Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

My first five months in my current day-job, back in 2003, were a baptism of fire. I had to get the company through two major certification audits in that brief span of time. There was a retired Engineering VP who had stayed on as a consultant, and he kept telling me to be sure I scheduled one of the audits quickly, before "Manny" retired. "Be sure you get Manny," he kept telling me. "Manny will help us." It turned out that "Manny" was a guy in the state's inspection office, and the way he helped us was by schmoozing with the national inspector, taking him out for dinner and making sure he was in a good mood. The "audit" would then consist of Manny and the national inspector and a couple of company guys basically shooting the breeze for a while and making some changes to our paperwork so it would look like they'd done something. I didn't realize that, and wouldn't have played that game anyway - and as a result, we...

This past weekend took me back to the Topatopa mountains outside Ojai, after my first trip last month took me up Nordhoff Peak . My final goal is Topatopa bluff, which I plan to do next month. For a dress rehearsal, I decided on Chief Peak, which sits right between Nordhoff and Topatopa. It turned out to be much more than I bargained for. To get to Chief Peak, you have to hike into the back country and find the Nordhoff Ridge fire road. There are several ways to do that. If you really want a long-distance hike, you could even do it from the Gridley Canyon trail I took last month. I chose the route up through Horn Canyon, because the distance and the altitude gain looked comparable to the Topatopa Bluff hike I was preparing for. The start of the trail is sandwiched in between an avocado grove and Ojai's Thacher School . In fact, the last quarter-mile or so of the road was blocked by some construction, so I had to park in the Thacher parking lot. The trail is almost flat...

I still remember that day back in middle school. I was having a discussion with a friend, and I said something ignorant and insensitive that played on racial stereotypes. My friend called me on it. Loudly. In the middle of the lunchroom. It left quite an impression. As I said, I was an ignorant middle schooler, a white boy growing up in the Midwest. I've learned at least a few things about race in America since then. But I never expected to make the struggle for civil rights and racial equality a big part of my life. I just sort of assumed it was happening out in the world somewhere, and I didn't need to think about it. Yes, that's a privileged attitude to take, but I was living in a pretty privileged environment. Then I came across my grandmother's remembrances of the time when her family moved to Baltimore during World War I, and the friendship she had with an African-American girl named Maggie, who cleaned the apartment house where they lived. "Neg...

The big problem we face in the Trumpocalypse is not Donald Trump. One tiny-handed demagogue can't upend the entire American system of democracy. And he can't do it in just a couple of years. The mess we're in took decades to happen. The problem is not Donald Trump. He's just the guy who figured out how to take advantage of the problem and use it for his own gain. The problem lies in American society. The problem is us . And when I say "us," I mean the people who look like me and had a similar upbringing to mine. Good ol' wholesome apple pie white "Christian" America. We're the ones who did this. We're the ones who are enabling it to go on. It will continue for as long as we allow it to go on - and the end of Trump himself, one way or another, will not necessarily be the end of it. I keep saying it's going to take us at least a generation to recover. A generation in which the US is seen as a backward, laughingstock of ...

Actually, I'm not too bad about spiders. They still freak me out sometimes, but many times I handle them just fine. I realize there are others who aren't so fortunate, though, and that's why I'm relating this little bit of my hike yesterday in a separate entry. I was coming down Horn Canyon outside Ojai much later than I expected, and much later than I'm usually out on a trail. It was after 6:00, the sun was starting to go down, and the shadows were stretching across the trail. There were changes in the local wildlife that I don't usually get to see. The day shift was ending, and the night shift was starting to come out. Including one of the local tarantulas, just moseying along the trail as I walked past. It wasn't very big, and it was moving slowly. I guess it hadn't had its coffee yet. Slowly enough that I could stop and take a couple of pictures without feeling like I was in imminent danger. And here it is. If you want to see, just cl...

I turned five years old in September 1969. It was just two months after the Apollo 11 moon landing and I was space-crazy, and my mom came up with the perfect birthday party game for me. She got a bunch of leftover boxes from our local grocery store, cut holes in the bottoms for us kids to stick our legs through, and decorated them to look like spaceships. Then she decorated the back yard with signs for the moon and the planets. At the party, we all ran around in our spaceships, going from one planet to another. It was great. The California Channel Islands are kind of like that, a set of eight little worlds just off the coast, waiting for you to go out and visit them. Only one, Santa Catalina, has any permanent civilian communities on it. Two of them, San Nicolas and San Clemente, are military bases, although scientific and archeological research teams go there as well. (The real story behind the book, Island of the Blue Dolphins , took place on San Nicolas.) The other five -...

I was heading back down from Santa Cruz Island's Montañon Ridge Saturday when I met a pair of hikers on the way up. I'd just seen one of the Island Foxes (the one in the photos below, to be specific), and mentioned to them that they had just missed out. They half laughed and half rolled their eyes, and said, "Oh, we've seen plenty of foxes." The Channel Island Fox is one of the conservation movement's great success stories. Fifteen years ago, four of the six varieties (one for each island they live on) were almost extinct, the victim of an ecological chain reaction that began when DDT wiped out the bald eagles that lived on the islands. Golden eagles flew over from the mainland and filled the gap in the food chain - but they eat land animals, whereas bald eagles eat fish. They saw the foxes as snack food, and the foxes, who had never had to worry about bald eagles, didn't know they needed to get under cover. The Catalina foxes also took an en...