Asteroids and commerce

Like many people, I have been fascinated by the thought of asteroids whizzing around the sun (and occasionally close to, or into, Earth). When I was young I had a poster on my wall that included all the planets and two asteroids - Ceres (actually a dwarf planet) and Eros. Interestingly, although Ceres is the largest asteroid (at almost 1000 km in diameter) Eros is quite far down the list (and is only about 34 x 11 x 11 km).

Side note: there are some pretty good pictures of Eros (from the NEAR-Shoemaker mission) and some incredibly good pictures of Ceres (from the NASA Dawn mission). The Dawn mission also captured great pictures of Vesta, which is about 525km in diameter and the second most massive (and third largest) asteroid.

But the really 'valuable' asteroids could be quite different. (Unless there is something under the surface of, say, Ceres that has more value to us. Perhaps the bright spots on Ceres signal something there?)

But to get back on topic - I recently found a site that ranks asteroids by criteria such as 'most valuable', 'most cost effective' and 'most accessible', as well as giving information on their orbits and their next closest passes by Earth. Take a look at: http://www.asterank.com/. It seems like a pretty good informational site (outside of the rather speculative valuations).

Most of the 'most valuable' are not easily accessible, and many of the 'most accessible' are not valuable. The 'most cost effective' list ranks them by a combination of value and accessibility - ranking '1999 JU3' as the best bet. You can click on that row to see information about the asteroid and its orbit, etc. Or you can enter a name into the 'Lookup' field (hint: enter a few letters and then wait - it will then bring back a filtered list in the lookup field).

Some other interesting possibly mine-able asteroids:
1. One of the most massive metallic asteroid is probably ‘16 Psyche’ (could seriously damage the prices of Nickel, Cobalt and Iron)
2. Or ’21 Lutetia’ (would hit the same commodity prices)

I also saw that ‘2011 UW158’ is ranked as a very valuable asteroid for the Platinum in it. It just made a close pass by earth (http://www.space.com/30074-trillion-dollar-asteroid-2011-uw158-earth-flyby.html) but won't be back for almost 100 years. Also, if a 'trillion dollars worth' of platinum suddenly entered Earth's platinum market, I'm sure it would quickly be a tiny fraction of that!

(If looking up on the 'asterank' site, put ‘436724 (2011 UW158)’ in the lookup field)

#NoToTorontoOlympicBid number 3

OK - now I remember why I was against Toronto making an Olympic bid! It will cost me a lot of money and mean less for actually improving the city.

As promised in the last '#NoToTorontoOlympicBid' post, I read a couple more articles on the olympics and recommend you do too.

The first was an article from the Globe & Mail - 'Why Toronto Should Say No to the Olympics'. And it references this article by Richard Florida looking at the book by Andrew Zimbalist that shows why hosting mega-events is a bad deal for the city involved.

Perhaps we can just follow Boston's mayor's lead. And for a few hints on how to influence the result, see this article on How Boston Kicked Out the Olympics.

Namao Air Force Base - Air Show

Here are a number of photos from an (early 70's) visit to the Namao Air Force Base. If anyone can give a more exact date please let me know! In the meantime, I'll see if I can find the negatives that the photos came from and see if there is anything on them to give a better date.

Namao was always a fairly low-key place - at least, it wasn't in the news much! If you're looking for information on the base look at this Edmonton Public Library link, or (of course) your friendly neighbourhood Wikipedia entry for CFB Edmonton.

Namao is closed now, but at one time (see the first link) it had the fourth longest runway on earth and was a backup landing location for the Space Shuttle!

CT-114 Canadair Tutor

(Thanks to those who pointed out that it was not a CF-104 Starfighter. More than one reader of this blog!)

CT-114 Canadair Tutor

CF-115 Buffalo

Cockpit of an early Huey (I think) helicopter

CF-130 Hercules

Early Chinook helicopter(?)

Old and New Fort Saskatchewan - The Fort itself

I visited 'The Fort' recently and went inside the newly built reconstruction of the original 'Fort on the Saskatchewan'. Some very interesting information - and you can feel a little like you were really there just after it was built (around 1875).

Here's a photo from one corner of the (newly built) Fort.

And here's a much earlier photo from almost the same location.

A few differences are obvious - plastic bins and the picnic tables - but it's surprisingly close overall. The old photo was taken after the 11ft walls (stockade) were taken down and the original guard house (low building towards the middle of that picture) had been removed. Plus a more recent building shows up (to the left rear...the ice house as I understand from my newspaper correspondent from The Sturgeon Creek Post - a publication I recommend reading if you want to keep track of what's going on in The Fort. The Sturgeon Creek Post is also the original name of the NWMP post that became Fort Sask). A few other things are 'close' - the chimneys in the men's quarters, the height of the flagpole, and some minor building differences - but these could also be due to the difference in timing. It's not clear when the old photo was taken - I got it from here.

Finally, a picture that I liked from the junior officers quarters - makes sense that there would be buffalo hides on the beds but they still had a big impact when we opened the door and first saw them!

#NoToTorontoOlympicBid number 2

I did a little reading of some of the more moderate articles on the economics of holding the Olympics, and the results seem to be summed up by the following (from the New York Times article "Does Hosting the Olympics Actually Pay Off?")

1. The Olympics won’t make a country rich.

2. They’re not even good for tourism.

3. But they will make its people happy.

I'd quibble with that last one, but it does seem that it makes a lot of sports fans in the country happy and as long as they're not asked to pay for it directly (like Montreal), they're OK with the false economics, etc.

I personally think it is a major waste of money and perpetuates the old boy's club of the IOC (see my last post) rather than focusing on furthering amateur sport and international cooperation. Hard to say whether it's worse to spend 10's of millions of dollars (or roughly $100M in the case of Chicago for the 2016 games) and lose, or to spend that money and 'win'.

So now I'll read some of the really negative reviews and see what they say!

#NoToTorontoOlympicBid

All I can do is point to this post and ask that the one or two readers of my blog also fight any attempts by various promoters of the Olympics to take our money.

(OK, I *can* do more - and both hope I don't need to and hope it will be useful - if needed)

Here's the image from Jim's blog that none of you probably want to see:

Our lilac bush's spring growth

Took this first photo in mid-April, just as our lilac bush was starting to get into its spring growth.

It was nice to see something green starting out after a long winter!

Then, as I was looking at the lilac recently I wondered what this particular branch looked like now. It was hard to tell exactly which one it was, but I believe that it is this one:

(May not be exactly the same branch, but the new growth looked pretty similar on all of them. The stems have also changed colour making it harder to match.)

The new growth above this junction now measures about 60cm - that's roughly 2ft for those not yet comfortable with this new-fangled metric stuff - and that's after only 1 month!