Stanford Five Year Reunion: Friday: Welcome, Developing for the Third World, Legal Fiction, and Taiko

Friday, October 13th 2006, I headed down to Stanford bright and early for the official welcome to reunion weekend given by the president of the university.

Welcome and Opening Panel:
The president's welcome formed an odd contrast with the panel that followed. President Hennessy announced a five-year four-point-something billion dollar campaign to raise money for a variety of initiatives. He spent much of his time exhorting alumni to give money, citing many examples of great things Stanford and its alumni do, then trotted out one of Stanford's new nobel laureates. (This is slightly ironic given the laureate did his award-winning research before coming to Stanford.) The laureate gave a speech in a similar vein: look how great Stanford is; give money. Both especially emphasized annual giving.

The panel that followed these speakers, "Designs that Make a Difference: From the Classroom to the Third World," focused on a particular design school class that makes students design incredibly inexpensive products that improve the quality of life of people leaving in impoverish conditions. The panel included one of the professors who teaches the class and three students who designed neat projects, including a solar-powered LED flashlight to reduce the use of kerosene lamps in India, and a new frame for a foot-powered well (a device that brings water up from a well much faster and easier) that decreases the cost of buying a foot-powered well by fifty percent. Pretty cool stuff and a pretty cool panel. These are good examples of students doing good for the third world and was rightly introduced as look-what-our-students-do.

There's irony here. Think about it: these students are proving how huge an impact one can have with very little money. I bet Stanford didn't think deeply about how this appears next to a speech on the importance of raising a huge amount of money.

Digression: It appears many alumni haven't gone to lectures in a while -- during the first half an hour of the welcome, cell phones kept ringing every three minutes or so. People are out of the habit of turning them off. But they learned relatively quickly; all the other events were relatively unmarred by these disruptions.

Killing Time:
With a few minutes to kill after the welcome, I headed down to the Gates building. I'd planned to log in and do some work. I thought despite having my regular school account expired that I'd be able to use my CS account (which is still valid) to log into the pup cluster, a lab of CS machines. Happily or sadly, they'd replaced these machines. They were now configured to require a school login, not a CS one. So instead of working I headed back out to read in the sun for a while.

It was a stunningly beautiful sunny day, even more so than normal for California. I really wished I had my camera, as the glow from the stones in the quad and the sparkle of the fountain by Gates would've made excellent photographs. In fact, many places were photogenic, as Stanford put down new mulch, cut grass, and spiffied everything up in honor of reunion/homecoming. When I was a student I always snickered at these activities. Today I appreciated them.

Class Lunch:
At lunchtime I picked up one of the box lunches and made my way to the class tent. There were a handful of alumni, perhaps several dozen, scattered among many tables. Sitting with the person I re-met the previous night, I met a few alumni I never knew while a student. They were all cool. We traded stories about where we were in life (political staffer, medical student, computer consultant, business school student). Perhaps the most interesting observation from our lunch discussion was that a bit more than half of us were bored with, disillusioned by, or simply antsy about our current jobs and ready to do something new.

In a later conversation, a friend of mine hypothesized this is a consequence of our school system. We never remain in one place for more than four years. Thus, after four years doing the same thing after graduation, people naturally start to feel antsy.

Anyway, what would a blog post be without the obligatory food description? The boxed lunch consisted of a sad mass of teriyaki chicken breast of precisely uniform texture, a perfunctory salad, and (yay) a fresh strawberry and a tasty brownie.

Oh, I also ran into someone I knew: an ex-roommate's ex-girlfriend. I wonder what he'll say when I tell him I saw her.

Law and Fiction Panel:
After lunch I headed to a discussion of how popular culture views the law system and legal dramas. The panelists included a law professor and novelist, an attorney and novelist, and a television producer, all moderated by an editor of Slate who also writes the Supreme Court Dispatches and Jurisprudence columns. (These are columns I enjoy when I have the patience to sit through Slate's advertisements.) The television producer seemed a bit out of place. His most recent work was 24, which I don't think of as a law show. He did, however, previously work on LA Law.

Everyone agreed the reason legal dramas are so common is because they are engines for stories. It's easy to keep the same characters but get an entirely new situation each week. They also agreed that is why most legal shows focus on the courtroom, not the day-to-day drafting of papers and settling of cases out of court. These latter activities take 90+% of lawyers's time but don't make good stories. None of the panelists minded shows ignoring this boring aspect of law even though it gave viewers an incorrect impression of the discipline.

The moderator brought up a good point: law is like religion in that both involve precise rituals, often seemingly impenetrable to the uninitiated. The moderator tried to take this idea further, claiming lawyers were the priests of our society. None of the panelists bought it. (The moderator bothered me a little. She put forth too many of her own ideas into the conversation. Instead of helping smooth the dialog, it helped make it slightly less coherent.)

(North American) Taiko
I enjoy listening to Taiko and feeling my whole body vibrate to the drums, but I don't often get the opportunity to listen. Hence, I headed to the class on Taiko: a one hour lecture with two performances. I learned some of the history of how taiko get started in Japan and in North America, and how this isn't really an ancient tradition. Aside from beating drums at festivals, taiko (well, kumidaiko) was pretty much invented in the 1950s and soon made inroads in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose before spreading to the rest of the country.

In addition to learning the different types of instruments used and the different ways of hitting them, I learned there isn't a formal written notation for songs. Rather, they are taught orally, much like a rap using the words for the types of beats: don, don, doro, ka, ka, tsu, don, doro, kara, doro, tsu...

Drums ought to be made out of the trunk of a huge tree. Apparently, however, the much less expensive option of using wine barrels tend to work almost as well.

And, like all other classes and panels, I was once again one of the few young people in the audience.

With nothing else I wanted to attend after the taiko class, even though it was late afternoon and I'd taken a vacation day, I decided to head back to work to compensate for not taking a vacation day on Thursday.