Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

WARNING! WARNING! Danger, Will Robinson! I'm going to talk about Star Trek: Discovery , so if you're not up to speed on the latest episodes and don't want to be spoiled, turn back now! In fact, at the moment I'm just typing enough stuff so that the link on my Facebook page won't give anything away. Blah blah biddy blah, I'm so stuffy hand me a scone. And never eat pears. By the way, does anyone else think that spin-around thing the Discovery saucer section does is really silly? Okay, that should do it. Discovery is back from its midseason hiatus now. Actually, I'm a week behind, having just seen the January 7 episode last night. And what a surprise it was. Not all the stuff with the Mirror Universe, as I'd already read about that. I'm referring to the scene where Doctor Culber gets killed out of nowhere. Doctor Hugh Culber, one half of Trek 's first canon gay couple, partner of Lieutenant Paul Stamets. I found myself having ...

Doctor King wasn't the first one to say it. He heard it from a young woman named Prathia Hall , who used "I have a dream" several times in the opening prayer of a service commemorating a church that had been burned down by the KKK. Preachers often borrow from each other (just like writers, I should mention), and Doctor King borrowed it from her. I didn't know that before yesterday. I heard it from the Rev. Traci Blackmon , who was our guest preacher for Martin Luther King Sunday. This is our second MLK Sunday with our new Rector, and I've got to say he brings in some pretty amazing guests. Last year's had a profound effect on me, too. (Yes, you can see me in the background. My seat in the choir always puts me in the sight-line of the live stream camera.) Rev. Blackmon's sermon was titled, " Where are the Dreamers? " and she pointed out that "Prophetic resistance is only possible for those who can still dream." It's ...

I discovered this past weekend that 2018 is the Madeleine L'Engle Centennial. What would have been her 100th birthday comes at the end of November. The first of what will probably be a number of podcasts about her life and her writing came out last month, when Marketplace's "Make Me Smart" read A Wrinkle in Time for their Book Club and interviewed one of her two granddaughters who collaborated on a new biography that's coming out. Give it a listen if you're so inclined. There are many different themes in A Wrinkle in Time , but one they discussed at length in the podcast was new to me - the idea of Meg having to be her own rescuer. Meg's father is missing when the story begins, and she's told he's been fighting a sinister dark force that threatens to consume all of creation. They go off in search of him, and at that point we think, "Once they find him, he'll be able to save the day." Only he can't. Meg has to do it i...

Friday evening, Rachel Maddow pretty much rolled out the MSNBC playbook for the coming year. Trump is unstable, incompetent and dangerous. He was helped into office by enemy agents who are poised to meddle with us again. Republicans in Congress are so hell-bent on their extremist agenda that they're protecting him so he'll sign their bills into law. The only hope we have to stave off disaster is a massive Democratic victory in the 2018 elections. I can't really argue with any of those points, although I think they're being presented in a way that's too alarmist. But I don't need to be beaten over the head with them day after day for the next ten months. I'm also wary of pinning all our hopes for the future of civilization on a single election. Weren't we all doing that in 2016? How did that work out? Rather than sitting around obsessing over every fraction of a point in the latest opinion polls or whether every little tweet puts us one step ...

Nothing like a nightmare about Trump pushing The Button to kick off the New Year. I've had a marvelous holiday season too, starting before Christmas when I took Emma and her mom out to Vasquez Rocks, through a great Christmas Eve and into my adventures of this past weekend. And I've got to say, one thing that's made this week-and-a-half so nice is that I had so much less exposure to all things political. There's a lesson to be learned in that. (Both of those photos from Emma's mom, Angelique.) It seems pretty clear to me that for 2018, I should resolve to keep blocking out all things about what Trump is tweeting, whether the Russia probe is going to be shut down, who's going to control Congress, what abominable laws are trying to be passed, and so on. But that's not easy to do, and it won't get any easier with the midterm elections approaching. Nor is it something I necessarily should do. I can't live in a bubble, oblivious to what...