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HOUSTON (AP) — Prized free agent Carmelo Anthony visited Houston on Wednesday and was greeted with images of him in two Rockets uniforms.

A day after visiting the Bulls, the New York Knicks' star continued his tour in Houston. A video board outside the Toyota Center depicted one image of Anthony in Houston's white uniform with red lettering and another in a retro red and yellow uniform. Between the pictures was Anthony's logo with the word 'Melo' in it.

He was wearing his No. 7 in both renderings, despite the fact that current Rocket Jeremy Lin wears that number. The Rockets would likely have to unload the point guard to snag Anthony.

Lin responded to the snub on Twitter on Wednesday afternoon with a bible verse. He tweeted the verse Luke 6:29: "If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them."

He later tweeted a much stronger response to the jersey pictures.

"Im entitled to standup for myself/say i felt disrespected as i did thru tweet but point is love unconditionally/as jesus loved me," Lin tweeted.

Houston got the biggest prize in free agency last offseason when it signed Dwight Howard away from the Lakers, with designs on making a deep run in the playoffs this year. But the Rockets were bounced from the postseason in the first round just as they were the year before. So they started looking for more upgrades to the roster.

They made the first move to free up money for adding players by agreeing to a trade that will send center Omer Asik and cash considerations to the New Orleans Pelicans for a protected future first-round draft pick.

Lin is set to make more than $8 million next season in the final year of a three-year contract. That's a steep price for a backup after he was relegated to the bench last season because of solid play by Patrick Beverley and started just 33 games.

The 30-year-old Anthony would add another proven score to a team that features Howard and Harden. Anthony averaged 25.2 points last season with the Knicks, which was second in the NBA to Oklahoma City's Kevin Durant. Harden was fifth in the league with a 24.3 average, but the team struggled in its playoff series against the Trail Blazers while focused on shutting him down.

Anthony is expected to meet with the Mavericks and the Lakers before sitting down with the Knicks.

The Rockets would not provide details about Anthony's meeting Wednesday.

LONDON (AP) — It's a long way from Middle Earth to 17th-century Massachusetts, but Richard Armitage has made the journey — and found a surprising link.

The British actor — dwarf warrior Thorin Oakenshield in Peter Jackson's "Hobbit" trilogy — is now starring at London's Old Vic Theatre as John Proctor, the decent man in a world gone mad in "The Crucible," Arthur Miller's modern classic about the Salem witch trials.

The play recounts the mania that swept a community of colonists in 1692, which resulted in 20 people being executed for witchcraft.

It's a change of pace, to say the least. Armitage says the "The Hobbit" is "a big machine that you get to play a little cog in." In "The Crucible," Proctor — decent, tormented and flawed — is the center of the audience's attention.

"I can feel that the audience are breathing his breath as they watch the play," Armitage said. The show, in previews, opens Thursday.

But the actor says "there are threads and arteries" connecting the worlds of Miller and J.R.R. Tolkien— including their operatic scale.

"At the end of the second act of that opera ("The Hobbit"), my character says, 'If this is to end in fire then we will all burn together.' And in exactly the same place in Miller's work — and it definitely wasn't plagiarized — I say, 'We will burn, we will burn together.'"

Armitage, 42, admits to being a little apprehensive about his return to the stage after a dozen years in television and movies. He'll soon be onscreen in "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies" and in the tornado thriller "Into the Storm."

Armitage, who once had himself water-boarded for a torture scene, took a similarly hands-on approach while preparing for "The Crucible."

"I went and worked with some cows," said Armitage. He also visited Salem. Although he found the tourist site there a bit disappointing — "Disneyland for witches" — he called the village "quite magical."

"Seeing the actual bricks and mortar ... It's just something that connects you to the reality of real people that this happened to," he said.

"We think, 'Oh it's a period piece about some kind of hysteria about witches,'" he added. "(But) it's here today in civilized Western societies. In America, in England. This slow feeding of fear to pitch neighbor against neighbor. It's not as far away as you might think."

Tall and dark-haired, Armitage has an old-fashioned, matinee-idol quality. His bearded, brooding face stares from posters all over London's subway system. One recent afternoon he sat in his dressing room, reading fan letters — actual paper letters.

He's no stranger to leather-jerkin roles — he was the villainous Guy of Gisborne in the BBC series "Robin Hood" — and it's easy to imagine him fitting snugly into Proctor's breeches.

But this is not a production that plays it safe. Director Yael Farber is a South African with a reputation for a passionate, challenging approach to scripts.

"Scorcher' is way too mild a description," was The New York Times' verdict on "Mies Julie," her South Africa-set version of August Strindberg's "Miss Julie."

"People start to focus on how handsome or excellent a production it is, and that's just not what I'm in theater for," said Farber. "I'm in theater to try to tap some kind of vein of truth (so) that the audience gets taken on an experience that changes them.

"I've also learned that some people just don't want that — but then don't come and watch this production!"

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — An Israeli inventor has created a scanner that he says could change the way we shop and take care of ourselves — by reading the chemical makeup of foods, drugs and other items we use.

The tiny gadget is still limited to a few key applications. But creator Dror Sharon envisions a machine that will compile a massive collection of data that will allow users to analyze the physical matter that exists around them.

"We wanted to find applications where people have the most visceral connection to the world," said Sharon, CEO and co-founder of Consumer Physics.

His gadget, called the SCiO, is an infrared spectrometer the size of a thumb drive. It is being marketed for three applications — food, pharmaceuticals and horticulture, or the health of plants. Simply by pointing and clicking a miniature digital wand, users can see how many calories are in a piece of cheese or determine when a tomato will reach peak ripeness.

Its name evokes the Latin verb "to know."

These features may seem more fun than life-changing at this point. But ultimately, advocates say, the SCiO could have life-saving uses, such as identifying contaminated foods or determining whether a drug is counterfeit.

"Immediately, the major impact will be increasing the awareness of people to the material world around them, which is already an enormous effect," said Sanford Ruhman, a professor of chemistry and expert on spectroscopy at Israel's Hebrew University.

Ruhman, who is not involved with SCiO, said that while the technology has been growing smaller and smaller for decades, the SCiO represents a significant new step. It is believed to be the first device of its kind.

A self-described "skeptic by nature," Ruhman suggested that in the future the ability to detect chemicals could be very beneficial in fields such as health and security. "It is just the beginning of something that can become much larger," he said.

Sharon, an engineer with an MBA from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes the gadget as the next generation of "Googling." He finds the current process of searching for information to be cumbersome. The user must think of a concept or question, identify a relevant set of words, type them into a search engine and hope they get some useful results.

With the spectrometer, he said, you can just point the gadget at an item — without even necessarily knowing what it is. The device reads the item's molecular structure, matches the information to an ever-expanding database and then can send additional data to your smartphone.

"I think it will change the world in many ways," said Sharon. He said the device could have potential uses for monitoring car tires, fuel tanks, soil analysis and the human body.

Sharon has raised over $2 million from over 11,000 supporters on the fundraising website Kickstarter. For now, he says the gadget's capabilities are limited by the relatively small size of its database.

But he expects thousands of these investors to have a SCiO in their hands by the end of the year to help build what he calls "the world's largest database of matter," which will be stored online and shared between users.

Additionally, hundreds of these new backers will be enlisted as developers to tweak and experiment with the SCiO's software.

"Obviously it's nice to have $2 million," Sharon said. "But it was more about creating a community and creating engagement rather than actual funding."

He expects the gadget to hit the consumer market "sometime in the next year," at the price of $299.

Yossi Vardi, one of Israel's most successful high-tech investors, said the unorthodox development program is one of SCiO's greatest strengths.

"It's kind of an open innovation community," said Vardi, who said he is not an investor in the company. "And the winners are those who are able to recruit the highest number of developers, because then you have like a huge worldwide brain, which comes with a lot of ideas."