### Decreasing the murder rate by decreasing lead

Crime is down by 40% in Jamaica, and one of the major reasons is the banning of lead in gasoline (Matthew Yglesias' Slate article here).

Wait, what?

Well, the symptoms of lead poisoning include insomnia, delirium, cognitive deficits and confusion. People don't naturally go around murdering people. Murder isn't intrinsic human behavior. However, if a person suffers from delirium, a lack of sleep and cognitive disorders, mix in a bit of poverty, frustration and free time and you have a good recipe for abnormal, pathological human behavior.

I'm sure there were other sociological factors at play, but I wouldn't be surprised of lead poisoning were the dominant factor. After all, when was the last time we saw a 40% decrease in the murder rate in the US? As pointed out by Yglesias in his article, "Climate change tends to outshine all other environmental worries these days, but the lead-crime link is a powerful reminder that a whole range of issues people care deeply about have significant environmental aspects."

Personally, I'd like to add that this is a really good reason for having government agencies to set policies that benefit the populace, even though it might mean imposing an unprofitable regulation on industry. This should be obvious, but in today's political climate it's often important to remind people that "big government" isn't always a bad thing. Let's hear it for unleaded gas, (relatively) clean air, and clean water. Yay for the EPA!

"After all, when was the last time we saw a 40% decrease in the murder rate in the US?"

For one specific example, consider the period between 1995 and the present :)
40% in the US? Really?!

Must be all that stop and frisk, eh? :)

### 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…