### The Planets

If you think Owen singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star warmed the heart of his astronomer father, you gotta bet that my heart was bursting with pride tonight:

That's my boy!!!

HeyLindsay said…
YAY OWEN! That was great work! My favorite is the excitement that he gets in his voice when he gets to Pluto. Forget the fact that those "experts" decided that Pluto wasn't a planet. It is to Owen, and he is PUMPED about it.
blissful_e said…
You can tell Owen really knows his planets because he skipped Mars and was able to go back to it without missing a beat.

In my day, we bought a Mercury to go to visit Venus...
Goofle Marcy said…
Whoohoo Owen ! Standing up for the
littlest among us, the weak, the downtrodden!
The plutos shall inherit the Earth.
mama mia said…
The perfect Montessori Solar System Presentation I lesson.....with teacher made materials! My kindergarten students could not have done better...Owen has great teachers indeed.
karinms said…
He's going to be so disappointed when he gets to school and they don't talk about Pluto anymore!

Owen is pretty much the smartest ~3 year old I've ever seen. I can't believe he knows all the planets! That is amazing.
kellifornia said…
Owen is officially smarter than me when it comes to the planets : ) Haha. Baby geniuses do exist I guess.

### 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…