Friday, August eighth was a monumental day for the incoming freshman of the Class of 2012. Tears were shed in both glee and sorrow. Since the last mailing received on June 27th, the incoming frosh, including myself, have all been anticipating the day where yet another piece of information would be shared to bring us closer to New Student Orientation on September 16th. Rooming assignments haunted me since August began: would I be roomed near my Admit Weekend friends, in THE Branner, the dorm every incoming frosh seemed to be hoping for, near the library, or in the middle of nowhere? Nightmares seemed to occur each night, in which my roommate was incompatible with me and everyone in my dorm was rude, introverted, and unhygienic. Well, this message came rather rapidly, appearing in our stanford webmail inboxes. I immediately clicked on the link to see my future.

In between writing this summer I've been knitting. In particular, I've been knitting scarves. It's an activity which lets me be creative, yet gives me an "output" rather fast.

I'm rather pleased with myself because after a bit of screwing around I've figured out how to embed beads in my scarf and using a variation on the "cheater's lace" pattern, I've created what I'm calling my "sea scarf." I chose the colors and beads to evoke the nets fishermen use.

I just need to finish the scarf by weaving the yarn tails back into the scarf before snipping them, and am still deciding what I'm going to do with the scarf (I give away the majority of the scarves I make to friends and family).

While it doesn't look that big, the scarf is 5 1/2 feet long. I like to make my scarves that way so that you can wind them around your throat and still have play.

Presented in TIME Magazine under the title Are Oil Prices Rigged?, the controversial Officer-Hayes Hypothesis claims that oil producers have artificially boosted prices by speculating in the oil futures market. It relies on the fact that the futures market is smaller than the physical oil market, so it is in an oil supplier's interest to boost prices in the smaller, price-setting market.

In light of the realization that one firm did, in fact, control 11% of the oil futures market, Officer-Hayes has proved plausible.

Ari J. Officer studies financial mathematics Garrett J. Hayes studies materials science and engineering at Stanford.

hey (soon-to-be) freshman, here's a guest post by Anne Crossman, a Stanford-educated author with some tips about how to, uh, get the best out of orientation (and then some!) --darius

So, you’ve got your dorm assignment for the year…your summer reading well underway (!)…and you’ve most likely been hitting the Back to School sales pretty hard in the hopes of making your new home at Stanford a bit, well, homier. Ah yes, I remember the nauseous excitement well.

It was just a few years ago that I, too, had packed every crevice of my parents’ white minivan with what I thought I couldn’t live without for the year, pulling up to Stern Hall at 7:30am as my Twainie RA’s were getting set to unroll the red, uh, foil gift wrap. It took me by complete surprise when they welcomed me by name as if they had been waiting for me for the last four years; any qualms I had about moving away from home vanished.

With the run-up to the Democratic National Convention and Obama’s epic speech (we know it will be that), it’s useful to remind everyone that you should not pour all your hopes in him; he is a weak vessel, as he is human after all.

With the season kick-off to Stanford football tonight, the first question is Why? I mean, why tonight? Listen, if you’re going to broadcast a message asking for the fans to come on, and offer a Gridiron Guarantee—refund season tickets to those who are unhappy with their Stanford football experience—you’re sending the message that you want plenty of fan support. If, on the other hand, you move one of your five home dates to a day far before the school year even starts—staff isn’t even training yet!—then you have a problem with fan support, at least with those fans who call themselves students. Part of the idea behind moving the date up was to move from the icky FSN network to ESPN, certainly a worthwhile move to increase exposure. But what worth is the exposure if the stands are half- to three-quarters empty, as is the definite risk? I hope for the best but you never know.