Ah, Cecil, you have (at last) betrayed your ignorance! As anyone with a knowledge of basic physics would know, a Lava Lamp will not function in space, as it requires gravity.
LINK TO COLUMN: Has anyone ever had sex in space? - The Straight Dope
Well here’s a link to the column in question anyway.
Link?
[Airplane]It’s a way to look at information from another website without reposting all of the information here, but that’s beside the point.[/Airplane]
Well, the lava lamp would glow and get hot, it just wouldn’t circulate.
http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=105965
An xkcd elaboration
Ummm, Cecil knows exactly how lava lamps work: How do lava lamps work? - The Straight Dope
In the sex-in-space column, he was making a joke. He often does. They’re sometimes lame. Oh, wait, he’s the boss – they’re always very, very funny.
I just wanted to say that this column is one of my top five favorites from Cecil.
#1 is reserved for “Do male pigs really have corkscrew shaped penises?” That was my first introduction to the Straight Dope, I saw it in a student paper in Chicago in 1983-4
On to a point from the second supplementary column: in the late 50s / early 60s, serious proposals were made that (astronauts, of course, being all straight, manly men) it would be prudent, nay, imperative for NASA to institute a Whore Corps.
This was probably the only time the same jumping-off point was used in short stories by both Robert Heinlein and C. S. Lewis.
Cecil focuses mainly on American space missions, in which it is indeed unlikely that sex took place either on all-male missions or the zero-privacy Shuttle. But what about the Ruskies? I keep seeing references on this topic to the USSR’s Mir station and one particular time when the crew consisted of two Russian cosmonauts and an American female guest crew member.
You mean Shannon Lucid?
I must admit that I had something of a crush on her in 1978.