Today started off sadly with the news that Pat Tillman had been killed in action in Afghanistan. It hit me hard for several reasons: he was a local man who I'd seen play both for ASU and the Cardinals, he was genuinely loved, a true scholar athlete. As someone who frequently scans the Coalition deaths for the names of former students, this was the closest I'd had to a personal loss, as he was a student at one of my colleges. It also reminded me that so many have died, and I don't know their names, but I read every one tonight, to remember.

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Some of my students don't quite appreciate why I make them complete all of their graphs by hand in the intro astronomy courses. Today, during office hours, I was reminded of why I made that decision long ago. A student had two columns of data - mass of the planets, radius of the planets. He was asked to graph mass vs. radius on a sheet of graph paper. He looked at me blankly and asked "what's that all about?" Um, dude, graph mass vs. radius on the graph paper. I turned to write an email as he worked on the graph - when I checked his progress, I saw that he had written "mass" and "radius" on the interior part of the graph, not as labels. "Is this what you mean?" Whoa. No. Definitely not. I told him that he needed to plot the values. "Just anywhere I want?" No. No. First you must assign numerical values to the axes. He starts working on it, and I turn back to my computer. When I look back, he has carefully started marking the y-axis by factors of ten, which is fine, except that his values span up to 2000 so he'll need about 10 more sheets of graph paper at this rate. When he reaches 200, I stop him and prompt him to add zeroes to all those values. It continued thusly til the plot was done.

And THAT is why I ask students to plot by hand. You'd think by the time they got to college they'd know how, but I know better now.

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Sakai got robbed, man. No way Flay could ever beat him.