Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

Last summer, I fell in love - with the California Channel Islands. They've been sitting out there, just off the coast, for all the time I've lived here, but it wasn't until I took Emma to Carpinteria last June that I really took an interest, like the proverbial special someone who's been standing next to you all along but you never noticed. Now I'm hooked. I want to visit as many of them as I can, and I've got the beginnings of ideas for stories about them (my "literary 401K," I call them, since I could be retirement age by the time I get around to writing them). There's just one little, itty-bitty problem. Boats. Unless you're wealthy enough to afford an airplane, the only way to reach the Channel Islands is by boat. Well, they are islands, after all. I made my first voyage onto the open seas back in 2012 , sailing out to Anacapa Island and back with my boss and some other people from day-job land. I did okay going out because th...

There I was yesterday morning, squeezing my way through packed and roasting hot Pershing Square at LA's March for Science, when I happened upon my own personal nerdy highlight of the day. Standing in front of the Caltech exhibition tent was Mike Brown , the astronomer whose discovery of several objects in the outer solar system led to the reclassification (some say "demotion") of Pluto from a "planet" to a "dwarf planet." I'd seen him at a couple of times at Planetary Society events, so I recognized him immediately. He wasn't talking about Pluto (although his t-shirt did say, "Pluto had it coming") but instead was showing people a piece of the meteor that slammed into northern Arizona about 50,000 years ago, creating Meteor Crater. I even got to hold the thing. It was heavy! I posted about this encounter on Facebook, and someone responded with "Homer is Homer and Pluto is a planet." I had no idea that's the tag...

There's one thing the original Star Trek did better than any of its successors. It reflected and commented on the times in which it was made. That's not to say the other Treks never did social commentary - certainly they did. But it was more generic commentary about less time-specific issues. You watch the original series, and there can be no doubt that it came from the sixties. I don't think any of the more recent shows were that clearly a product of their times until the post-911 Xindi storyline on Enterprise . I mean really, when else would a scene like this one have been made? I remember the sixties. I remember when everyone talked about peace and love and brotherhood. What the heck happened? If you could go back in time and tell the young people of the sixties what kind of a country they'd be living in - what kind of a country they'd create ... Well, they'd think either you'd been doing too many drugs or maybe not enough. Surveys and s...

The Rector at All Saints was out of town on Palm Sunday, but he still made his mark on the day. On Facebook he posted this tantalizing line from the sermon he heard that morning: "It's not that we care that there is an empire. It's that we care that we are not the empire... Jesus exposes that the very aspiration to be empire is evil." I kept hoping to find the full sermon somewhere, but alas it hasn't turned up. Maybe it will eventually. In any event, it resonated with me because of some realizations I've had in recent weeks. I've never felt more American than I have in the weeks since the election, protesting and writing against the current administration's agenda. I've never felt more Christian than I have in the weeks since the election, objecting to the way that "white Christian America" has so completely abandoned its Christian principles.  And I think that's because I'm no longer part of the empire. What empire d...

Writing for You Can't Do That On Television wasn't just about water and green slime. I put my fair share of my own touches in it. Perhaps the one that holds up the best in my own mind came in the "Poverty & Unemployment" episode, when Alasdair finally gets released from the dungeon, only to realize he doesn't want to leave and face the harsh reality of the big, wide world. To this day, I refer to that as the "Bob graduates from college" sketch. And I wasn't alone, of course. We all did stuff like that. It's perfectly normal. But do I think most of the kids in the audience got my subtexts and subtle references? Of course not. For most of them, it was all about the water and the slime. And that's okay. I knew it was there, and I knew what it meant to me, and that was enough. I mention that point in light of the big ruckus on Wall Street these days over the Charging Bull and Fearless Girl statues. A bit of backstory: The...

Friday afternoon, I found out what kids today mean when they talk about wanting a "safe space." There I was, trying to finish up my work week, when I heard one of the lab technicians talking very loudly with the engineers about what a great thing it was that we'd bombed Syria, how the current administration was getting tough and not taking any nonsense, and what a great job they'd been doing so far. It took me half the evening to get myself back into the right headspace. If you've followed my posts over on LiveJournal since the election, you know that I was pretty devastated by it. Not just by Trump and his minions themselves, but by the people who elected him. " My people," mostly - white, nominally Christian and "Midwestern" in attitude if not in point of origin. We have such people even here in California, although not enough to cause much mischief in the voting booth. Every time I hear this Trumpian nonsense spew out of them, it le...

Surprise! Wow, nothing really ever does get deleted from the internet. I haven't used this blog in eight years, and yet here it was waiting for me. Today, I went to post a new entry on my LiveJournal and was greeted by a new Terms of Service agreement. It looks like it's primarily about Russians cracking down on other Russians, but getting involved with Russians on the internet may not be the most prudent thing to do these days. Some of my friends are telling me it's time to bail out, and I think they might be right. But... I so don't need something else to wrangle with right now. Preserving 14-1/2 years of entries doesn't look like it would be a problem. Plenty of people out there have come up with ways to do it. The more troublesome thing, though, is that my main audience these days comes from Facebook. I'd have to reset the links for any entries I wanted to keep sharing over to the new journal. And then, of course, there's the question of w...