### Life is funny

A friend of mine is getting a PhD in astrophysics and she now plans to pursue a new career in film. She is currently dating a really cool guy who is also a fairly famous director (I really like his movies, no matter which of my friends he dates). We went over to their place for their joint birthday party last night, and we got to talk with a bunch of normal people who also happen to be famous Hollywood insiders. It was a very enjoyable experience, especially given how much time I've been spending around astronomers lately.

We had great food, conversations about casting in St. Louis vs casting in Omaha, talked about the differences between a white dwarf and a brown dwarf, all while the boys splashed in the hot tub.

After saying farewell to the hosts, one of my conversations on the way to the door may or may not have gone like this:

Me: "Honestly, probably not. I've only hung out with [famous director] once, at an astronomy conference in Seattle of all places."
Lady: "Interesting. I take it you're an astronomer."
Me: "Yup. What do you do?"
Lady: "I'm an actor. My name is Laura."
Me, looking closer: "I'm John. Are you Laura Der..."
Me: (awkwardly attempting to come up with a movie of her's other than Jurassic Park.) "Oh, I enjoy your work..."
Lady: "I was in Citizen Ruth."
Me: (not having seen that movie) "Oh...so..."
Me: "So, in Jurassic Park. They had a dinosaur trainer on set, of course. But did they have a separate trainer for the velociraptors?"

mama mia said…
I imagine this may happen to you more than once in your locale :)
did you do Brian's velociraptor impression for Laura?

### 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…