Many of us watched the Apollo launches and wondered how many millions of dollars were chucked into the sea as the spaceships shed their rocket stages. It couldn’t be helped, the fuel was burned and the weight had to be shed. But now everything has changed. SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket into space last night from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and then recovered the first stage by landing it upright- right on target!   

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The second-stage rocket of the ORBCOMM-2 mission is off to deliver satellites, but the recovery of the bigger fuel tank is a first. This historic milestone means that the first-stage rocket can be reused for a future mission.  

You can see the ORBCOMM-2 Full Launch Webcast from the SpaceX control. At 32:00 in, there’s a graphic that explains the flight succinctly, and immediately after that, the first stage lands. SpaceX had attempted such a landing before, unsuccessfully, on floating targets, but this was the first attempt on land. And it worked.     

(Image credit: SpaceX Photos)

You can make your very own Star Wars opening crawl, just by typing in what you want to say, or even copying and pasting text from somewhere else. In this one, I used the text from this morning’s feature article. If I had more time, I'd think of something deep and philosophical, but hey. The Star Wars Crawl Creator is at the Star Wars site. You can share your crawl in social media or take a screenshot and share it with us in the comments! -via The Daily Dot

Mode has another installment of their 100 years series, with a loo at holiday menswear. New Year’s Eve is the time for parties and breaking out a special fancy look, which has changed quite a bit over the last century.

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Dressing up for New Year’s Eve got gradually more casual over the century, but the custom is still to be a bit dressier than everyday wear. The 2015 version is wishful thinking on the part of clothing vendors. As with most of these videos, you really have to wonder what kind of drugs inspired the fashions of the 1970s.

Santa Claus is one of the most popular movie characters ever, although his film persona is often turned on its head, completely different from the jolly old elf of the classic tales. Contains NSFW language.

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Burger Fiction gives a verity of cinematic Santas: the cute, the jolly, the magical, the disillusioned, the confused, the drunk, the rude, the angry, the criminal, and the heroic. There’s a list of the movies used at the YouTube page. -via Tastefully Offensive
 

The winter solstice heralds the beginning of winter, and gives us the longest nighttime of the year. This fact alone is the reason there are so many winter holidays that center around lights. My husband was born on the winter solstice, which usually falls on December 21st, but this year it’s the 22nd. That will correct itself next year, which is a leap year. But the solstice really isn’t a “day.” Let’s learn more about the winter solstice.    

1. IT HAPPENS ON DECEMBER 22 UTC THIS YEAR.

The date of the winter solstice varies from year to year, and can fall anywhere between December 20 and December 23, with the 21st or 22nd being the most common dates. The reason for this is because the tropical year—the time it takes for the sun to return to the same spot relative to Earth—is different from the calendar year. The next solstice occurring on December 20 will not happen until 2080, and the next December 23 solstice will not occur until 2303.

2. IT HAPPENS AT A SPECIFIC, BRIEF MOMENT.

Not only does the solstice occur on a specific day, but it also occurs at a specific time of day, corresponding to the instant the North Pole is aimed furthest away from the sun on the 23.5 degree tilt of the Earth’s axis. This is also the time when the sun shines directly over the Tropic of Capricorn. In 2015, this moment occurs at 4:48 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). For those of us on Eastern Standard Time, the solstice will occur at 11:48 PM on December 21 (though officially it happens the day following). And regardless of where you live, the solstice happens at the same moment for everyone on the planet.

There’s more to learn about the winter solstice in a list at mental_floss.

(Image credit: Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net)

Vintage Christmas cards can be beautiful and festive, or they can be downright incomprehensible. What does an image of a frog murdering another frog have to do with the holiday? Or a dead bird? Why are these cards so weird? If you were to ask the people who bought them, they would say, why not? Stephanie Boydell of Manchester Metropolitan University said that card manufacturers would recycle popular images from non-Christmas projects to keep up with demand.

So why were such odd things depicted?

"They're only odd to our eyes," Ms Boydell says.

"The Victorians had a different idea to what Christmas was about - not particularly Christian, but a time of good humour. You may find a mouse riding a lobster strange - I find it funny. It's horses for courses."

See more of those Christmas cards that make you wonder at BBC News.

It’s a pain when your birthday is overwhelmed by and subsumed into another holiday. My husband’s birthday is today, and what did he get? Christmas candy. My sister-in-law was born on December 26th, and she never had a real birthday party growing up, as all her friends were busy or gone during school vacation. Even family members have a limit on how much they can spend on gifts this time of year. Happy birthday (and sympathy) to all you December babies! This is the latest from Megacynics.  

Who wrecks your halls, Force-stuns your dog, and steals your Christmas presents? It’s Darth Santa, the modern Scrooge who makes the Grinch seem like a minor inconvenience.

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There’s never been any doubt that this would be a Star Wars Christmas, but who who will be the chosen one to save us from Darth Santa? Yeah, I know, both “Darth” and “Santa” are titles, and it really should be Darth Claus or Santa Vader. Let’s not quibble when the Sith Lord is listening. -via Viral Viral Videos

We know that St. Augustine (established in 1565) is the oldest existing European community in the U.S. We know Jamestown (1607) is the oldest English community, and although the Roanoke colony was settled earlier, it did not survive. Such was the case of the Luna settlement, a Spanish colony in Florida that was the first multi-year European settlement in what would became the United States. Spanish conquistador Tristán de Luna y Arellano settled his expedition in what is now Pensacola, Florida, in 1559. Stranded by a hurricane that wrecked their ships, the colony lasted until 1561. It’s exact location was lost to history -until now.   

Discoveries by local historian Tom Garner in October and research afterward by University of West Florida archaeologists confirmed where Don Tristan de Luna established his Spanish colony in August 1559 – six years before the St. Augustine settlement and nearly 48 years before the English settled in Jamestown, Va.

The historical site is in an urban downtown neighborhood within view of the two shipwrecks linked to the Luna expedition in Pensacola Bay. UWF declined to reveal the exact location to protect the neighborhood and integrity of the site.

“This is one of those almost once-in-a-lifetime type things,” said John Worth, associate professor of historical archaeology in the UWF Department of Anthropology and a 16th Century Spanish historian. “I figured if the Luna colony would be found it would probably be found accidentally. I did not expect it would occur during my tenure here necessarily. I just figured eventually we might find it, somebody would. I guess this is the culmination. I didn’t even hope to find it as much as just wish.”    

It’s not just a few artifacts, either. Excavations by the University of West Florida have yielded a lot of evidence of the Luna settlement, which you can read about at the Pensacola News Journal. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: University of West Florida)

The Miss Universe pageant took place last night in Las Vegas. Steve Harvey, who you know as the host of Family Feud, announced the winner as Miss Colombia, Ariadna Gutierrez-Arévalo. And then it got weird.

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While Miss Colombia was taking her victory walk, someone pointed out that Harvey had read the card wrong, and the actual winner was Miss Philippines, Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach. Harvey took the stage and announce his faux pas. Last year's winner, Paulina Vega, also from Colombia, had to return to the stage to remove the crown from Gutierrez-Arévalo and place it on Wurtzbach's head. There is no script for such an occurrence, but the ladies did their best to stay calm and poised. Something tells me Steve Harvey will not be asked to return to host the pageant again. -via Digg

Do you recall Conrad, the dead raccoon that lay on the streets of Toronto so long that citizens memorialized him? That only went on for a couple of days. Rosie the Roach on the campus of Texas A&M University was honored for weeks! The roach lay dead for quite some time in the stairwell of the anthropology building when someone made it a little shrine. That was on December 3rd.

Things escalated from there, as the mourners came and added to the shrine, paying tribute to Rosie. They left coins, poetry, candles, and items to usher Rosie into the roach afterlife. Yes, that includes a roach clip. It’s amazing what students will do to put off studying for finals. Finally, on December 17th, Rosie had her final sendoff in a cremation ceremony. You can see the entire sequence of ten photographs at imgur. -via Metafilter

Bill Fink of Belleville, Illinois, passed away last Wednesday. His brother, M.C. Fink, wrote his obituary to give him "the most memorable sendoff possible." Fink had been ill and had been in hospice care. To answer your question, yes, they did try turning him off and on again. A friend left an appropriate comment underneath his online obituary.

I only knew Bill for a few CPU cycles, but without exception, the User Experience (UX) was bug free. The times Bill and I shared the same memory and process space happened to be at events like DigiGirlz and FIRST Robotics where Bill shared his passion for technology with youth. You didn't need detailed event tracing or a full memory dump to know that Bill truly cared for others.

My condolences.

Quite a few friends and co-workers came to the reddit thread to attest that Fink was a great guy who had an awesome sense of humor. Here’s an article he wrote last year about he got his dream job as a Technical Evangelist for Microsoft. He never lost his enthusiasm.

Update: This post has been edited to reflect that Fink's brother wrote the obituary.

A group called Galactic Empire plays the main Star Wars theme in a manner you’ve probably not heard before. They give the dark side a real workout here! We have Darth Vader, a Shadow Trooper and an Imperial guard playing guitar, a Stormtrooper on bass, and Boba Fett in drums.  

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How do they play with gloves on? I find your lack of faith disturbing. Do or do not, there is no try. It’s not all music. they stop in the middle to show some silliness. -via Viral Viral Videos  

Now you’re thinking counterintuitively! Who came up with this odd idea, anyway? According to Wikipedia, Finland started using a sharpened bones, then the Netherlands developed sharpened steel blades. We will probably never know who was the first to go from cleats to prevent slipping to a single blade for speed. This question is posed by the latest comic from Buttersafe.

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

(Image credit: Flickr user Jeremy Richardson)

Tiptoeing towards a solution to an annoying, minor problem
by Csikszentmihalyi Aeiou, Improbable Research staff

Humanity, beset by countless worries, devotes time and thought to preventing or solving the problem of how to match a pair of socks. Here are a few of the notable efforts.

Anderson’s Sock-Matching Innovation
“I.D. Socks (Identification Socks),” U.S. patent 4734938, issued Apr 5, 1988, to Bruce R. Anderson. The patent document explains:

A sock (hosiery) with identification markings includes the sock, a written word description of the color of the sock, and a symbol or symbols. The word description and the symbol are permanently integrated into the sock. The user uses the markings to pair the socks after laundry, to identify the color of the socks in poor light conditions, and to keep original pairs of socks together.

This invention relates in general to socks and in particular to men’s dress socks, but not limited to this category only.

Socks, for example, men’s dress socks, are composed of various materials and are usually of dark, solid colors. Being of this nature, when a week’s laundry is done there are many single dark socks which are difficult and tedious to pair back together. A further disadvantage is that in poor lighting conditions, as the early morning hours, it is very difficult for the businessman to tell what color socks he is putting on. A still further disadvantage is when a person has more than one pair of identical socks, bought at different times, it is difficult to pair them up based on the age of the pairs.

It is desirable to have socks which are marked in a manner such that their color may be determined under most lighting conditions....