### Watching Sunday Football With Owen

With 6 minutes to go the Jets scored a touchdown to go up 28-14 over the Pats. It was a beautiful pass to the back of the endzone by Mark Sanchez, his third TD pass of the game.

Right after we finished talking about what the "red zone" is and just before the touchdown play, Owen and I had this exchange:

Owen: Touchdown! Wow!
Me: Wow is right! He went to his second or third read and threw off his back foot.
Owen: I thought he was going to throw to number 49.
Me: (startled) ...me too... (now laughing) But he was covered in the flat.
Owen: Oh man. The Patriots are get-out-of-here!
Me: Yup, the Pats sure look like they're toast.
Owen: They're raw eggs!
Me: ...
Owen: I made that one up.

It's really scary how quickly he's picking up the intricacies of the game. He saw the fullback (#49) pealing out on a flat route after the play-action.

I remember back when I was sleep-deprived, changing poopy diapers at 3am thinking to myself, "This will all pay off eventually. Hang in there, it'll all pay off."

This afternoon was a big part of that payoff!

Amy P said…
I can't wait for Christmas and watching football with Owen, Papi, John John and Bubba!
blissful_e said…
SWEET!
mama mia said…
He seems to be able to read the field in soccer too! This observation is based on my one time watching at the final soccer session this summer....You just may have a little athlete on your hands...a future all american?

### 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…