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for the bottom horizontal axis. Label the middle of the axis zero. Each grid point to the left is then the number of days early. Each grid point to the right is the number of days late. Count how many children were born on their precise due dates. Count up that number of points on the vertical axis of your graph and mark the spot at zero. Do the same with the number of children born one day late. Two days late. Three. Four. Keep going. Now do the early kids. When you have finished plotting all of the due dates, label the top of the plot “The distribution of baby delivery dates compared to their due date.” Make a copy. Send it to me in the mail. My guess is that you will have something that looks like a standard bell curve. I would hope that the bell would be more or less centered at zero. It would either be tall and skinny (if most kids are born within a few days of their due dates) or short and fat (if there is quite a wide range around the due dates). One thing I know, though, is that the bell would have a dent on the right side. At least around here, no kids are born more than a week or two after their due dates. Everyone is induced by then.

I am usually capable of allowing myself to give up on trying to get the world to see things in my scientific, statistical, mathematical way. But this mattered to me. If I was at a dinner party with Diane and the subject of due dates was broached, Diane would turn to me with a slightly mortified look in her eyes and whisper, “Please?” I would rant about doctors. About teachers. About lack of curiosity and dearth of scientific insight and fear of math. I would speculate on the bell curve and about how fat or skinny it would be and how much it might be modified by inductions and C-sections, and whether different hospitals had different distributions. Inevitably the people at the dinner party would be friends from Caltech. Most had kids. Most of the fathers were scientists. Most of the mothers were not. (Even today things remain frighteningly skewed, though interestingly, most of my graduate students in recent years have been female. Times have no choice but to change.) As soon as I started my rant, the fathers would all join in: “Yeah! I could never get that question answered, either,” and they would bring up obscure statistical points of their own. The mothers would all roll their eyes, lean in toward Diane, and whisper, “I am so sorry. I know just how you feel,” and inquire as to how she was feeling and sleeping and how Petunia kicked and squirmed. (As an aside, my female graduate students wanted to know the answer to my question, too, and were prepared to rant alongside me. Times have no choice but to change.)

There was another calendar ticking, too. At the moment, the sun was almost directly between the earth and Xena. We knew Xena was out there, but we couldn’t see it. When Chad had looked at the surface of Xena and realized it looked similar to Pluto, he had done so at almost the last possible moment. Xena had been low in the western sky just at sunset. A few weeks later Xena set with the sun, and we couldn’t see it anymore. But slowly, the earth was moving around the sun, and Xena was eventually going to reappear on the other side, this time in the early-morning sky. As desperate as we were to learn more about Xena, we had no choice but to wait. Our first chance to get a good look would not be until September. I made sure that we were scheduled to be at the Keck telescope then. Other than that, there was little we could do except try to keep from telling people. I was looking forward to springing my news on an unsuspecting world.

But another calendar was ticking, too, this one involving two different moons. One of the people I had told about Santa was Antonin Bouchez, the former graduate student of mine who had convinced me not to quit two years earlier. He now worked at the Keck telescope helping to develop a fancy new technologically intensive way to make extra-sharp pictures with the telescope. Usually, when you take a picture of a star or planet or anything else with a