Glen Davis

San Francisco just moved one step closer to hosting the 2012 Olympic Games. As I mentioned in my earlier post, if San Fran lands the games Stanford will be the centerpiece of the ceremonies!

The United States Olympic Committee has selected two finalists to compete with one another for the honor of being the United States nominee to host the 2012 Games: San Francisco and New York.

Read more about it: pro San Francisco spin, pro New York spin.

There’s a fascinating excerpt from a Sunday School lesson taught by Condoleeza Rice in which she discusses her faith in God. If you didn’t know, she was the provost (chief budget and administrative officer) of Stanford prior to becoming National Security Advisor.

Dr. Rice is a believer, and since she’s been so closely acquainted with Stanford I thougth the interview was worthy of mention. Thanks to blogs4God for the link.

Just another example of Stanford changing the world!

Yeahthats me atop the pedestal that usually holds The Thinker. We were walking across campus and I saw that it was temporarily vacant, so I just had to jump up and have my photo snapped!

Doing a little research, I learned that Auguste Rodin originally created The Thinker as part of his masterpiece The Gates of Hell. The figure sat atop the gates and reflected on the fate of the damned.

Yikes! I suppose that makes Stanford a good site for The Thinkertheres certainly an ample supply of lost souls to ponder.

And so Paula and I are here to give him less to think about. Pray for us as we represent Christ on this strategic mission field!

Incidentally, youve probably seen The Thinker at other locations: thats because there are 25 castings of the famous enlarged version.

Sculpture follows different rules for reproduction than other art forms: there are several originals. That was news to me: if you’re interested read more here.

Stanford students are the 12th happiest students in America.

How interesting. A few thoughts:

1) We beat Cal by 7 points. 🙂
2) I wonder what measure they used to determine happiness? Is it related to the fact that we’re the 19th most gay school in America?

According to this survey, we’re also one of the most Democratic schools in America.

We also have the 13th nicest dorms in America, the 15th most beautiful campus, and the 15th best relationship with our host community (which makes me think the surveyists were smoking crack, because the town/gown relations here seem a might strained to me…).

I would never have found this survey had not Andrew Careaga lamented his school’s despair and Mean Dean pontificated on his professorial possibilities. Thanks!

the following is a rough paraphrase of a very cool encounter that occured just hours ago

The scene: I’m sitting at my desk, thinking about what to put on our web site when I receive a phone call:

“Hi–my name is Aileen, I’m a student at Stanford and I live in Oak Creek. I saw your website and had some questions about Chi Alpha. It looks like you believe in being filled with the Holy Spirit. Do you?”

Me: “Wow. [long conversation, skip a lot of stuff] How did you come across our website?”

Aileen: “I did a search for Oak Creek Apartments and your website came up.”

The bottom line: we wound up inviting Aileen (a Singaporean Ph. D. student studying the biology of cancer) over for supper. We had a great time!

God is continuing to arrange divine appointments for us to facilitate ministry among the students at Stanford!

I just found out that Stanford has a center called Bio‑X.

Is it just me, or does that sound like some sort of shapeshifting superhero?

In reality, Bio‑X is arguably the most ambitious interdisciplinary bioscience research effort in the world. (source)

There’s an interview with Matthew Scott, chair of Bio‑X, on the Stanford website. In it, he talks about his hopes for the superhero-monikered program.

One section I found particularly interesting:
We have a bioethics expert, Hank Greely [professor of law] as a member of the Bio‑X Leadership Council, and he will be advising about this. Many issues are likely to come up — issues of access to health care, debates about the meaning, practical applications, and dangers of new technologies, or genetic privacy — all kinds of things arise, some of them ethical issues and some of them scientific issues with social impact, not strictly ethical.

Hmm… if I had to pick ethical issues related to interdisciplinary genetic and biological research, access to health care would not be the very first thing on the top off my head.

Still, it sounds like a tremendously important research project–giving me another occasion to repeat our rallying cry–today they learn, tomorrow they lead. These future leaders must be reached with the gospel!