The Kudzu Files

When I was in Belfast 10 days ago, I saw the “peace wall” and got depressed. The progress I thought they had made really isn’t there. Basically, they’ve stopped killing each other, which is good, for sure, but you just get the feeling that it could all come crashing down with one incident. Our cab driver (we took the Black Cab Tour, which was great, BTW) told us he didn’t think that would happen, because they’ve come too far, but still…

But as I was reading the messages written on the wall, some good, some mundane, some just typical graffiti garbage, one small phrase near the ground jumped out at me:

“Please don’t stop trying”.

If I could find whoever wrote that, I would give them an enormous bear hug. It kept the spark from going out. Today, 5000 miles away, we need to write that message again.

“Please don’t stop trying”

When maniacs kill dozens of people with guns that are adored by the NRA and their gun-worshiping sheep, and they tell us new laws won’t stop it – please don’t stop trying.

When the president lies about everything, and his supporters stay with him regardless, and you think there is no hope for sanity in our political system – please don’t stop trying.

When it seems like the social progress we’ve made over the past fifty years is suddenly rolling back – please don’t stop trying.

Please don’t stop trying.

We are the ones who came after
We are the dreams of old people
In the days before they were old
The sun of other days
The stars of other nights
Belong to us now
Belong to us now
For a short time
Our dreams will visit like fireflies
On a summer night
They dance and swirl
And slip away to tomorrow

What happens when you chop up your Halloween jack-o-lanterns and toss them in the compost bin (yes, there's a 3-foot high bin under there)

A post shared by Harry Boswell (@hboswell54) on May 16, 2017 at 11:28am PDT

Walk outside some clear evening this summer, and look to the south (assuming you’re in the Northern hemisphere!). You’ll see a bright red star – Antares – and if you’re familiar with the night sky, you’ll recognize the constellation Scorpius. Look above Scorpius, into a fairly dark area without many bright stars. This is the constellation of Opiuchus (a bit of trivia here: Opiuchus is actually the 13th Zodiacal constellation, but having only 12 makes things simpler – sort of like how the Big Ten Conference continues to call itself the Big Ten even though it has somewhere between 12 and 16 teams, depending on which reports and rumors you believe). While you’re looking at Opiuchus, think about the mantra of some on the Right, that government can’t do anything right. And then think about this: somewhere in the patch of sky containing Opiuchus, a spaceship called Voyager 1 is continuing the journey begun on September 5, 1977; Voyager 2, actually launched 16 days earlier, and Voyager 1 had a combined cost of about $250 million (not including support in the ensuing years, which has raised the entire mission cost to somewhere around $900 million). Both spaceships have continued to perform important scientific missions as they hurtle in roughly opposite directions towards stars they won’t reach for 40,000 years. Their nuclear power plants will stop long before that – another 10 years or so – but as long as they have power they will continue to send data back to Earth. Currently, Voyager 1 is about 12,800,500,000 miles from Earth (that’s over 12 billion miles). Voyager 2 is about 10 1/2 billion miles in the opposite direction, in the constellation Pavo (the Peacock) in the southern hemisphere.

And we’re still learning. Data from Voyager 1 has revealed that the structure of the solar system isn’t quite what we thought. There’s a layer at the edge that wasn’t suspected. Is this important? Well, we don’t know, and won’t for a long time. Did 15th century Europe know that the islands they had discovered in the western ocean were one day going to be of vital importance to western civilization? Here’s what we do know: science matters, even if you try to deny the sometimes uncomfortable truth. And science at the level of the Voyager missions is only done at the national level. No private research lab is ever going to do science at this scale. Government does, and often does it very well even at the bleeding edge, and in these times of budget cuts and debt reduction, we would be wise to remember that.

No posts since May 1. I gotta do better in 2017.