Quotations

Hi Safarians! Just thought I'd post all my collected quotations from the speakers before our Stanford Mag stuff is due. I plan, at some point, to combine my list with Shruti and Janelle's, eliminate the overlapping ones, and get them up on our Google site. I made the funnier ones green. Enjoy...

Stanford Safari 2008 Sophomore College Quotations

University Organist Robert
“I tent to avoid organists. They’re very boring people.”
-On whether there are groups of organists that meet for conventions

University President Gerhard Casper
“An authority with very little authority” who’s responsible for everything.
-On describing how the university president is like a major CEO

“It is a ridiculous process—and you can quote me on that.”
-On faculty appointments

“All impressions are first impressions, and they are often the only impressions.”
-On giving speeches

“Poor Hennessey… He has to worry about appearing on YouTube.”
-On describing the changes in how public figures are judged

“That’s saying to a group of people, ‘I’m not your president.’”
-On what happens if you take a side on an issue

“In the end, what matters is teaching, learning, research... Everything else is just ‘fluff.’”

Peter Bing
“The Holy Triad.”
-On protecting the three most important trustee responsibilities

Protect the institution as a “marketplace of ideas.” “Represent the best of a free society.”
-On the duties of a trustee

“It’s fun to get involved.”
-Advice

Isaac Stein
“When we need to, we can change quickly.” (But usually no…)
-On the Board

“Remembering to think long term.”
-On the most challenging thing to do as board member

Coach Harbaugh
“If we could, we’d all be sittin’ around a campfire. Naked.”

“We support no other cause than the greatness and excellence of Stanford football.”

Doug Osheroff
“You don’t change, they change.”
-On seeing old friends at high school reunions

“Ahh… So many uses.”
-On gunpowder

“Chance will give you opportunities. The question is, what will you do with those opportunities.”

Kenneth Arrow
“My handwriting was very very bad.”

“Universities will be here for a long time, and they don’t become non-functional.”

“I realized economic forecasting wasn’t much worse than weather forecasting.”

“He should have understood that academic freedom is for professors, not for university presidents.”
-On Summer’s comment at Harvard

President Hennessey
“The Band is a unique Stanford tradition.”

“Occasionally, people do really bad things.”
-On the worst part of his job

“Talking to people about Stanford.”
-On the best part of his job

“Government is not going to solve any problems that are researched-based.”

“You ridiculous SOB! … You can’t do that, you can’t do that.”
-On limiting what you want to say sometimes as president

“Recovering.”
-On how he spends his summers

“Something that has pasta in it.”
-Favorite food

Favorite places: The Quad when it’s quiet, Mausoleum, Cactus Garden, Angel of Grief, Cantor

Larry Kramer
“When we went to Michigan, my first wife discovered it wasn’t Chicago she hated.”
-Most depressing quotation of the trip

“The difference between the students who want to do good, and the students who want to do well.”

“It’s like pornography: you’ll know it when you see it.”
-Quoting someone else

“Law is more like an art than a science.”

“You’re joking! What, you think you’re going to get mugged by a squirrel?”
-On the crime problem in the parking lot, after coming from NYC

“What, are they all drunk inside their rooms? With the door open.”
-About campus seeming dead on a Saturday night

Favorite place: New Guinea Sculpture Garden

Mark Mancall
“The Dalai Lama once said to me…”

Rich Skalski, Pest Control
“The whole attic was filled with raccoon poop. It was the grossest thing I’d ever seen.”

Maggie Kimball
Likes chocolate.

Dean Shaw
“We make judgments about admitting students because we believe they can be successful here. Period.”

“In fact, this process has a heart.”
-About accepting students from adverse backgrounds

David Demerest
“Out of the blue, I get a call from Debra Zumwalt.”

“And this is one of the best jobs I’ve ever had.”

“My job revolves around advancing and protecting Stanford’s reputation.”

“Any time a campaign is talking more about campaign strategy than issues… they’re having problems.”

“Reputation is whether you kept the promise.”
-On the reputation of a great university keeping the promise of a great education

David Harris
“Mistake? Mistake is wearing brown shoes with a black suit.”
-On how the Vietnam War can’t be sidestepped like a mistake

“Well, that’s fine talk for a guy who burns babies for a living.”
-What he said to David Packard, who worked in defense, at a Board of Trustees meeting

“So much of what the sixties was about was learning to take risks.”

“At some point you have to reach out and claim your life.”

“Look, I’m giving you four million dollars each year by not being student body president.”
-What he says to people calling from SU asking for money

“The first and foremost challenge we have as human beings is how to be our own person.”

“The scary part about Stanford for me is how it’s all so goddamn corporate.”

“The first step towards liberation is organizing yourself.”

Zimbardo
“I couldn’t believe God could take these kids, so I thought it was the Devil.”
-On the children’s hospital in the NYC ghettos

“The power of institutions over the individuals in them.”
-Brief description of the Stanford Prison Experiment

Dr. Richard Saller
“We’re no longer the subordinate of Cal. We even win football games.”

Phillip Pizzo
“Rather than learning it all, learn a roadmap to help you get there.”
-On how practices change so constantly

“At Stanford, we are not trying to just train physicians, we are trying to change the world.”

“Pick something inspirational for you.”
-Advice

“This incestuous relationship with industry only makes it worse.”
-On pharmaceutical companies and the Med School

Cantor: Sally and Anne Katherine
“And then the cadavers got in there…”
-About the history of the old anatomy building

David Rasch
“I don’t become their lawyer… I lay out their rights.”
-On his job as University Ombudsman

“Find someone you can talk to if someone’s bothering you.”
-Advice; it’s important to at least be able to say what you want, even if you don’t succeed at getting it

The Wonka Family

Some history on Warren G. Wonka and his sis Wendy Wonka came up in the Sandstone & Tile in 2002.  I think its fabulous!  Check it out!!!

~The Other Wendy :)

Did anyone else notice this?

While we were biking on the way to the law school I spotted a lady in a catwoman outfit outside of Bing Wing. Just an observation.

Cristina

Beware of local folklore!

Ok so last night I snuck away for dinner with my grandparents and the waiter tried to claim that his great grandfather (I believe), Harry Mosher, designed/built the quad.  Well, being a newly saturated wealth of information regarding Stanford, I knew instantly that Olmstead did all that incredible designing but I humored him.  He went on to tell us about how there was a street named after him, etc. (which there is...kinda like we heard from Chris Berka and the Marguerite, which everyone now thinks is named after the horse because of a newspaper article that may not be entirely correct).  As soon as I got back to the dorm I looked up Mosher and even though the waiter was slightly confused as to his relative's relationship with the university, Mosher appears to have been a fairly prominent figure in his time...in the chemistry department.  Shruti and I went on a wild goose chase through many fascinating Stanford websites (including the Sandstone & Tile on the 1906 earthquake, very relavant to Leslie Bone's presentation yesterday) and I highly recommend you check them out...and watch out for the Palo Alto claim to fame through Stanford...they won't get it by anyone in the safari :)

Cheers!

Wendy

Popular Particles

So I was checking out The Onion's AV Club, and check out what video is tops for the week in list of its popular videos? That's right, the Large Hadron Rap. I guess we all watched it enough times to make an impact....

Rock on, Safari!

-josh

A Day In the Life of President Hennessy

Hey everyone. I'm preparing my introduction for Pres. Hennessy right now and I remember at the beginning of the class, some of us were interested in what a typical day for Stanford's president entails. Here's an interesting account of a day in the life of our president, John Hennessy: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/president/inauguration/hennessy_bio.html

-Taryn

Stanford Safari Quotes!

Hey all!

So Janelle and I (Shruti) have been collecting random quotes from our great speakers- funny, inspirational or whatever so we decided to put them together here. If any of you all have any you should put them up here too!

Robert Morgan
- "Churches come, churches go. Organs Remain."
- "I tend to avoid organists; they are very boring people."
-"The organ was louder than the violin." (on why he switched from violin to organ)
-"So yummy!" (in that cool Welsh accent...)

President Lyman
-"You have to remember to define what a university is really about."
-"Well, everyone likes being the head guy. It's kind of like, the buck stops here." (on what was most fun about being President)

Howard Wolf
-"The best part about this place are its stories. I was talking to someone and he said, 'Let me tell you about how this place changed my life.'"

President Casper
- A student to President Casper: "I was trying to find myself",
President Casper: "I advice against it. You might succeed!"
- "One is a celebrity to some extent"
- "Anyone who wants to govern the country, has to entertain it."
-"The job of college president...was the only job I really didn't have."
-"I became an expert on baseball bats (wood vs. aluminum)." (on chairing the PAC-10 conference...)
-"I was expected to provide sex for the students, parking for the faculty, and football for the alumni." (or was it in a different order...?)
-"There was a joke that I was appointed President because I was the only one who could pronounce the university motto."

Peter Bing
- "There is an emotional epoxy that attaches us all to Stanford. We're all in this together. It is fun to get involved."
-"We have to protect this institution that means so much to us."
-"Unless you have an open marketplace of ideas, you have nothing to fight for."
-Magazine article quoting Dianne Feinstein: "'I wanted to be the (ASSU) President, but in those days they would've elected a monkey before a woman.'" (Ouch)

Bob Reidy
- "The sense of place is really important. It is all back to the support of the academic mission"

Persis Drell
- "If you have an opportunity to have children, I highly advice that you have them"

Isaac Stein
- "If you have money, they ask you for it"
-"Managing a university is like herding cats. You have to move the cat food."

Coach Harbaugh
- "As human being, we are lazy, Thats the way we are built. If we could, we would be sitting around a camp fire all day. Naked."

Doug Osheroff
- "It was August 1st. August 1st is my birthday by the way. I like orange cakes."
- "People started calling me THE BRAIN. That is social death."
- "Gunpowder is really great stuff!"
- "I know two Nobel laureates who have fingers missing from experiments with gunpowder."
- "Being a nice guy and being a nobel laureate- an oxymoron."
- "After 45 years, people change. You dont change, but they change."
- "blah, blah, blah... and I don't want any of this appearing in the Estonian newspaper!"
- "I tell all my grad students, it is OK to call me at 4 in the morning. But it better be good!"
- "I don't know if anyone loves Caltech; they survive Caltech."
- "So I was outside waxing my car, and I saw her. So I quickly invited her to the most romantic event of the season- the Physics Department Picnic."
- "You have to give the grad students an opportunity to fail. In the lab I mean, not forever!"

Donald Kennedy-
- "When someone comments about LSJUMB I say- "Would you rather have them march in paramilitary outfits?", when they say yes, I dont know what to say."

Dean Pizzo
- "I have never gone to work"

Dean Saller
- "We are uniquely multi-disciplinary... So is the Univ of Milwaukee. Uniquely disciplinary yields 1,60,000 searches on google."

Rick Shaw
- "By bringing people together from all walks of life, I think it will contribute to world peace"
- "I was at Berkeley too many 100 years ago"
- "On high school transcripts, C's are a kiss of death"
- "A loner, kinda wandering around and bumping into trees"
- "The Draw- that whole experience is a bummer!"

Rich Skalski
- "They dont think about pest control when they make these buildings!"

Larry Kramer
- "You dont pick between Stanford Law school and Harvard Law school. You pick between Stanford University and Harvard Law school"
- "You cant become a rabbi or a hairdresser without a clinical education- but you can become a lawyer!"

President Hennessey
- "I like an early morning phone call when the Nobel Prized are announced"
- "We have a lets-go-try-it, take risks kind of culture"

Ken Arrow
- "I am very careful about what I write. I was born with a bad handwriting"
- "Economic forecasting is not much worse than weather forecasting
- "Academic freedom is for Professors, not University Presidents"


BOB quotes
- "So...Whats new in ancient Roman History?"

Stanford Hospital etc

Hey Guys!

Here is a bit about the Stanford Hospital rebuilding over the seismic laws incase you guys didn’t know about it! Debra Zumwalt was talking about it.

http://www.stanfordhospital.com/newsevents/newsreleases/2006/plans

http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=4077

Here are some interesting facts about the Google Book Project. Each book is gone for an average of a month! I didn’t know that.

http://www-sul.stanford.edu/about_sulair/special_projects/google_sulair_project_faq.html


Cheers!

Shruti

LHC Madness

If you thought SLAC [I mean, SLAC (meaningless): Home of The Pinofsky Linear Accelerator Center?] was really baller, here's more info about the Large Hadron Collider. Click on the link to the picture album from Boston.com--it's pretty stunning.

http://www.instructables.com/community/More_on_the_LHC_Countdown/

-josh

The Real World: Zimbardo

So I've been reading The Lucifer Effect while also living my life (doing my thang, you know how I do). Not surprisingly, the two have intertwined like a well-cooked casserole, and I often find myself relating Zimbardo's theories to the actions and events in my daily activities. Here are two of my musings about the SPE and the applications I have found; note, though, that these are just theoretical relations and I could be totally off the mark.

This summer, I worked at a web site. One of my responsibilities was to monitor what people are saying--people are supposed to follow the "Be Nice Policy," but, well, a bunch of them don't. There are a whole host of [insert expletive here]s on the Internet writing comments that are so blatantly in violation of social mores that it would be hard to imagine anyone even considering acting this way in person. But on the Internet, they do.

And then it dawned on me: I don't know who these people are, and they don't think I know who they are. Their real self is disguised under a username and avatar, and they are essentially anonymous. (What they don't realize is that site administrators can track IP addresses and find fake accounts and lock/disable anything they write.) The theory about anonymity backed by Zimbardo and all of the research he cites--evil kids' Halloween party, guards with stunna shades--looks to be the exact cause of evil users. Given their prevalence, it only makes sense that some/most of them are normal, probably decent human beings. But on the Internet, they're assholes. Is the anonymity of the world wide web giving them cause to act in evil ways? Perhaps I'll ask Prof. Zimbardo and see what he thinks. Hmmm. Discuss.

Secondly, I thought about one of the prisoners' statements that it was the loss of control that really got to him. However, I also went on a rafting trip (which was most fun when the rapids beat the hell out of our boat) and went biking down a hugenormous hill with crappy brakes. And those were both really fun and exciting experiences--mostly because in those cases, I/we had very little control of the situation. The less control I had, the more fun it was. If I were in complete control, they would have been highly unmemorable situations.

But we all want control of our lives, right? And a lack of control drove some prisoners crazy. Is there a controlometer that determines what levels of control are aggravating and which are exciting? Does said controlometer fit conventiently into your pocket? How can lacking control be entertaining and painful?

Discuss. See you all tomorrow (well, today, but that's not important)!

-Josh

Collection of newspaper articles from this summer...

I'm not really sure why I didn't post these earlier but I've been paying special attention to the Bay Area section of the SF Chronicle this summer...

Jude Shao, a Stanford alumnus, (whose story was discussed in Cream of the Crop) was arrested in China about 10 years ago for "allegations of tax evasion" and given an unfair 15 year sentence. Stanford alums help create a website (freejudeshao.com) for him and he was finally freed last month.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/08/ED4311L5HF.DTL&hw=stanford+olympics&sn=077&sc=176

Stanford is building a new hospital! It is going to be 7 stories, cost about $2 billion, and hopefully be completed by 2015. What interested me most about it is its "creative" design. They've designed it so that the interior walls can be moved around to accommodate new technologies, patients with cancer and bone marrow transplants can be in positive pressure nursing units ("units will have higher air pressure so the air flows outward, which will prevent bacteria and other contaminants from entering"), and hospital visitors can enjoy outdoor views and even a spa.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/13/BATR113AL7.DTL&hw=stanford+hospital&sn=045&sc=1000

And finally, a Stanford professor's view on gardening...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/04/HOT210TB5F.DTL&hw=stanford+gardens&sn=001&sc=1000

and the Stanford garden website to go along with it- I used it last year to learn about the cactus garden...

http://grounds.stanford.edu/points/gardens/index.html

~nadia