As a diehard baker of extreme cakes, I understand the difficulty in complex cake construction. Truly, I do. But this commemorative space shuttle cake at an event to salute the achievements of women in space has gone fabulously off the rails.
I never thought the phrase “External Fuel Tank” could sound so, well, dirty.
Picture below the fold to protect the children. (From the always entertaining CakeWrecks).
Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists:
Our day (and night) jobs notwithstanding, the blog is about whatever we find interesting — science, to be sure, but also arts, politics, culture, technology, academia, and miscellaneous trivia. We have similar outlooks on many things, widely disparate opinions about others, and will do our best to keep the discourse reasonably elevated.
June 25th, 2009 at 10:24 am
That is a cake? Whoa!
And,
I never thought the phrase “External Fuel Tank” could sound so, well, dirty
What do you mean by that? That it looks like a penis or something?
June 25th, 2009 at 11:09 am
huh? it just reminds me of the movie poster for “the little mermaid.”
June 25th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Looks like it melted on reentry.
June 25th, 2009 at 11:25 am
treelobsters,
If you’re talking about the fuel tank, then it can’t melt on re-entry because it separates from the shuttle on launch and it doesn’t come back fast enough to cause enough friction with the atmosphere to heat it up, in order to melt!
If you’re talking about the shuttle part then if it melts during re-entry it will break up into pieces!
June 25th, 2009 at 11:27 am
Thanks for posting this. You just made my day.
June 25th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Nothing makes people click a link better than “picture below the fold to protect the children.”
June 25th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
What Sean and Eugene said.. and then there’s the whole FRICTION discussion just waiting to .. erupt. OH man. and — btw, what’s with that angling to the side?? External fuel tank-correctness, is it..?
;->
June 25th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
The same cake will be used to celebrate all the brave men in space who also list slightly to the right.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Is that how a penis is supposed to look like? What’s wrong with me!
June 25th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
If you look at it upside down that shuttle has a huge…smile.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Well, you need those yankie oil monglers to spend their money in the name of science. What is a better motivator than a big read dick connected to a cool looking piece of space craft. Why do you think Bush wanted to put people on Mars? He so fell for it.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
“Women in Space: We’ve ‘come a long’ way”.
Just when I was trying to convince my friends that engineers aren’t always that nerdy and out of touch… What nerd was multitasking here?
…
…
…
ummm, Somebody Jewish?… sorry, couldn’t help it… millions of pounds of thrust from the two SRBs… sorry, slippery slope…
Submit Comment and get out now… Eject, eject, eject!!!
June 25th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Gustav,
Maybe you should start eating those spicy cheetos right before you…
Just playing. Love the Buzz Aldrin/Snoop Dogg Video on your blog. Thanks!
http://littlescienceblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/rapper-doc-rendezvous-aka-buzz-aldrin.html
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/0be5c681fc/buzz-aldrin-s-rocket-experience
June 25th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
The external tank is filled with liquid hydrogen and oxygen stored at cryogenic temperatures…
…which obviously causes some major shrinkage.
June 25th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
women in science always seem to get the shaft
June 26th, 2009 at 1:56 am
The main object looks about right to me. What I’m worried about is the peculiar shape of the two smaller things either side!
June 26th, 2009 at 11:29 am
“The same cake will be used to celebrate all the brave men in space who also list slightly to the right.”
When you get fitted for a space suit do they ask “What side do you dress on, sir?”
June 27th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
They apparently practice safe shuttling… but what’s with the white crayons????
June 27th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
[...] him speak at the Q2C festival in October. He’s not afraid of blogging on controversial or outrageous subjects, and a few days ago he published an entry titled “Science and Religion are Not [...]
June 27th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Somehow now everything NASA publishes can be seen in a different light. In a post from 2007 called “Astronaut job: Icing on the cake” (http://www.nasa.gov/astronauts/d_olivas_profile.html) Brandi Dean wrote about astronaut Danny Olivas:
“Becoming an astronaut is hard – a lot harder than Danny Olivas ever thought it would be. But hard in a good way. ‘It’s hard in the way like making your favorite cake,’ Olivas said. ‘It takes a long time, you have the ingredients all over the place and you have to clean up afterwards. But the reward justifies all the effort.”
Um.
June 29th, 2009 at 6:29 am
Thats no moon…
June 29th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Oh my, and I thought the She is an Astronomer logo was bad.
June 29th, 2009 at 11:37 am
you can learn a good deal by studying sally ride
June 29th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
Sex, science and cake!
Somehow you combined three of the most awesome things in the universe.
That’s impressive
June 30th, 2009 at 8:32 am
Sex? I wonder. The phallic object in question is apparently so shriveled that it compressed the Shuttle’s fuselage like a tin can. What’s the Seinfeld line?…Oh, yeah, “Like a frightened turtle!”