First days on the job

Yesterday was my first day at work. Man, I love astronomy. I rolled in at 8:55am to sign and fax some forms (IfA form 5b, NSF Institutional Allowance Request, NSF Fellowship Starting Certificate, IfA Research Statement/Scope). I went to lunch with Mike Liu, got a tour of the department during which Mike introduced me to ~87 different people, and then went home at 2pm to move our stuff from the hotel to the vacation rental. No meetings, no orientations, no time cards, no HR videos showing the right and wrong ways to lift boxes (Don't Do What Donnie Don't Does).

Overall, not much to report. The layout of the IfA is pretty confusing. I keep getting stuck on the 2nd floor really far from a stair case. Mike described the layout as "Two identical square buildings, where one square is kinda mirrored and connected by that walkway. Well, the other is not really like this one. Don't worry, you'll figure it out in a couple weeks."

I tried to get some actual science done, but my computer at Berkeley (owen.berkeley.edu) is down. I called my old office and asked Ryan to try and restart it. But owen seems to be pretty sick and didn't reboot. Fortunately my critical data are backed up on my laptop and at SFSU. Guess it's time to put my research allowance to work. To the Apple Store!

karinms said…
The compy must miss you... Have fun at the Apple store!! Maybe they'll have a combined computer/iphone deal. That would be sweet. Been to the beach yet?
JohnJohn said…
Have we been to the beach yet? she asks. Only like half a dozen times! Pics to come.

On the Height of J.J. Barea

Dallas Mavericks point guard J.J. Barea standing between two very tall people (from: Picassa user photoasisphoto).

Congrats to the Dallas Mavericks, who beat the Miami Heat tonight in game six to win the NBA championship.

Okay, with that out of the way, just how tall is the busy-footed Maverick point guard J.J. Barea? He's listed as 6-foot on NBA.com, but no one, not even the sports casters, believes that he can possibly be that tall. He looks like a super-fast Hobbit out there. But could that just be relative scaling, with him standing next to a bunch of extremely tall people? People on Yahoo! Answers think so---I know because I've been Google searching "J.J. Barea Height" for the past 15 minutes.

So I decided to find a photo and settle the issue once and for all.

I then used the basketball as my metric. Wikipedia states that an NBA basketball is 29.5 inches in circumfe…

Finding Blissful Clarity by Tuning Out

It's been a minute since I've posted here. My last post was back in April, so it has actually been something like 193,000 minutes, but I like how the kids say "it's been a minute," so I'll stick with that.
As I've said before, I use this space to work out the truths in my life. Writing is a valuable way of taking the non-linear jumble of thoughts in my head and linearizing them by putting them down on the page. In short, writing helps me figure things out. However, logical thinking is not the only way of knowing the world. Another way is to recognize, listen to, and trust one's emotions. Yes, emotions are important for figuring things out.
Back in April, when I last posted here, my emotions were largely characterized by fear, sadness, anger, frustration, confusion and despair. I say largely, because this is what I was feeling on large scales; the world outside of my immediate influence. On smaller scales, where my wife, children and friends reside, I…

The Force is strong with this one...

Last night we were reviewing multiplication tables with Owen. The family fired off doublets of numbers and Owen confidently multiplied away. In the middle of the review Owen stopped and said, "I noticed something. 2 times 2 is 4. If you subtract 1 it's 3. That's equal to taking 2 and adding 1, and then taking 2 and subtracting 1, and multiplying. So 1 times 3 is 2 times 2 minus 1."

I have to admit, that I didn't quite get it at first. I asked him to repeat with another number and he did with six: "6 times 6 is 36. 36 minus 1 is 35. That's the same as 6-1 times 6+1, which is 35."

Ummmmm....wait. Huh? Lemme see...oh. OH! WOW! Owen figured out

x^2 - 1 = (x - 1) (x +1)

So $6 \times 8 = 7 \times 7 - 1 = (7-1) (7+1) = 48$. That's actually pretty handy!

You can see it in the image above. Look at the elements perpendicular to the diagonal. There's 48 bracketing 49, 35 bracketing 36, etc... After a bit more thought we…