Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• Sorry for the silence here; I rarely go a week without posting but a lot of things ganged up on me. Many have noticed that I'm gradually moving toward posting less often but doing longer posts. I've discovered that it doesn't take me a great deal more time to write more

Comments

[kevinnickerson]

Guyfie's been working on the Phase Change memory for what seems like 10 years. It's always been just a year or two away. I wouldn't hold my breath, but he'll probably disagree.

[johnridley]

A friend-of-a-friend did his masters thesis on phase-change memory at Michigan Tech...somewhere around 1980. ISTR it was about 10 years away back then. It's probably about 10 years away now too. Fusion power, anyone?

[anonymous]

Accoring to Wikipedia, flash memory can be engineered for significantly better endurance (1 million cycles) - or not (100 thousand cycles).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Endurance

I recall standing out in the front yard as a kid trying to follow the instructions in the newspaper for seeing an Echo (Echo 1, if my memory has not degraded too much). Instead we saw something that seemed to be going the wrong way. We never had any idea what it was.

RH in CT

[johnridley]

check out www.heavens-above.com - you can find all sorts of things passing overhead. Iridium flares are fun.

What's really fun is to get the exact timings of satellites that are going to pass into the Earth's shadow while overhead, get a timing, and set your watch very exactly. Then you can give a countdown. I saw someone do this at a public astronomy event once. He didn't tell anyone what he was counting down to, so a lot of people just thought he was being goofy. Then he hit "zero" and the satellite we were watching blinked off. He got a bunch of "wow, cool!" comments out of that.

[johnridley]

There are a couple of guys who sell software that runs on a PC and controls computer guided scopes, to track satellites. I saw an article about them several years ago. They combined this with taking video through the eyepiece, giving them 30 exposures a second. Then they used software to select the cleanest images with momentarily good seeing, and stacked the exposures. The resulting images were good enough that you could easily see the profile of satellites, and could even see the painted sections of the space shuttle and the open bay doors.

They started putting images of unidentified satellites on their web page along with ephemeris. Some guys in suits stopped by and asked them to please stop doing that.