Today is a big day for the Italian cruise ship that ran aground and tipped over in January 2012. The so-called Parbuckling Project, with the goal of tipping the Concordia upright and refloating it, is now underway. Th engineering involved is massive and fascinating. Should take about two days.

Richard Feynman is the master of all explainers. He takes incredibly complex concepts and break them down to make them more easily digested. Professor Feynman gave a series of seminal lectures at Caltech in the early 1960’s that were transcribed and edited, evolving into book that became the definitive introduction to physics. Now those lectures are available online, for free. Here’s an example:

To illustrate the power of the atomic idea, suppose that we have a drop of water a quarter of an inch on the side. If we look at it very closely we see nothing but water—smooth, continuous water. Even if we magnify it with the best optical microscope available—roughly two thousand times—then the water drop will be roughly forty feet across, about as big as a large room, and if we looked rather closely, we would still see relatively smooth water—but here and there small football-shaped things swimming back and forth. Very interesting. These are paramecia. You may stop at this point and get so curious about the paramecia with their wiggling cilia and twisting bodies that you go no further, except perhaps to magnify the paramecia still more and see inside. This, of course, is a subject for biology, but for the present we pass on and look still more closely at the water material itself, magnifying it two thousand times again. Now the drop of water extends about fifteen miles across, and if we look very closely at it we see a kind of teeming, something which no longer has a smooth appearance—it looks something like a crowd at a football game as seen from a very great distance. In order to see what this teeming is about, we will magnify it another two hundred and fifty times and we will see something similar to what is shown in Fig. 1–1. This is a picture of water magnified a billion times, but idealized in several ways. In the first place, the particles are drawn in a simple manner with sharp edges, which is inaccurate. Secondly, for simplicity, they are sketched almost schematically in a two-dimensional arrangement, but of course they are moving around in three dimensions. Notice that there are two kinds of “blobs” or circles to represent the atoms of oxygen (black) and hydrogen (white), and that each oxygen has two hydrogens tied to it. (Each little group of an oxygen with its two hydrogens is called a molecule.) The picture is idealized further in that the real particles in nature are continually jiggling and bouncing, turning and twisting around one another.

This is an incredible gift to the world.

NASA built this thing thirty-six years ago (in 1977) and it still works. Amazing.

Thirty-six years after it rocketed away from Earth, the plutonium-powered spacecraft has escaped the sun’s influence and is now cruising 11 1/2 billion miles away in interstellar space, or the vast, cold emptiness between the stars, NASA said Thursday.

And just in case it encounters intelligent life out there, it is carrying a gold-plated, 1970s-era phonograph record with multicultural greetings from Earth, photos and songs, including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” along with Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Louis Armstrong.

At this point in its journey, it takes seventeen hours for the Voyager signal to get back to Earth. My (very) rough math:

11,500,000,000 m / 186,000 mps = 61,827 seconds = 1,030 minutes = 17.17 hours

Cool.

Virgin Galactic, part of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, wants to bring you into space. Their first goal is to provide a supersonic suborbital spaceflight for space tourists. Ultimately, their goal is to offer orbital satellite launches and, following that, human orbital flights.

After a successful sound-barrier-smashing test flight, Virgin Galactic has released footage from a camera on its prize spaceship’s tail. The view, though not as extraordinary as the one that future ticketed passengers can expect to see as they float at the craft’s windows, is a white-knuckle-inducing one of a plume of fire and a distant desert below.

Here’s said footage. And sign me up, please.