### Hanging out on the Frontier of Astronomy

I'm giving my first public astronomy lecture on June 30! I've actually known about this for a while, but they finally finished the posters last week and put them online.

The lecture will be video recorded, so I'll post the video if I can. But if you happen to be in Honolulu on the 30th, stop by for the talk!

mama mia said…
Wow! Love the poster! want a copy if possible....John, I hope you are able to post a link the video, as I'd love to hear the talk.
karinms said…
That is SO COOL! You should get a framed copy of the poster. Its a really nice poster. I'm looking forward to watching it online. Good luck!!
blissful_e said…
Way to go, Dr Johnson!

I'm sure it will be a terrific talk and I hope you can post the video so we can learn all about exoplanets!
Marshall said…
Wow, that's an awesome poster. You clearly are giving a far more stylish public talk than the one I gave two months ago in Ventura. (And surely with much cooler and more exciting science, to boot. ) Good luck on it! Having just done this myself, it was a complete blast, with a super enthusiastic audience who kept asking really great questions. (Though not necessarily all related to the subject of my talk - the questions eventually drifted into "ask an astronomer anything" mode, challenging my ability to explain cosmology...)

Heh, in fact I thought of you at one point during that night. There was this one cute-but-insecure retired gentleman, who kept prefacing every question with "I know this is probably a stupid question but... <insert really good question>". At one point, he asked something along the lines of "I know this is probably a silly question, but do different kinds of stars have different kinds of planets?" Well, there's this guy I know in Hawaii you might want to ask about that... :-)
fayebean said…
That is so cool!! I especially love the part "Dr. Johnson"!!! Other people have to call you that!! Do you ever get over how cool that is!! Have fun and good luck!!
fayebean said…
That is so cool!! I especially love the part "Dr. Johnson" in the description!! Other people have to call you that!! Do you ever get over how cool that is? Have fun and good luck!!

### 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…

### 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…

### The Long Con

Hiding in Plain Sight

ESPN has a series of sports documentaries called 30 For 30. One of my favorites is called Broke which is about how professional athletes often make tens of millions of dollars in their careers yet retire with nothing. One of the major "leaks" turns out to be con artists, who lure athletes into elaborate real estate schemes or business ventures. This naturally raises the question: In a tightly-knit social structure that is a sports team, how can con artists operate so effectively and extensively? The answer is quite simple: very few people taken in by con artists ever tell anyone what happened. Thus, con artists can operate out in the open with little fear of consequences because they are shielded by the collective silence of their victims.
I can empathize with this. I've lost money in two different con schemes. One was when I was in college, and I received a phone call that I had won an all-expenses-paid trip to the Bahamas. All I needed to do was p…