More on China's ASAT test

One thing I and most media stories didn't mention about the Chinese ASAT test was the debris from the test (all those small bits from the smashed satellite) is already causing concern for those who have other satellites up there. If some of the debris crosses another satellite's path (or the international space station for that matter), it could be bad. Small pieces could damage solar panels while larger pieces can act as their own ASAT weapon and take the satellite off line.

Hat tip Argghhh!!!

Computers at the speed of light

Scientists said yesterday that they had achieved a long-sought goal of slowing waves of light to a relatively leisurely pace and using those harnessed pulses to store
an image.

Physicists said the new approach to taming light could hasten the arrival of a futuristic era in which computers and other devices will process information on optical beams instead of with electricity, which for all its spark is still cumbersome compared with light.

I'll I can say about this is WOW. Ok, and hope when computers are run by light instead of electrons, they have an operating system that is stable enough to run it.

Hat tip Lucianne.

Rail Guns coming??

The Navy has tested a rail gun in Virginia and is happy with the results.

If this works as well in a full scale model as it did in the test, the consequences are huge. No more explosives stored in the ship's magazines. No more surface to surface or surface to air missiles with ranges of less then 250 miles needed. The cost of firing the weapon will decrease from $1 million (for a Tomahawk) a shot to the cost of a bullet (a few hundred at most). No warhead is needed in the shot because of the velocity of the bullet.

Strategy Page also has an interesting write up on the subject.

This technology won't be available for a number of years still and a test of concept does not make a weapon system, but the development continues.

Looking forward to seeing more on this.

Hat tip Lucianne

Thursday Items

Two items in the news I wanted to talk about today.

The first is a story from Spaceref.com on China's successful test of an ASAT weapon. Yep, the Chinese got a kinetic energy ASAT weapon and were able to test it on one of their old weather satellite. The US also has an ASAT weapon but we only tested it once, think in 1985 and now it is supposed to be against international law to test ASAT weapons because it creates more junk in space which can damage other satellite or the international space station. But I guess since the US didn't do the testing its not newsworthy.

The scary thing is, if the PRC does have an effective ASAT program, a large part of the US smart bombs are now vulnerable. They rely on GPS guidance and if the Chinese take out the GPS satellite, our expensive JDAMS are now just dumb bombs.

Hat tip Lucianne

The second item is about Senator Obama. He is running for President. His father was a Muslim and according to Islamic Law, that makes Sen. Obama a Muslim. However, Sen. Obama claims to be a Christian. Now the penalty for leaving the Islamic faith is death in many countries. It will be interesting to see if anyone will ask him if he will feel threatened visiting places like Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, or Turkey. It will be interesting to see if CAIR will agree that people have the right to choose their religion and that includes the right to change their religion without fear of persecution as stated in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Will be interesting to see what develops.

Hat tip Lucianne

Have a good Day

Wednesday

Well, had a story I wanted to comment on and link to, but IE crashed and now I can't find the dumb thing. Oh well, such is life.

I do have a favor to ask, will the person who turned off the heat from the sun PLEASE turn it back on? Its been FREEZING here in So Cal for the last week.

Ok, ok, for you folks in Denver, Chicago etc. stop laughing. When it gets below 60 F, its cold in CA. Our houses are not built to survive high 30 F weather. And So Cal residences basically don't know how to drive in the rain, if there is any ice, you don't want to be on the road.

Yesterday (Tuesday), went outside during the day, bright sunny day and it was still cold. Why isn't the sun working???

Hope your staying warm and hopefully I'll have something more profound to say tomorrow.

Oil Prices and the local price for gasoline

I saw it again.

A Bloomberg article said crude oil fell to a 19 month low or $51.21 a barrel. On the comments section at Lucianne.com, someone asked (paraphrased) why do gas stations raise the price immediately when prices increase but take a while to lower the price when oil prices go down?

Welcome to Econ 101.

The basic answer (as the station owners admit to on TV), when the price of oil increases, they raise prices on anticipation of more expensive fuel in the future. The don't want to lower prices when oil prices fall because they already have the more expensive gasoline in their storage tanks they need to sell first.

And folks need to remember its not just the local gasoline station setting the price. The distributor and the refinery all adjust their prices based on what the future costs of the material will be and adjust their prices accordingly.

The oil industry isn't the only one to practice this type of pricing either. The computer industry follows the same logic. When a memory factory in Taiwan burns down (as what happened a number of years ago), the price for RAM went up over night. Even though the RAM on store shelves didn't change from before or after the fire, but everyone knew that RAM would be in short supply until the factory could be fixed and put back into production. So everyone started to buy RAM and the shortage everyone feared developed because of the panic buying. Of course stores will raise prices if something is selling out quickly and they are not likely to be able to order new supplies, the laws of supply and demand apply. Demand goes up, so do prices. However once the panic ended, the industry saw there was still enough memory even with the factory off line so the price started to come down on RAM. However, for the people and stores who purchased the high price RAM, they wanted to get rid of it without losing too much money so they tried to hold prices steady while the old RAM was sold.

Bottom line, if people think there will be a shortage of the item or a price increase for an item in the future, they will raise prices on their current stock so they will be better able to pay for the higher prices and to make some additional profit. When the shortage turns into a glut, people will try to hold prices at the old level until they can sell the existing inventory at the high price and then lower prices for the new cheaper inventory. If another vendor has the same or similar item and can lower prices faster (by holding less inventory, like Dell Computer for example) then the companies holding the high priced inventory will take a bath on liquidating their inventory just to keep market share. Its called capitalism.

That's enough rambling for today.

More dust

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