I haven’t had much to say lately. Neither here nor on social media (which I seldom use, anyway). My words are no longer at home outside of my head. Where do they go? What value to they carry? To whom do they intend?

I’ve been hyper-focused on my research project and team at ASU, building a mathematical model of an off-world habitat and community. My work at LIGO has slowed, but remains in motion. Mostly guiding, in a supporting role. With the help of my high school physics prof Dan Heim, we are preparing the Cave-Cassegrain telescope to ship to Tanzania, the one I drove from Wisconsin back to Arizona a few weeks ago.

I am settling into some semblance of a routine, now that Colleen and I share a house in Flagstaff. Runs every-other-morning from here around Buffalo Park and back. Home made fruit smoothies, fresh eggs from Nikki’s chickens on the east side of town, then work from my shed-office, a tiny tin-roofed structure built from lumber recycled from two generations earlier. Interior sideboard are covered with newspapers from the 1800s. When I need a break, I walk around the space (4 paces long, 2 paces wide) and journey back in time.

I am experimenting with crabapple pies. Colleen continues to cook incredible meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She is a natural with food. We eat incredibly healthy, yet both crave garden-fresh food knowing we have succumb to store-bought produce that always fails in comparison.

This was my summer to begin construction of a home on my land outside of Moab. But recent alterations to the C&Rs have raised confusion and tension. My ideal, modest mountain cabin may not be accepted, for it does not uphold the neighborhood that is leaning toward half million dollar homes. Legal language has been employed instead of neighborly consideration, despite my best attempts at personal communication. While the land remains astounding, I question if this is where I want to live, to raise a family. I should not have to seek legal approval to build a greenhouse or children’s playground when the nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away. I cannot help but see parallels between our small microcosm of the larger, over-developed world. Houses are sized not according to personal need nor their impact on the environment, but by the need to increase the value of the investment. This establishes a contest between frequently opposing forces. Development almost always wins.

The issues on the border are crushing to me. I fight back tears as I listen to the news. Having worked on the border with No More Deaths (https://www.kaistaats.com/blog/2010/06/no-more-deaths) I feel the pain of the situation deep inside. I contemplate forgoing a vacation and instead learning if my organizational and computer skills could somehow be applied, a database and image recognition algorithms to help reunite children with their parents.

Today, I must remain focused. Three calls with ASU research team members (ignoring that it is a Sunday), editing a film proposal, and the final submission of my book proposal for MIT Press.

A few paragraphs from my book, “When Stars Collide” (working title)

This is the realm of multimessenger astronomy, the amalgamation of instruments each designed to witness a cosmic event though a unique point of view. Not unlike seeing the human body from the outside, optical light refracting from clothing and skin, an x-ray image looks past the superficial to the inside. Add ultrasound, CAT, and fMRI and we have a multimessenger means to probe the interior as we do the vast exterior of the cosmos with telescopes.

[snip]

What makes astronomy so exciting is that while you anticipate one thing, you are often met by another. It is not that the laws of physics are being broken, rather that our understanding of the laws is being challenged and expanded. What we did not expect catches us off guard, keeps us humble, and reinforces a childlike sense of the mystery and magic of the incredibly vast universe in which we reside.

[snip]

Franco was annoyed that I had not kept up with the LIGO email lists, that we could not reflect on this together. I realized my mistake, for I had missed the live unfolding of something extraordinary. But what we didn’t know then was that just three days later there would be another detection event, this one a total game changer.

[snip]

This confirmed that the signal was real. It could be seen with an unaided human eye above the background noise in the data from both Hanford and Livingston. At that point, all skepticism disappeared and a chant erupted in the telecon chat: “Send the alert!” “Send the alert!” “Send the alert!”

The alert went out to hundreds of astronomical observatories around the world, partners who had for years waited for just such an opportunity. This started it all. This was the birth of multimessenger astronomy.

I have all but lost my philosophy. It lingers, here and there, a remnant of its once prominent place in my daily routine. The words used to describe something deeper, a connection to more than the mundane are now missing from my vocabulary. I can discuss algorithms, programming paradigms, and the missing depth of themes in modern film, yet I feel next to nothing. That upwelling, that hidden source of power, angst and rhyme has eluded me for months at a time.

In daily conversation I find that what I say has almost no impact, not on me nor those with whom I speak. Just words. Just phrases. A kind of auto-complete. Yet inside there is a depth that has not been tapped since I departed South Africa in 2015 and moved back to the States. I seemed to have left that part of me behind that listens more than I do speak, contemplates more than I generate, and creates more than I mitigate.

Productive I remain, checking off items on my list every day. Yet closer to that which I desire … I remain at a distance for my goals are amorphous, ambiguous, and ever set to change. Only with a foundation set in philosophy, some undercurrent of constant flow and direction does everything I do carry the subtle underpinnings of a belief system, a philosophy of hope and change.

Maybe it is time to read the classics again, to be reminded of the words of those who have come before. I need to allow the stories, the poems, the rhymes of many generations to settle into me, to again become integrated into who I am such that when I speak, I speak with the depth and conviction not of a single entity, but of a whole.

It is time to read more, write more, sing more–to no longer fail for a loss of words.

Future generations will look back on this time and place and see us as selfish and corrupt, as barbarians who were year after year, election after election willing to put congressional desires for power and control before the lives of those they claim to represent.

As one of the high school survivors shared, “We are survivors of a cruel and silent nation, a nation where we do not live out the true meanings of our creed. When will we as a nation understand that non-violence is a way of life for a courageous people … we are here to fight for love and peace. As Dr. Martin Luther King said, ‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Violence cannot drive out violence. Only peace can do that. Death cannot drive out death. Only proactive life can do that.”

To not directly address the issue of this nation’s addiction to violence is to perpetuate a state of insanity that future generations will look upon as we do now electric shock therapy, castration of those with learning disabilities, and witch trials. Looking back we will see clearly how inconceivable it is to reduce the use of weapons through the application of more weapons. We are on the verge of curing cancer, building synthetic thinking machines, and walking on the surface of Mars. At the same time our congressmen and women would rather watch hundreds of school-age children be gunned down than admit they were wrong to accept overt monetization of our democratic process for the increase of their personal wealth and power.

We will some day look at those who ignorantly repeated the phrase “Guns don’t kill, people do” and say simply, shame on you.

The first death associated with a fully autonomous vehicle occurred Saturday night in Tempe, Arizona, as reported by the Associated Press. While it is not yet determined what happened, and if a human controlled vehicle might have resulted in the same unfolding, this raises a number of questions about how we should now and will over time learn to deal with the death of a human due to computer error.

For me, it feels different than when a human kills a human due to drunk driving or not paying attention while behind the wheel. It feels wrong. And yet, the theory is that if all vehicles were self-driving, the 40,000 vehicular deaths per year would be reduced to almost none. To tabulate lives this way is to reduce humans to a body count, even if it the portrayal of saved lives is accurate.

For our society to accept that a computer mistake, not a human one will be acceptable is going to take a while. How will autonomous vehicle companies deal with law suits? Will the car company as a whole, the supplier of the cameras, sensors, or software designer be responsible? When a person is killed due to an intoxicated driver or distraction we blame that individual and perhaps society for allowing substance abuse or texting to continue. But when a computer is at fault, a system designed to be faster and safer than a human, will we still seek to blame or simply justify the error by running the numbers?

It seems we have grown afraid of silence.

Despite the increasing isolation, we no longer know how to be alone.

We now talk to our computers, to our cars, to the machines that provide our music and to our phones. Talking, talking, always talking. Yet, we no longer longer just talk to each other.

It seems we have grown afraid of silence.

It seems we don’t want to be alone.

There are as many faces as there are emotions, each powerful for what it conveys. Yet we wear them as though for the first time, unaware of their power to affect those we love.

If our smiles are the heat of summer and tears the rain of spring. If our naked bodies wrapped in blankets are autumn preparing for winter, then we can embrace each season as an integral part of the cycle, and look forward to what each brings.

When we live in fear, we see only failure.
When we fail, we protect ourselves.
When we are protected, we feel afraid.

And we spiral down,
  down,
    down,
      until we have pushed the one thing we hold dear

        o
       v
      e
      r

      t
      h
      e

      e
      d
     g
     e

As with so many of us who feel a kind of deep pain when injustice is served, I have struggled to make sense of what unfolded this past two months. What I witnessed often felt too far removed from my own experience to present anything more than a repeat of what had been said by experts in history, psychology, and politics.

Now, it seems, the pot is about to boil. Perhaps it is time to release the pressure and address the pain. It is time to acknowledge that a latent, mostly silent, large minority of individuals desire to speak their mind. And what their mind has to say is “I no longer feel in control,” or perhaps, “I no longer feel important.”

In a world where the generational demographics are changing, where the borders are no longer clear, there resides a growing sense of “What about me?” When a leader focused entirely on himself says “Make American great again” he implies “I want to be in control” where we seldom feel empowered to do anything.

It became implicitly clear on election night that I live in a bubble, surrounded by those born with the empathy gene switched on. A blessing or a curse, it is difficult to determine at times. My friends, colleagues, and peers all in disbelief at such an overt expression of anger, bigotry, and fear. Not since Woodrow Wilson and the segregation of the White House staff have we seen this rise to the office of the president.

Should we be surprised? Dare we expect a consciousness rising to have established a new equilibrium since 1969? We remain a product of our DNA and evolution does not work with such haste. We are not yet arrived to a social paradigm in which those born without the expression of xenophobia carry the upper-hand.

Until that day, we must live with the potential of radical, even bipolar change.

But when more than one million people stand in peaceful protest against one man, calling for equal rights for all humankind, that is a kind of stirring the pot that might just make this president worth his crimes.