### Like, you know?

I plan to make all of my students watch this video:

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

I've noticed the creeping vines of questions crawling on sentences in many recent science talks, especially by the "young'uns." The non-question question mark is a defining characteristic of Caltech undergrad speech patterns? I've also noticed a lot of, "Today, I want to tell you about low-mass stars." Oh yeah? You want to tell me that? Well tell me, instead of leaving me in doubt right off the bat! "Today I'm going to tell you about low-mass stars." Period. Then do it!

Another pet peeve of mine is "sort of." There are way too many things in astronomy these days that sort of do things, and sort of correlate with other things. In practice, you don't sort of extract your spectrum. So don't tell me you did.

Tell me what you know. Be the expert in the room. Not just for your sake, but for mine and the rest of the audience.

Hat tip to my seester Amy P. for the video.

P.S. Can you tell I'm suffering from post-AAS burn out?

Anonymous said…
Like, you know, sort of... one of the phrases my first boss made me eliminate from my vocabulary was "I guess". I am not guessing! I need to tell him yes or no and why! He was right, and I still remember that conversation even though it's been 10 yrs ago now (yikes, am I that old?). It goes along with the "sort of", though. And I can't believe I am old enough to criticize the way young folks talk. Am I that old already???
blissful_e said…
Way to go, John! Fight the good fight!!

### 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…