Owen Ya-ya!

It's been hard to get action videos of Owen lately because he's become obsessed with watching videos of himself doing things. So if I get the camera out while he's doing something entertaining--which is about every 10 minutes--he'll immediately stop and run around to see the playback, even if I didn't manage to film anything. He just doesn't get that he has to do something on film first in order to watch himself.

Erin's dancing distracted him long enough for me to catch him in action in the video below. Notice at the end when he sees the reflection of the camera in the TV screen and tries to climb up my leg to watch the instant replay.

This is the same Jewish Wedding song that Owen was dancing to on bubble wrap in a previous post. And no, neither Erin nor I have any Jewish ancestry. Owen apparently developed his own heritage (no jokes about a Jewish milkman! Harold Greenstein was a gentleman and a consummate professional.)

Here's a video of Owen watching the previous video. Very meta.

karinms said…
You guys have the best blog ever!
mama mia said…
My gosh, I was just thinking the same thing, Karin! and also wondering what school might be like for all these little people who are growing up with instant "watch me on the video capability".....I am so old school, that this is just amazing to me. I can check this site and feel like I am right there!
JohnJohn said…
I'm glad you guys are enjoying reading it as much as we're enjoying writing it. But let's face it, Owen's the real star of this blog!
best post ever.

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…