### "Tricky puzzles" with Owen

Owen and I like to play "Tricky Numbers" and "Hang Pig." Tricky numbers is long addition, but we don't call it that. Hang Pig is like Hangman, without the misanthropic imagery. Nonna the Montessori kindergarten teacher is thrilled. We are too :)

Tricky Numbers at the top with a maze at the bottom.
More Tricky Numbers, and "Dad" spelled Espanol-style.

Hang Pig!

mama mia said…
maybe nonna needs to get some golden beads for Owen so he can make some sense of those tricky numbers, and actually build those quantities, each addend above the other and trade the units for tens and the tens for hundreds and the hundreds for thousands? or just bring it home from classfor the holidays? tricky number toys? we call it dynamic addition with golden beads
blissful_e said…
I'll have to remember that it's all in the marketing... "tricky numbers" is a much cooler name than "long addition." And I'm relieved no men have to die in the course of your word games!
JohnJohn said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
JohnJohn said…
E: Ha! Yes, indeed, it's all about marketing! Bell peppers are known as super-happy-fun peppers, cabbage helps you see further, and Chad Ochocinco *always* eats *all* of his dinner.
Amy P said…
Don't ever let anyone tell Owen that he isn't supposed to make an "8" by putting one sorta-squished circle on top of another. That's how engineers do it!

In a few years he'll be on to long division...perhaps better spun as tricky "goes-in-tahs" as in "times and goes-in-tahs"

### 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…