Author: Robert Zimmerman

China finds SpaceX’s launch prices challenging

7:08 pm

Competition! China finds SpaceX’s launch prices low — and a challenge to meet.

Declining to speak for attribution, the Chinese officials say they find the published prices on the SpaceX website very low for the services offered, and concede they could not match them with the Long March series of launch vehicles even if it were possible for them to launch satellites with U.S. components in them.

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No deal

12:48 am

No deal. Key quote:

If Democrats are not going to do even minor surgery on Medicare and Medicaid and Republicans are not going to raise taxes, there is no hope of big budget deal to cut a deficit now running at 11 percent of gross domestic product.

And that raises another question. How long can the Federal Reserve continue financing these deficits? China, choking on U.S. debt, is reportedly beginning to divest itself of U.S. bonds. Japan will need to sell U.S. bonds to get hard currency to repair the damage from the earthquake and tsunami. And the Fed is about to end its QE2 monthly purchases of $100 billion in U.S. bonds. Where is the Fed going to borrow the $125 billion a month to finance this year’s deficit of $1.65 trillion, and another of comparable size in 2012? Bill Gross’ Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund, has sold all his U.S. bonds and begun to short U.S. debt. Pimco is betting that the value of U.S. Treasury bonds will begin to fall.

We may be about to enter a maelstrom.

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Congress removes wolf from endangered list

11:16 pm

Congress removes the wolf from the endangered list. From Senator Jon Tester (D-Montana):

“Right now, Montana’s wolf population is out of balance and this provision will get us back on the responsible path with state management. Wolves have recovered in the Northern Rockies. By untying the hands of the Montana biologists who know how to keep the proper balance, we will restore healthy wildlife populations and we will protect livestock. This provision is best for our wildlife, our livestock and for wolves themselves.”

I don’t know if Tester’s description of the situation in Montana is accurate (though I tend to rely on local expertise in these matters). However, to get an opposing viewpoint the article above goes to the Center for Biological Diversity, an organization I do know something about. In caving matters relating to white nose syndrome, CBD has pushed extremist and outright ignorant policy positions (trying for example to have all caves and mines on all public lands closed in order to protect bats, even though there is literally no evidence that such an action made sense). I would not trust their opinions under any condition.

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The WISE space telescope results go online

4:07 pm

The WISE infrared space telescope results are now online, for anyone to search.

Data from the first 57 percent of the sky surveyed is accessible through an online public archive. The complete survey, with improved data processing, will be made available in the spring of 2012. A predecessor to WISE, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), served a similar role about 25 years ago, and those data are still valuable to astronomers today. Likewise, the WISE legacy is expected to endure for decades.

You can hunt for new asteroids, comets, and galaxies here, with instructions on how to do it here.

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Taxing the rich will not solve the problem

12:54 pm

Because it is often claimed that we can solve our federal budget problems by closing loopholes and increasing taxes on the wealthy, I thought I’d share this video from Bill Whittle, dramatizing this Iowahawk essay.

We can argue all day about whether we should increase taxes on the wealthy, but that is not going to solve our debt problem. Even if we confiscated every penny of profit from every person or corporation earning more than million dollars a year, we would still not make the slightest dent in the federal deficit.

Our federal government is simply spending money it doesn’t have. We need to cut spending, and cut spending drastically, in order to gain some control over this problem.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to me the American people or Congress are yet willing to face this fact.

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Experiment fails to find dark matter

9:28 am

The uncertainty of science: An underground experiment in Italy has failed to detect dark matter, as theorized by scientists.

In a paper published online last night, the XENON100 researchers report three events detected during a 100-day run of the experiment last year that might have been due to dark matter1. However, as they expected to see between 1.2 and 2.4 background events — interactions mostly caused by a radioactive contaminant in the xenon — their result is statistically negative and therefore rules out the existence of many of the more strongly interacting and heavier WIMPs.

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