Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
The launch of a prototype rocket designed to replace the aging shuttle has been delayed by bad weather.The slender, 100m-tall Ares I-X vehicle was supposed to test technology crucial for the development of a manned craft. A combination of high wind speeds and clouds contributed to Nasa's decision to scrub the launch at Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. The experimental craft has two further four-hour launch windows between 0800 and 1200 EDT on 28 and 29 October. The craft is the first new launch vehicle that Nasa has designed and built in more than three decades.
The launch of a prototype rocket designed to replace the aging shuttle has been delayed by bad weather.
The slender, 100m-tall Ares I-X vehicle was supposed to test technology crucial for the development of a manned craft.
A combination of high wind speeds and clouds contributed to Nasa's decision to scrub the launch at Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.
The experimental craft has two further four-hour launch windows between 0800 and 1200 EDT on 28 and 29 October.
The craft is the first new launch vehicle that Nasa has designed and built in more than three decades.
Halloween just got a lot less magical for a group of Harry Potter fans in London. Warner Brothers cracked down on a planned Harry Potter-themed dinner run out of the home of a London woman using the name "Ms. Marmite Lover," informing her that references to Diagon Alley and different foods from the book constituted copyright infringement. "While we are delighted you are such a fan of the Harry Potter series," said a letter from the company, "unfortunately your proposed use of the Harry Potter properties...without our consent would amount to an infringement of Warner's rights."
(and perhaps some consultants as well. So cool for hot summers, and only 10 times as expensive!) "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
What's it all about? The winner of the THE Lord Dearing Lifetime Achievement Award has distilled ten facts of university life to share It was Wallace Stanley Sayre, a political scientist at Columbia University, who reportedly came up with the most famous law of academic politics: the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.Anyone involved in sorting out university car-parking will recognise the law's truth.Now Sir David Watson, professor of higher education management at the Institute of Education and winner of Times Higher Education's 2009 Lord Dearing Lifetime Achievement Award, has condensed his observations of the sector into nine rules of his own.Watson's "Laws of Academic Life" are:* Academics grow in confidence the farther away they are from their true fields of expertise (what you really know about is provisional and ambiguous, what other people do is clear-cut and usually wrong)
What's it all about? The winner of the THE Lord Dearing Lifetime Achievement Award has distilled ten facts of university life to share
It was Wallace Stanley Sayre, a political scientist at Columbia University, who reportedly came up with the most famous law of academic politics: the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.
Anyone involved in sorting out university car-parking will recognise the law's truth.
Now Sir David Watson, professor of higher education management at the Institute of Education and winner of Times Higher Education's 2009 Lord Dearing Lifetime Achievement Award, has condensed his observations of the sector into nine rules of his own.
Watson's "Laws of Academic Life" are:
* Academics grow in confidence the farther away they are from their true fields of expertise (what you really know about is provisional and ambiguous, what other people do is clear-cut and usually wrong)
This effect is also known in the world of sailboat racing. A well-equipped racing yacht or dinghy has innumerable adjustments that can be made to the sail controls, the centerboard, and the operating method. Some adjustments are well known, while others cause interminable debate. The observation is that there is no argument about the ones that everybody knows work, so the argumentation is about things that can't be clearly shown to be beneficial. The conclusion is that they probably don't make any difference.
So the arguments get more and more energetic as you get further into areas where nobody actually knows anything. Which goes a long way towards explaining why religious wars are the worst.
He was quite convinced that had the hotel not been emptying the next morning they would still be there now. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
