This still baffles me, and I know we've all been there. You show up to class a minute or two late (on time in my book), and it's like your classmates have built a human wall blocking you from all the seats. One person in the aisle seat of a row effectively nullifies all the seats in that row.

We usually have two options when we face this dilemma:

Halloween '09 has come and gone--like an apparition, perhaps--only to leave us with some highlights of the event.

A jack-o-lantern in front of Synergy.

There were a bunch of good costumes, but overall I was a little disappointed in the lack of astoundingly creative get-ups that I had expected. Where is that Stanford ingenuity applied to something as trivial as a night of partying? In any case, those who did dress up in a noteworthy way deserve some sort of recognition, even it it warrants no material prize in return. Sorry!

When I received an email that Chamillionaire--rapper/hip-hop artist most famous for his hit "Ridin'", a song well-parodied by Weird Al Yankovic--would be coming to campus on Wednesday and students could see him for free, I was distressed that I hadn't heard about this event earlier. After all, Stanford Concert Network has struggled to bring any well-known artists to the Farm, and I figured that if Chamillionaire were performing, someone would have let the masses of students itching for a good concert on campus know immediately.

But that's just it--Chamillionaire is not performing on Wednesday; rather, he is lecturing with Quincy Jones III on "Innovation in the Changing Music Industry," as a part of the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar Series to launch the Global Innovation Tournament. Chamillionaire: global innovator and entrepreneur? Even if the cops don't catch him riding dirty, this is still, at best, an interesting choice for a speaker on the subject.

Following her reading last night, Joyce Carol Oates doled out writing (and life) advice as part of the more intimate colloquium this morning.

Oates began with, ended with, and repeatedly emphasized throughout a quote by Bernard Malamud: "Write your heart out." She drew heavily upon her past experiences as a writer--one of the most prolific of the modern era--to provide advice and debunk common misconceptions held by young writers.

Joyce Carol Oates on writing, from the colloquium:
On happiness:
"Happy people are great to have around--everyone wants to marry a cheerful person--but you don't want to be only happy. It's just not very exciting."

This weekend, Camp Wellstone is coming to campus! What is Camp Wellstone?

According to wellstone.org, "Campus Camp Wellstone trains students nationwide on how to run energized, community building, winningcampaigns. We focus on campus and community organizing and young voter engagement."

Last year at this time, around November 2008, Stanford was in the midst of a upswell of political engagement and activism, and the country was about to elect its new leader. One year later, there's still work to be done (as we follow the #VoteNoOn1 hash tag tonight), as thought leaders, activists and organizers. Stanford, here's your chance to organize as organizers!

Email stanfordcampwellstone@googlegroups.com to RSVP and get more info!

Remember, remember the 5th of November...

Greetings from Stanford at Oxford where we are currently celebrating Guy Fawkes Day with plenty of festivals and fireworks! So today is basically a national holiday commemorating the prevention of a terrorist attack on London in 1605. See V for Vendetta for details...

Oxford is awesome, so we thought we would cue you in on a little bit of fun we are having from across the pond...

If you've been in White Plaza lately, you may have noticed that its centerpiece, The Claw, has been dry. The fountain is normally a repository for pennies and toes on a warm day, but without water, it resembles something out of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.

Why? Ted Tucholski, grounds manager at Stanford, explains: "The fountain has been off due to renovation and installation of a new filtration system . It is now off so that the piping to the bubblers in the sculptural part can be replaced . This is being done to increase the efficiency of the fountain and to conserve water."

So there you go. The rigging of a more efficient filtration system seems like a pretty good reason for a temporarily waterless fountain to me.

Students for a Sustainable Stanford and FEED held their potentially-annual harvest party in White Plaza today. As if having the opportunity to dance like a tree to live bluegrass music didn't make my inner hippie orgasm enough, I also left with my face painted and a tummy full of homemade pumpkin muffins (made with REAL pumpkins - click here for recipe) and fresh persimmons. Well done my farm-loving friends, well done.

The wheel of compost knowledge wows yet another unsuspecting bystander.

In an era of increased oversight and meddling by the University, many of our dearest traditions have been diluted, spayed, and neutered. Exotic Erotic, Mausoleum Party, and Full Moon on the Quad have all suffered from losing the spirit of spontaneity and reckless abandon that is essential to any notably debaucherous event.

Fortunately, we still have the special dinner, an exploration and a celebration of what becomes possible when enough people pool their resources together and act irresponsibly. A perpetual favorite among the upperclassmen who inhabit Stanford's Row Houses, special dinner truly is special. Even the most timid residents emerge from their rooms in theme-appropriate costumes to eat well and drink well; everyone becomes part of the living monument to excess. The best part? Special dinner is exclusively student-run, and it's only this awesome because no figures of authority deprive us of our agency. So experience and treasure this most special of Stanford traditions, even if you don't quite recall it the following morning.

As Fall quarter's end draws near, the number of performances by groups and departments on campus jumps exponentially. And while most people will not get a chance to see all of these events due to generally being busy, it seems to me that most people will not get a chance to see any of these events due to not hearing about any of them--particularly those who really do want to see them. Plus, many--I stress the many--of the performances are exceptional, and the rest are usually interesting, albeit confusing, in some other way.

To counter this lack of knowledge about campus performances, we offer you a list of as many of these events as we can, listed chronologically.

About 40 Stanford students gathered yesterday to attend the first of two days of community organizer training, as part of "Campus Camp Wellstone".

"Campus Camp Wellstone is not your average political training," read the intro sheet, "We're not going to tell you who to vote for, or how you should feel about any particular issues... we're here [to] teach you the skills you need to become effective organizers on your campuses and in your communities... you'll know how to create an effective message, communicate that message... develop a strategic plan for action, recruit members and volunteers, build organizational coalitions and develop the next generation of progressive leaders."

Sponsored by the ASSU Speakers Bureau, the ASSU Community Collaboration fund, and a host of on-campus VSOs (voluntary student org) such as the Emma Goldman Society for Queer Liberation, EPA Youth Court, Haas Center, MECHa, SPEACK, STOP, QSA, the training attracted a wide range of student leaders and organizers, focused on hot topics of the day such as the Environment, Education reform, LGBT rights, and food justice, to name a few.

A large group of students received emails last night from the a new Objectivists group at Stanford. About half of the people I've spoken to received the emails - none of us signed up for a list.

The email, signed by Matt Cook and Dakin Sloss, pointed readers to an article by the two here: http://stanfordreview.org/article/the-man-made-myth. The article claims that global warming is a hoax. Specifically, the two argue in the article that an 800-year timelag in some paleo-climate data indicates that CO2 does not drive climate change, but rather that climate change drive CO2 concentrations.

There was a considerable amount of pseudo-science babble in the pair's article, which is below. I'm not going to argue about the whole "CO2 doesn't drive climate change" crap. For that, you can go talk to any of the professors in the Stanford faculty, specifically Ken Caldeira, Mark Jacobson or Steve Schneider.

It's worth, however, looking at how the pair tried to make their argument, because it tells us something about what they're thinking.

If you haven't been in an accident in the circle of death, you will. Luckily, TUSB is here to help you learn the (lack of) rules of the road.

1) As you can see, in section 'A' anarchy takes hold: make up your own rules. Ride through the middle, do a wheelie while going counterclockwise, do whatever you want. This works perfectly, until you get more than a few people making up their own rules. As soon as you get an athlete going 50 mph clockwise and a freshman on a cruiser bike going counterclockwise, the death rate rises at an astonishing rate.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Stanford students tore down a replica wall in White Plaza--captured on video below. Unfortunately, the wall was a little too well built in places--the protesters had some trouble tearing down sections of the mock wall.

Two emails have been making the circuits lately, and both highlight interesting aspects of the Stanford community/experience.

The first is an invitation to an event with that intends to address the 1 in 4 depression rate at Stanford by "just good old venting and problem-solving" by those feeling the effects of an inexplicable drear just below the surface of each day. Thursday, November 12 at 9:00 pm in Old Union 216C. (See below for the complete email and my brief opinion).

The second is certainly more frivolous. It's a blog in the vein of FML where the catch phrase has been altered to: SMIF (Saving Money Is Fun!). The blog is the project of the ASES frosh intern team (whatever that is) and was designed to compete in the Global Innovation Tournament, which asks its entrants to find innovative ways to making saving money fun. SMIF Blog

(Read more below the jump)

From rankings, at least. While Stanford has an on-again-off-again attitude towards college rankings such as the U.S. News and World Report's annual statistics related to our continued appearance in the top 5 best colleges, Stanford's president, John Hennessy, didn't manage to make a similar list--Time Magazine's top 10 University Presidents.

In fact, none of the presidents of the "powerhouse schools"--schools such as Stanford, the techstitutions (MIT/Caltech), or the Ivy League--were to be found on this list, which instead favored presidents of bigger public schools (Ohio State, Michigan) and unknown schools (UT Brownsville, Miami Dade College). Heading the list, though, is Ohio State's E. Gordon Gee, who also happens to be the country's highest paid president of a public school with a salary of about 1.3 million dollars per year.

Welcome to the first installment of Aural Fixation, the Unofficial way to stay abreast of musical goings-on in the Bay Area and beyond.

Them Crooked Vultures is what you get when you combine the bassist from Led Zeppelin, the drummer from Nirvana, and the guitarist from Queens of the Stone Age. If you enjoy bluesy and soul-crushing rock music, then this convergence should be a serious cause for celebration. John Paul Jones (bass), Dave Grohl (drums), and Josh Homme (guitar) aren't doing anything revolutionary, but they're laying down some heavy music and doing it quite well.

Their self-titled debut album is due out November 17th, but they've generously allowed the album to be streamed in its entirety in advance of the official album release. Them Crooked Vultures will be also landing in the Bay Area next Thursday the 19th for a show at Oakland's Fox Theater. Check out the album at themcrookedvultures.com.

Keep your ears to the ground,

Ian

Two years ago, Stanford's football team needed a 4th and 10 one-handed catch in the endzone to defeat perennial football powerhouse USC. This year, the team not only upset USC again, but did it in style--winning by an improbably large 55-21 margin.

Granted, this win is slightly less heroic since Stanford (now 7-3) is actually a good team this year with an impressive record, and USC (now also 7-3) seems to be slowly fading from the heights they reached with Reggie Bush, Matt Leinart, and Carson Palmer. But USC football is still USC football, and Stanford football is still Stanford football, so any victory over the Trojans is impressive nonetheless.

Jim Harbaugh might be the best thing that has ever happened to Stanford football. Since he became head coach, he has engineered a complete turnaround of the team--the culmination of which was yesterday's resounding defeat of USC. And while his ability and success would normally dictate a salary raise, I stand firm in my conviction that giving Jim Harbaugh an enormously lucrative new contract right now--as is about to happen--is reprehensible and shows that Stanford's priorities are extraordinarily misguided.

I don't even dislike Harbaugh--I might even have a touch of the wildly contagious Jim Harbaugh fever, which seems to be the newest incarnation of swine flu. But in the midst of an economic recession that has ravaged the athletics department, to increase Harbaugh's base salary to around 1.25 million dollars per year is ridiculous.

The paperless trend has taken another leap forward at Stanford: doctoral dissertations, the lengthy piles of paper that culminate the work of Stanford PhD students, will now be published online.

Unsurprisingly, Stanford mega-start-up Google is behind the new idea, which makes Stanford "the first university to take the whole dissertation approval and publishing process electronic." The new paperless plan also saves money (printing and distribution costs), space (our library is only so big), and makes it much simpler to view and read published dissertations.

The only problem: nobody really wants to read dissertations.

This week on TUSGraph, I've prepared a lesson in sports history. The graph shows the points for (black) and against (red) USC over the past three years. That red line only occasionally peaks above the black one, but I've marked the only times anyone ever cares about USC at Stanford. I was hoping a visual representation might highlight two things:

1. How amazing our victory was in 2007
2. How amazing our victory was in 2009

Still not getting it? Pretend Stanford football is the guy, and USC is the watermelon.

Now for some predictions. Based on highly scientific math, we can predict the score of Big Game.

In 2007, we beat USC by 1 point, and Cal by 7.
In 2009, we beat USC by 34 points, and....

Well, it doesn't take a non-fuzzy to show that we're going to beat Cal by 238 points this year (34 * (7/1)). Thanks for following Graphematics!

BEAT CAL!

This year's Big Game Gaieties, Stanford's pre-Big Game comedy musical extravaganza, premieres tonight in Memorial Auditorium. And, as in years past, it will make fun of campus groups, feature plenty of nudity, and more than enough scatological humor to appease even the most lewd Stanford students. As such, this year's show is the epitome of what the modern Gaieties has become: the perfect example of why Gaieties could be, and should be, so much better than it is right now.

I say this from the point of view of someone who has been a member of the writing staff for the past two years. The actors, directors, and producers perform the marvelous feat of completing the show in a mere two months, and for this they deserve major credit. The fault, then, does not lie in the performance of Gaieties--it is in the writing of the show, which has pushed the play into a spectacle that is not even close to being the best show Stanford students can create.

Big Game week at Stanford (and Cal) features plenty of Cardinal-Golden Bear showdowns, even outside of the football game itself. There is the Big Game Blood Drive (who can donate more), the Big Drive (canned food collecting), and there is the most unique--and by far the most interesting--Stanford-Cal competition of all: The Big Wheel, a 5v5 unicycle basketball game.

That's right--during halftime of the Stanford women's basketball game today (11/19 vs. Pepperdine), rival unheralded unicycle basketball players will face off to determine who gets to hold the bragging rights as the better one-wheeled hoopsters. For those who care more about circuses and less about football, this game might be the one to watch this week.

Following in the great footsteps of overseas trips before us...
including this awesome trick that apparently got students in trouble with the Italian police several years ago:

...A couple of Overseas Programs decided to celebrate Big Game week with a little international flavour:

Florence:

Ponte Vecchio

Oxford:

Radcliffe Camera

Stanford House

Australia:

GO CARD!

Props to Alexis Arnold, Shruti Tibrewala and Joyce Truong for the pictures!

The New York Times has been giving a whole slew of attention to Stanford recently--and for those who have given up reading newspapers in favor of problem sets and papers, here's a recap:

The Times profiled Stanford running back Toby Gerhart, who has been instrumental all season (and particularly helpful in obliterating highly-ranked Pac-10 foes Oregon and USC), as he becomes a likely contender for the Heisman trophy.

The Times' editorial observer writes about the diversity of bicyclists and their equally varied transportation devices on Stanford's campus.

As mentioned earlier on TUSB, Stanford and Google have teamed up to move the dissertation-publishing process online.

While not directly related to Stanford itself, the paper reports very big news from secondary education in California: the California Board of Regents has decided to raise tuition at UC schools by 32% to help keep the UC system afloat.

Other Stanford appearances in major news media? Comment or email it to blogforstanford@gmail.com.

According to an anonymous source, word on the street is that at this very moment "there's an entire enormous dumpster full of packaged water that was thrown out earlier this week between bob and theta Delt...The water seems to be past it's expiration date (whatever that means for water)...At the very least it may be worth salvaging some"

My gut environmentalist's first question is of course, "WHY WOULD YOU EVER BUY BOTTLED WATER??"
My second, more reasonable question is, "Wait, water can expire?"

Obviously to attempt to solve the mystery of this supposed 'expiration' I jump to my BFF, http://www.chacha.com/. The answer to my query? As follows:

"The FDA states that bottled water that has been bottled and stored properly does not expire."
"FDA states that it has no limit on shelf life if stored properly. Some laws and retailers require and insist on an exp. date."

Aha! It does not expire! And so my bottled-water drinking friends, I bestow upon you this knowledge of free packaged water in the dumpster between Bob and Theta Delt. Drink up.

According to a representative from Student Housing:

"The emergency water and food ration bars in the dumpster are Student Housing emergency supplies that have in fact expired. I did consult with Julie Muir our fantastic Recycling Program Manager at Peninsula Sanitary Service, and the University’s Surplus Property program to see if there was some way we could donate the supplies. However, we determined that because they are expired we could not risk human consumption, and the person-power it would take to open the individual containers to use the water for other purposes made that infeasible. Thus I made the difficult decision to dispose of the items. I will make every effort to do better with future emergency supplies by recommending we find ways to use stored supplies before their expiration date."

In summary:
1) The water is probably fine to drink (as previously determined)
2) Other food you find in the dumpster is a little more eat-at-your-own-risk

Props to housing for reaching out to PSSI (that's the recycling center on campus) to try to dispose of this stuff responsibly. And props to the universe for not cursing us with a disaster. But as pointed out above, it would be awful nice if all this stuff didn't have to go to waste. I guess that's up to the dumpster divers to solve.

A student helms the Birdcage booth

Banners hang from Green library

The axe will remain in Berkeley for another year--underdog Cal (how strange does that sound?) defeated the Cardinal 34-28 in the 112th annual Big Game.

After a fast start and two early touchdowns by Toby Gerhart, Stanford's defense struggled. Cal controlled most of the game, led by substitute running back Shane Vereen and quarterback Kevin Riley. But Gerhart and redshirt freshman quarterback Andrew Luck fought back in the fourth quarter, bringing Stanford to within 3 points with possession of ball with about 5 minutes to go. After failing to gain much yardage, Jim Harbaugh decided to go for it on 4th and long--but Luck's pass was deflected incomplete, giving the ball back to the Golden Bears near Stanford's end zone.

Cal played conservatively and settled for a field goal--crowned by an interesting decision by Cal coach Jeff Tedford to take a knee on third down--giving Stanford one last chance to score a touchdown with just over two minutes to play.

A short kick gave Stanford good field position near our own 40 yard line, and Luck took control, running for a first down and then passing for another. Facing some pressure from the Cal defensive line, Luck threw a short pass to Gerhart down the sideline, who bulldozed his way to the Cal 13 yard line. But two plays later, Luck threw a pass across the middle intended for tight end Coby Fleener, but Cal linebacker Mike Mohamed intercepted the ball before it got to the end zone, ending Stanford's chances at winning Big Game and likely going to the Rose Bowl.

Despite the loss, though, Gerhart kept his Heisman hopes alive by scoring all of Stanford's points on 4 touchdowns and tallying 136 yards on 20 carries.

The staff of TUSB has been working to develop a series of guidelines and suggestions about blogging on TUSB. After some deliberation, we have decided the following:

The major rules of blogging on TUSB are outlined in the blogging agreement.

Additionally, some tips and reminders about blogging on TUSB (list created November 2009):