Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

For most of my childhood, I lived right next door to Park Tudor School in Indianapolis, a lush, sprawling campus that used to be the Eli Lilly family's apple orchard and country retreat. My parents both taught there. As far as I was concerned, that meant we owned the place. My friends and I made up a Frisbee golf course around the campus. We went sledding on the hills in winter. We launched model rockets off the athletic fields. It was our back yard and playground for years. One time, my brother and I were invited to join a game of Capture the Flag some friends were planning to play on the campus after dark. The thought that such a game might not be a good idea never occurred to us. It was our back yard and our playground. Why couldn't we do it? Well, the police officers who showed up after about half an hour didn't see it that way. And they weren't impressed when I tried to tell them my parents worked there, so everything was all right. Imagine that! Th...

What a week it's been. People in day-job land have been checking on me and fretting about me, ever since the surprise news on Monday that I'm being replaced as Quality Manager and moved to the position of Senior Quality Engineer. Taking over the manager job will be the quality engineer from the Mexicali plant who's been coming up here periodically to help us out. I've actually been trying to get him relocated here permanently for the past year. As you might imagine, though, the way he's being moved here isn't what I expected. I was surprised, but I'm not really all that upset. Back in 2009, I got half my department taken away was saddled with writing instruction manuals after they laid off the technical writer - that upset me a lot more. This time, I'm taking it a lot better than some of the other people I've heard from. As I said, I've been wanting this guy to move here, so I think it's a good thing for the company to do it. Many...

Writing is hard. Writing well is harder, but so very worth it. I'm focused primarily on my biography series these days, but I have some fiction ideas that I think about when I get the chance. I've been reading some of my never-finished and unpublished work, too. Some of it is good, and makes me think I should go back to it sometime. The Eyes of the Enemy was put on hold twice, but still got finished and published. Maybe a couple of these other two stories can, too. But some of what I read makes me cringe, either at something I did that I've learned not to do or at something I did that I haven't figured out yet. And something else, too - it's made me realize how nearly two years in Trump's America have changed me. I'm a straight, white, cis-gendered man, and in America that means I'm the default setting. I could write every character as someone exactly like me, and that would be considered okay. And of course I've done that before. Whe...

I first sat down to write this entry the other day, but before I could get a word out, I was interrupted by a day-job crisis that put my entire premise to the test. Fortunately, I got through it in one piece. As I've pointed out before, the news media's business model depends on keeping your attention, so you'll stay tuned through all their commercials. One way they do that is by trying to convince you that something you value is about to be taken away. At the most basic level, they try to make you think your life is in jeopardy. That's where all those local TV news stories come from - "Can your pet hamster kill you? Details at eleven!" You see it in sports, too. As a lifelong fan of the Indy 500, I've been reading articles explaining why IndyCar racing is on death's door ever since the split between the Indy Racing League and CART - twenty-two years ago. You'd think surviving a decade would be long enough to get off the critical list, l...

I'm pretty sure this is the only time I'll ever quote Playboy magazine, so don't miss it. The January 1985 issue included an essay by James Baldwin, " Here Be Dragons ," in which he explored issues of sexuality and gender identity (decades before the current interest in non-binary identification) and related them to his own experiences. (If you want to check out the essay, please be aware that it contains pretty frank descriptions of adult situations. It was in Playboy , after all.) What struck me most was his assessment of what it means to be an American man: "The American ideal, then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden -- as an unpatriotic act -- that the American boy evolve into the complexity of ...

Channel Islands Restoration sent me a checklist of things I'll need on San Nicolas Island. It had a few surprises on it. Looks like I'll be making a few purchases before I go. But at least then I'll have the stuff for next time. They also sent along a set of rules for visiting the island. One of them really stood out. So no Kaepernicking. Well, it is a Navy base, after all. But then there was also this one. That was a heavier blow. I always take my camera with me when I go into the wilds, and on this trip I especially wanted to record as much as I could about the experience. At first, I thought about appealing to the organizers. I'm a children's author! I'm not interested in pictures of military secrets! How are pictures of plants and foxes going to jeopardize national security? But then I decided that would be acting a little too spoiled, so I will just make do without this time. There are restoration projects on islands that aren...

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...

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...

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...

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...

I've had a number of different blog post ideas cross my mind this past week or so, on various subjects related to the Trumpocalypse. Russian interference, racism, authoritarianism, white privilege, deception, inequality... the list goes on and on, to the point where you get tired just thinking about it. Even this post, where I'm telling you about how crazy and unsettle I've felt trying to write about these times, has gone through multiple versions. But it all comes back to something I realized while hiking last Saturday. I've realized it before, but it seems I need regular reminders. I was hiking back up Sisar Canyon and the Red Reef Trail, toward Topatopa Bluff. It was the same hike I'd done two weeks earlier, but it had been cloudy on my first trip and I hadn't been able to see the face of the bluff at all. This time, the bluff was in full view - and what a view it was - but the hot sun really wore me out. After five miles of climbing the six-mil...

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...