Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

There's an often far-too-brief window in a child's life, around the tween years, when the universe opens up before them and reveals its wonder and glory and magic and mystery in ways they hadn't realized before - and often, they respond to the power that opens up around them by finding their own power within themselves. Those years are where stories like Stranger Things or The Hunger Games come from, or E.T. a generation earlier, or even the Oz franchise a century ago. In Japan, they've been celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Boogiepop franchise, a series of light novels that set the standard for the light novel genre that came alive in the 2000s. The story is about an ordinary, mild mannered girl named Miyashita Touka, who becomes a mysterious supernatural hero named Boogiepop and battles threats to the world. One big difference from the typical superhero story is that Touka is completely unaware of Boogiepop's existence, and it's never completel...

After this past week, I needed something to restore my hope for the future. This afternoon, I found it. I have a new hero, too - Dr. Serena McCalla of Jericho High School on Long Island, champion science fair coach. That's my brother's turf. I wonder if either he or my sister-in-law knows her. It's been quite a while now since I realized that I couldn't do anything about the mess our country is in right now, and that my attention and my energies would be of more use if I focused them on my books. Recent events have only confirmed that belief, and now the election is just a few weeks away. But it's been really hard to tear my attention away from the unending disaster that's been unfolding. Things being as bad as you thought they'd be, and then some, is hard not to think about. Fortunately, there's this little documentary called Science Fair . It follows a group of students as they qualify for and then participate in the 2017 The Internatio...

Wow, look at that. It's been weeks since my last post here, and I only posted once in all of June. I've just gotten back from my annual July 4 Indiana trip, where I tried to minimize my social media exposure. I think it was good for me. I've been thinking a lot lately about how much I want to interact with this electronic beast we've created together. Right before my trip, I made what I plan to be my final post on my old LiveJournal. I was surprised by the response it got - or rather, I was surprised it got any response at all, given that I hadn't posted there since last October. At the moment, I'm working on the second of my Mathematical Lives biography series, about Florence Nightingale and her advances in the field of statistics. When she was in her early 20s, she hadn't yet decided to become a nurse. She felt a spiritual calling to do something for the poor, but she hadn't yet figured out what it was. At the same time, her family ex...

(Not to be confused with "Girls Gone Wild," which is a topic for some other blog to write about...) Trying to forge your own writing path is hard, and it gets me down sometimes. This morning, for instance, although I'm better now. For those of you tuning in late, I've been trying to develop a way of storytelling that communicates math and science concepts, or at least inspires enough interest in them for kids to go and find out more for themselves. One thing that's hard about it is not having anything to compare myself to. Yeah, yeah, I know - "What part of 'forging your own path' did you not understand?" I knew what I was getting into, but that doesn't make it easy. One of the big reasons I've gotten into anime and other Japanese programming so much is that it's one of the few places where I can find at least a few shows that point toward what I'm trying to do myself. On Japanese TV, you can see random references to the...

I'm not sure I've ever gone this long without a journal update. The week-long audit I've spent more than a year preparing for begins tomorrow. Getting ready for it has been hampered by other craziness in the day-job world, and I haven't had the mental energy to do much else. I've gotten so out of my writing mindset that I feel like I can't even put a decent blog post together, let alone anything else. So today I'm going to do something low-pressure and fun, to get my momentum going again. I give you... The Anime Nerd Girls of Science! Five female anime characters I've come across who take science more seriously than their American counterparts. That is, if they even have American counterparts. #5) Senomiya Akiho, Robotics;Notes The "Science Adventure" series of visual novels and anime series had to have at least one character on the list. My first thought was Makise Kurisu from Steins;Gate , but she's too much of a male ...

Okay, it hasn't happened yet, but that hasn't stopped kids from wondering what space is like, and it hasn't stopped teachers from wanting to teach them. In the latest edition of the internet radio program, The Space Show , host David Livingston talks to the authors of a new book, Kids to Space Mission Plans: An Educator's Guide . As the name suggests, it's all about how teachers can put more space-related materials into their classrooms. I picked up a copy of the first Kids to Space book at Worldcon a couple of years ago, and it would have been really handy when I was writing Lunar Pioneers . The broadcast is available for download, so be sure to check it out. And what will those kids do when they grow up and become astronauts? Space.com has a new article describing ideas currently floating around for the first permanent lunar station. The forerunner to Clementine Colony, perhaps? Be sure to check that out, too.