### The intersection of the Cilppers and Warriors

Owen and I have been watching lots of NBA games this season. Now the season is over and we're in the NBA Playoffs, our two favorite teams, the Golden State (Oakland) Warriors are matched up against the Los Angeles Clippers (not the Lakers, who suck, f'real).

We noticed that the two teams have a lot of overlap in the space of names: the intersection of the Clippers and Warriors player names has a lot in common. Here's what we've come up with:

There are 2 Crawfords:

Jamal Crawford is in the running as the best sixth man in the league, coming off the bench to play the scoring guard for the Clippers. Meanwhile, Jordan Crawford comes off the bench to play scoring guard for the Warriors.

There are 2 Barneses:

Both come off the bench as small forwards: Harrison Barnes for the Warriors, vs. Matt Barnes for the Clippers

There are 2 Greens:

Willie Green comes off the bench as the third-string shooting guard on the Clippers while Dramond Green comes off the bench at power forward for the Warriors.

There are 2 Blakes:

Steve Blake is the backup point guard for the Warriors, vs. Blake Griffin the starting power forward for the Clippers.

There are 2 Jordans:

DeAndre Jordan starts at center for the Clippers while Jordan Crawford comes off the bench for the Warriors at two-guard.

There are 2 Davi[d-s]es:

David Lee starts at power forward for the Warriors while Glen Davis was traded by the Magic at the trade deadline and comes off the bench at center/power-forward for the Clippers.

There are two *Andres:

DeAndre Jordan starts at Center for the Clippers while Andre Iguodala starts at shooting guard for the Warriors. Also, and I realize this is stretching a bit, Andrew Bogut starts at center for the Warriors.

So there you have it! The intersection of the name-space between the 3rd and 6th seed in the Western Conferences of the NBA playoffs this year!

Stretching further, two players played college ball in Michigan:

Jordan Crawford played at U. Michigan while Dramond Green played at Michigan State.

Reggie Bullock (backup shooting guard for the Clippers) played at North Carolina, as did Harrison Barnes.

But stretching to find commonalities among college origins results in far fewer overlaps than the name-space does!

### 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…