Saket Vora

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.