The United States exports three times as much to Latin America as to China

The Weekly Address from the White House this week has done a bit of math for us:



"We now export more than three times as much to Latin America as we do to China, and our exports to the region will soon support more than two million jobs here in the United States. Brazil, the first stop on our trip, is a great example. In 2010, America's exports to Brazil supported more than 250,000 American jobs."

"Ahora exportamos más del triple a América Latina que a China, y nuestras exportaciones a la región pronnto respaldarán más de dos millones de empleos aquí en Estados Unidos. Brasil, la primera escala en nuestro viaje, es un gran ejemplo. En el 2010, las exportaciones de Estados Unidos a Brasil respaldaron más de 250,000 empleos en Estados Unidos."

To compare that to the GDP of China and Latin America in total, the easiest way is to ask Wolfram Alpha. It tells us that the GDP of Latin America is $3.9 trillion, while China's is $5.3 trillion. In other words, proximity results in four times more exports per dollar of total GDP when comparing the two (that is, in theory China's GDP would have to be four times that Latin America's for exports between the US and both regions to be equal). Something to keep in mind when talking with anyone you know with young children that is debating whether to send them to School A or School B and is pondering the merits of Spanish vs. Chinese or anything else.

On a related subject, I think I remember reading a paper a year or two ago saying that normalizing relations with Cuba would also create an instantaneous 30,000 jobs, mostly in Florida and related to the travel, banking and telecom industry.

Read more...

Planet-hunting Belgian-Chilean Trappist telescope now operational, takes first images

A relatively small (60 cm) but crucial telescope has just gone into operation - it's called Trappist and is Belgian but located in Chile and controlled automatically from the other side of the planet. What makes this telescope interesting is that it is devoted entirely to two things: 1) Detecting and characterizing extrasolar planets, and 2) studying comets. The third image here (and a few others here and there) on the telescope's site shows its size compared to that of a human.

For first light you always want to show off a bit, of course, and thus they have provided this image of the Tarantula Nebula:



Besides the excitement from the added ability to discover exoplanets, the other lesson to take away from an observatory like this is that pretty much any country is able to contribute to our overall knowledge of other planets. Compare this to the difficulty of simply sending up a rocket, as Korea's Naro rocket failed again yesterday in spite of it being the second attempt, made with Russian cooperation and the fact that Korea is one of the world's largest economies.

Read more...

Lt. Commander Data on 20 years with the Hubble Space Telescope, plus Chile wins the European Extremely Large Telescope

Here's a nice surprise, Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner) doing the narration for a short film on 20 years with the Hubble Space Telescope.



In other telescope news, the ESO (European Southern Observatory) has finally decided on the site for their next telescope, the European Extremely Large Telescope - it will be constructed in Chile, in a location that is shaping up to be a kind of Silicon Valley of astronomy. Right now the largest telescope we have is the Large Binocular Telescope which became operational in 2008, and is constructed of two mirrors of 8.4 m in diameter each giving a total collecting area of 111 m². The EELT, due to start in 2018, will have a single mirror of 42 metres in length, with a total collecting area of 1,300 m². The most exciting part about the new telescope would be the ability to measure the atmosphere of extrasolar planets.

2018 will also be an impressive year with the commencement of two other extremely large telescopes, the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope.

Telescopes of this size usually end up costing about $1 billion or so. For twice the cost you could get something like this (cancelled due to cost and technical difficulty in favour of the EELT) Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, with a phenomenal diameter of 60 - 100 metres and collecting area of up to 7,854 m².

Those tiny blips there are trucks.

Of course, the EELT is no slouch either.

Extrasolar planet hunting does, of course, take place using much smaller telescopes like HARPS (also located in Chile) which has a diameter of 3.6 metres and has discovered 75 extrasolar planets all by itself.

Read more...