Hi everyone. I’m JD, a rising sophomore studying Computer Science. Vansh and I along with 5 over Caltech students had the amazing opportunity to travel to India and participate in the 10 day cultural immersion program at IIT Gandhinagar. I will pick up where Vansh left off.

Friend L really likes Mexican food and had been wanting to make tacos for weeks, so we finally caved in and made tacos for dinner today. (Friend L is one of those people with actually no cooking experience at all but somehow ends up cooking food that looks more legit than what we make. I don’t understand it at all. She also runs the blog Surf Surf Revolution.)

It’s not if you ask my younger brother. Haha. Last weekend, my parents and little brother dropped by to visit me. Isn’t that sweet? :) While they were here, we explored the Getty Center in west LA. If you haven’t gone before or for a while, you should definitely check it out! I really love the overall layout of the museum. It was designed to reflect and complement the surrounding hills, which makes it feel good to be walking around in this academic sort of environment. It also means that there are stunning views no matter where you look.

We have a dorm cat named Heisenberg in the alley I’m living in for the summer. (She’s a female cat though.) Apparently all the kittens in her litter were named after famous scientists. Her namesake, Werner Heisenberg, is possibly best known for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. Chemistry 1a, a core class for freshmen, introduces this principle, and one of the core physics classes I’m taking next year will include an introduction to quantum mechanics.

There are times where you know exactly what you want to have for dinner and exactly the right ingredients to make it. There are also times where you don’t really know what you want for dinner but have the ingredients to make some nice tasty dish that you know how to make.

Day 3 After being at AX for a while, the initial feeling of “Wow, look at all these weird people in costumes OH WAIT I’m one of them” gradually morphed into something like “oh wow look at all these normal people not wearing costumes, they’re so scary”. The thing is that, anime conventions have a strange atmosphere. For some reason or another, there is little sociedal pressure to conform to what society views as “the norm”. You want to have rainbow-colored hair? Sure. You’re a guy but you want to wear a skirt? Why not. And the attitude spreads. As time passes, the initial feeling of insecurity gradually fades away as you realize that people aren’t going to judge you for who you are and what you like; in fact, there’s probably someone nearby who likes the exact same things.

This weekend has been pretty eventful. I made a decent amount of progress on work and got to tour around most of Lake Geneva over the past two days. My roommates and I bought eurail passes just like we did last year. I wasn’t planning on traveling that much but the pass is practically worth it alone being able to use the ferries on the lake since everything is expensive in Switzerland. This Saturday Cedric and I decided to take the ferry to Yvoire, an old medieval town that jets a bit into the lake and is surrounded by woods. We started out somewhat near home in the town of Nyon which is kind of known for their Roman ruins. From there we began our day on the lake. Below is the view from the chateau in Nyon. Right across the lake and you can’t really even see the other side of the lake. We were to see just how long this body is.

Today, we went to a Thai restuarnt off of Colorado called Chilly Mango. The place is a little far for walking, but it’s closer than going to Old Pasadena. Chilly Mango is clean and has cheap, simple, yet good food. And the portion sizes are very filling!

From July 4th-7th, there was aJapanese pop culture convention held at the Los Angeles Convention Center called Anime Expo or AX for short. It was the second anime convention that I’ve been to; the first one being Fanime in San Jose in 2011. AX was super exciting, and I’ve never seen so many people stuffed into one area before.I definitely enjoyed seeing everything going on at the event! AX is the biggest anime convention held in the United States every year, and it hosts high-profile artists, actors, producers, and other individuals from the animation industry. There are a variety of activities for attendees to take part in, from sitting in on guest panels to competing in costume or videogame contests. The guest panels are really cool because you can hear what the guests were thinking, the troubles they encountered, and their approach towards tackling those problems while they were producing a show or voice-acting a particular character.

Welp the weekend is over and honestly, not much happened in terms of wild and crazy adventures.. I had to get a bunch of work done for a presentation I am giving tomorrow and I have two other projects that I need to make some headway on. Today was the 14th of July which is the Fête Nationale (National Holiday) in France, basically equivalent to the 4th of July in the US. I spent the day in my office debugging code, producing more plots, setting up a new work environment and putting together slides. We actually only left at 7 pm so we could go make dinner and then I continued working from home. It wasn’t until past 10 pm when we started hearing fireworks in the distance that Cedric and I realized that we were being terrible Frenchmen. We tried to pull together anything we could in our apartment for a “celebration” but unfortunately we are somewhat out of food. So… we ended up making hot chocolate, but very French and patriotic hot chocolate. It’s actually pretty cool seeing fireworks in France since the shows last for a very long time and are often synchronized with music. But we live out in the fields and the closest large town was far enough away to make it inconvenient to leave while working.But anyways, Vive la France!

Last time…Chengyi and co. were stuck in line for 3 hours and the convention hasn’t even started yet! What’s going to happen when Anime Expo finally starts!?Day 1The first day of Anime Expo! The Exibition Hall and Artist Alley open today! As expected, there was a long line. It was a good thing we arrived two hours early, because the long line soon grew into a very, very long line.

Hey Everyone,

Hi everyone,

Hi everyone, This week has been relatively quiet for me, so I thought I’d simply share with you all the ways in which we are being entertained during the summer weekdays here at school.

Today, I will hijack the blog and talk about something completely unrelated to food…In Which the Food Blog Turns into an Anime Blog (Part 1)Anime Expo was on July 4th weekend. For those of you not in the know, Anime Expo (also known as AX) is the largest anime convention in North America. This year, it had an attendence of 61,000 unique people (and 161,000 turnstile). Because of its size, it often has visitors from the anime industry, sometimes even famous directors and producers. Anime Expo also attracts many indie artists trying to make some pocket money by selling their art in the Artist Alley as well as a great a many cosplayers. For those of you in the know, you should’ve have seen the blog topic hijack coming.Held in the LA Convention Center, Anime Expo just a short train ride away from Caltech. Being held on July 4th weekend also meant that, since it’s a national holiday, JPL gets the whole four days off. I had been planning on going to AX for some time now–in fact, I bought a four-day pass for the convention right when SURF results came out and I knew that I could stay at Caltech for the summer. Obviously, I wansn’t the only one who went. Quite a lot of my friends were going, too, so some of us decided to do a group cosplay of the characters from Tekkonkinkreet, which, by the way, is an excellent movie. (For the sake of perserving some sort of anonymity for people, I’m going to post super sketchy drawings of things instead of photos sometimes. Thank you for your understanding.) Day 0 is for people who preregistered to pick up their badges, so it doesn’t have any events. However, everybody decided to go anyway because it means that we won’t have to wait in line and miss out on events and things when the convention opens.

We’re almost ready to start building part of the DDR mats! The only non-circuit board materials we still need to get are sheet metal, plastic panels for arrows, and some screws. Recently I decided to test the sensor idea to make sure it would work. Based on previous DDR mat designs and instructions on DDR forums (like here), we’re first going to try to make sensors using steel mending plates and screws.

For the next part of my SURF project, I’m starting to read about grid diagrams for knots/links. A grid diagram is a way to draw a picture of a knot or link. You start with a square n by n grid, and then place O’s and X’s (at most one symbol per box) in the grid. The grid must have exactly one O and one X in every row and column. After this, we get to connect all the symbols! It reminds me of tic-tac-toe and connect the dots (actually, part of the programming portion of this SURF project reminded me of connect the dots as well). We draw vertical lines from an O to an X in each column, and then draw horizontal lines from an O to an X in each row, letting the horizontal lines go underneath the vertical lines. At the end, we have a picture of a link, like in the following picture, where n = 4. (There’s also a convention to orient the link.)

Hi everyone,

For the fourth of July, I went to Griffith Observatory and Mount Hollywood with my church (Hill Community Church), a large portion of which is Caltech students. During the evening of July 4th, we had a picnic potluck dinner on the grass outside Griffith Observatory, then started on a short hike to Mount Hollywood, a small peak nearby. Before starting on the hike, we had some time to go inside the observatory and enjoy the view; from the back of the observatory, we could see all the way to downtown Los Angeles!

>> p = [5,4,2,3,9,8,1,6,7] p = 5 4 2 3 9 8 1 6 7 >> x = plot(p)

Since it’s summer, we don’t have to do any homework sets or work on the weekends, so we have a lot more free time to do things like cook, work on projects, go off campus, relax, etc. Because I didn’t have to do anything else last Saturday, I walked over to Lake Avenue to eat dinner and go grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s, and then decided to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Fortunately there’s really easy recipes online (I’m still trying to learn how to cook/bake). They turned out to be more chocolate chip cookies than oatmeal chocolate chip cookies since I didn’t have enough oatmeal though.

On Friday, a group of my friends and I went to a Korean Barbeque (KBBQ) restaurant called Oo-kook. For those not familar with KBBQ,Wikipedia describes it as:

"Gogigui literally "meat + roasting", or Korean barbecue refers to the Korean method of grilling beef, pork, chicken, or other types of meat. Such dishes are often prepared at the diner's table on gas or charcoal grills that are built into the table itself." I've been to two other KBBQ places: Gaon and Road to Seoul. The nearest one to campus is Gaon, which is runs a little higher on the price range. The meat there is so-so, but the environment is clean and not too noisy. Service is a bit better/faster if you have a Korean in your group - though that seems to be true for a lot of KBBQ places? Road to Seoul (RTS) has better meat than Gaon, but you have to shout for the person next to you to be able to hear you. What bugs me the most about RTS is that to celebrate a birthday, they flash on and off *all* of the lights and sing over the intercom. This happens several times a night, which can be very jarring. RTS is also pretty far from Caltech.

It can be said that curry rice is a Japanese tradition. Since its introduction to Japan during the Meiji era, it has grown in popularity, with different flavors and special mixes rising from different regions. Now, Japanese curry has strayed so far from its original sauce and has become so intrinsic to Japanese culture, it is basically a national dish.

Hey guys,

When Ishida-san* told me that Tsukuba is in the countryside, he wasn’t kidding. While there are quite a number of modern establishments, especially close to the downtown area, a fairly noticeable portion of the area is still farmland, as evidenced by the view from the window right outside my dorm room:

Because of all the labs on campus, Caltech has its own supply of construction materials, almost like a mini-Home Depot. For MechE’s and people wanting to build things, the most important places to get building materials on campus are the Central Warehouse, Stockroom, and Carpenter shop. The Central Warehouse has metal and plastic, like sheet metal, acrylic plastic, and various kinds of rods, tubes, and blocks. The Stockroom has screws, bolts, washers, etc. The Carpenter shop has wood (plywood, MDF, 2x4s, etc.). The best part is that everything is right on campus, so it’s extremely convenient. Additionally, the Carpenter shop and Central Warehouse sell material by the square foot (or sometimes even square inch), so you don’t have to buy the entire 4’x8’ piece of plywood if you only want a few square feet.—-These places are especially convenient because the Caltech DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) Club has funding to build two arcade-style DDR pads this summer! Since going to Home Depot requires finding someone with a (large) car, which is difficult, we’ll probably end up buying materials from the stockroom, warehouse, and carpenter shop on campus and ordering the rest of the things we need online. (We might be able to get one trip to Home Depot with some upperclassmen that are planning to build a loft.)

This is a picture Dr. Jason Alicea. Whoo! Once every week during the SURF period, the Student Faculty Program (SFP) organizes these things called student-faculty dinners. Itencourages more personal interactions between students (from both Caltech and outside of Caltech) and our awesome professors.

We’ve touched down in Geneva and have now made it through our first week at CERN. I am living with two other Caltech students this year, Chi Chi and Cedric, who are here for their first times in Geneva. We’re actually living in the same place as last year too… yep really nostalgic moments. It’s pretty cool though because I actually remember my way around the area and to some degree feel like I’m more familiar with the land around CERN than Pasadena (probably just because I got lost so many times last year).

(This was written before the box arrived, so apologies for any confusion caused by the change in ingredients.) I have no idea what to cook today. The ingredients we have left are the nappa cabbage, kale, potatos, onions, eggs, and flesh, but we can’t think of any dishes that we can make with these foods. I was planning on making some asian thing with the cabbage, but our leftover ginger had mysteriously disappeared, so that was that. There’s probably some dish out there that contains these ingredients, but, being college students with little cooking skills, we (me, Roommate S, and Friend A) didn’t know any. So we are stumped. Thankfully, The Other Friend A, who actually knows how to cook, happens to stop by while we were standing around and doing nothing. “Oh man, you should make omeletes! Kale is delicious in omeletes.” So omeletes it is! Omeletes are great. All you do is dump all of your food together on top of a fried egg and eat it. There’s no need ot worry about seasoning or cooking time. It’s the laziest food ever. Also, the C-Store sells eggs, so I can spend my infinite dbal! Too bad that none of us actually know how to make omeletes. How to Cook Omeletes (probably)

1. Obtain eggs and things to put in omeletes.
2. Turn things to put in omelets into small pieces.

I LOVE getting packages in the mail. It feels like someone sent me a present, even if I ordered the package myself. :P At Caltech, undergrads are given PO boxes for getting letters/postcards/etc. Anything that’s larger is picked up at the on-campus mail office, which is conveniently near most of the student houses.

Knotilus is a database of all prime alternating links with 23 crossings or less (according to their website there are 98,517,495,461 such links). It’s great for browsing pretty pictures of knots and links (with different colors!). Along with pictures of the links, Knotilus provides its own archive number, the Gauss code for the alternating link, other knot tabulation numbers, and information about the symmetry and orientation of the link. The Knotilus archive number is of the form ax-b-c, where a = number of crossings, b = number of link components, and c = the cth link in the archive for a set a,b. For example, 6x-1-1 is a knot with 6 crossings and 1 link component (hence a knot), and is (arbitrarily) the first knot listed in the archive with those properties.

Caltech InnoWorks Recap: I am the co-Director (with my friend Monisha) of a student club called Caltech InnoWorks. We aim to increase opportunties in science, math, and technology for local middle school students on the free or reduced lunch program. To this end, we run a free, completely hands-on, yearly summer camp. It’s a lot of prep work throughout the year, but also very rewarding. :) There’s a news article on us on the Caltech website:here.

Hello! My name is Huey-Ru, but I go by Debbie. :) I am a rising Junior, majoring in Computation and Neural Systems. It’s a fancy title for Neurobiology with some electrical enginneering, computer science, and applied math mixed in. This is my first time blogging for Caltech and my second Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) at Caltech.

Over the weekend, I went out for lunch at zpizza. I’ve been to one at home, but never in Pasadena. The service at the Pasadena location was great! The staff was super help and understanding. They offer a variety of unique pizzas (ie. Thai or Napoli), as well as the typical variety of cheese, pepperoni, etc. They also provide gluten-free crust on request, and apparently it actually tastes good.

Hi everyone, I’m Kiara, now a junior majoring in chemical engineering. This summer, I amworking at Sumitomo Chemical’s Advanced Materials Research Laboratory in Tsukuba, which is about an hour and a half northeast of Tokyo. Caltech has this thing called the Japan Internship Program (JIP), which pairs its applicants to a Japanese company to do research there. To apply, you need to be a Caltech sophomore or junior and have 1-2 years of Japanese language experience. I applied during the first term of sophomore year, got in, and here I am! It’s my first time being in Japan, so it’s bound to be an interesting eleven weeks ahead. :)

We interrupt your regularly-scheduled cooking to bring you a special message: It’s here!! It’s actually here!!!

There’s a lot of people here that enjoy playing Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). (If you’re new to DDR, here is a nice introduction.) During the school year (and summer when club members are around), the Caltech DDR Club plays DDR every Friday evening, and sometimes on other days as well. Generally we connect the DDR mats to a laptop, and then use Stepmania, ITG (In the Groove), or OpenITG to play DDR. One of the nice features of using a laptop instead of a dedicated game console is that you can create your own custom stepchart for any song. Additionally, it’s easy to find songpacks online where people have written their own custom stepcharts, so you never get tired of playing the same songs over and over again. Since we play at least every week, it’s pretty easy to improve fairly quickly (several people play level 9s, 10s and 11s, and a few can play 12s). Generally, level 9s have 8th notes between 150-200 bpm, meaning there are between 5-7 steps per second. Level 10s, 11s, and 12s often have 16th notes between 120-200 bpm, meaning there are between 8-14 steps per second! (forutnately not for the entire song) Because there are usually several hundred arrows in a 1.5-2 minute song on these levels, playing DDR is a pretty good workout!

On June 8-9th, there was an event in Pasadena called the 626 Night Market (NM). 626 is the area code for Pasadena. In their own words, the 626 NM is an “Asian food themed night market that showcases a variety of local businesses, entrepreneurs, and artists.” This event started last year, and it’s based on the existing night markets in Taiwan (and other parts of Asia). At 626 NM, you can eat all sorts of yummy foods, see live performances, and buy art/random merchandise.

Hi everyone, my name is Valère and I am a rising senior working with the High Energy Physics group at Caltech. Last summer I wrote about my first experiences at CERN working with the CMS experiment. I have continued working with the HEP group at Caltech and am now on my way back to CERN, not as a SURF student this time but as part of CERN’s summer student program, though still working with Caltech. With the LHC on temporary shut down for upgrades the dynamics will be quite different this year. Our group will be less focused in Geneva and spread across Caltech, Fermilab and CERN. I will also be commencing work on my senior thesis, not to mention looking into graduate schools. So there’s plenty that’ll be going on this summer.

Since there’s no mandatory board dinner over the summer, it’s the perfect time to grind experience points and level up on some life skills. Although I have been making food on the weekends with friends for a while now, all of my friends who actually knew how to cook have left. Since I have tons of cooking experience from watching quality Japanese cartoons when I was little and that one cooking class I took in middle school in which I totally did not set my oven mitt on fire, nothing can go wrong, right?? To prevent starvation, roommate S and I decided to go off to Pavilions, the nearest supermarket, to buy some foods for the next few days.

This summer I’m doing my first SURF! It’s a math SURF, and my mentor studies low dimensonal topology, specificallyHeegaard Floer homology.

Sophomore year, third term, I took my first medically-relevant class at Caltech. It’s a course taught by Dr. Petrasek, who has a degree in medicine and later got a PhD in applied math at Tech, so it’s a class that deviates from the basic sciences to look at clinical research and medical advances. Since I loved the class last year, this year I decided to be a TA (teaching assistant) for it.