### Hold on! Correction on "Young Black Scientist Makes History"

Correction to A Young Black Scientist Making History! - Fabienne Bastien is the first Black female astronomer to publish a first-author Nature article. I stated that she was the first Black astronomer.

I wrote my article about Fabienne Bastien after participating in an email thread with Keivan Stassun on a related topic. He mentioned that Fabienne was the first Black female astronomer to publish in Nature. I missed that key qualifier, which was totally my mistake. I should have A) carefully reread Keivan's email before rushing to post and B) done my own literature search.

Having done both now, here are some other notable examples of Black Astronomers publishing first-author papers in Nature:

Walker, A. D. M.; Greenwald, R. A.; Stuart, W. F.; Green, C. A. 1978Natur.273..646W
Basri, Gibor 2001Natur.411..145B
Basri, Gibor 2004Natur.430...24B
Marchis et al. 2005Natur.436..822M
Marchis et al. 2006Natur.439..565M

I apologize for this oversight, particularly to Franck, Gibor and the late Art Walker. I promise to blog more responsibly in the future. I make no excuse for my error, but I don't think it takes away from the greater points of my post. Thanks to Kyle for questioning my accuracy in the comments area!

Dr. Hoffman said…
Well, your question is still germane: "why the hell is this record being set in 2013 and not 1985?!" But it's a fabulous achievement, and I'm so proud to know Fabienne! Huge congratulations to her!
Bryan said…

### 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…