Hockey Moms vs. Soccer Moms Which is the more important voting demographic? By Jacob Leibenluft Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin proudly described herself as a "hockey mom" in her speech to the Republican National Convention Wednesday night, and the label has been a favorite of both headline writers and her sign-waving fans in St. Paul. (The description is such a part of her identity that a biography published a few months ago was called Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska's Political Establishment on Its Ear.) How many other hockey moms are out there? Probably a few hundred thousand. According to USA Hockey—which has jurisdiction over the vast majority of youth leagues nationwide—there are 347,061 players under the age of 20 registered with the organization across the country. Presumably, most of these players have moms, although since there are some households with multiple hockey players, we can assume that 347,061 is a rather high estimate. Most hockey moms are located in colder parts of the country: In total, about two-thirds of youth hockey players come from either the Great Lakes states or the Northeast. More detailed demographics on youth hockey players are a little harder to come by, but they're almost certain to be largely Caucasian. Just 2 percent of National Hockey League players are black, despite the work of a "diversity task force" for both the professional and youth leagues. (The task force has held special camps in Wasilla, Alaska.) USA Hockey claims hockey-playing households earn nearly twice the U.S. average, with a median income of $99,200. According to polling by the Pew Research Center, a slice of registered voters that might be roughly equivalent to hockey moms—comprising white married women with kids under 18, incomes over $75,000 and living in the prime hockey-playing regions—tilts Republican by about nine percentage points, albeit in a pretty small sample. That group is somewhat less GOP-friendly today than it was in 2004, but it's still far more Republican than an overall electorate that favors Democrats by 13 percentage points. How do hockey moms compare with soccer moms? They probably have to pay a good deal more to get their kids on the ice; for example, this Anchorage-based team charges preteen players $1,850 a year in fees. (The cost of equipment can easily add a few hundred dollars more.) They may also have to wake up earlier, too; because ice time is limited, many teams are forced to have practice hours before school starts. Hockey partisans on the Internet—see here, here, and here—also claim that hockey moms are a bit more intense than their soccer counterparts, both in terms of the commitments they make to the sport and the intensity with which they cheer their kids. Partially as a result, USA Hockey has spearheaded a "Relax, It's Just a Game" campaign to try to get parents to calm down. We might assume that soccer moms are a little more diverse than their hockey counterparts; it's hard to identify obvious political differences between the two groups. (As Slate's Jacob Weisberg pointed out in 1996, part of the problem is that the term "soccer mom" has never been defined very clearly—referring variously to struggling middle-class women as well as wealthy McMansion moms.) In any case, the soccer moms have the hockey moms outnumbered by a wide margin nationwide. U.S. Youth Soccer—which covers a smaller percentage of youth teams than USA Hockey—claims a total membership of more than 3.1 million players. In swing states like Florida, Ohio, Colorado, and Pennsylvania, the figures aren't even close, with anywhere between seven and 20 times as many soccer players as hockey players. But there are two competitive states where hockey moms may rival soccer moms for political importance: Minnesota and Michigan. Palin should expect a favorable reception to her hockey bona fides in the North Star state, home to 44,500 youth hockey players and one of the nation's largest concentrations of hockey-playing girls. (Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota governor who was reportedly McCain's second choice, has himself been known to take to the ice.) But Palin's hockey-mom ties run deepest in Michigan: Not only does the state boast 37,004 youth hockey players, but Track Palin spent six months of his senior year living in Portage, Mich., while playing for a midget major hockey team.

Vetting Vet The origins of vet, verb tr. By Juliet Lapidos As details come to light about Sarah Palin's connection to the Alaska Independence Party, her husband's DUI, and her teenage daughter's pregnancy, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications, have questioned whether John McCain "vetted" his running mate properly. Yet the Republican presidential candidate insisted Tuesday that the "vetting process was completely thorough." Where does the expression to vet come from? It's a figurative contraction of veterinarian. The fancy word for animal doctor originated in the mid-17th century. The colloquial abbreviation dates to the 1860s; the verb form of the word, meaning "to treat an animal," came a few decades later—according to the Oxford English Dictionary the earliest known usage is 1891—and was applied primarily in a horse-racing context. ("He vetted the stallion before the race," "you should vet that horse before he races," etc.) By the early 1900s, vet had begun to be used as a synonym for evaluate, especially in the context of searching for flaws. A character in Rudyard Kipling's Traffics and Discoveries, published in 1904, says of a guard battalion: "These are our crowd. … They've been vetted, an' we're putting 'em through their paces." Through the early decades of the 20th century, vet was primarily a Britishism. It became fairly popular in the United Kingdom during the 1930s, especially to indicate the examination of candidates for military positions, as well as the inspection of manuscripts or public speeches prior to delivery. In his 1936 biography of G.K. Chesteron, William Richard Titterton wrote: "[N]aturally each article of mine was vetted for libel with a microscope." Over the next couple of decades, it gained traction across the Atlantic. Time magazine appears to have used the word vetting for the first time in 1945 but only in the context of a quote from "The Anatomy of Courage," a newly published study on the psychological effects of war by the Briton Lord Moran: "A young subaltern with 'dark eyes under long lashes, a pink and white complexion' was sent to Moran for 'vetting.' " The word first appears out of quotes in that magazine in 1959 (in an article on picking a new symphony director for the Los Angeles Philharmonic), pops up once in the 1960s, and then several times in the 1980s. William Safire first tackled vetting for his "On Language" column in 1980. In response to a reader's complaint that Newsweek used the word twice in two weeks, Safire noted that "some dictionaries have it" and that "the Britishism is in vogue use in America today." He dedicated a second column to vetting in 1993, which is right around when the New York Times started using the expression with great frequency—in reference to Bill Clinton appointees, among other topics.

Aerial Wolf Gunning 101 What is it, and why does vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin support the practice? By Samantha Henig Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and John McCain's vice presidential pick, is an enthusiastic hunter who has proposed legislation and cash incentives to encourage aerial wolf gunning, the controversial practice of shooting wolves from an aircraft. Do people in Alaska really shoot wolves from planes? Yes, but only with the government's permission. Aerial shooting yields better results than traditional hunting, since it allows the hunter to cover a lot of ground quickly and track target animals from a clear vantage point. Historically, hunters also used planes to drive animals—polar bears in Alaska and elk in Montana, among others—toward gunmen waiting on the ground. But many hunters found the practice unsportsmanlike, since it violates the "fair chase" ethic, and animal rights activists call it inhumane, since airborne gunmen rarely get a clean (i.e., relatively painless) kill. In response to concerns like these, Congress passed the Federal Airborne Hunting Act of 1972, which made it illegal for hunters to shoot animals from a plane or helicopter. The federal legislation (PDF) does have a loophole for predator control, permitting state employees or licensed individuals to shoot from an aircraft for the sake of protecting "land, water, wildlife, livestock, domesticated animals, human life, or crops." (This doesn't just apply to wolves; coyotes and foxes are sometimes gunned down from aircraft, especially in Western states.) Since 2003, Alaska has issued aerial wolf-hunting permits in select areas where moose and caribou populations are particularly endangered. The idea is that by killing the predators, the airborne gunmen can ramp up the number of moose and caribou that human hunters can take home for supper. An aerial wolf-gunning team typically consists of two people—one to fly the plane, and one to shoot the animals. Former crop sprayers tend to make good pilots because they are used to flying close to the ground. Airborne hunters tend to fly single-engine Super Cub planes at very low speeds and at altitudes of less than 100 feet—sometimes swooping down to 10 to 15 feet above the ground. But flying so slow and low can be dangerous, and there have been a number of reported deaths in recent years as a result. Helicopters have the benefit of being able to hover very close to the ground, but they're prohibitively expensive for private pilots. (A small helicopter might cost as much as four times more than a Super Cub.) This past spring, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game lent its helicopters and employees to the predator-control effort. There are two methods for making a kill during an aerial hunting expedition: Either you shoot the wolf while airborne or you track the animal from above, then land and shoot it from the ground. Legal limits on "land and shoot" hunting have been far less stringent: For many years after shooting from the air was outlawed, anyone with a hunting or trapping license could practice "land and shoot," provided he or she walked a certain distance from his plane before opening fire. Current rules in Alaska require a delay between landing an aircraft and killing an animal: In most cases, hunters must wait until 3 the following morning before they can get started. Back in the 1950s, Alaska paid government employees and bounty hunters to take out thousands of wolves, but today's aerial wolf killers are unpaid. (They can make some money by selling the wolf pelts.) Palin tried last year to have the state pay $150 for every wolf killed, but the state superior court shot that down as an illegal use of bounty payments, which were outlawed in that state in 1984.

Drunk and High in Denver Does alcohol have more of an effect when you're up in the mountains? By Jacob Leibenluft With Democrats finishing up their convention in Denver, reports suggest that the parties in the Mile High City haven't been quite as wild as in past campaigns. One culprit may be concerns about the altitude, which caused the DNC to warn delegates that "alcoholic drinks pack more of a wallop here than at sea level." So does altitude really make you drunker? Probably not, but alcohol could make your altitude sickness a little worse. In the 1930s, R.A. McFarland, a Columbia University psychologist, began studying the interaction of altitude and alcohol to figure out what effects drinking might have on pilots. After years of research, he eventually concluded that "the alcohol in two or three cocktails would have the physiological action of four or five drinks at altitudes of approximately 10,000 to 12,000 ft." That conclusion has been accepted by many as an article of faith ever since. But the limited research into the topic doesn't back it up. To start with, altitude doesn't seem to change how the body metabolizes alcohol. A study conducted in Austria tested the impact of drinking on young male alpinists near sea level and at an altitude of almost 10,000 feet. The participants' blood-alcohol content after drinking the equivalent of 1 liter of beer was nearly identical regardless of their location. Another study (PDF) conducted by the FAA in the late 1970s found that while both alcohol and altitude independently impacted the performance of pilots in joystick-control tests, there was "no significant interaction" between the two. (A similar experiment found that the impact of alcohol on subjects answering math problems was the same at sea level and 12,000 feet.) On the other hand, it is possible that alcohol exacerbates some of the problems associated with acclimating to high altitudes. (The main symptoms of altitude sickness—headache, dizziness, a suppressed appetite—resemble those of a hangover.) That same Austrian study found that the participants who drank the alcoholic beverage had slightly impaired breathing up in the mountains compared with subjects whose drinks didn't have any alcohol. Since you need to breathe more to compensate for low oxygen at high altitudes, drinking could make you more likely to experience hypoxia. Still, the effects of moderate drinking on altitude sickness are probably rather modest. Indeed, a study of several thousand visitors to Rocky Mountain resorts found that adults who drank within the first 24 hours of arriving actually had lower rates of acute mountain sickness—although the results may have been skewed by visitors who decided not to drink because they already felt ill.

Can You Really "Own American Wind and Sunshine"? Plus, are they serving Coke in the Pepsi Center? By Noreen Malone Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer delivered a speech focused on energy policy that brought the crowd to its feet, particularly for the line "The petro-dictators will never own American wind and sunshine." Can anyone really own wind or sunshine? Only after you've harnessed it. Wind and sunshine, like water, are public goods. But just as a property owner has a right to drink from a stream that runs through his land (though he can't drain it at will, and exact rules vary by jurisdiction), he can set up a wind turbine or a solar panel. He can then choose how to avail himself of the energy he captures. He can use it to heat his home, for example, or sell it to his neighbors. Wind and solar-energy ownership is still an emerging area of law. Unlike natural gas, which is delivered primarily through pipeline networks, wind and solar-energy producers must rely on the aging energy grid, which was originally constructed to accommodate only local utilities companies and isn't set up to connect long distances. So while mineral rights and geothermal energy are highly regulated, both wind and solar energy remain local issues, somewhat minimizing large-scale federal regulation to date. There have, however, been some local conflicts over who owns sunshine. There's no universally recognized legal right to receive sunshine. So if you want to install solar panels, but your neighbor has a large oak tree in his backyard that shadows your roof, you can't legally force him to chop it down. That said, in some states, such as California, if you've already installed panels and then your neighbor plants a tree or builds a shed that blocks the sun, you can force him to remove it. There's been less conflict over wind-ownership rights so far, since turbines are usually located in isolated areas. However, as the industry expands, there have been instances in which adjacent wind farms complain that an upwind farm has created so much turbulence that their own output is damaged. Although in theory anyone can turn their property into an energy-producing wind farm, the renewable-energy field has high barriers to entry, with expensive equipment and specific climate requirements. Much of the most promising areas for harnessing either wind or solar power in the United States—on the ocean near the coastline—are contained in federal land preserves and thus owned by the government. Large oil companies have also made significant investments—buying up land and building equipment to secure a chunk of the renewable-energy market in the United States. Bonus Explainer: Can you buy Coke inside the Pepsi Center? It depends on where you're sitting. On the first floor and upper concourse, only Pepsi is served by Aramark, the vendor. However, those who are lucky enough to be sitting in the private suites, which are purchased for use by media organizations during the convention and which encompass much of the second level of the Pepsi Center, can request a Coke. That's because a different vendor, Levy Restaurants, services concessions in the suites. And even on the ground floor, Coke has a presence: Coca-Cola Recycling LLC is the official recycler at all DNC venues, including the Pepsi Center.