Thank you teachers and staff for an incredible school year! pic.twitter.com/qR4lm1a4iV
— Forest Hills Public Schools (@ForestHillsPS) June 5, 2025
Faster than you can say “lost luggage” innovators will be outnumbered by regulators, administrative busybodies and muckety-mucks seeking a piece of the action in the nascent catalog of space standards. Innovators will use standardization processes (particularly those favored by the federal government) to outflank their competitors. Space is not our primary domain but, because academic programs are re-tooling their aerospace programs, we keep an eye on it. Solving problems related to space traffic management and orbital debris, for example, are hazards that can be solved with the assistance of academia. Aerospace programs have been co-operating with governments for decades and there is build-out of earthbound facilities needed to continue support for it. This is a new unit on our Syllabus starting 2022. We will at least poke at the topic (i.e. track the relevant literature) to see if we can be of any help enlightening approaches to making the physical earthbound campus safer, simpler, lower-cost and longer-lasting. We will start with aerospace research facilities. https://youtu.be/JFrU19HwDs8![]()
Aerospace
The academic calendar of Anglosphere educational settlements subtly shapes life of the mind, generally; and family life, specifically. Its rhythm is rooted in the cathedral schools and monastic learning communities of medieval Europe between the 1100s and 1400s. Universities were not originally organized around modern “semesters.” Instead, the year followed the Christian liturgical calendar, agricultural seasons, daylight availability, and travel conditions.
The classic English university calendar evolved into three major terms: Michaelmas in autumn, associated with arrival and beginnings; Hilary or Lent in winter, associated with discipline and study; and Trinity or Easter in spring, associated with examinations, outdoor rituals, music, rowing, gardens, and celebration.
Modern commencement traditions across the Anglosphere are descendants of medieval spring degree ceremonies. Academic gowns, hoods, processions, Latin phrases, formal dining, chapel music, and public recognition all preserve traces of the university as a scholarly guild and religious-civic community.
Before railways, electric lighting, and central heating, universities had to adapt to muddy roads, short winter days, limited candles, cold buildings, and agricultural obligations. Spring therefore became the natural season of culmination, reunion, athletic competition, courtship, and ceremony.
The medieval university was not merely a school but an educational settlement — a self-governing town of scholars, libraries, chapels, kitchens, workshops, residences, and dining halls. That settlement pattern survives in residential colleges, quadrangles, tutorial systems, common rooms, chapel choirs, and formal meals.
Anglosphere campuses retain this ancient emotional rhythm: autumn seriousness, winter inwardness, and spring release. That continuity helps explain why colleges and universities still feel culturally distinct from ordinary commercial society. (Relata: Gulliver Visits the Great Academy of Lagado)

We’re “organized” but not too organized; like the bookseller who knows where every book can be found.
at a conference where you don’t have to present
— Peyman Milanfar (@docmilanfar) April 4, 2025
#AcademicChatter #AcademicTwitter
Academics be like 👇 pic.twitter.com/6cpVEw3PVS
— Reviewer 2 (@GrumpyReviewer2) April 2, 2024







