Saket Vora

A pretty balanced weekend, I’d say. I woke up early Saturday morning and joined Amit, Nader, and a few others to a special roundtable event titled “Courting Disaster: The Fight for Oil, Water, and a Healthy Planet“. It featured an impressive panelist list: General John Abizaid, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Dean of the Earth Sciences School at Stanford and recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant Pamela Matson, and CEO of Edison International John Bryson. Stanford’s President John Hennessy hosted the roundtable, while CNN’s Carlos Watson moderated it.

Tom Friedman was the most animated and engaging speaker, clearly adept with words and explaining concepts. He described his trips to China where he would hear from automakers “America, you polluted for 150 years and became who you are. Now let us have our turn.” In response, Friedman told them to “take their time, because in 5 years, you’ll be wanting our clean technology so you don’t choke to death.” Friedman sees that clean and green technology is the next big global industry, and agreed with Bryson that economic pressures must exist in order to cause meaningful change in society. General Abizaid illuminated many points about Iraq and our reliance on foreign oil as a threat to national security. General Abizaid has three or four direct relatives serving in Iraq, including his daughter and son-in-law. Stephen Breyer was fun to listen to, because his comments were never as direct or straightforward as the other speakers. At one point, Watson asked him what he thought about taking into consideration international laws when deciding a Supreme Court case. Breyer started this response that didn’t seem to deal at all with his question. He spoke for several minutes, and only at the very end did you finally realize that he was answering the question the whole time. Very clever.

After the roundtable, I did the laundry and had some lunch. I met up with Nader and two of his buddies from the VLF group – Morris and Dennis. Morris is a major player in the group. As a 5th year grad student, he has worked in the VLF group for 9 years (yeah, since he was a freshman at Stanford.) Dennis didn’t really know the game, so we explained it to him on the way the stadium. We stood in the Red Zone (student section), where we yelled and cheered the whole game. Some notes:

• for kick-offs, all the students jingle their car keys.
• students do a “oh-oh-oh first down!” when we make first downs
• some guy with a microphone tried leading the section in cheers, only he kept shouting when our team was in the huddle on offense or setting up on the line. You don’t make noise when our offense is there so they can listen to the play. A bunch of us started to yell “shut up!” at him towards the end.
• Since this homecoming, a bunch of band alumni were invited back to play with the current band. The drum majors this time wore a V-for-Vendetta outfit, complete with the mask. The half-time show was rather stupid though.
• Our de facto ‘fight song’ is All Right Now, originally by Free. This song is played when we score touchdowns. There really isn’t anything comparable to the Red and White song at NCSU or even our classic fight song.

We lost a close game, 36-38. I got back to the apartment, and worked on some homework and watched TV.

Sunday morning I woke up early and continued work on this EE 214 homework. At 2pm, Jimmy and Nader came over. Jimmy, who is a senior this year in EE, was a huge help. We worked through our last problem and Jimmy got my unix environment all set up. Nader was lagging behind, so I helped him quickly finish the rest of the homework. Amit and I went over to Mary and Matt’s house for dinner again. She is amazing. She made spinakopita and Italian risotta with basil, tomatoes, mozzarella with balsamic vinegar reduction drizzled over it. For dessert, she had made lavender infused creme brule, complete with the culinary torch and everything. She dropped a stalk from a lavender plant while cooking the milk, cream, and eggs. You can taste the essence of it but it’s such a challenge to place the flavor. It was delicious. After dinner we played several rounds of bridge. Amit is learning fast. I had several good hands, and Mary and I made 5 a few times.

I tried going to the Rains computer lab to print my homework for tomorrow, but the printer is broken (again). The paper tray is out of paper, but they have locked the paper tray so I can’t open it. Oh yeah, and the Rains housing office, which is right across the courtyard from the lab? They don’t have the key. Sigh. Anyway, gotta get ready for this upcoming week.