Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

As of tomorrow, I will be working from home for the duration of the coronavirus emergency. I'm still on call to go back to the factory if I'm needed, but I don't think that's likely. Both my boss and the one other person in the Quality office think they'll be more productive if they keep coming in to work. That puzzled me at first, but as I was planning and organizing for my time away, a thought came to me. Most people don't know how to do this. They think about working from home, and they don't even know where to start. But I have, and I do. I spent about a year in 2001-2 writing three books, one of which, Liberty Girl , is still in print. Some other people in the office have worked from home before too, and they're all set to go. Others, not so much. If you're one of those people suddenly finding themselves tossed into the deep end of the work-from-home world, here are a couple of tips: #1 - CNN has an off button. Use it. (Okay, t

Suppose Jesus Christ really was who he said he was. I know not everyone who reads me believes that, but work with me here. If Jesus really was who he said he was, then he could have placed himself on any throne he wanted, anywhere in the world, at any time in history. He could have made himself Caesar. He could have put himself on the throne of Genghis Khan or Ramses II. He could have ruled from Tenochtitlan or Constantinople. He could have placed himself in Buckingham Palace or the White House, the Kremlin or the Forbidden City. But instead, he chose to be a peasant from a conquered people, in a backwater of the Roman Empire. He chose to be a nobody from nowhere. What does that tell us? When I was at Dacor, back in the 90s, I used to think that if I worked my way up the corporate ladder, then I could fix everything when I got to the top. I could put a stop to the ridiculous project schedules and make sure we had proper time and resources to get new products right the firs

I'm really tired of feeling helpless. I don't really make New Year's Resolutions, but there are definitely some changes I need to make. I have so many different writing ideas in my head, but I've never been able to work on more than one at a time. It's one of the main frustrations about having to work a day job, because I feel like I'd be able to write so many more of my ideas with the additional time. A year ago, I told myself that if I couldn't write more than one project at a time, I could at least make notes for future books while working on my current one - but not even that has worked. I kept waiting for it to happen, when what I needed to do was make it happen. So I took this weekend off from my Ada Lovelace biography - now in its final chapter - and did some reading and note-taking. I didn't make all that much tangible progress, but I feel like I learned a lot about how to put stories together, what I'll be capable of while I'm

Writing about Victorian women is hard. You have to fight through all sorts of competing agendas to figure out what really happened in their lives. I first noticed it when I wrote my Florence Nightingale biography a year and a half ago. The previous biographies I read had radically different takes on her life, and especially her relationships with her mother and her sister. One book wanted to make her mother the bad guy, responsible for Florence's misery before she was allowed to go into nursing. Another wanted to make her sister the bad guy, and another wanted both. A number of the books I looked at and discarded wanted to turn Florence into a paragon of caring - but properly submissive - Christian womanly virtue. Florence was actually a Unitarian, and if she'd been submissive, we'd never have heard of her. Then I found the wonderful online archive of Florence's papers, established and maintained at Canada's University of Guelph, and it revealed other thi