Day 21 - Welcome to Stanford

After another great RPG session this morning, Diego and I headed to Stanford. We had originally planned to head into San Jose but the Winchester Mystery House was a little more expensive to visit than we wanted to spend so we went back to Uni.

I have been on a couple of tours of Universities before, an impromptu one from a teacher and alumni of Cambridge, one around Durham, another at Trinity (Dublin). This was far an away the slickest sales pitch. It was interesting watching a student clearly having to talk through his teeth about the great plan that Stanford offers to help students afford attendance after all $60k/year is a bargain... Having said that there was a lot of interesting facts, many great alumni and stories. I particularly like the Hewlett Teaching Centre that is directly opposite Packard Electrical Engineering building.

The thing about American universities is they have no history, I guess this is true of the US as a whole. The thing is, they pit a lot more thought into how to make stuff look like it has history, make it look like it has been that way for time immemorial. They pay a lot of attention to the wider landscaping, making sure that the wider area is pleasant and usable. Obviously Stanford, Mountain View, Palo Alto are well off areas that can afford this but it is true for Golden Gate Park, Central Park and to a large extent US cities in general. In the UK, and Europe in general it feels a lot more like things will just get built as needed and then we will spend years either tolerating the short falls or trying to find ways to undo what we did to ensure it works. I know a lot of this can be put down to the desire to preserve what we already have and the lack of space available to us but I think it also speaks to a very half-arsed and fundamentally cheap way of doing things.

I have just finished a book on the Salem Witch Trials which was fascinating. I am honestly impressed that a group of women were so effectively able to puppeteer an entire state albeit only for a short time, but even then it seems that they got of without any legal repercussion (even civil suits seemed to get dropped) although a lot of stigma and in most known cases: unhappy endings. They orchestrated the hanging of 20 men and women, the deaths of others in prison and in total the imprisonment of over 200 men and women.