Friday, September 24, 2010
Japan today announced that it is releasing the captain of a Chinese fishing
boat arrested two weeks ago in disputed territorial waters of two
uninhabited islets you've never heard of in the East China Sea. China
quickly declared economic war, suspending shipment to Japan of dysprosium,
a rare earth metal of which youve also never heard. Dysprosium is highly
valued for its magnetic coercivity, a property of which youve also
probably not heard. Dysprosium is important in the production of hybrid
cars, such as the Toyota Prius. So why do rare earths have to come from
China? They don't; rare earths (the lanthanide series plus scandium and
yttrium) are actually fairly abundant in the Earth's crust, but 20 years
ago China began marketing rare earths at well below production cost,
forcing mines outside China to shut down, creating a monopoly. For other
nations, including Japan, to resume mining would involve consierable
delay. The word "dysprosium" is derived from Greek meaning, "difficult to
get at."
Boeing announced that its going into the space-tourism business with Space
Adventures to take astronauts, who seem to have little else to do, to the
ISS along with tourists who have way too much disposable income. The story
in the NYT last week said this would "bolster the Obama vision for NASA."
That part of the story must be wrong Mr. President, your vision is grander
than that. Since the space race is long over, you may be worrying about
what to do with the astronaut corps, as well as that goofy pile of hardware
we put in low-Earth orbit for reasons now forgotten. To help, I skipped
lunch today to make you a things-to-do list: 1) send DSCOVER to the L1
point, it's way past time; 2) drop the ISS in the Philippine trench before
someone else gets hurt; 3) commit a number of large telescopes to
identifying potentially Earth-crossing objects and to refining their
trajectories; 4) forbid astronauts to go near Mars, although a robotic
sample-return mission would be nice; 5) install a sonar on Europa to look
beneath its frozen ocean; 6) start putting together a giant segmented
telescope at the L2 point to study extrasolar planets; additional segments
can be added by future generations. Let me know when you've finished the
list and I'll skip another lunch.
An op-ed by Roger Scruton in The Wall Street Journal this morning was
titled, "Memo to Hawking: Theres Still Room for God." An English
philosopher, Scruton is a visiting scholar at the ultraconservative
American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. "Almost no one," he
writes, "believes there is a rational scientific theory that tells us how
the universe emerged from nothingness." No one, that is, except those that
might be expected to know, physicists, who labor to make such a theory
possible. In addition to Kant, Scruton invokes Newton and Einstein to make
his point, but unlike philosophy, physics is tightly bound to observation.
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