interest in politics, always more intellectual than emotional, seems nearly exhausted by the election season. "I definitely get tired of the politics stuff," he tells me. "Or at least I'm tired of it now. You basically have a lot of sociopaths and crazy people who work in the politics industry who are kind of enabled by it being such a strange profession. Just a lack of. . . ." Silver stops to reach over for a french fry, eat it, and think. "I mean, well, the fact that it's seen as so optional to actually be truthful?" It offends his sensibilities as a data scientist in pursuit of truth. "You know," he continues, "whereas business can be amoral, I think politics is actively immoral on many occasions. So people will ask if I will go work for a campaign and I say, 'No way.' I can make a lot more money working for a hedge fund and it would be a lot less actively evil. At least you're not trying to manipulate people's belief systems."

In my view, the way not to get tired of the politics stuff is to be, specifically, interested in the behavior of real human beings, with all their flaws. That they are unusually flawed human beings — "sociopaths and crazy people" — becomes a positive. You are observing and analyzing these people, who are manipulating and dissembling and lying. This does not conflict with your own love of the truth. You pursue the truth about their lies and manipulations.

"I get that there are some of my conservative brethren don’t agree that the tea party should protest tomorrow."

"They’re afraid that it will disrupt a winning narrative: the IRS targeting a vast array of American citizens based on political beliefs and religion. They’re afraid that the sight of tea partiers shouting slogans and waving Gadsden flags at IRS offices will provide the media squirrel the left needs to pivot."

Writes Dana Loesch (via Instapundit).

What a strange paradox it would be if finding out about the outrageous suppression of the Tea Party led it into self-suppression! It should be invigorated. Let's see how well they do it tomorrow.

There obviously are ways to do it badly. Instapundit warns tea partiers to look out for infiltrators. (Expose them!) And Loesch says:

I don’t want to see a single sign about Obama. I don’t want to see a single sign about Biden. Or FLOTUS. Or vacations. Or anything other than the overreaching power of big government. No signs on anything other than this malicious and criminal behavior was perpetuated by a government too big to be held accountable. It was carried out behind a [veil] of purposeful complexity.

So she's saying whatever you do, don't follow Saul Alinsky's Rule 11:

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

Loesch's rule is: Don't identify a responsible individual. Don't make it personal. Attack the abstraction.

"This should be noted: The very best day ever of the Althouse blog."

"More solid, informational, intellectual, thoughtful content than any day in my memory, going back three years. Good work."

Email received yesterday. Yesterday was the day with the bird theme. The day before was the day with the umbrella theme.

I'm quoting fan mail — or possibly faux fan mail, intended sarcastically — but I note that I've got my share of antagonists, and the umbrella posts have proved especially confounding for them.

"I’d never heard lyrics to a rock song like that before."

"We talked a while before we decided to get a group together and make a million dollars."

When Jim Morrison first read his song lyrics to Ray Manzarek.

Outwardly the two seemed so different. The strikingly tall, dark and handsome Morrison looked the part of rock star, while Manzarek, with glasses and comparatively close-cropped blonde hair, retained a more professorial look.

Ray Manzarek has died of bile duct cancer at the age of 74. Manzarek was the keyboardist for their group, The Doors, and if you know any keyboard riff from that era, you know his.

"We can, and many have, argue about whether the proposal that families eat more home-cooked meals is a sexist push 'back to the kitchen' for women..."

"... as well as a romanticization of 'the way things never were.' There’s value to that. While there’s no reason that the responsibility for meals should fall toward women, if they are the ones who absorb the 'guilt' of the message about home-cooked foods, then a sense that every night requires a freshly prepared gourmet meal on the table will become yet one more reason that women can’t 'have it all.'"

"A huge tornado, perhaps a mile wide, tore through towns near Oklahoma City on Monday, flattening homes and businesses..."

"... starting fires and sending residents scrambling to find friends and neighbors possibly buried in rubble. There were no immediate reports of injuries...."

Therapeutic robots.

Coming soon, to help you with your last few steps toward the grave.

At the Tree Shade Café...

... come in here and talk.

"Since 1998, there has been an unexplained 'standstill' in the heating of the Earth's atmosphere."

"But when it comes to the longer term picture, the authors say their work is consistent with previous estimates."

The researchers say the difference between the lower short-term estimate and the more consistent long-term picture can be explained by the fact that the heat from the last decade has been absorbed into and is being stored by the world's oceans....

"There is other research out there pointing out that this storage may be part of a natural cycle that will eventually reverse, either due to El Nino or the so-called Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and therefore may not imply what the authors are suggesting," [said Prof Steven Sherwood, from the University of New South Wales].

The authors say there are ongoing uncertainties surrounding the role of aerosols in the atmosphere and around the issue of clouds....

"If you look at the top 10 health problems around the world, they are much more common in men."

"But the current focus is predominantly on women's health."

[Sarah Hawkes from the University of London's Institute of Global Health] says that when you look at recent data, men lose three times more years of healthy living than women because of tobacco, alcohol and unsafe driving.

"It's cool to be a man that smokes and drinks — who drives a fast motorbike, or fast cars," she says. "If you were really serious about saving lives, you would spend money tackling unhealthy gender norms" that promote these risky behaviors.

So the "health problems" that have to do with men are personal behavioral choices. The focus on women is about pregnancy and childbirth, where health care is needed. In that view, what's wrong concentrating on women? That focus is really about the next generation, which includes males and females.

Any big Supreme Court decisions coming out today?

If so, we'll find out soonest by following the SCOTUSblog live-blogging here.

ADDED: The Court granted cert. in an Establishment Clause case, Town of Greece v. Galloway, about whether "a legislative prayer practice violates the Establishment Clause notwithstanding the absence of discrimination in the selection of prayer-givers or forbidden exploitation of the prayer opportunity." SCOTUSblog opined that it's "a potentially significant religion case" because "The Roberts case has not done much in that field so far." My instant impression was they granted cert. to reverse and it's obvious (based on precedent).

AND: This chart shows which cases are undecided from each month of the term so far. All the November cases have been decided, but one case remains from October, Fisher v. University of Texas, the affirmative action case. There's also a chart which shows which Justices have written the cases from each "sitting," and that chart makes it appear that Kennedy is writing the affirmative action case.

ALSO: No Fisher today.

WaPo's Fact Checker "is just scratching the surface of Lerner’s misstatements and weasely wording..."

"... when the revelations about the IRS’s activities first came to light on May 10. But, taken together, it’s certainly enough to earn her four Pinocchios."

Glenn Kessler reviews 3 key statements by Lois G. Lerner, the IRS’s director of the exempt organizations division.

"The church eventually stopped talking about heaven..."

"... for a variety of reasons: the rise of science; the emergence of the Social Gospel, a theology that encouraged churches to create heaven on Earth by fighting for social justice; and the growing affluence of Americans."

"How to buy happiness."

"The new science of spending points to a surprising conclusion: How we use our money may matter as much or more than how much of it we've got."

I don't know why that is "surprising," but the details are perhaps worth noting. For one thing, buying a house or moving to a better house is found unlikely to bring more happiness.

And dozens of studies show that people get more happiness from buying experiences than from buying material things. Experiential purchases — such as trips, concerts and special meals — are more deeply connected to our sense of self, making us who we are....

Some meal you ate is more deeply connected to your sense of self than your home? I find that hard to believe. I think it's more that the meal is over and done with, so the happiness was consumed on the spot and remembered. The house continues and you enjoy it sometimes but are burdened by it too. You have mixed feelings over a long period of time. It's not a memory.

And experiences come with one more benefit: They tend to bring us closer to other people, whereas material things are more often enjoyed alone. (We tend to watch our new television alone on the couch, but we rarely head to a wonderful restaurant or jet off to Thailand solo.) 

That's why you might want to bring loved ones into that house of yours. And why is there no mention of the nonwonderful restaurants and nonwonderful flights overseas?

So, doing things with other people makes a difference for happiness, and our research suggests that doing things for other people can provide an additional boost. 

That's obvious and not about how you spend your money. Dropping dollars on restaurant meals and travel won't necessarily get you better social connections.

In experiments we've conducted around the world, including in Canada, the United States, Uganda and South Africa, we find that people are happier if they spend money on others. And we've found that spending even just a few dollars on someone else provides more happiness than using the cash to treat yourself.

This is why we love to pay taxes, no?

5 reasons why Yahoo will ruin Tumblr...

... and the argument to the contrary.

"Presidential speculation around Scott Walker heats up as he heads to Iowa this week."

"Walker may be shrugging off chatter about 2016, but political observers see plenty of signs he is considering a run for president after his 2014 re-election campaign is over."

He’s working on a book about his life, tentatively titled “Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge.” And Walker readily admits he’s traveling around the country for high-profile fundraisers and other conservative gatherings, from New Orleans to Iowa, Washington, D.C., to California.

“We used to call this period ‘testing the waters.’ I think that’s what he’s doing,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “He can’t be explicit yet. But I think he’ll run.”

Sabato and his colleagues put Walker at the top of their list of 2016 Republican presidential contenders, noting that "Democrats tried — and failed — to strike him down in a recall election last year:

"Not only did Walker survive, but this unscheduled political war elevated him to stardom amongst conservatives across the country. If Walker were to become the Republican presidential nominee, Democrats will have helped it happen."

Obama's message: Nobody cares... no time for excuses...

Obama was addressing the graduates at Morehouse College, which is an all-male and historically black college.

Obama said that too many young black men make “bad choices.”

“Growing up, I made quite a few myself,” Obama said. “Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency to make excuses for me not doing the right thing.”

But, the president implored, “we’ve got no time for excuses.”

“In today’s hyper-connected, hyper-competitive world, with millions of young people from China and India and Brazil, many of whom started with a whole lot less than all of you did, all of them entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven’t earned,” he said. “Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination.”

ADDED: Here's the full text of the speech.