Here's a video from last year's NSF, TMT & Discover panel, on the topic of "Mysteries of the Universe."

Mike Brown is one of my colleagues at Caltech, and his daughter is in Owen's class (the Beavers) at the Caltech Children's Center. The moderator Phil Plait is the author of a great blog called Bad Astronomy. I'm really looking forward to meeting him in person.

The woman with the awesome red socks is Debra Fischer, my friend, close collaborator and newly minted full professor of astrophysics at Yale (previously a prof. at San Francisco State). Debra and I are both former students of Geoff Marcy, so I consider her my academic big sister. She taught me how to use a telescope, plan an observing run, give a good science talk, and, most importantly, how to be a good scientist. I owe a great deal of my success to the lessons I learned from Debra late at night at Lick Observatory using the CAT to search for planets.

As if being a Yale professor isn't enough, she's also currently a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and was recently on the subject of the cover story in their magazine. You can read more about my big sis' and her search for planets around the Sun's closest neighbors here:

mama mia said…
So I am hoping your presence on this year's panel will be on video too? And you will send us all a link so we can watch it from afar? Can't wait to hear you discuss exoplanets.
JohnJohn said…
Yup, it'll be a webcast. There will also be a feature article in Discover Magazine soon after the event.

### 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…