Saket Vora

Videos from this week’s lab:

EE 414 - VCO/PLL Lab 4

EE 414 - VCO/PLL Lab 2

EE 414 - VCO/PLL Lab 3

EE 414 - VCO/PLL Lab 1

Wow. It’s 4:20am. My apartment (nader was over too) just had a six hour chat…one of those meandering discussions that can go to places you’d never expect. Nader scored two microwaves and he gave one to us (we have one that actually turns). Simon observed the existence of holes in the rear shaped precisely like electrical sockets on the back of the microwave, and naturally we being engineers on a Saturday night spent a good 20 minutes (to Luke’s chagrin, even he was sort of participating!) debating this, even taking a photo of it and enlisting the help of Wikipedians. Gene came in, horrified and amazed that we would be doing this instead of going to a party to meet people, which got us talking about how we hang out, the art and importance of meeting strangers and talking with them, nice ‘lounge’ places in the City, girls, the nature of the Russian front in World War II (via a mention of an indian girl here in russian studies), to the Holocaust, the persistence of Eastern bloc and Russian grudges, the motivations behind the Bolshevik revolution, the cyclical nature of war and peace, ‘peace’ under occupation, speculation of a third World War and where it would be, the status of China’s military might, the relationship between China and Australian, the tense relationship between Indonesia and Australia, East Timor, international law and justice, the turning away of chinese immigrants at the northern Australian border, the encouraging of Cuban boats here, the broken immigration policy for skilled and talented workers, labor, educational attainment in the US, societal justice, and economic drivers for welfare in Australia and the United States.

My EE 414 labmates have been doing a fantastic job shouldering the load while I’ve gone AWOL to tackle this embedded project. I fixed the problem with the GPS today and felt pretty good about that. Tomorrow I’ll split between the 414 lab and the project.

I’ve been in the library coding for 10 hours…will be continuing at home through the night. Definitely getting schooled. Some people were asking so I thought I’d post the lab report that me and my EE 414 lab mates (Andy Chen and Siddharth Panwar) wrote for the last lab exercise. This is the most ‘complete’ lab report we’ve written so far. We underestimated how long it would take us and ended up turning it a day late. The TAs are great though, they understand.

Check out here: EE 414 Lab 3 Report: The LNA

I know I haven’t posted any new videos…will do so next week.

Need I say more? Barack Obama flashing the Wolfpack sign. I’m in heaven.

On Tuesday Obama scored a decisive victory in North Carolina, speaking from Reynolds Coliseum for his election night address. Meanwhile, the race in Indiana drew tighter and tighter as the night wore on, ultimately resulting in a very narrow victory for Clinton. It’s over for her: she doesn’t have the momentum or the money to continue any further.

Barack Obama will be the Democratic Party Nominee for the President of the United States.

(sizable update on general stuff coming later this week..full disclosure that picture came from Fox News homepage)

Update: My household figures might be off a bit. Will look at it later.

The latest story regarding the Democratic primaries concern the gas tax, an 18.4 cent tax placed on gasoline which helps fund work on highway infrastructure. In face of rising fuel prices, McCain proposed an elimination of this tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day (May 26 to September 1). Hillary Clinton quickly agreed, stating that oil companies would pay for it. Obama dismissed this, claiming it was political pandering and that eliminating the gas tax doesn’t help.

I saw the following two ads by Clinton and Obama:

Clinton says it would save $8 billion for families. Obama says it will ’save Hoosiers about 30 cents per day.” I was curious about where these numbers were coming from, so I took 20 minutes with Google and Excel to do a quick exploration. I found that the “30 cents per day” total for Hoosiers is certainly within a reasonable order of magnitude. Since Hillary’s “$8 billion” statement was vague, I don’t know how she is driving that number. If I take the estimated savings amount by Hoosiers and scale it up using the ratio of Indiana’s population to the US population, I get about $6 billion. But I’m not sure. You can see my math below and download the Excel sheet if you wish.

As some of you know, Stanford operates on a quarter system, not a semester one like NC State did. Fall quarter is late September to mid December, Winter quarter is January to late March, and Spring quarter is April to mid June. As a result, classes move faster and there is what I like to call the step function, that time where it feels that everything kicks into high gear and stays that way until the end of the quarter.

In EE 414, we are starting the hardest lab, which will last two weeks. How hard? Written in the lab guide: “Section 11.3: It doesn’t work; now what do I do (after weeping uncontrollably)”. Our goal is to construct a “frequency synthesizer-based local oscillator”, which is a voltage controlled oscillator and a phased locked loop.

In EE 192C, we are doing our midterm software design project, due May 15th. I’ll be writing code that interfaces with a GPS receiver and Bikiran is handling interfacing with a memory card.

So yeah. Busy two weeks, but it’ll all good.

Tomorrow I’m gonna try to get tickets for the Salman Rushdie talk in the evening. In finance class we’re doing term sheet negotiations — my study group is playing the management team and another group is the VC. Should be fun.

Jordan’s parents and sister were in town and they kindly took me out to dinner on Friday. I had a wonderful time and it was nice to finally meet them. Maybe Jordan will stay out here for the summer too, not too sure. The law students have finished and there is a concentration of them in Studio 1, where Nader is a RA. Like the fat cats they like to think they are (sorry Win, hehe) , they were leaving a lot of things behind and I was able to nab an Ikea rolling cabinet thing, a plant, a vase, and some other things. Suckers.

Naman introduced me to Andrew McKee and I had coffee with him Saturday morning. Really cool guy — B.S. in biomedical engineering from Duke, started Duke Medical School, took a leave of absence to be a saxophonist and composer, then finished his degree, worked at McKinsey for a while and is now in the business ops & strategy group at Google. We talked about his time at McKinsey, how we both know of Naman (Andrew is meeting him in a couple of weeks), and about the field of energy. He and his wife just got an apartment up in the City.

I renewed my housing for next year — will be in the same room. I like living here. The NC primaries are Tuesday and you all know who I’ll be rooting for.

This makes me smile.

It’s about time for an update, right? Things have been progressing at a steady clip. First — THANK YOU to my mom and sister for sending me a care package. It was a much welcomed sight! Let’s see: Jess left back for Australia on Monday night. It was nice having her around the apartment — now it seems that Simon is back full-time at work on Omnisio. I went and saw the Pulitzer Prize winning humorist Dave Barry who did a talk at Memorial Auditorium on Monday night. Though he focused a bit more at topics more relevant to an older crowd, it was still a fun show. Amit hadn’t read any of his stuff before, but came once I showed him some columns. Dave Barry is a big reason why I refuse to say the stupid pet names that Starbucks have. A small coffee is a small coffee, not tall. A medium coffee is a medium coffee, not grande. And don’t get me started on venti. Oh yeah — Dad in in Phoenix now at a supply chain conference. Sapana seems to have re-started her blog, and she’s starting off by explaining in plain English (close to it, anyway) what she does for research at the University of Chicago.

RF Circuits class has been great this week. We’re in a meaty topic that is one of Dr. Lee’s favorite: phase lock loops. We’re looking at voltage controlled oscillators and thinking about things in the phase domain and learning about how to ensure spectral purity down to parts per million accuracy. Dr. Lee showed us a design example in which the allowable voltage ripple on the VCO control line has to be under 630 micro volts. Then said that’s what we had to build in the lab. Yes, using X-acto knives and copper foil tape. I am not making this up. Dr. Lee had other nice moments which solidifies him into being one of the most enjoyable professors I’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing from. He was showing us a plot from a chip that his RF lab built that had some insane level of spur rejection, and I asked what the noise floor of the instrument he used to measure it (he was in fact at the noise floor). He then went on to talk about what goes into these ultra precise instruments. He said that Agilent has a 500 GHz spectrum analyzer in its catalog, such that if you light a match near a transmission line, this thing could pick up the blackbody radiation off of it. He said that these things are priced in log dollars. (Similar to how cracked up our 314 class last quarter: that Agilent will gladly charge you dB dollars for fixing your broken instruments, and that is 20 log not 10 log, because money is power. Apologies to my dear readers who don’t find this electrical engineering humor even remotely amusing, but I know several of you probably will. Maybe.) He went on saying “this is why I love that geeks are different from normal humans. There is place for obsessive compulsive people who spend months and years hunting down the most obscure sources of error. You don’t get parts per billion accuracy by accident. You know there was an engineer who was trying to find a way to do some homebrew science experiments with relativity. He took his two little kids on a camping trip and for fun threw a pair cesium atomic clocks in the back of the van. He left one at base camp and then had his kids take data as he drove up the mountain. Sure enough, the time difference was within 10% of the result predicted by relativity. Man! Having your kids take data like that on a camping trip? My dad sure didn’t do that. My dad’s idea of fun was feeding the bears at Yosemite and believe me, you don’t want to do this when you’re in a small car. Then when the rangers came over to talk to my dad, that’s when he’d pretend to not know English.”

Anyway. So our task in 414 was to build a low noise amplifier. I’ve been posting videos on this lab. I got frustrated in trying to model and simulate it so I just set about building one while my partners did some simulations. I arbitrarily picked my output point, had no matching networks, nothing. I powered it up, put it on the noise figure meter, and got 3.5. That’s ok. Our goal is low 2.xx noise figure. Miraculously, I’m meeting the 3 other specs (S11, S22, and S21). I come in the next day and try it again. This time my noise figure is 2.3 (!) but the other specs are worse. I discover a problem in the instrumentation, so I try it again. Mind you I’m not changing anything important in my circuit. And suddenly, those 3 other specs come back into line. Wow. My labmates were egging me on, telling me to decrease the voltage supply and miraculously, I get a noise figure of 1.95 (the current class record). AND the other 3 specs are met. I couldn’t believe it. Other groups have spent days doing simulations in different software suites. Another group slaved away building 5, 6, 7, 8+ different boards. And somehow…my simple arbitrarily designed board just worked. Karma, for sure. I’m going to get slammed for the next project.

I’ve also been working for my embedded systems project. Bikiran, my partner, has been awesome. He’s done some embedded work before and knows his way around the system. He also takes projects above and beyond and forces me to think better about the assignments, which is definitely helping me. We’re going to get our midterm software project soon. The dev kits we have (the instructor made them) have a GPS receiver, SD memory card, tri-axis accelerometer, magnetometer, and pressure sensor. It’s pretty wicked. Here’s a video of Bikiran and I working on the last project:

EE192C Embedded Systems Project from Saket on Vimeo.

After class Wednesday I joined Josh, a 1st year medical student for coffee. He’s involved in the Stanford chapter of UAEM — Universities Allied for Essential Medicines. I was meeting with him to meet the group here after working with Derek Lundberg and Naman Shah over at Carolina by trying to get signatures of famous people here at Stanford to support the cause. Last February I spoke with Dr. Kenneth Arrow (Nobel Prize, Economics) and he signed the Philadelphia Consensus statement, which calls for things universities can do to better fund and support research for neglected diseases etc.

Wednesday was also the day that Joy Johnson was in town for a NSF conference/talk. Mary and Nader met her for lunch and then later I met up with Joy in the afternoon and Nader joined us again. We walked around the E2Y2 building, the engineering quad, the main quad, etc before heading up to University Avenue for dinner. We later dropped her off at the hotel cause she was taking the red eye back to Boston. We talked at length about MIT, the program, and graduate school in general. MIT takes in about 120 EE-CS students. I was totally shocked to hear that of the 120 incoming class, there are only two (2!) African-Americans. Nader pointed out that Stanford’s incoming EE class of 210 students probably wasn’t much better. Joy said that of the entire EE department at MIT, there are only 5 African-Americans. Wow. Granted, there was apparently a really big controversy 2 years ago that might have affected things…but man. It was great to catch up with her.

On Wednesday night I found out that the Palestinian Ambassador to the United States, Afif Safieh, was giving a talk here and Nader and I attended it. It was a decent mix of people, several people with Middle East affiliations, a number of Jews, etc. Safieh was a remarkably engaging and expressive speaker. Educated in Europe and having spent many years traveling, he has a strong command of language and culture. He spoke bluntly about the challenges that the Palestinians face, the grave situation that faces Gaza right now, and the wasted role of America in the peace process. I have spent a fair bit of time learning about and following the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and many of the things Safieh spoke about were on point, though I think he ignored acknowledging the negative actions by militants on the peace process. He spoke at length about reality and the perception of reality. He’s certainly on an interesting footing though — though he represents the PLO, Hamas won the popular vote in Gaza and the governance is split. He considers himself a secularist and doesn’t seem to think that Hamas is doing much to improve the situation. One thing that I personally led the applause in was when he advocated a campaign of non-violent resistance against the Israeli occupiers. He says that people who have lost what that they have, they must resist but that public non-violence is a powerful form. Nader is skeptical, pointing out the almost laughable asymmetrical balance of power between the Israeli’s and the Palestinians. But I argue that violent resistance has been occurring for the better part of 60 years and so far Palestine’s condition has only regressed. Anyway — there was no heckling or people making a scene. I kept urging Nader to ask his question (”how do groups that are put on terrorist list become legitimate actors that can take a seat at the table?”) but he was a bit slow and instead the last question went to an undergraduate who naively asked who the ambassador wanted to see win the US Presidential race. Sigh. First, he’s a foreign diplomat and cannot professional say what he thinks of this matter. Second, have some tact! McCain is already using a statement from Hamas saying that they want to see Obama in the White House. How’s might it look when the world finds the Palestinian Liberation Organization ambassador endorses Obama too? Bravo. The BBC is currently running articles about the staggering humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Look — blame whomever you want. Blame the Israeli’s for the blockade, blame Palestinian militants for causing the blockade. But after you’ve finished huffing and puffing, realize that there are nearly 1.3 million civilians suffering here. And note to America: just go on and keep ignoring what our it’s-not-up-for-debate-or-discussion relationship with Israel is doing to America’s image in the Arab world.

Speaking of which. I was reminded again today of state of the mainstream media here in America. As I was finishing up lunch at around 12:05pm, I saw BBC News report news that the US military confirmed an airstrike in Somalia which killed a senior Islamist militant…and some other people in the blast. Surprised, I quickly scoped out CNN, MSNBC, and FoxNews. Only MSNBC and FoxNews had even a mention of it, but it wasn’t really discussed. Checking back two hours later, the story was completely off the front page of (click the link to see the archived copy of the site) CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, CBS News. BBC was still running it front and center. The New York Times and its international counterpart International Herald Tribune were reporting it prominently, even Al Jazeera English. Sure, it’s not important that Americans know how their country gets involved with affairs in the Middle East! Our politicians (except Ron Paul it seems…) seem to be completely oblivious to an idea that less than friendly interactions with groups of people could have negative effects down the road (blowback!). Say anything to the contrary and you’re labeled unpatriotic. No it’s cool, it’s better this way. Americans shouldn’t be informed of what’s going on so heaven forbid the next time something awful happens we can innocently ask “why do they hate us?” Thank you mainstream media.

Sorry for the two rants. These have been accumulating for a week now. This whole post ended up longer than I expected. I’ve now been writing for over an hour now…and should probably get some sleep (5am?!). I’ve got lunch with the entrepreneurial finance professors at the faculty club (they want to get to the know the students more) then the frantic last push to finish the 414 lab. Good times.