Neil deGrasse Tyson (a really big liar, or course) says that you'd have to inflate the balls with 125F air to get them to drop 2psi at 50F. I said 120, but anyway, the Ideal Gas Equation is relatively immutable. Actually perfectly so in the described ideal conditions.
I haven't read the NFL rule but unless it has some vague language forbidding anything that might cause the pressure to change, then Belichek et al aren't lying. They didn't break the rules, they just figured a slick way to trim the odds.
Even though the actions of financial players were incredibly damaging to the country, in many cases they weren't strictly illegal. Actually, as Michael Lewis has observed, each of our big financial crisises has had an epicenter in a space between financial regulations where at worst there is enough ambiguity that prosecution is problematic.
And then there's accounting, where it's been calculated that by GAAP standards, the PE of the SP500 is 141, not the 40 or so that is reported using special items, etc. Which I guess we're all complicit in because, what the heck else do we have except a stock market?
