This is not really a long story, but I think it’s sort of interesting. I was going to turn in my physics problem set with my friend, and on my way there, I saw a crew of three or four people with a very large camera doing something. It looked sort of interesting, so I casually asked them what they were filming. They said they were from BBC and shooting a documentary on the web. I said ‘cool’ and then as I was leaving, one of the main guys asked, ‘hey would you like to be interviewed?’ I agreed and about 15 minutes later I was being interviewed for (possible) inclusion in BBC documentary about the web.
So, why was this funny?
1) Because there’s always all this random stuff going on here.
2) Because when they started to interview me and then my friend Eric, they had this whole twist about how corporations may be involved in the CS department, how does it affect you that the CS department has billionaires, or what do you think about the companies… etc.
After thinking about this for a little while afterward, I think the thing that was funniest to me is that I feel the CS department here is very traditionalist, and really looks down on pandering to industry. This is why they have been slow to adopt classes about the web, because it is looked down upon by real computer scientists. This was rather ironic, since many Stanford computer science students go from “pure academia” right out to cs industry. Just something to think about.