LocalFluff

@XKCD I only travel with my hat and an extra pair of under wears,

Star Wars I, edited scene: "-Emperor, your galaxy is... it's a dwarf galaxy." "-Kill all astronomers and revive Fred Hoyle! My galaxy is the entire universe!"

Should SpaceX paint the Starship red and white like Tintin's Moon rocket, or keep it all chromed like Flash Gordon's one? I think this is an engineering dispute that needs to be resolved. I vote for Tintin. Tesla red.

I don't get it how to upload images here!

Last report from NASA's control room on the Insight landing: <a href="http://tinypic.com?ref=2tcte" target="_blank"><img src="http://i67.tinypic.com/2tcte.jpg" border="0" alt="Image and video hosting by TinyPic"></a> tinyurl.com/InsightBaxter

Concerning astronomy in the history of art, John Milton's great epic Paradise Lost is filled with references to astronomy, a hot topic in the 17th century. In Book 8 there's plenty of lovely language about it. youtube.com/watch?v=sd_51YnigWg&feature=youtu.be&t=91

What music with a "spacy feeling" to it can you recommend? From science fiction movies, maybe, or like "Neptune the Mystic" of The Planets by Gustav Holst.

@PearsonArtPhoto And there are no high waves. I've heard something about some anchoring mechanism. Must've looked like a great idea after the first landing at sea. A really good idea.

SpaceX has a sense of humor and made a compilation of its rocket crashes. youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ&feature=youtu.be Look at 1:20 to see how a first safely ship landed first stage barely stays aboard during the trip home.

Proton launching Blagovest-1 today. The video shows how very violent these things are. Great photo, worthwhile watching for a second. It's rerun with the sound in real time, the camera shaking as the chock wave hits it. youtu.be/ljIuglUUR78?t=24

@called2voyage Good! I like it better that way than your old fascist way.

@called2voyage A "Lunarian" orbit??? Are you trying to play stupid again?

What is the corresponding adjective to "Lunar" when pertaining to moons in general? ESA's JUICE mission to the Jupiter system certainly won't enter a "lunar" orbit around Ganymede. Is it a "moonary" orbit or a "Ganymedary" orbit?

Can one add to the bounty of someone else's question who already has a bounty? Are multiple bounties possible for the same Q, and if so how?

@Hohmannfan I suppose ordinary atom cores would collide with each other and generate detectable radiation. Maybe some regions of spacetime are simply wrinkled to begin with, without any need of mass to do it.

Too stupid to post a question about it, but could DARK MATTER simply be ions, common atom cores, in regions of space where there are no electrons? (Maybe because they were annihilated by positrons).

When Otto von Bismarck besieged Paris in 1870. An early military use of aerospace. An astronomer even went off to observe an eclipse" Just 1½ minutes of this clip, until he starts talking about the German anti-pigeon Luftwaffe.

Seems it was filmed live from the air as it happened!

A huuuge ammunition storage in Ukraine exploded spectacularly last week. One dead and five injured, I read, which sounds like alot of luck! Bombs are going off still now. But why are these randomly ignited anti-air and -tank rockets (with solid fuel?) flying around in spirals?

This is the most beautifully filmed launch I've ever seen! A Soyuz about a year ago: youtu.be/q1fihj_ed9w?t=188

Space raft ("spacecraft raft" actually) but space raft I haven't heard of before. A bit diminishing compared to "the Mars exploration spaceship" that NASA marketed (until now I suppose). I know it is just Trump reading a text about something he doesn't know or care much about, but I think it's a bit funny.

But he emphasized the 'O'. Orion orIon.

Did the president say "The Oreo space raft"? Oreos as in "-I'm putting your fat candy ass on a diet, Christie!"

@called2voyage Concerning putting a man on the ladies' loo? Okay, snowflakes, I'll respect your hysterical intolerance and complete lack of humor.

Too bad we couldn't return within a lifetime. "God willing, we will return!" /Cernan

I would hire SpaceX to park my car.

Super great landing. And the sea heaves more from a second to another than the precision of the landing at the precise crossing of the X in SpaceX. No more error bar "landing ellipses" on Mars, just put-this-there and it is done.

Maybe one centimeter too far to the left.

Spot on!

Falcon 9 launch in 15 minutes! And it hasn't even been canceled yet. spaceflightinsider.com/mission-monitor

And then you do remember how the entire unplanned messy bug hunting project started and revisit its root cause, finding out that the bug mysteriously seems to be gone, if it ever really was there to begin with.

After iWatch and GoogleGlasses, I'm looking forward to the space-based pizza-sized Xhat accessory to my Somesung smartphony.

Sure! I'm just saying that it is detrimental to the future of this site to be so extremely political and intolerant that one has to think twice about making a joke even about space.

Gender and climate are topics that people always have made jokes about, but now the intolerance of this North Korean McCarthyism has ended this. Yuri Maltsev, the last defector from the Soviet Union and Gorbachev adviser, said that in Soviet the only thing one was allowed to discuss about the news paper Pravda was the weather. But now in the US the weather has become the most taboo topic! And it is even worse with gender issue. We need to lighten up a bit.

The politics of it, yes. That is obvious, that is why you are doing this to me now. But I fully respect anyone's freedom to define its gender, I think we agree on that. It is the politics of intolerance and false "PC sensitivity" that we disagree on.

@called2voyage No, I don't think I hold any other opinion than you on the gender issue. What makes you think that?

I'd have no problem in the world with Obama putting a transwoman on the Moon. He just didn't have that much of an ambition or ability. If Buzz Aldrin said that he has changed his gender identity, would you understand the joke then? He could title his autobiography "From the Moon to the ladies loo". This whole transgender topic is engineered with the sole purpose of being "PC sensitive" and motivate oppression and make people shut up and stop thinking and stop laughing.

That's McCarthyism and North Korean censorship at its extreme.

@Hohmannfan When I make a perfectly harmless and funny joke like "JFK put a man on the Moon, Obama put a man on the ladies' loo", it gets erased and I get a warning here.

My jokes about presidents are not appreciated here, because of some communist McCarthyist intolerance and pretended hyper sensitivity of some certain privileged groups. I'm expecting another warning. There's a pretty bad attitude around here to be a social informal chatroom.

@immibis Why would a bank ever want to sell any of the empty houses it owns after a customer defaulted on the interest payments? The empty house is a profit on the balance sheet. It's mark-to-market can only keep on increasing. A stronger banking balance sheet helps lowering the interest rates further and drives up housing prices, which just increases the balance sheet ever more.

@MontyHarder No no no. The banker gives the borrower the loan for free for 10 years, with the house as security. And 20 years later the banker has a 4 times more valuable house as loan security. +300% profit in case of default, and +400% basis for his 0.8% loan renewal rent. At least that is what has happened. I'm asking about forbidding sales at lower prices, in order to guarantee an eternal continuation of this lifelong bubble. And I cannot prolong this comment-chat anymore, sorry!

There will remain houses that are cheaper than other houses. What house in Sweden is cheaper today than it was 23 years ago? If no house is allowed to lose in price then housing loans have risk free security (which the bank after a forfeiture is guaranteed to be able to sell with a profit) and no one will lose money when selling her house. Banks will halve their interest rates each time the prices double. That is what has happened for 23 years now. The threat is that it ends, so why not perpetuate status quo with a simple law? Isn't that the safe and conservative way to go?

Most who move, move to another house in the same jurisdiction. If some housing broker manages to puzzle together a number of clients so that A can move to B who can move to C who can move to A, then each can add X% to the last price and everyone involved makes big profits since the bank loans are guaranteed risk free and the rate is much lower (negative actually given CPI inflation) than the property enrichment they all enjoy. A majority don't own any house anyway, and many of those who do are retired and will never move again. Their children will enjoy a guaranteed increased inheritance.

@R.M. The fire insurance company takes over the house and makes a guaranteed profit on its balance sheet because it can never be lawfully sold at a loss. The balance sheet of the insurance company will continuously improves as the mark-to-market "value" of that house keeps on increasing. The condition of the house doesn't matter, it must never sell at a lower price than it was bought for. It is that simple!

@ErwinBolwidt "It really depends on how the law is formulated" So economic theory hasn't much to say about the consequences? That theory assumes that people commit crimes to cheat any law, so regulations are just random irrelevant noise with some avoidance costs depending on how many police the government employs?

@ErwinBolwidt Then why have any economic regulations of anything at all? For example, if paper moneies are cheaper to produce than digging up gold, then everyone will print their own monies. Is that how it works, that government IS irrelevant, and not only SHOULD be?

@SalvadorDali Basically, it is a perfect asset on the balance sheet, since it cannot legally lose value. Those who want to move to another house simply have to barter with a chain of people than can rotate their houses with each other. And each of them will profit from it because they all will sell what they had more expensively, and can thus increase their bank loans, which in itself is profitable since the interest is lower than the cost of living and the house investment impossibly can become a loss. Some "cannot", that's how it is already today. Next is: Status quo or crash?

@mkingsbu They could try! Extremely few rental appartments to be found in Sweden, and heavy tax penalties on anyone who rents out his own home to anyone. Still, renting wouldn't bust the bubble. Housing prices could only continue upwards, saving the banks.