We still have like 5 bunches of uneaten green onions left. Good luck, Roommate N! Please eat all of the green onions for us!

Eight weeks down, two weeks to go. Our time here at CERN is coming to an end and I am rushing to wrap up all of my work and document it. Even when one is piled up with work, exciting opportunities never fail to pop up while at CERN. This past Monday the two other Caltech summer students and myself, along with one of the postdocs in our group gave a VIP tour to the chef of the White House, William H. Yosses. He had met Professor Spiropulu at Harvard and was on vacation so he stopped by for a tour of the CMS detector and the SM18 magnet facility. It was incredibly exciting because not only did we get to go back down to the CMS detector at Point 5 on the opposite side of the ring, but we were acting somewhat as tour guides for the President’s chef. Both he and his husband came to see the detector and they were incredibly nice and just a pleasure to spend the afternoon with. They were really interested in all of the physics at CERN and I was impressed by how quickly they grasped what we told them.

The normal schedule SURF program ended a week ago, so now I’m back at home for a month before fall terms starts. There’s still plenty of people at Caltech though; preseason sports just started and there’s a few people that started SURF late or took a vacation in the middle that are finishing up their SURF projects.

Disney during the day was awesome, but Disney at night is even better! We went to a couple different evening and night shows, and they all completely blew my mind. Just the shows alone would have been well worth the price of the park entrance ticket.

One of the most awesome things as a SURF student at Caltech is that the Student-Faculty Programs Office arranges and hosts activities for us! These events are usually geared to help people chill out from work and socialize.

Today, Sandeep Pandey, a social activist, brought us to a small rural village and explained how the village governs itself. The village has one elected leader who is responsible for listening to the villager’s needs. The village recieves a small amount of money from the government that the leader then spends on various projects like paving roads and installing electriity to houses. Here in the village, we could see the caste system much more manifested than in the city. While a city’s organization prevents strict separation, the village allows for division by caste. Suprisingly, caste was a greater divider than religion in the village which was 65% Hindu and 35% Muslim. Lower caste members lived in separate sections of the village than upper caste members and cannot enter the homes of upper caste members or interdine with them.

Hey all,

So this weekend I spent most of my time inside working, especially since there was a torrential downpour in Geneva. I went out to buy a bunch of chocolate early in the morning and planned on traveling around the lake, but then I got caught in the rain and my only goal was to get back to CERN without getting my chocolate soaked (chocolate is of high priority in Switzerland).

This past Thursday was one spectacularly exciting and eventful day filled with plenty of adventure and heroic feats. It all started when Cedric and I decided to go hiking with two other summer students after work. Seems harmless I know, but little did we know what would come, or really we should have but somehow common sense wasn’t on our side that day. The excitement began at lunch when the four of us got together to discuss our plans for that afternoon. It was at this point that we finally decided to hike up Mount Salève after work, despite having to start our hike at sunset. Perhaps our failure to foresee what was coming was due to the fact that we were distracted by a huge fire outside of the restaurant. By huge fire, I mean a small constant stream of smoke billowing out of a trash can after someone failed to extinguish their cigarette before throwing it out. The fire was fairly well contained but as good citizens we decided to save CERN from this conflagration by shuttling water in our water bottles into the trash can. It took around eight liters of water to put out the smoke since the trash can had basically been filled with a bunch of old cigarettes. So yes, this is how we saved CERN from the terrible cigarette fire of 2013, also why my water bottle now smells like cigarette smoke.

Over the next two days, we visited the ruins of an an ancient Indus valley civilization, learned about the Vedas, listened to a conert Sitarist, and learned some Bollywood dance.

Pizza is one of those foods that is pretty easy to make yourself but tastes infinitely better than the store-bought versions. Once upon a time, when I was in middle school, I decided to make pizza for a cooking project. Pizza seemed pretty easy to make: you just gotta mix some flour with water, dump some ingredients on top, then stick everything in the oven and forget about it. Middle-school me ended up making a pizza without too much fire or death involved (I set my oven mitts on fire, but that’s irrevelent).

It was quite fun getting our farm boxes every week, but SURF is almost over and people are going home, so Friday will be the last day in a while that we will be getting ourfresh produce delivery. As a memoir, I’m going to dedicate this post to Farm Fresh to You! I’ll spam photos of the farm box we got over the summer, then talk about our experience with the service.

Cheese fondue is the food of Roommmate S’s homeland, so she’s been bugging everyone about making it for a while before Roommate N caved in and agreed to make it. I was still a bit skeptical about the healthiness of this meal because it’s carbohydrates dipped in liquified fat and protein, but Roommmate S couldn’t be stopped.

Because the summer SURF program is almost over, the church I go to (Hill Community Church) decided to go play laser tag at Ultrazone. Each week or two this summer, we’ve had some kind of fun fellowship activity, like going out for dinner or having a picnic at Griffith Park.

On the third day of our search of India, we started off the day with a presentation about the architecture of Ahmedabad. The city was built by Ahmed Shah in the early 1400s and was later fortified with an outer wall. Multiple gates were built to allow access and also so that the Shah could monitor trade into and out of the city, as the Ahmedabad’s location along the river Sabarmati was a prime spot for trade. These gates stand to this day, and we would actually get to go see them later on in the program. Ahemdabad’s architecture is very varied, as the city is split into old Ahmedabad and “new” Ahmedabad, with the differences in building styles clearly visible between the two.

For Caltech’s Prefrosh Weekend last term, some people in my house decided to build a boat to give prefrosh a tour of Caltech. (The slogan was “See Caltech the way it was meant to be seen…from a boat!”) The best place to sail the boat is in Millikan pond, which is probably the deepest non-swimming pool body of water on campus - it’s somewhere between calf and knee level.

Today we made applesauce oatmeal chocolate chip cookies! I had a jar of applesauce that I needed to finish by next week, so we substituted applesauce for all of the oil in the recipe. For some reason, the recipe had lots of oil but not very much butter, and it’s a lot easier to substitute applesauce for oil than for butter. Applesauce apparently makes the cookies softer and chewier, which I thought would be good since the last cookies I made were super super crunchy even on the inside. Since I’m living off campus next year (only around 5-10 minutes away by walking) and won’t be on a food/board plan, I have to practice cooking over the summer. Also, next year, cookies will be a good way to convince people to come over and visit me off campus!

Roommate S had wanted hotpot for the longest time, but we always had been too busy/had a constant food source during the school year to bother to do anything about it. During the summer however we had no board dinners and ample free time–along with the discovery that there’s a bus line that goes straight from Caltech to 99 Ranch, an large asian supermarket, we didn’t have an excuse to put off having hotpot anymore.

Over the summer, we’ve been setting up Dance Dance Revolution every Friday and Sunday night. During the school year, we usually only play on Friday nights, but since no one has any homework or sets over the weekend in the summer, we’ve added Sunday nights as well. Last Sunday was the first day we tested our homemade DDR mat extensively.

Because I wasn’t too satisfied with the results of last time’s baking, I decide to try making Japanese Milk Bread again. This time, I played it safe and used bread flour instead of a mix between all-purpose flour and bread flour… The difference between all-purpose flour and bread flour is that bread flour contains more wheat protein, which, when added to water, forms gluten. Gluten is a protein that contributes to the chewiness and elaciticity of the bread–kneading the dough helps facilitate gluten formation and also makes the gluten molecules link together, creating a gluten matrix that shapes the bread. The gluten matrix also traps CO2 bubbles formed by the yeast and allows the bread to rise.

Hi everyone,

Hi everyone, it’s been a while, I know. Japan has been a very busy (and fun!) time - work during the weekdays takes up quite a bit of energy, and the rest has been used up going to various places during the weekends. Since the work has been winding down a bit, I suppose now’s a good time for me to talk about it. :)

We’re almost done building the first DDR mat! (Myprevious post about one arrow panel was actually written a week or two ago but wasn’t published for a while; we’ve made a lot of progress on the DDR mats since then.) It works well enough that we can play some songs on it; we just need to tweak the sensors a little, make the wiring neater, and add Start/Escape buttons. We haven’t tested it very thoroughly yet, but we’ll be playing on it tomorrow and should be able to work out any sensitivity problems soon. Here’s a picture of the almost completed DDR mat:

Recently I’ve been working on writing a GUI for my SURF project. I’m using Tkinter, the standard GUI for Python. I didn’t program before coming to Caltech, so I took CS 1, the intro programming course, during first term. During the course, we covered a little bit of Tkinter; mainly drawing things on the canvas, like making a bunch of bouncing balls bounce off the edges of the canvas. Making a GUI for user input uses different “widgets” than drawing moving objects, but there’s plenty of documentation and examples online that are very helpful. Additionally, the module tkFileDialog comes with standard functions to create the Open and Save dialogs. It did take me some time to realize, though, that I had accidentally made several widgets children of the wrong frame, so they wouldn’t format correctly. Currently, my GUI looks like this: It will most likely look different by the time I’m done, though, since I’m planning on adding some more features. There’s currently three main input methods: Knotilus, Plink/SnapPy, and Seifert data. Knotilus is a database of links, while Plink/SnapPy is an open source python program that allows a user to draw a link by using mouse clicks. The program interprets the input and outputs an associated quadratic form as a square matrix. When combined with the other SURF student’s code (he’s working on the same project), it will output the Heegaard Floer correction terms, an invariant for 3-manifolds. An invariant is a charactersitic that tells things apart, like species or microchip implants in animals. Different objects can have the same invariant value, though a single object, even after certain transformations, can only ever take one invariant value. For example, multiple animals can all be the same species, but a single animal, even after being relocated or growing, is still the same species. Invariants for 3-manifolds are used to tell different 3-manifolds apart from each other, which is especially useful in topology. Heegaard Floer homology, which includes the correction terms we’re computing, is all about invariants for certain types of 3-manifolds.

We got some pluots in our farm box the other day, which is super exciting because I’ve never had a pluot before. A photo of the food for the week; we got one of the small-sized boxes for this week because we had SPECIAL DINNER PLANS, so there’s not that much food in it. What even is a pluot anyway? Wikipeida tells me that it’s some arbitrary mix of apricot and plums, but that doesn’t tell me anything. I like both apricots and plums, so, at the very least, it shouldn’t be terrible. Anyhow, here are some close-up shots of the pluot. The type of pluot we recieved is named Dapple Dandy or Dinosaur Eggs. Apparently, this type of pluot is called Dinosaur Eggs because it looks mottled and kind of ugly on the outside.

Today, we will take a small break from photos of food and look at photos of random craft things…

It is now the end of the weekend and it did not go quite as planned but was eventful nonetheless. My original plan was to go to Lyon and then go to the beach but our car ran a flat so I spent Saturday morning taking the car to the shop instead with the rest of the day at CERN working.

We had another NERF war yesterday in the South House basement! The basement is shaped roughly like a figure 8, with a courtyard in the middle of one of the loops. It’s where the South House laundry room, DDR room, Physics 8 lab, music rooms, group study rooms, and various South House storage rooms are located. Since it was a weekday, we only played for around an hour in the evening. Playing NERF in the SAC generally doesn’t disrupt anyone, and we usually only see people walking to the laundry room. This time, some other people were about to play laser tag in the SAC, so it was confusing figuring out which people to target!

This week has been incredibly productive and we are only half way through the week. We had a typical college student dilemma the other night. We have been staying at CERN untl 9 pm the past few nights, primarily to talk with Caltech people with the time difference. Turns out we hadn’t gone grocery shopping for a while and stores close here around 8 pm so we scrounged together a fantastic meal of a cup of rice, three eggs and a hand ful of tortellini to share among the three of us. We also had nutella which is really what got us through the night.

On our second day at IIT Gandhinagar, Alphons Kannanthanam, a famous Indian politican, discussed the bureaucracy and politics of India. Alphons worked as an Indian Administrative Service and was an elected member of the Legislative Assembly of Kerala. He earned the title, The Demolition Man, after he razed over 14,000 illegal buildings as commissioners of the Delhi Development Authority. He was also featured among TIME Magazine’s list of 100 young global leaders in ‘94. As District Collector of Kottayam, he pioneered the literacy movement in India by making Kottayam town the first 100% literate town in India in ‘89. Currently, Alphons in a National Executive Member of the Bharatiaya Janata Party (BJP).

Roommate N found some free canned beans lying around, which obviously meant that dinner that night was beans. I don’t remember what sorts of beans they are; all I knew was that they’re not your reguler old black beans or pinto beans or kidney beans. Anyway, Roommate N wanted to make Indian-style curry, and so we did. We didn’t have a recipe for Indian-style curry things, so Friend N just went by the “probably legit” way of cooking. We first stir-fried the beans with some string beans, then added a large number of spices and herbs that’s lying around the kitchens/we bought some long time ago. Some things added include: yogurt, cinnamon, curry powder, cumin, and crushed cashews. I think this dish has the greatest number of ingredients we’ve put into anything we made so far…! Here’s a photo of a stash of some of the things we used: The finished dish:

Some time over the last year several people decided to buy NERF blasters and have NERF wars in the South House basement. Soon after that, the number of people with NERF blasters and the frequency of games began to increase until some subset of people with NERF blasters was playing nearly every weekend. Eventually I joined, found it was lots of fun, and decided to keep coming. During third term the last year, our group applied for club membership and funding, though the committee that approves new clubs won’t meet until this fall.

Hi all, This past week, a bunch of us celebrated a Techer’s birthday rather uniquely. Catherine (or Cat), our ASCIT Secretary, turned another year older this past Tuesday. Since she also works closely with Tom Mannion, our beloved ASCIT “overseer,” we got to celebrate Cat’s birthday at Tom’s house with a bunch of different cakes and ice cream flavors, all courtesy of Tom. Tom had also hosted a trustees dinner at his house earlier that evening (does this man ever take a break?) so several late-staying trustees celebrated with us as well. We all ended up talking for several hours about the status of student life at Caltech…the good, the bad, the traditions, the changes, etc. It was incredibly interesting to hear stories from Caltech alum about student life back in the day and compare them with our own stories from the past few years. The overall lesson learned from this conversation was that things have certainly changed with time! We continued Cat’s birthday celebration into Friday evening, during which a group of us Flems went out to eat at Cleo Restaurant, a delicious (and definitely pricey for us poor college students) Mediterranean restaurant in Hollywood. For those of you looking for a new place to eat in LA, I would definitely recommend this restaurant…one of the best I’ve eaten at by far! The group at Cleo.

Today (Saturday) I spent several hours working on building the DDR mats with some other DDR club members. (You can view my previous posts about building DDR matshere and here.) We finished coating nearly all the non-arrow panels with sheet metal so it’s smoother and doesn’t have splinters, and got one arrow panel (the bottom one) mostly finished. It currently doesn’t have any wiring or sensors since we need to do lots of soldering for that, but the plastic arrow panel itself fits perfectly under the four corner brackets. The gray foam is 1/2” weatherstripping foam that the plastic arrow rests on. Eventually we might paint or put a printout of an arrow on the bottom of the plastic, but for now it’s useful to have it transparent so we can easily see if anything under the arrow panel is misaligned or broken.

This half of the blog posts about my family’s visit focuses on the food! It’s a good thing that they came during the summer. Otherwise, my desk would be unusable and completely covered in papers and food.When my family came over to visit, they brought a mountain of Asian snacks. I’m not even exaggerating! This picture only includes one half of the food and snacks my parents brought.

Warning: contains photos of dead animals. Continue reading at your own risk. Tom Mannion, the Direction of Student Activities (or, as Techers sometimes put it, “paid to give students free food”), hosted an Iron Chef event on Thursday night – four teams of student cooks are given mystery ingredients they must use to cook with, and retired-chef Tom Mannion himself judges the resulting dishes. I was quite excited for this event not because I was going to attend, or to look at the super fancy (and sometimes not so fancy) things the students whip up, but because of the promise of FREE FOOD.

This summer some of my friends are teaching me how to cook - I can now stir-fry most leafy vegetables without any help or supervision! It’s usually pretty easy to get fresh produce since Safeway (Pavilions/Vons), Trader Joes, and Fresh & Easy are all within walking distance of Caltech, but getting Asian produce and food is a little harder. However, I recently found out that there’s a Metro bus route (267) that picks up on the edge of the Caltech campus and goes to Arcadia right past Ranch 99, a large Chinese supermarket. Ranch 99 also happens to be in a shopping mall with lots of Asian restaurants and stores, too!

Hey guys, my name is Vansh Kumar and I am a rising sophomore studying either Computer Science or Applied Math here at Caltech. My friend and I, JD Co-Reyes, are going to tell the story of our experiences during “India Ki Khoj” (In Search of India), a 10-day program at IIT Gandhinagar we attended through the Caltech Y. The goal of the program is to allow foreigners to get a taste of India through speakers, field trips, and interactions with the IIT students. IIT stands for Indian Institute of Technology, and you can think of them like the Caltechs of India, with various elite campuses around the country. This particular IIT was located close to Ahmedabad, the capital of the state of Gujarat in western India.

Tired of eating crappy supermarket bread, Roommate S got into a bread baking mood lately and started making bread like mad. Even Roommate N got roped into this madness. Soon, frosh cooking turned onto frosh baking – from ciabatta to challa, we started abusing the public oven. But something felt missing. Sure, all this European bread was tasty, but I missed the soft and fluffy asian bread of my childhood. The bread came in a rectangular loaf, with a soft brown crust and white insides. It had no name but was sold at every Asian bakery. After some poking around, I found a recipe for something that seemed correct – Japanese milk bread. Japanese Milk Bread I used this recipe for the bread because 1) it’s the only one that didn’t require milk poweder, which I didn’t have on hand and 2) it showed up pretty high on the Google search results. However, as I found out too late, this recipe is pretty terrible at giving step-by-step instructions and left out a lot of detail, which made bread making harder than it should have been… (It was only after baking the bread did I realize that I probably should have looked for the recipe in Chinese or Japanese instead. Digging around on the internet for a while lead me to this blog. In fact, I’m pretty sure the recipe I used was ripped off from here. Next time…!) I’m sure you can all read the recipe yourself, so I’ll spare you the rambling. However, here are some tips and tricks I wish I should’ve known while making the bread. Protip: Knead the dough until it stops being sticky.**If you don’t, your bread will be very crumbly and not very chewy. Note that softness and chewiness has nothing to do with each other! ** Protip: Let the yeast come out of hibernation a little bit by putting it in a soup of lukewarm water and flour before you dump it into the dough. **The recipe I used was kind of bad and didn’t tell me to do this, so my dough didn’t really rise much in the time it said it would. My bread probably would’ve turned out larger and fluffier if I had revived the yeast before mixing it. **

Friend L really wanted macaroni and cheese and went ahead and bought the materials before anyone could object. And so once again we were roped into making things that we weren’t planning to – whatever, mac and cheese is delicious.

It is Saturday but I am going back into work today at CERN to see if I can fix a few bugs in my code and straighten everything out for the work week. I am trying to finish up some figures for a paper that the group wants to get out soon. I also now need to make sure that everything is put together within the next few weeks since I will be presenting in the CERN Main Auditorium on August 13th. It’s pretty exciting since that is the same stage where all of the major presentations, including all of the public announcements like for the Higgs last year, are made. At the same time it’s a bit nerve racking, but totally worth it.

Hi everyone! I thought I’d take a break from filling out medical school applications to share with you all my plans for the upcoming school year as ASCIT Social Director. Many of these events have traditionally been held every year around the same time, while some are new ideas that I’ve recently come up with. Let me know what you think! Fall term:

• End-of-Rotation Party: A party to celebrate the end of rotation! Enough said. [ANNUAL]
• End-of-Rotation Carnival: I help Tom Mannion host a school-wide carnival predominantly for the new incoming frosh in mid-October. There are usually lots of fun, traditional carnival games and activities, endless amounts of food, great musical performances by current students, and this year, a memorable nighttime “show.” If you’re a prospective student, you won’t want to miss this event! [ANNUAL]
• Interhouse Pumpkin Carving Contest: Houses compete to carve the coolest and most unique pumpkin. The house that wins gets a dinner at Tom’s. [NEW LAST YEAR, HOPING TO BECOME ANNUAL]