### Soccer update

Coming off a tough 4-0 loss last week against the Dorito Sharks, the Yellow Jackets came into this morning's game with a 1-1-1 record and a renewed focus. Today's opponents were the Red Gangsters (no, seriously). Even while shorthanded the entire game, led by speed-merchants Boden and Owen, the Yellow Jackets managed to keep consistent pressure on the Red Gangsters' end of the field, while the Yellow Jacket defense, led by the diminutive yet fearless Luke, smothered the Red's primary scorer, a kid about as tall as me. However, the Jackets missed a number of key scoring opportunities, with shots consistently sailing just wide of the goal.

The game was tied 0-0 in the fourth quarter when Owen went end-to-end on a fast break starting at the opponents' goal box. Owen's shot and rebound forced the opponents' goalie to reach outside of the goal box to grab the ball, resulting in a free-kick penalty. Bode, following Coach Hector's advice, kicked the ball across the width of the goal box (essentially a corner kick), over and through the defenders, connecting with Dante at the far goal post. Dante stopped the ball and punched it in for the only goal of the game. It was exhilarating to see Bode, Dante and Owen running to midfield in a line doing their airplane celebration. Coach Hector yelled, "That pass was every bit as good as the goal!" He then looked at me grinning and said, "We worked on that same situation this week in practice." Awesome coaching!

The Yellow Jackets are now 2-1-1 and looking as strong as ever heading into the last half of the season. Go team!

### 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…