Opinion Columns
Back before the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year, I happened to see a notice from the Iowa State Daily newspaper on Facebook. It noted that they were looking for opinion writers as the new school year began. At the time I considered myself "opinionated", but not too outspoken about them. Still, I figured "what the heck" and got in touch with the current opinion staff and started writing. I graduated in 2011 and closed my relationship with the Daily after making many friends, perhaps playing some role in the various ACP awards they won, and writing 46 different opinion columns with the paper. If you are looking at this page, I hope you can enjoy a few of these columns below and perhaps may enjoy any columns I write in the future.
We live in an incredible time. Our parents saw the development of the personal computer and the Internet. Will we have prolific maglev trains and space travel by the time we are in our 40s and 50s? Who knows?
In any case, what we do know is that our business and personal lives will make heavy use of science and technology to make our lives easier. One result of that fact is that most industries will require more science, technology, engineering or mathematics knowledge.
Years ago, astronomers dreamed up an amazing instrument that would be able to see 13 billion years into the past, just a short hop past the big bang (13.7 billion years back). It would orbit around the sun, held in place by both the sun and earth's gravity at a point where it would be tugged along behind us while remaining a discreet 1.5 million kilometers away. This observatory would be the Hubble's big brother with a 50 percent bigger mirror and a bunch of advanced features like a sun-shield and the ability to run its sensors at a frigid -388 degrees Fahrenheit.
"Beep beep beep ... beep beep beep."
Just 54 years ago this month, Sputnik beeped out a tune to millions of humans from miles above their heads. It forever changed the future of the earth and human technology — proving to people around the world that the sky was not the limit and allowing us to develop new technologies that would forever change the world.
Parking on the Iowa State campus — what a nightmare. I'm quite sure that if I got a group of seniors in an auditorium and asked those who have received parking tickets on campus to raise their hands, those with their hands down would be in the minority. Just about everyone that drives a vehicle on campus has purposefully or accidentally violated a parking lot rule at some time or another.
Following the events of Sept. 11, 2001, fear became the driver for the United States military's actions. The nation and the military wondered, "Who are these foreign men who would kill themselves in an attempt to murder thousands of Americans?" "Are there more of them?" "How can we stop them?"
In an attempt to gather as much information as possible as quickly as possible, the Pentagon and the White House decided that any valuable individuals they captured in Afghanistan and other areas abroad would be labeled "illegal combatants" rather than "prisoners of war" — allowing the military to argue that the Geneva Convention protections for prisoners of war do not apply.
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