As I've mentioned here before, I wrote for a little more than a year, (ending in April 2022) on a steady basis, for a small operation that hoped to explain public affairs to young people -- pre-teens and early teens.
This operation created a small income stream for me ($400 a month) which nonetheless sometimes came in very useful when it arrived.
I lost this stream of income when the project closed down operations. Their site went down in the aftermath of the cessation of operations, but someone brought it back. With one cryptic exception there is nothing on it posted subsequent to early May of this year, when they ran out of the inventory of my work.
The site disappeared from its URL before May was done. Then it came back into existence briefly in August. I provided you in an earlier post with three samples of my work for it during that resurgence. Then the site disappeared again in early September. Now, as we get into October, it is back again. And again, I will use this brief opportunity to save something before it disappears again.
Three of my contributions from March of this year: one on health, one on science, one on politics. None is credited to me by name. They are all attributed simply to "Staff Writer." But they are my creations all. I was working within a format that required almost haiku-esque brevity of me on extremely complicated subjects, and I think I pulled it off pretty well.
---------------------------------
Health: The Latest Incarnation of the “War on Cancer” (ARPA-H)
The Story:
In mid March 2022, a new U.S. government agency came into existence, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). A spending bill that President Biden signed into law on March 15 includes $1 billion in funding for ARPA-H, intended to drive breakthoughs in the understanding, prevention, and treatment of Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and cancer.
Background:
A so-called “war on cancer” has been a staple of presidential administrations in the United States for decades. President Richard Nixon apparently first used that phrase, and in December 1971 Nixon signed into law the “National Cancer Act.”
The Obama administration, of which Biden was a part as Vice President, used the term “moonshot,” suggesting that the kind of concentrated money and energy that got Americans to the moon could get us to a healthier, and cancer-free, world.
In Pill Form:
Unfortunately, the reason presidents can keep announcing such programs is that certain diseases, cancer and the other two named in Biden’s announcement especially, have proven resistant to them. Cancer rates have fallen in recent decades, most likely as a consequence of the decline of tobacco smoking, which was still a once-ubiquitous habit. at the time Nixon signed the 1971 Act. But a direct attack on cancer … a cure … may still be distant.
Science: Chemical Engineering: Bonding and Nanoparticles
The Story:
Scientists at the University of Michigan have developed a new theory of bonding: specifically, about how nanoparticles bond to form crystals. There is an odd paradoxical quality to the new theory: it postulates that some bonding comes about because of entropy, the tendency of disorder to increase in the absence of expenditures of energy. How can this impulse-to-disorder be a glue for the ordered structure of nanoparticles? A proper explanation in this column is impossible, but their article, and its abstract, are available online.
Significance:
The scientists have published their conclusions in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Two of the key figures in this work have explained their findings in laymen’s terms in a press release. Sharon Glotzer, the Anthony C. Lembke Department Chair of Chemical Engineering, and Thi Vo, a postdoctoral researcher in chemical engineering, answered some questions about their new theory, emphasized that the theory of “entropic bonding” is important both theoretically and practically. Not only may it help humans understand the world better, it may help with building stuff, too.
Strange New Worlds:
“If entropy is helping your system organize itself, you may not need to engineer explicit attraction between particles—for example, using DNA or other sticky molecules—with as strong an interaction as you thought. With our new theory, we can calculate the strength of those entropic bonds,” said Glotzer.
South Koreans Vote for President
The Story:
South Korea, more formally known as the Republic of Korea, held its presidential election on March 9. Under South Korea’s law, all citizens over the age of 18 have the right to vote. Although a non-citizen registered in the relevant local constituency who has had a resident visa for three years or more has the right to vote in local elections, such residents cannot vote for the President.
Background:
The leading contenders for the office going into the polling date were generally considered to be: Lee Jae-myung, of the Democratic Party, and Yoon Suyk-yeol, of the People Power Party.
Both major parties are capitalistic in their economic policies. The Democratic Party presses for a more generous safety net than its opposition; the People Power Party complains that Democratic Party regulatory policies ties the hands of employer/managers, to the detriment of the public interest.
The Thing to Know:
Yoon Suyk-yeol of the PPP prevailed in a close count. In a concession speech the following day, Lee Jae-myung acknowledged the sharp polarization of opinion in the country. “I sincerely ask the president-elect to lead the country over the divide and conflict and open an era of unity and harmony,” he said.
Brevity is a feature of a world where no one wants to learn anything new, I.e., anything. Information may, of course, inform , affirm, disinform, discount or discredit. A few of us still value lifelong learning as a privilege, even obligation, of a life well lived: meaning remains important to those individuals. The rest shadow the herd closely.
ReplyDelete