Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

The Thomas Fire is finally coming to an end, but not before it grew into the largest wildfire in modern California history. I personally was never in any danger, but the smoke was pretty bad for two full weeks, even forcing us to close the factory area in day-job land once or twice and send people home. All through that time, I kept an eye on the fire's progress as it moved through the Ojai Valley. Thankfully, the city of Ojai itself was spared, but the trails I hiked through last spring weren't so fortunate. I knew they were hit hard, and yesterday I drove out there to do some scouting, to see just how bad it was. There's a lookout point along Highway 150, where you can stop and gaze across the entire Topatopa range. A plaque points out all the peaks and canyons, including the ones I visited. All of them are thoroughly blackened now. Here's what the three spots looked like, with links to my old posts if you'd like to see what they looked like before.

During the years I spent trying (and failing) to be an Evangelical, I found a lot of stuff written about "The End Times," and the coming of the Antichrist. Everyone had a different idea about who the Antichrist was, where he would appear, and so on, but there's one thing everyone felt pretty confident about. The "real" Christians (assuming they hadn't all been carried away by the Rapture) would know who the Antichrist was. The Antichrist wouldn't be able to fool a "real" Christian - which is to say, of course, an Evangelical. So it strikes me as sadly ironic that the most anti-Christian figure we've seen in generations of American politics is so adored by the white Evangelical community. Note that I'm not saying Trump is the Antichrist. The Book of Revelation is a tricky thing, so I'm not even sure there will ever actually be someone who is the Antichrist. But Trump is close enough, if not because of his own moral bankr

This morning, I had to invoke some extreme self-discipline. That is to say, I didn't let myself turn on my computer until I'd addressed all my Christmas cards. That was the last thing I had to do for the traditional, American Christmas. And despite the grumbling I do about it, I'm really not against that part of the holiday, provided I can keep it from getting too commercialized. But Thanksgiving is my big social holiday. By mid-December, my social capacity is reaching its limit, and I'm ready for a more inward-looking holiday. So, of course that means I go to Pasadena and sing with forty other people in front of a congregation several hundred strong, right? Yes, that's true, but despite being in the midst of all those people, it's still a very personal experience. What I wrote about it last year did a good job of capturing the mood. This year, it's our first major holiday since James Walker left as our Music Director, which is an even bigger

To tell you the truth, when the first sexual harassment claim against Al Franken came out, I was surprised that it was the only one. Not that I think Al Franken is a bad guy, which I don't, but because of where he came from. The type of shenanigans he was being accused of (and photographed doing, in at least one instance) fit perfectly with the brand of humor he wrote on Saturday Night Live , and that brand was what made him a success. It was his livelihood for a long time, a part of his public persona. Of course he did stuff like that. However ... That doesn't let him off the hook. Yes, there have been complaints already about Franken paying the penalty while Donald Trump and Roy Moore are still around. That's not important, unless you agree with Republicans that having power is more important, even if it means you have to follow your leaders into the sewer. I thought Franken was doing a great job as a senator, but that just makes his resignation a tragedy, no

Thanks to that massive Chinese hoax the rest of the world knows as "climate change," we here in Southern California now face the risk of massive wildfires pretty much all year round. And at the moment, we're being hit harder than we have in years. I don't know what the TV networks are showing, but I suspect that today at least, the fire getting everyone's attention is the one burning in the Sepulveda Pass, because it's near the Getty Center and all the expensive homes. But that's actually the smallest of the major fires burning. The one here in Ventura County, with smoke seeping through the office windows near me even as I type, is much bigger and has done more damage. The weather is what got these fires going, and it's also what makes them so hard to put out. Yesterday, the wind was blowing too hard for water-dropping airplanes and helicopters to fly, so the ground crews had to make do on their own. If that keeps up, they may have no choic

The America of today is a lost cause. Don't believe me? Then just watch the Trumpy Bear commercial. Fortunately, what I saw this afternoon gave me hope for the future. A day of making author visits to various classes at Park Tudor School concluded with a middle school genealogy group, about twenty kids who have been digging into their family histories. I was there to talk about the way I used my own family history in both Liberty Girl and The Eyes of the Enemy . They were impressed with what I had to tell them, and they liked the family artifacts I had to show them. But I was pretty impressed with them as well. I don't know whether Park Tudor has been making a push for greater diversity or greater diversity is something that's just been happening naturally - maybe some of both. Whatever the reason, the group in front of me was a markedly richer mix than we had forty years ago. And yet, they were all running into similar obstacles in their research. A whit

One year into the Trumpocalypse, and I have a number of different thoughts trying to crowd their way through my fingers and onto the screen. Let's see which ones make it out here. For the past year, I've thought, read, written, talked and listened, trying to make sense of what happened and what we can do about it. Some of the things I've thought about haven't been pleasant. It's "my people" who did this to us. "My" Midwestern, Christian white folks. People I've known my whole life were a part of it. That's been very hard to understand - and the things I have understood are hard to accept. At the end of the day, it all keeps coming back to race. Bigotry in general, really. Women and LGBT people are in the crosshairs too. But more than anything else, it keeps coming back to race. It's easy to see when Trump does something like defend the white supremacy marchers in Charlottesville. But it keeps showing up elsewhere, t

Whew! I really needed this weekend. Three days of Leadership Skills training followed by the first day of an audit to renew our Chinese export license will do that to you. I still have Audit Days 2 and 3 coming up tomorrow and Tuesday, but it's been nice to have a break before those came along. A few weeks ago, I started writing the first of my Mathematical Biographies, the project my publisher pitched to me at last year's California Homeschool Conference. While I was wrapping up The Eyes of the Enemy over the past year, I was also researching mathematicians, trying to find the right mix of people and mathematical ideas. An overarching theme began to emerge as I explored the possibilities, one that came from watching the world around me as much as it did from my research. I knew I wanted a diverse set of subjects, and my publisher did too. Various news events have convinced me it was the right decision. My current plan covers thirteen subjects over nine books. Of

My favorite C.S. Lewis book is The Great Divorce , in which a group of people in Hell get an opportunity to visit Heaven. In the end, all but one of them choose to go back. Each one has something they need to let go of in order to enter heaven - some kind of pride or greed or hatred - and they can't bring themselves to do it. More recently, in this week's episode of the anime series Kino's Journey , Kino's fellow traveler Shizu boards a city-sized ship, where the population lives under the oppressive rule of the Tower Clan. Seeing that the ship is breaking down and falling apart, he and Kino overthrow the Tower Clan and bring the people to the safety of dry land - only to discover that they prefer the ship and don't believe his story that it's going to sink. I halfway expected the people to start shouting "Fake news! Fake news!" Just because people's lives are bad, that doesn't mean they'll automatically leap at the chance fo

I've been doing my best to avoid watching news since last November. I'm mostly successful, but that darn twosome of Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell are hard to resist. But even that is too much. Just like their counterparts at FOX News, they keep their ratings up by appealing to the revulsion people feel for the other side and the hope that their side is on the verge of turning the tables. The fact that they use real news stories to do it instead of making stuff up doesn't change the overall approach. That's just the business model. But this week, any faint hopes I had that the Trump Russia story would have a meaningful effect pretty much evaporated. Republicans have found a way to pin the "real Russia scandal" on Hillary Clinton, and that's all they'll need to shut down the Congressional investigations, and perhaps the Special Counsel's office as well. Robert Mueller may yet be able to get some people prosecuted on state charges

"The world is not beautiful. Therefore, it is." So says the gender-nonconforming title character of Kino's Journey , by far the most challenging anime show of the year. "The world is not beautiful: And that, in a way, lends it a sort of beauty." Kino shows us that world by traveling through it on Hermes, a talking "motorrad" (German for "motorcyle" - there's no other German in the story, so I have no idea why everyone calls Hermes that). It's mostly a lush, green, peaceful-looking place, but it's dotted by mostly walled city-states whose citizens can do the most awful things. Kino's visits last three days and two nights, all the time needed, supposedly, to find out the country's character. (And now I'll do the obligatory aside about pronoun usage. Kino was born a girl named Sakura - more on that in a moment - but now presents as male and is often taken to be male. On the anime discussion board I frequent,

My sixth grade teacher liked to have fun. We did improvised comedy skits, played math games and had a camp-out in the Headmaster's back yard. It was a fairly snowy winter, and on several days he took the class out to go sledding on some of the campus's hills. The whole class, except for me. I don't remember exactly why I didn't want to go at first, but I do remember why I continued staying in as the days went on. I was having too much fun reading. In particular, I'd started reading ahead in our history textbook, because I was fascinated by the story it was telling. One part I remember especially was when Cortez met the Aztecs at just the right time for them to think he was their god, Quetzalcoatl. I remember thinking how great a plot twist that would have made if the story had been fiction. I've always loved history, be it world history, family history, sports history or whatever. I've always loved digging through libraries and resource documents

You don't have to watch anime for very long to notice some things about Japanese culture that are very different from the West. It's one of the things that draws me to it, actually, and one major difference I find fascinating is the completely different spiritual world. Shinto is an "animist" religion, where everything has a kami , a "god" or spirit, roughly equivalent - by my reckoning - to a patron saint. But what struck me as particularly different from what I'm used to is the notion, presented in more than one show, that the kami depend on having believers. Ones with many believers or worshippers are big and powerful. Ones with few are small and weak, and even in danger of disappearing. Thus the kami are inclined to grant their believers' wishes, so as to keep them believing. Now, I know better than to judge an entire religion based on a few anime episodes. I'm sure they've misrepresented some things (you should see how Christi

Apologies for stating the obvious, but October has gotten off to a pretty lousy start. I feel like I should write something, but I also feel like there's nothing for me to write. Donald Trump is being a jerk to another woman and person of color who dared to criticize him. Another shooting rampage has left incomprehensible numbers of people dead and injured. We've done these things before. What new things could there possibly be to write about them? In the Quality Manager's world, we learn that in order to get a problem really and truly fixed, you've got to dig down until you find the root causes. If all you do is correct the immediate issue, the same problem is just going to happen again. But applying that principle to the world at large is tricky, especially when people are dying. Yes, we need to get as much aid to Puerto Rico as we can, but unless we dig down and address the white supremacy in our culture, the next time a largely nonwhite segment of our pop

Last night was the much-anticipated premiere of Star Trek: Discovery , the first new series for the franchise in twelve years. I'm still processing what I thought of the two-part pilot. The setup reminds me vaguely of David Gerrold's Voyage of the Star Wolf novels, which are also centered on the first officer of a starship that gets blamed for bumbling into a war - but I'm pretty sure that similarity will end within an episode or two. I was irked by the main character's behavior, although you can't say she didn't suffer the consequences of her actions, so maybe she'll grow from here. And I was ticked that they killed off Michelle Yeoh, even though I suspected they would it do after both she and Jason Isaacs were announced as the new Star Trek Captain. What I found most dismaying is that we have yet another Trek series about war. The final years of DS9 covered almost nothing but the Federation's war against the Dominion. Voyager , being a si

I'd made my plan a few months ago, to give myself something to look forward to through the long weeks of audit preparation and online class creation. Catalina Island offers a number of deals to people who go there on their birthdays, including two-for-one on the boat fare out there. I'd gone to the island just after my birthday last year and loved it, and I already knew I wanted to take Emma back there, so she was an easy choice as my "plus one." There's just one problem with celebrating a birthday in public. It's that you're celebrating your birthday in public. At the Catalina Express ticket window, they give you a big, festive button and invite you to put your name on it. Eventually, I did pin it onto my hat, but as you can see, I remained the anonymous birthday boy. Others were more into the birthday spirit, including this one lady and her gal pals who sat next to us on the boat. Pretty much everything that happened during the ride was compl

I'm not sure I've ever gone this long without a journal update. The week-long audit I've spent more than a year preparing for begins tomorrow. Getting ready for it has been hampered by other craziness in the day-job world, and I haven't had the mental energy to do much else. I've gotten so out of my writing mindset that I feel like I can't even put a decent blog post together, let alone anything else. So today I'm going to do something low-pressure and fun, to get my momentum going again. I give you... The Anime Nerd Girls of Science! Five female anime characters I've come across who take science more seriously than their American counterparts. That is, if they even have American counterparts. #5) Senomiya Akiho, Robotics;Notes The "Science Adventure" series of visual novels and anime series had to have at least one character on the list. My first thought was Makise Kurisu from Steins;Gate , but she's too much of a male