### The cost of science

Over the past few years U.S. astrophysics has hit hard times financially. Everyone is feeling the pain as they submit ever more grant applications each year, only to get more rejection letters citing the lack of funding provided by Congress.

Science is an expensive enterprise. It takes money to pay student, postdoc, engineer and professor salaries. Telescopes require a lot of funding each year to maintain. For example, a night on the Keck 10-meter telescope costs $100,000, or about \$167 per minute. And that's a bargain compared to ALMA, LSST and JWST.

So let's put the tremendous national cost of astronomy on an easy-to-understand scale. Take the Iraq War. The total direct costs of the war from 2003 to 2010 were about a trillion dollars, or 390 million dollars per day.

The combined NASA Astrophysics and NSF AST astrophysics budgets are 1 billion dollars a year. That's a lot of money. Tax payers spend a billion bucks a year on astrophysics. Think about it, that's 2.5 days of war. PER YEAR!

Astronomy for a year costs 2.5 days in a war of choice. Jeez!

We're lucky congress is so generous to fund such a luxurious enterprise as understanding the mysteries of the universe. In a more ideal world, we'd swap astrophysics for two and a half days invading a foreign land for...um... weapons of mass... er...to get rid of terrorists... hmmm... Screw it, WE WON! (Oswalt 2006)

### 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…