SpaceX’ next launch attempt has apparently been slipped to mid-February, due to a thrust-vector control issue. The static test firing will still occur this weekend, though.
Space Law Bleg
Did the Chinese violate any treaties about not making messes in space when they destroyed their own weather satelllite? My dim understanding is that this issue remains unsettled in the Liability Convention, due to an inability to agree on a definition of the word “debris.” Any space lawyers out there more up to date?
I’d think that, at a minimum, if any of the bits strike someone’s satellite, or ISS, that the Chinese could be held liable under the OST. If it could be proven that it resulted from this event, that is (probably a difficult thing to do).
Order Now
Frank J. has a new book out
It’s a compilation of many of his blog posts for the past few years. I guess I should finish mine.
Molecular Machinery
Behold: molecules that can walk and deliver payloads in a straight line. This could lead to some interesting breakthroughs.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here are some interesting pictures of semi-conductor junctions and charge carriers, at the nano-scale:
“There’s no major surprises here,” says Andreas Heinrich of IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. “But the fact that they are actually imaging the electric properties is a big step forward.” Surprises may show up when de-vices shrink below around 50 nanometers, Heinrich says, because dopant atoms will be so scarce that their individual positions may affect the de-vice’s function. Tomihiro Hashizume of Hitachi’s Advanced Research Laboratory in Hatoyama, Japan, says the ability to see precisely how charge carriers move “will be indispensable for the further progress of de-vice miniaturization.”
[Update a little after 11 Eastern]
The scientists are designing the 250-micron de-vice to transmit images and deliver microscopic payloads to parts of the body outside the reach of existing catheter technology.
It will also perform minimally invasive microsurgeries, said James Friend of the Micro/Nanophysics Research Laboratory at Australia’s Monash University, who leads the team. The researchers hope the de-vice will reduce the risks normally associated with delicate surgical procedures.
The piezoelectric approach seems promising.
How much further behind will be nanobots?
Continuing Obfuscation
Brian Dempsey persists in his folly, in comments.
OK, Brian. You claim that SS1 cost five to ten million dollars per flight. So riddle me this: if Burt had decided to fly SS1 one more time, do you claim that he therefore would have had to come up with five to ten million dollars more to do so?
If so, why?
If not, then how much do you think that he would have had to come up with, and in that case, what was your original point, which was comparing SS1 cost to other suborbital vehicle costs (i.e., apples and kumquats). Wasn’t the intent of your mistaken posting to attempt to wrongly persuade people that SS1 is not a substantially cheaper vehicle to operate?
You may think that the difference between marginal and average costs is meaningless, but people who actual understand launch economics (and economics in general) do not.
Give It Up, Folks
This guy says we’re not going to colonize space.
Suffice it to say I find his “arguments” uncompelling, even if I were Catholic.
For one thing, he conflates advocates of space colonization with advocates of people looking for ET, as though the two things had anything to do with each other. He also deploys the foolish Antarctica analogy. He should stick to theology.
Life Under The Bush Debacle
Heh:
Let
They Should Have Been Forewarned
Mark Steyn makes a good point:
And yet the media came within a whisker of pulling him across the finish line. If it
More On Born To Believe
Michael Novak writes about prayer. His example of Sartre is just more evidence for my thesis, I think. If I’ve ever prayed in my life, it was only as a very young (pre-school) child, and then only because I was told I was supposed to. I don’t ever recall any sense that there was anyone home when I did so, and I haven’t done so since the age of five or so.
As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, he tried hard all his life to be a serious atheist, but even he felt himself breaking out in thanksgiving to God for certain beautiful days, certain stunning events. Of course, he then withdrew these “prayers,” but he quite recognized the naturalness of the impulse in himself. He wrote that being atheist is in practice much harder than many let on. One needs to stay on watch at every moment against little surrenders. The world so often seems “as if” there is a God.
Despite the fact that he reasoned himself into atheism, he was a natural-born believer. I’ve never felt an impulse such as that he describes, and the world has never seemed “as if” there is a God to me.
[Update a few minutes later]
Oh, and just to make clear, nothing in either of these two posts should be construed as an argument either for, or against, the existence of God. If God exists, He does so entirely independently of my, or anyone else’s beliefs about Him.
Errrr…unless, of course, you think that God exists for those who believe, and doesn’t for those who don’t. Which may actually be the closest thing to the truth.
A Magic Bullet?
Conventional wisdom has long been that there are many types of cancers, and that we won’t come up with a single “cure for cancer”–that there will be many different treatments for different problems. But some researchers think that they may have in fact found a low-cost drug that cures many types of cancer, with few side effects.
This seems like pretty big news.
[Via Geek Press]