### 2013 NBA Countdown: #6 Chris Paul

Let's face it. This household likes point guards. I've spent a lot of time in this space talking about the hybrid "1.5 guards." Well, the 6 food 3 inch Paul, from Wake Forest, is a pure one. He looks first to set up his teammates with his exceptional ball handling and passing. He keeps his scoring in reserve, often waiting until key moments to remind everyone how well he can finish at the rim, or pull up for a three-point jump shot.

What I find most impressive about Paul is his ability to rebound from the guard spot. He's not tall, but he's built like a fire hydrant and he has a real nose for the ball. When playing for New Orleans he has several seasons during which he averaged 5+ rebounds a game, including his rookie season. With the Clippers he has a full house of big-men to handle most of the rebounds, but Paul still hauls in 4.4 a game as of last season. Over his career, he has averaged 18.6 points and an astounding 9.8 assists per game. He's had three seasons averaging a solid double-double.

Chris Paul. Whooooooo!

Owen says:

1. Is friends with Blake Griffin
2. Nickname is CP3
3. Mostly does assists
4. Makes a buzzer beater if he has to
5. Always gets an unfair match-up
6. Always is open o has his teammates open

Here are Paul's Top-10 highlights from last season:

Chris is stylish:

### 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…