### First day of school!

Last night we had this (paraphrased) conversation:

Erin: "Jeez, I can't believe Owen is starting school tomorrow. I keep thinking about what I need to take care of for tomorrow morning, but it's hitting me that this will be every morning!"

John: "I know, every day from here on out. Crazy."

Erin: "It's weird. I didn't think he'd make it this far!"

John: (laughing) "What do you mean by that?"

Erin: "Well, when you have a baby, you think of them as your baby. But he's a boy now."

John: "Oh, I thought you meant you didn't think he'd survive to 5."

Well, we sent our boy off to kindergarten this morning for the first time.

Fortunately, thanks to summer school and his time at the Caltech Children's Center, he was more than ready. After dropping him off, Erin texted: "Awesome dropoff. As we walked up to school he says, 'I'm so excited!' No tears whatsoever."

Here he is in his uniform before donning his Spiderman backpack.

Mar also had his first day, but he won't fly solo at preschool until Thursday. Mommy will be with him all day today:

Erin will provide further updates soon.

Megan said…
They are so handsome! And have fun with kindergarten... I know we are so far! :)
blissful_e said…
That's fantastic that Owen is so excited!! Hopefully Marcus will be just as enthusiastic.

What will you do with all that free time??
Bonzer said…
Soooooooo cute and such big boys!!!!

### 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…