Sure, these days with Google Maps and other available sources, we’re all pretty accustomed to seeing recent satellite images of our city. Does that make seeing a moments-ago fresh-from-the-camera view of Houston sent directly to you (and maybe 354,400 or so other Twitter followers) by an astronaut hanging out on the International Space Station less of a thrill? If not (or even if so), behold: Here’s an overhead view of downtown Houston taken just “a little bit ago,” sent by low-earth-orbiting astronaut Reid Wiseman this afternoon.
- Downtown #Houston a little bit ago [Reid Wiseman on Twitter]
Photo: NASA/Reid Wiseman
Someone Was Watching Over You
All I see is liberals, hipsters, moochers, and the government.
Now excuse me, while I yell at some kids on my lawn
Its amazing that there was a person above us “just a little while ago” soaring at 17,150 mph at an orbit height of 205 miles snapping pics of our fair city.
Now I know I’m loved :)
Commonsense, its adam and eve, not adam and steve.
Why not Space Center?
I saw this on Imgur about an hour ago, so who is reposting OC from swamplot onto imgur???
It might be that the best outcome for Houston is for the Inner Loop to have an exurban quality of life. Send commuter rail out to the suburbs — not for the suburbanites to commute to downtown — but for the Inner Loopers to commute outbound in the mornings to densely clustered (out of necessity) suburban tall office towers surrounding the stations, and then back into town in the evenings.
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This is more viable than the traditional idea of New Urbanist suburbs with transit connecting them to a downtown core since politically none of Houston’s suburbs are on board with cultivating a small town ambience, but are ok with letting office builders do their thing.
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To be sure, suburbanites would still commute to downtown but it will be seen as an aberration. Downtown will still have things to do after dark, but other areas of the Inner Loop, connected by LRT/buses/cars/bikes/sidewalks, will do a much better job of providing the QOL aspiring exurbanites may crave.
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Suburbanites will, of course, still commute to a large extent to the office towers in their suburb. But they will do so by car, and won’t care about the urbanist quality of life (in other words, nothing will change for them).
I first saw it on my Twitter feed. A lot of Reid’s 350k followers probably live in Houston. It isn’t necessarily a copycat post just because you see it twice. However, astronaut posts typically take about a day to end up live on Twitter, so it’s probably a picture of Houston yesterday, not today. Still pretty good though.
Separately, if there is such a thing as an appropriate forum for off-topic trollish gay bashing, this is not it. Forums become cesspits quickly if that garbage is allowed to continue.
Sid: that poster wasn’t gay bashing. He was making a satirical comment as someone else – basically calling the other user a homophobe (which was petty and dumb, IMO, as I’ve never seen CommonSense post something that would imply he’s “anti gay”)
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Personally I find the overuse of calling someone (or claiming someone to be) a bigot / racist / whatever, more offensive than most things that bigots say. Throwing the “racist!” card around too much causes it to lose all meaning for when there are actual examples of racism around. People hear someone called a racist and they’re like “meh, whatever. Everyone seems to be called a racist by overly sensitive thin skinned crybabies”.
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Maybe it’s just me…
Cody: I didn’t say the word “bigot”, in part because I know what you mean. It is indeed overused. In addition, it has an ad hominem tilt, while I was trying to discuss only the comment, not the person. I don’t feel that calling the comment “garbage” was unjustifed. Sadly, to whatever extent it was trollish, it succeeded. Here we are talking about this instead of… aww, never mind.
Here’s hoping the moderator or owner can stop all these off-topic comments that seem to be increasing as of late. Makes visiting Swamplot a lot less enjoyable or even not worth visiting at all.