I continue to insist that winter is the best quarter at Stanford. And that late is better than never.
Academics
Classes were sort of hit-or-miss. I don’t know how that should translate into my enrollment practices going forward but I will certainly consider my options.
ME103: Product Realization (Design and Making)
Woah! As it turns out, metal is a big leap up from plastics. To quote a dazzlingly handsome fella’s project writeup for the course:
I have never worked as hard as I worked on ME163* ever in my life. The stress alone has taken years off my life, and that’s not even factoring in the grease and aluminum shavings I’ve eaten.
ME103 dominated my life in the winter. After careening my way through the experimental process-exploration phase of stool design, I had only three weeks to do the actual fabrication. Vivek had finished his sundial watch by the end of week 8. During finals period—just over two weeks later—I think his vicarious stress had outpaced anything he felt during his own project. But at the end of the day, Andy said that I was “wonderfully stubborn” so I suppose that’s worth all those 7AM to 11PM days in the PRL.
All the while, though, there was a parallel profound joy to the heavy load of the course. I learned an incomparable amount, gained profound experience in making robust physical products, experienced a whole underbelly of America that I had never seen before, and of course made new friends. It is too early to judge definitively but I think this is likely to be the most significant course of my Stanford career.
DESIGN141: Design Methods
My proposal for how to make DESIGN141 great: throw out the current syllabus, assign The Design of Everyday Things instead, and run class periods as Socratic seminars on the readings. If we need some of that IDEO flair, we can keep the foam prototype assessments (they were neat). It’s not enough to mean well at a place like Stanford. I urge those in charge to do the educational design work to realize the potential of this course to teach students about making human-centered products (or, better, to copy the work I just did for you free of charge).
Vivek did observe in this class, productively, that I design overly thick handles. I still think his are too thin but somewhere in between our natural diametric tendencies is the perfect grip.
ME80: Mechanics of Materials
ME80 was genuinely bizarre. I can’t speak to the reality behind the scenes, but it sure seemed like the teacher did not want to be there. Indeed, for the last few weeks, she wasn’t! The TAs taught the class instead. Further: we received one grade back the entire quarter, out of twelve assignments. I literally have no idea what I received on the second midterm, worth 30% of our grade (if memory serves), because it was never returned to us.
But it all turned out alright in the end, the math was actually kind of fun, and we now use the cantilevered stair model we built as a stand for a small clock in our dorm room.
BIOE122: BioSecurity and Pandemic Resilience
I’ve come out of this course jingoistic about vaccines and a lot more nervous about the potential use and proliferation of bioweapons. The main things preventing this at present are a social taboo and an innate human preference for weapons that explode. These do not strike me as effective detterence for a class of arms that can be extremely deadly and readily manufacturable. Perhaps the Hoover biosecurity magazine sitting on my desk will have a better solution.
ARTHIST129: Fashion
Every quarter must have at least one class for the heart. Would it surprise you to hear that this winter that was ARTHIST129? And what a class it was!
Emanuele Lugli is incredible. My notes on his lectures on the development of fashion take up a full memo book: he’s an electric, hilarious presence at the front of the classroom. Though I initially enrolled in the course hoping for a more practical breakdown of clothes—what materials exist, how pants are sewn together, the formal definition of a chemise—I was happily diverted into a seminar that focused more on the cultural role of the industry. We started with an analysis of some of the tensions/contradictions inherint to fashion: pricing justified through “exclusivity” of mass-manufactured items, labels as artist signatures, etc. By the end of the course we were analogizing all of capitalism through the lens of fashion. Somewhere in between a wrote a kickin’ review of a Public School catwalk.
I find myself thinking about this class way more often than I would have thought. For the final you get to have a 1:1 conversation with Lugli, outside in the Rodan Sculpture Garden. I don’t think I could possibly encourage you to take it enough.
All the Rest
I bought new glasses. They’re green circular-ish wireframes. Nageena convinced me to like the Warriors, and we went to several incredible games. I took my grandparents in their first Waymo. Daniel ran another legendary FLiCKS, this time screening F1 with director Joe Kosinski.
After many years of wondering, I finally took a Zero Motorcycle out for a spin. The electrification of motorcycles is in many ways a much bigger leap than it is for cars: unlike the modern internal combustion four-wheeler, gas motorcycles all sport manual transmissions. Despite this radical improvement I found the Zero SR/S—their sportiest model!—pretty boring. The Verge Motorcycle, by contrast, was the most terrifying and awesome vehicle experience I have ever had. My test drive began inside the walls of the mall as we navigated the bikes out to the streets. The sexy bike, with its hub motor straight out of Tron, doesn’t feel like it does 0-60 in X seconds: it feels fucking instant. I am highly skeptical of their solid state battery claims for the next generation, but as soon as I save up the funds I think I have to buy this death machine.
Living with Vivek continues to be extremely awesome. I hand-wove a large net last year, and I finally finished it: we hung it on our ceiling to make the room more pirate-y. We also (re)started playing Sea of Thieves an irresponsible amount. Keep a wary eye on the horizon for the Jolly Mon or the Tea for One.
And, right after the quarter’s end, Nageena and I took a baby step toward removing “aspirational” from my business card:
As always, I offer my endless thanks to everyone who made this quarter so wonderful. My heart goes out to you!
