Saket Vora

A nice day so far. Dr. Lee is attended the Int’l Solid State Circuits conference in San Francisco next week (the same conference I attended last year on my first trip to Stanford) so he was taping Monday and Wednesday’s lectures ahead. I meant to get there for the first one at 9:30am, but overslept. About 5 or 6 people was there for the 2nd lecture, and he was great as always. What an extraordinary command of history for the field — truly shows his passion. If you’ve ever wondered about some sort of funny thing you see in this field, Dr. Lee knows it. For example. Scientists like to use 300 K as ‘room temperature’ cause its a nice round number. But when one scientist was working on noise power in circuits, he found that using 300K resulted in non-round number. But he found that 293K did result in a round number, so he defined that as room temperature.

Anyway, after that I went to a Barack Obama rally held at White Plaza. Two interesting speakers — one of them is Obama’s key technology advisor, a friend from Law School. He met Barack Obama while playing basketball at Yale. He told the crowd how Obama is THE 21st century president. He gave a shout-out to the former head of the Brookings Institution, another Obama supporter. The other was a former California comptroller and graduate of Stanford University. At Stanford during the 1970s, he was Student Body President and led the “association” (ie, all Stanford students) to oppose the university’s investments that supported the apartheid regime in South Africa. They called for divestment. This movement was so powerful that he led the student body into occupying the Old Union and effectively shut Stanford down. This caused a ripple effect into other schools across the country and across the world, ultimately achieving their goals and helping to free Nelson Mandela. His message to us — don’t believe that a bunch of 18 and 19 year-olds can’t change the world. We have done so and we will do it again on February 5th and in November!

Fired Up and Ready to Go!

After the rally, I went to go meet with Dr. Kenneth Arrow, professor emeritus of economics. I had volunteered on behalf of Naman to talk to him and get his endorsement for Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, a movement he’s involved with a friend (Derek Lundberg) who I played Frisbee with during the summers in Raleigh. They are an organization advocating shifts in university policy that ensure fair and affordable access of essential medicines for the developing world. Ben had made a comment to me about how neat it was that I was going to talk to him — he wrote his NSF proposal off Dr. Arrow’s work. About an hour before the meeting, I wanted to look up Dr. Arrow’s information to get some information…I should have done this a while ago! I see his Wikipedia page and immediately read “Nobel Prize Winner in Economics” and “2004 Presidential Medal of Science award” and my eyes widen. Oh boy. I better get ready for this!

Dr. Arrow was nice to talk to and asked some good questions about the movement. I chatted with him for about 15 minutes, left him the packet containing the Philadelphia Consensus Statement and some more information. Hopefully he will endorse it. That will make it 7 Nobel Prize laureates to endorse the movement.

Gonna use the rest of the day to get ahead on 314 homework (for once) and to do some neuroengineering reading.