Welcome to the early stages of the Unofficial Stanford Blog. You can call it our "beta" release, but then... that might just be gross.

What are we here for? Well, no blog written by Stanford students for Stanford students has yet garnered the critical mass necessary to be a force in the dialog here on campus. And that's a shame simply because, by virtue of being online and subject to minimal editorial control, a blog with a critical mass of legitimacy and readership would have the opportunity to make campus dialog more spontaneous, more intimate, and -- clearly -- more diverse.

So, we're here to do that, and we'd love for you to contribute. You can already tell that we're going to be talking politics. We'll probably also be talking sports, and... well, you can bet we're going to be taking advantage of YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and everything else that makes the web great. We're obviously not going to stop at just text, so... film studies majors, please do apply.

While we're at it, we're hoping also to inspire more people and more student groups to join us with their own blogs. This way, we could build a whole network of Stanford blogs and, well, that could be pretty cool. You'll notice that our URL is http://blog.stanford.edu/unofficial. If you or your group is interested, we can make it very easy for you to have your own blog past that third slash. That is, if you don't want to just contribute to the Unofficial Stanford Blog.

Senator Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president today at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, where, symbolically, Abraham Lincoln once declared that "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

I was moved, as I always am, by his soaring words, his intelligence, his integrity, and his eloquence. But aside from reinforcing in me that Obama is someone I want to and think I can believe in, the speech also reinforced for me that I need substance. Beyond the sweeping rhetoric, Obama's speech left me feeling flat.

Unfortunately, Obama's campaign seems to eschew the substance in favor of vague notions of hope and generational responsibility. Those are powerful notions, but I can't think of a presidential candidate in recent history who hasn't invoked them. Even worse is that Obama explicitly suggests that people who want to hear plans and specifics somehow "don't believe in talking about hope":

"There are those who don't believe in talking about hope," Obama told the crowd. "They say, 'Well, we want specifics, we want details, and we want white papers, and we want plans.' We've had a lot of plans, Democrats. What we've had is a shortage of hope."

Polar bears on chunks of glacial ice in the Bering Sea in 2004. From the recent NYTimes article reporting on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's just-released report that human activity is causing global warming. Nothing really new, it seems, except now the scientists report over 90% confidence in their predictions (however they're measuring confidence). This follows an alarming article in the WashPost reporting that global warming could extinguish the polar bear as a species.

One of my favorite t-shirts.

Tonight, the Stanford-educated President of the National Rifle Association spoke in Kresge auditorium. The title of the speech, lovingly, was "Firearms in America Today Represent Freedom." The flier for the event notes that the President, Sandy Froman, is the first Jewish and second female president of the NRA.

Diversity has made great strides.

The perfect Valentine's eCard for that special hippie co-op someone.

This Valentine's Day, why not make that "I love you" a sustainable one? We're not suggesting that you propose to anyone necessarily (that might be a little too sustainable)... but how about greening it up a little bit? Some easy things you can do today to say "Happy Valentine's Day, Valentine" in a greener way:

• Shower together. It saves water, and it's a sexy treat! Just, for the sake of your housemates, make sure you clean up afterwards. You can learn more about greening your sex life here and here.


• Cook 'em a nice, organic dinner. Head on down to Whole Foods on Emerson and pick up all the tasty organic ingredients you need. While you're at it, pick up some organic chocolates, too.


• Offset your loved one's carbon emissions for the next year. A $30 gift certificate is enough for them to purchase a TerraPass for their dorm room, and best of all, you can send these gift certificates via e-mail!


• Rent An Inconvenient Truth and watch it together. If you still haven't seen it, or watching Al Gore talk about global warming is a turn-on for either one of you, this documentary could be the perfect lead-in to foreplay. Or even foreplay itself. (Unfortunately, there are none available from Green as of this writing.)

For more, check here and here.

In other news, Google appears to have dropped the "L" from its name for Valentine's Day. "Googe"? That just sounds gross.

Maybe there was another chocolate-covered strawberry there and somebody ate it.

The tenor of tonight's speech and Q&A with Ralph Nader, I think, can be best illustrated by describing three of the more distinct moments in what was a very compelling evening:

• Alan Morrison's introduction of Nader came with a telling admission: that even he, who has argued more than 20 cases in front of the Supreme Court and is now on faculty at the Law School, feels that Nader demands more of him than he is 'capable' of providing.


• When Nader asked the audience, mostly Law students and undergraduates, how many of us will devote our post-graduation lives to the pursuit of justice (however we define it), far less than half of us raised our hands.


• The very first question Nader received during the Q&A went something like this: "Ralph Nader, given your assertion during the 2000 election that there is no difference between George W. Bush and Al Gore, has your thinking at all changed, seven years later, when we're stuck in the war in Iraq and Al Gore is the leading advocate for confronting global warming?"

As we get closer to March and high school Spring Breaks, we'll be seeing more and more prospective freshmen coming to Stanford to explore possibilities for their next four years at college and their lives beyond. As a tour guide, it is my distinct honor and pleasure to introduce them to some of the possibilities available for them to create here at Stanford.

Everyone is searching for clues as to what it is that gets one a spot in the next freshman class. Tour guides all answer that question a bit differently, and I want to provide some of my own (read: unofficial) perspective on it.

Guides will almost universally tell you about the importance of strong academic performance in high school. Most of the time, you'll also hear guides tell you some variation on: "Do what you love," "Be passionate," "Be who you are," and have something to show for it. An award. An invention. A great letter of recommendation.

First was the command line. Then was the GUI. Next up may be the 3-D multi-touch user interface, some of which is already making it out into the real world, for example in the iPhone. The latest innovations in interface design are meant to make computers look and work more like we and the physical world do, so that the interface recedes into the background, leaving us, simply, with our content. With interfaces like the one demonstrated here by NYU's Jeff Han, the old point-and-click model becomes just one of many new touch gestures possible in the multi-touch, ten-finger world in which we live. Check it out:

For more on multi-touch and other cool interface projects, try here and here (video). Of course, Stanford is in on the fun, too. Check out the iRoom, for example, or just check out our HCI website.

As we said in our first post, "Hello World!", we're here to help connect Stanford's blogging community, and bring talented people together to breathe fresh air into campus dialog. E-mail us at blogforstanford at gmail dot com with any questions or click here to sign up to blog.

We have only been in existence since Winter quarter and we currently receive an average of 200 unique visitors and 350 page loads per day. Woohoo!

Work with some of Stanford's most passionate bloggers and help build our collective impact on campus dialogue.

Send us your link and help us build a network of Stanford bloggers, no matter the topic. You can also subscribe to our all-campus blogger discussion list, or join our group on Facebook.

It's easy to get http://blog.stanford.edu/your-own-blog for you or your group. We have plenty of space and the best URL.

E-mail us at blogforstanford at gmail dot com to express your interest or sign up to blog here.

Thanks for your interest. We're here to bring a new level of personality, diversity, and creativity -- not to mention technology -- to the Stanford media space, and we'd love for you to blog with us. Registration is easy and open to all current Stanford students, and you should expect to hear back from us within 24 hours for further instructions.

This is a free-speech space open and dedicated to all student voices. Please read thoroughly our Agreement so that you understand your responsibility to respectful discourse.

If you have any questions, please e-mail Christian Tom and Jason Shen, Co-Presidents, at blogforstanford at gmail dot com.

This summer, 8 Stanford students will travel to the Mwange refugee camp in northern Zambia to implement community development projects in collaboration with the community. Undergrads Rhianon Liu, Emily Allegrotti, Elizabeth Kersten, Daniel Gonzalez, Annie Kalt, Katrice Williams, Liz Brody and Alison Root, are the eight Project Facilitators on the 2007 Mwange FORGE team.

A nonprofit organization founded in 2003 by Stanford student Kjerstin Erikson, FORGE, an NGO committed to empowering and enriching the lives of refugees, stands for “Facilitating Opportunities for Refugee Growth and Empowerment" and works to engage U.S. students and African refugee communities in collaborative projects.

The 8-member Stanford team will work in the Mwange Refugee camp near Melu's Village, a rural area near Mporokoso, Zambia. Mwange is home to about 20,500 refugees, all fleeing violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Stanford team will spend seven months in an intensive training and planning phase, in which members will learn about international law and refugee rights, the history of the region, and the problems facing refugees in Mwange.

I saw a Post-It on my RA's door which said,

Jessica- Thanks for being such an awesome RA!

Mind you, usually the note on an RA's door is more like,

Hi- Do you have the hall vacuum?

So where on earth did the wonderful the idea to say something nice come from?

Check out this great concept at http://postit.stanford.edu

As they say on their website, "It is easy to overlook all the good things and sometimes it takes a little reminding to remember they are there."

To rectify the situation (at least a little bit), all you have to do is, "Write down on a Post-It note something you admire about a friend, dorm-mate, or acquaintance and stick it to their door. This hopefully will spread across campus, chain-letter style, complement by complement. Pass on the post-it love!"

Barring an unexpected upset tomorrow, we should be invited to the NCAA Tournament once again this year. Arizona State only has one win in the Pac-10, and sure, they’ve lost by small margins, but they’ve lost 14 games all the same. They play a slow, plodding pace which is perfect for us—we don’t want our big guys running around, especially with run n’ gun Arizona coming in on Saturday. Their best player is a forward, not a guard and they shoot the three poorly. If we lose tomorrow, either Arizona State got extremely lucky, or we played extremely poorly, or more probably a combination of both happened.

With that being said, I’m really pleased by just making it, as we’re a team composed mostly of freshmen and sophomores and have no real bench to speak of (yet—next year Will Paul and Landry Fields could provide sparks alongside Taj Finger). The next question is, of course, how well can we expect to do?

Well, the prerequisite to our doing well is this: will Anthony Goods be back, and will he be at least 75% of his former self?