### Cool Data Visualization Showing Where Greenhouse Gasses Originate

This is a really cool way to visualize complex connections in a compact, easy-to-read plot (via The Dish). I wonder if there's software to do this.

From MotherBoard:
Hope this is getting clearer: carbon is deeply entangled in every sector that runs our lives right now. Fighting this thorn-studded, planetary kudzu will mean hacking away at all of it. Obviously, that means killing coal-fired power plants, and replacing them with solar, wind, and/or nukes. But it means getting combustion engine cars off the road, too. And pivoting towards more sustainable agriculture. And stopping deforestation. And cracking down on power-draining houses. And.
 A carbon-neutral, zero-waste city under construction in Abu Dhabi
On a related note, I watched a documentary on the architect Norman Foster last night on Netflix called How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? What struck me is the scale of his undertakings, which now includes an entire city in Abu Dhabi, designed from scratch to be carbon-neutral and zero-waste. The first striking aspect of this project, after the enormity of the scale, is the fact that an oil-producing country has commissioned its construction. A country that has everything to gain through more fossil fuel usage recognizes the need to be carbon-neutral. Interesting. The other thing was a quote from Foster:
The tragedy that is given the urgency of the situation, given what is at stake which is literally our survival as a species, what I find inexplicable is that there is only one [of these cities]. If there were twenty urban experiments...one would be very critical and say Why only twenty? That is the shocking thing.

### 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…