### Owen's laptop

Like most kids his age, Owen loves computers. So many buttons and colors and sounds. Heck, I find them irresistible, too! But I can't have The Boy banging on my computer anytime he feels like it. So I took Erin's old work computer--an IBM Thinkpad from the stone ages (2001)--out of the closet and dusted it off. I set up the voice navigator and customized Wordpad with huge fonts and bright text colors. I also daisy-chained two USB keybords together, tripling the number of keys to push and allowing the whole family to push buttons if Owen wants to share ("Ehbody do it!"). Leapfrog's got nothing on our homemade interactive learning device.

Last night, Owen figured out how to use the track-nub to move the cursor to the login icon. The computer is officially his now...

Kristen said…
Now that's awesome. When I was a kid, all we had was "Space Elmo" to teach us math on our Apple2GS. He was made of 10 pixels and had 8-bit color. And I thought it was the best thing in the world :) But I only had one keyboard...
Natalie said…
too bad its not a mac
Natalie said…
That was from will. I love your computer. Can you build one for us? Oh, wait, Will says he can build one, one that's even better.
Anonymous said…
'period' sounds a little like 'gooey' that is so cool. reminds me of the thing we had at kmnr to read what you typed in (very stephen hawking)

is he still saying "see it?" at the end

### 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…