As part of our vacation, my wife and I were planning to see Stanford and Berkeley (yes, we're geeks - deal with it). We jumped on the CalTrain, to Palo Alto. Got to Stanford just in time for our tour at 11am. We learned that it is the biggest campus in the country (and the second biggest in the world behind the University of Moscow) at 8180 acres.
One of the things our tour guide discussed was the houses on campus. Many are the usual communal homes, Greek housing or dormitory setups you would expect. However, some of them have their own chefs. His own house apparently has a chef who turned down a job at a four-star restaurant to remain at Stanford. Must be nice. No wonder college tuition is through the roof!
Another interesting story that our tour guide told us concerned the physics department. A physics professor whose office was on on the first floor of the building won the Nobel Prize in 1996 (Douglas Osheroff, who shared the prize with Lee & Richardson at Cornell for the discovery of superfluidity in helium-3). A physics professor on the second floor won the Nobel Prize in 1997 (Steven Chu, who shared the prize with Cohen-Tannoudji and Phillips). A professor of physics and applied physics whose office was on the third floor won the Nobel Prize in 1998 (Robert Laughlin, who shared the prize with Störmer and Tsui for explaining the fractional quantum Hall effect). I assume at that point, the physics department started lobbying furiously for the addition of a fourth floor to their building ... alas, the 1999 prize went to tHooft and Veltman of the Netherlands.
Stanford claims 16 Nobel Laureates on their faculty, but this is a gross exaggeration because their definition is way too liberal. If you exclude fellows at the Hoover Institution (which is not in any way affiliated with teaching at Stanford) and emeriti faculty (who are retired), they really have only three Laureates. Interestingly, they are all in physics (Osheroff, Laughlin, and Richard Taylor, a professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center who shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics for investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons). Chu is at Berkeley now.
The first PC to run Google is on display in one of their computer science buildings. They have twin buildings donated by the estates of Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard, the HP founders. Not to be outdone, Microsoft has recently made a large donation to the computer science department.
We toured the Hoover Institution (no, there's no access to Thomas Sowell's office) and went up to the top of the tower, for a fantastic view of the campus and the city of Palo Alto.
We left campus and went into town, where we had lunch at Pluto's. (By the way, isn't it a shame about Pluto's downgrade to "dwarf planet" status?)
We got back to San Francisco and had dinner at Sears Fine Foods. Dinner was good, and for dessert we had their "world famous" pancakes.
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