Caltech

Build Apache!

Ahh! I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted. Despite the three day weekend [three day weekends here are traps, since profs extend due dates, so we procrastinate more, and then we get super overworked], it’s been yet another crazy week: Ricketts had their Interhouse party on Saturday, I went to the LA Phil at Walt Disney Hall on Sunday, swim conference meets lasted from Sunday to Tuesday, SURF applications were due on Tuesday, and the rough draft of my humanities essay was due on Wednesday, as well as a math set due on Tuesday, and an orgo quiz due on Wednesday.

Yeah. It was a *lot*. Where to start… I guess I’ll go in chronological order, so… Ricketts’ Interhouse, Apache! [Note that it’s pronounced a-POSH, although I’m not sure why.] One of the things that sets their interhouse apart from the other ones is the construction: rather than building everything in the weeks and months before, they “build” everything the Thursday night before the party. The reason I’m putting build in quotation marks is because there is no actual construction—they cover the walls, ceilings, and windows of their lounge and dining hall with black paper and clear out the tunnels that people enter the party from. [The tunnel entrance is another really cool part about Apache.] It takes them pretty late into the next morning, but partway through, they get In-n-Out burgers! Yum. Anyways, their style of construction really gives the party a unique atmosphere. While I’m not a Skurve, I helped them build Apache for an hour or so, to procrastinate take a break from writing my SURF proposal. It was lots of fun! Though all of the duct tape ripping and loop-making hurt my fingers a lot…

Here are some pictures during Build Apache:

Here we are, just starting out with clearing the lounge and taking off the curtains. Notice the huge amount of tape in the bottom right corner:

Now look at where all the tape goes!

Covering up the passage between the tunnel and the party:

Here's the finished product of Build Apache, complete with the band they hire to play during the first half of the party:

Despite the miserable rain and cold last night, plenty of people left the safe dryness of their rooms and showed up to the party. In fact, it simply made the party even more packed, since everybody squished inside to avoid the wet. 

Also, here’s a picture [from last year] of some Skurves in the tunnels waiting to guide people through. The one with the bandanna on his head is the current Ricketts president… I’m not sure why he’s yelling…

K, that’s it for this post. Next up will be my trip to the LA Phil, to be followed by SCIACS, the swim conference meet.

-Jennifer

Mes derniers deux jours pres de Paris

Despite having work, my last two days in Paris were awesome.

I was leaving early Wednesday morning, so Monday and Tuesday night were the last nights to really enjoy friends and the city before taking off.

Monday evening was yet ANOTHER picnic (SO MANY, I LOVE IT!).  We went to one of the most beautiful parks I have ever been to in my life: Parc de Sceaux.  Our meal was delicious.
Though we stayed late, we did not have to climb the fence thanks to the kind security guards who let us out (I should say that the week before, during a picnic that I missed, several others were not so lucky).

Well it was coming down to my last day in France!!!!  It was a hectic day, filled with me scrambling around, working on my project a bit, getting required signatures for checkout, etc.

I finally said farewell to my mentor!  It was so sad to realize that the personal interaction was over!  We discussed the project a bit, and what we had to finish up (it proves to not be that much).  I said bye and that was it!  Done with math in France!  The paper will be completed very soon after I get back, and I also plan on writing my program in Matlab in order to make it more widely distributable.

That night I just began to pack and clean up.  Finally, later in the evening, all my Ecole Polytechnique friends came to wish me farewell, so we had a little party :)  I'm gonna miss that group!

We got some great but silly photos:
Lysandra, Mike, Ricardo, Amy, Mario, then me in front. 

I'm gonna miss these kids!

Anyway, that night I got no sleep (I was busy packing/cleaning/preparing for my huge voyage).  Thanks to my friends Lee and Mario for helping me carry my stuff to the train station!  I had so many bags!  Somehow, despite the fact that I bought more stuff in Europe, I must have been much more efficient with my packing in comparison to when I left the states because I fit everything quite easily in my bags and even had space to spare!

I left Ecole Polytechnique at 7 AM Paris time.  I traveled a long time, from Paris to Montreal to Vancouver to Los Angeles.  I got to Caltech around 9 AM Paris time, the next day.  That means I was traveling for 26 hours, on no sleep the night before!  But no problem, Caltech will prepare you for this kind of thing! ;-)

Anyway, it seems as though this blog is coming to an end.  I'm a bit sad to end it because it's very much a symbol that continues to tie me to my research experience and exciting adventures throughout Europe this summer.  However, I had to leave France, and now I have to leave you!  I hope you all the best in whatever adventures you guys have!  Please never hesitate to get to know me at Caltech!  I hope my blog was as fun for you as this summer was for me!

Yours truly,
Anton

----
Anton Mario Bongio Karrman
Applied and Computational Mathematics
Caltech '11

The Last Parisian Hurrah...

So picking up where i left off!

That Sunday was a wacky day...  I, yet again, was out until sunrise *_*  Regardless, I still managed to arrange a picnic with some friends (thank god for cell phones); they were Kerry and Katie, the MITers, and we had a delicious little lunch at Luxembourg Gardens.  It didn't quite go as planned due to the fact that grocery stores ended up being closed (we hadn't thought that it was Sunday!), so we just ended up getting tasty little sandwiches at a little cafe nearby.

When we got to the garden, we found a nice little patch of grass and laid our stuff down and began our picnic.  I pulled out my laptop (french music for the picnic!)...  Anyway, we felt a bit awkward because no one else was sitting on that particular grass.  A few minutes later, many other people began to sit on the grass as if we had set a new trend.  Well, we soon found out why no one was originally sitting there: a security guard came by and asked us to move our picnic to the permitted grass sitting area, which all of us (the other trend followers included) did. :)

Soon, Lysandra met up with us; she had been working at a community service project that gives you a free ticket to a David Guetta concert if you do a few hours of work a few weekends before.  I'm so jealous she's going to see him!  For those of you who don't know, see here: When Love Takes Over.

After Kerry left (she had work supposedly :( we all went to Montmartre and met up with more people, including my friend Mario and his friend Diogo.  Katie and I were the only ones interested in cheese fondue, and considering she was a bit sick the last time we got it in Montmartre, she wanted to get it today to make sure she really enjoyed a fondue meal before heading out of Paris (this was her last night before she returned to the states!).

Side note: she had to buy a new suitcase that day, so she did.  The hilarious part: it was pink.  Along with her dress she wore that day and the purse she was carrying.  I can't help myself you gotta see this:

Anyway, fondue was of course delicious (even during Summer!).

Afterward, we did a bit of tourism and went to the Basilique du Sacre Coeur.  I've always loved this basilica, and it is so beautiful, both inside and out.  It's on the hill of Montmartre, so we had stairs to climb, but it was worth it thanks to the beautiful view from the top!

Here we are in front of the basilica.
Soon we left via the huge staircase!
Me on the huge staircase :)
Afterward, we went to the Seine to spend some of Katie's last moments in Paris taking it all in :D  We did the super cliche shot by Notre Dame because we were nearby (it's maybe even more beautiful during the night!):

She went back to Cite Universitaire to go pack.  I went to enjoy my last week left in this beautiful city...

Well, that week was full of more exciting adventures with the level set method and using it to represent the shape of a structure during optimization of linearly elastic materials.  For yet another peak, I'll show you the optimization of a long cantilever (we fixed the left side and apply a downward force on the right side):

The objective function (which is the function we're trying to minimize) is the amount of work that the force does on the structure.  Even though the structure does not appear to be moving, each little piece of it is displaced a tiny bit, on the microscale.  The total amount of work that the applied force does in order to make all these little elements move is the compliance, and it is what we are trying to minimize.

Here we show a graph of the objective function as it's being minimized. 

Of course, it eventually reaches a limit, implying that the compliance of our structure is minimized given whatever initialization and parameters we used while running the optimization.  The nice thing about this example is that with this initialization, we don't have any strong topology changes, so not only does the objective function decrease globally (overall) but also locally (as in for each step).  Sometimes, when we have really complicated setups, a huge topology change must take place in order to get the truly (globally) optimal shape.  In this case we must allow local INCREASES in the objective function in order to get an overall globally optimal solution; it would look much like the objective function above, except would have little humps on the way to the bottom limit.

Well after working on this all week, it was finally time for another weekend! :D
That Friday was nothing too crazy; just a little trip into Paris to spend some time in the Latin Quarter with good friends :D  We got gelatto.  It was delicious.  We stopped by the Seine and there was a performance, so we watched it a bit:

That night was very fun and ended relaxingly early (we got home to Ecole Polytechnique by one)...

The next day consisted of quite a  bit of fun.  Lysandra and I had a picnic at a castle way out in the western outskirts of Paris just north of Versailles.  This castle was featured in the film The Count of Monte Cristo...  It was located on a bit of a plateau, so we had a great view of Paris from far out...
Our picnic was delicious. Behind the camera is a beautiful view of the Ile de France (Paris) region.

Here is that aforementioned behind-camera view:

A photo of the castle.  We took a nap on the lawn in the foreground because we were tired :)
There was a beautiful garden in front:

Awesome!  Afterward, we went back into Paris and found a cool little boat shuttle on the Seine near the Eiffel Tower.  So we took the boat tour :)

After the boat ride, we met up with Mario and had a picnic at the tip of Ile de la Cite, which is the island that Notre Dame and Saint Chappelle are on.
Le Pont des Beaux Arts is in the background!
We met some people from Lithuania here and chatted a bit with them.  The most memorable part of the conversation was when I said I was working on a mathematics project at the university; the girl did the fake gun shot to the head gesture while saying "How boring!"  Wonderful.

So after our picnic, we had a bit of gelatto (again!) and then went back to Ecole Polytechnique to get ready for a nightclub that night.  In the end, we did not end up going in the club we found (it was on a boat in the Seine) just because it looked rather lame...  However, we did have an interesting adventure getting there; notably, two guys in the metro came up to us and started chatting with us.  They were really funny/fun. 

In the end, we decided against the club...  Well, when all else fails, have a picnic... ANOTHER picnic haha!  So that's what we did: we had a picnic at Nation (first we stopped by a little convenience store and got some cheese and crackers along with Nutella and chips).

In front of the statue at Nation.

A particularly goofy photo of Mike and me.  He's a physicist from Cornell o_0  I'm gonna miss this kid!

We ended up getting tired very quickly, so we took a bus back to Chatelet and then took another back to Ecole Polytechnique.  We climbed the stairs and took off to bed!  And the sun had not yet risen this time :)

The next day was very relaxed.  I woke up in the early afternoon and then met Lysandra; my friend from lab at Ecole Polytechnique, Youssef, had invited us over to his flat to have some delicious Lebanese food!  Man was that food delicious!  We had some nerdy math discussions and talked a bit about Lebanon; it was so much fun!

Youssef and I in front of one of the biggest libraries in Paris.

An voila, my last weekend in Paris!  Stay tuned; I'll continue with my last two days in Paris, coming up soon! :)

Always,

Anton

Europe, je t'aime, mais il faut dire au revoir.

I am writing this as I sit in my room at Ecole Polytechnique intermittently packing my things.  My plane will take off toward the fire engulfed city of LA in about 7 hours. 

I miss my friends.  I miss my family.  And I miss Paris and the people I got to know here, my new friends, and heck I haven't even left yet. 

I'll recap a bit of my final Parisian hurrah...

Paris: two weekends left!  So first things first!  It was my friend Lysandra's birthday two days after I got back from Italy!  So of course we celebrated!  That Thursday evening we had the pre-party which was a picnic on Le Pont des Beax Arts, a bridge on the Seine River that is meant only for pedestrian traffic, and thus picnicers :D  We had a ton of delicious food and even had live music (my friends Ricardo and Lee played guitar for us!).

 

Mario from Brazil, me, and Mike from Cornell!

While we were at the bridge, we met a few girls from Poland!  A fun group (Lysandra is on the left):

Well, the next night was the actual party! :)  Lysandra and a collection of friends left Ecole Polytechnique and went into Paris for a delicious dinner!  Here is the name of the little place  :

It means "At the foot of Fouet;" Fouet is the name of the street.  The 6eme indicates that it is located in the sixth arrondissement (neigborhood) of Paris.

 

Francois from Luxembourg (the country), Carlos from Columbia, Mario from Brazil, me, Ricardo from Brazil, Lysandra from Brazil, and Kerry from MIT

My steak was good but I've definitely had better!  Well after our meal, we decided to go to a night club...  We had a tough time finding a good one, so we just in the end decided on going to Cafe Oz, which my friend Katie from MIT had already been to.  She gave it a good review, so although I felt bad for making her go a second time (you only have so much time in Paris, so you should always try new places), we ended up going there :)  It was really good; we all had a lot of fun and even ended up dancing on the tables because we're cool like that :P

 

Lysandra, Ricardo, Me, and Mario :) at Cafe Oz

Ricardo and Mario from the best technical university in Brazil, Kerrie and Katie from MIT, and me from Caltech (duhhh :P

So we finally left the music at around 4 AM and found an amazing place to eat next door; it had the best snacky food anyone leaving a club could ever want!  So we ate there :)  I got a strawberry jelly crepe, the others got some fries and Cokes etc. AWESOME!

By about 5 or so, we wandered the streets a bit, looking for a metro stop.  You see, the metro doesn't start until 5:30 AM, and even then, Lysandra decided to stay in the city because she had some business to take care of at a Brazilian bank at 9 AM.

So once the metro started up, we all went to the Champs de Mars, where the Eiffel Tower is, to watch the sun rise over Les Invalides. :)  But on our way to the metro, we got distracted!  Apparently someone had pulled over on the street corner, turned up the music in their car, gotten out of their car, and started a dance party with 30+ people.  Some friends that we had just made nearby told us to come and join the shenanigans!

So we did.  What a birthday!  Everyone sang for her, too!  (I have it on video :)

Well finally after we met some people, danced, had a few chats, and hung out at this 5 AM street party, we got to the Champs de Mars.

Doing something about X-men... I don't know o_O.  Why our arms are crossed...

So the sky turned a beautiful color!  In the middle, where the sun is rising, you can see the tip of Les Invalides, where Napoleon's tomb is.  On the right is an important military school; on the Champs de Mars, it is directly opposite the Eiffel Tower.  Soon, all of us grabbed some food at a little patisserie nearby, and I finally went home, leaving Lysandra and the others to figure out the bank situation :)  I was so tired I almost fell asleep on the metro and missed my stop at Ecole Polytechnique!

The next night was fun as well.  After waking up at like 5 PM because I didn't get home and get to sleep until 9 AM, I went out to yet another night club with a girl who was just arriving at Ecole Polytechnique for a year long chemistry research project.  Her name is Amy, and she is from Berkeley, close to where I grew up!  We went to Duplex, one of Paris' most famous nightclubs and met a bunch of international students because it was an international party.  It was very cool watching the bouncer say "whoah" when he saw our Polytechnique badges (we got in for free because we were students) and then "whoah" again when we whipped out our California drivers' licenses to prove our age.  :) What can I say, we're somewhat intelligent, we're from California, AND we speak French, so yes, DO be impressed, Mr. Bouncer.  :P

Me, then Rachel from San Francisco State (close to home!)  And Amy on the right.

Well darn, we missed the last metro, AGAIN.  But it was OK because it gave us the chance to check out the Arc de Triomphe, which was where the club was located!  We went too close though, and got booted by security haha

Despite the angle of my foot, it did not snap off my leg.  After photos, we decided to find a bank because I was beginning to go broke.  So we walked a bit down the most famous street in Paris, the Champs Elysees, and found a BNP Paribas, which has close ties with Bank of America, so I don't get international charges b ^^ d

Me on the Champs Elysees :)

So the goal at this point was to find the Seine and walk along it until we got close to Chatelet (a central bus/train station).  So we looked on the map next to the Arc and saw the Seine and decided we must walk in that direction.  However, we did not realize that the Seine snaked around the Arc, and we were actually walking toward it, but we were walking toward the part that was much farther.  However, we thought we were walking toward the close one...  Great.  We got lost.  Walked a lot.  Ended up in a forest.  Yeah seriously, in Paris. 

3 hours later, we scratched the bus idea because the metro was already beginning to start up.  However, we did end up near La Defense, which is a pretty cool place; it has a huge metal arc that is in line with the Louvre Pyramid, the Concorde obelisk, the "mini" Arc de Triomphe, and the Arc de Triomphe, all on the same straight road: The Champs Elysees.  

 

Me with La Defense (La Grande Arche) in the background :)

Finally, after walking around somewhat aimlessly for hours (good thing Amy decided against high heels for the club) we got a metro back after grabbing a pain au chocolat for breakfast.

Sunrise above Ecole Polytechnique. 

Anyway, that's just a taste of the collection of my final Parisian adventures.  So much more to tell, but I'll do it justice with it's own post! :)

Always,

MANNTON ;-)

Now it's time to go, curtain's finally closin'

They say that time flies when you're having fun, but this is ridiculous!   I feel like I just showed up in Paris yesterday!

Boy has a lot happened since I saw you guys last...  Most notably I did the huge Eurotrip that any American traveling this continent really must do.  Most people do tourism throughout this trip, but not me!  Haha my plan was a bit more complicated (and in my opinion, fulfilling!) than that :D

So why did I scurry around Europe for 12 days?  The direction of my trip was motivated by several things, including opportunities to see some of my favorite musical artists perform, getting to know certain regions through the eyes of the people who live there, meeting up with tons of my family members, and even finding beautiful places to relax and do a lot of nothing! :)

Highlights of my trip:

 

Brussels with my friend Didier from an online social networking site, CouchSurfing, in Brussels.  Two weeks later, the couch I stayed on was featured on the evening news in Brussels and Didier was interviewed! :D

 

One of my favorite trance duos, Milk Inc. in Aarschot :)

 

My friend Stijn from CouchSurfing and his family; we're standing in front of the oldest turret in Aarschot.

 

Me and my Brazilian friend Lysandra from Ecole Polytechnique.  The Duomo cathedral is behind us.

Me and Mike di Scala, one of the most prolific Clubland artists in the UK.  We're on the Spanish island of Ibiza.

 

Me with Mike Lewis of N-Trance and DJ Manian of Cascada.  Cascada recently came out with Evacuate the Dance Floor, which was the top selling single in the UK for more than two weeks.  We three are in Ibiza.

 

Me in front of the Ibiza airport.

 

Famiglia in Italia: about 40 of my relatives had a reunion because I visited them in northern Italy :)

 

At Livignio (tucked away in the Italian/Swiss Alps) with my cousins Mattia and Alessandro :)

 

With family at Bellagio on Lake Como.

But about two weeks ago I got back to Ecole Polytechnique, and since then I have been wrapping up my project.  And BAM is it working well :)  The paper I am writing that explains the methodology behind our topology optimization algorithm as well as acts a basic kind of user's guide is almost finished; all that is really left is adding graphics of some of our resulting structures and doing some proof reading.  Check out our optimal bridge:

Anyways, I'll soon give you a taste of how my last two Parisian weeks went as well some more cool examples of topology optimization of linearly elastic structures :)

Always,

Anton

My last weekend in Paris for a while, amongst other awesome things :)

So before heading out of Paris for a while, I wanted to do a bit of more touristic stuff.  I was excited because Friday night was when I got my code to work, so this was definitely a weekend for celebration :)

I planned on meeting up with some of the Cite Universitaire students before they left on Saturday, so we arranged a meeting at the Eiffel Tower.  However, there were so many people and between trying to get to the top and people being too late etc etc we missed each other!  I paid 3.50 euro to walk to first level of the tower.  And then I waited in line to get to the top.  However, I thought that the line I was in was to buy the ticket and get on the elevator; I was wrong.  It was actually only where you get on the elevator; people are supposed to buy tickets elsewhere.  The people in line next to me said they'd save my spot, so I ran to get a ticket to the top but they had just closed the stand!  Can you believe that... :(

 So I found a guy that was working there and I told him my situation, but he was really frustrated because there were a ton of people that wanted to go to the top but had been too late to get tickets so they were harassing him about it.  Well finally I intervened and told these people to stop feel so deserving and to basically leave the guy alone; my argument was that I was ready to leave despite the fact my friends were at the top and I had already waited a long time in the *wrong* line.  Hahaha so the guy really appreciated it, so he winked at me and led me to the elevator where he let me in for free :D and I got to cut everyone in line hahaha.  Before he did it though, when I still thought I wouldn't get to the top, I said bye and thanks to the people holding my place in line.

I got to the top but couldn't find the Cite kids :(  I did find my friend Brendon who is working on a project at Ecole Polytechnique with me; he and I met up with the people who offered to save my spot in line.  They were really cool guys from British Columbia.  Some of them were doing university studies.

Anyway, that was Friday.  Saturday, I ended up meeting with Brendon and two of the MIT undergrads, Katie and Anna.  We were invited to Federico's house (Federico was one of the guys from the Belgium House that we met earlier that week at Cite Universitaire). 

The "four amigos" :P Luca from Italy, Fede from Costa Rica, Serge from Belgium, Anton from America :)

Katie and Anna from an east coast US technology institution, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as MIT.

Fede made us some delicious Costa Rican cuisine and afterward all of us went to one of the most famous nightclubs in Paris, Queen.  We had a bit of fun there but finally left around 4:30 or so.  Geez the weather was terrible!  Anyway, I needed to pick up a train ticket for my vacation that I was planning, so I crashed for a few hours at Anna's place and then headed to the Montparnasse train station to get the ticket.  Finally after that, I went back home and went to sleep around 10 AM or so until early that evening.

That Sunday, Katie, Anna, and I went to Montmartre (the setting of the film "Moulin Rouge" as well as the location of the beautiful Sacre Coeur cathedral).  We had delicious cheese fondue and afterward I grabbed a yummy crepe.  The guy selling the crepe was really cool; when I told him I grew up in Northern California, he started telling me how much he loved San Francisco (he visits his family there supposedly).  He kept saying "yes, yeeEESSsss" much like Igor from the movie "Young Frankenstein."  I tried to do the whole Igor impersonation but failed miserably because I couldn't stop laughing.  Overall the weekend was a blast.

That week, I had to make some trips into Paris and finish up my project before leaving on vacation for 10 days that Friday!  So I explored the city a bit and ALSO got the DVD of Lady Gaga pics that the guy I met at the concert a few weeks earlier had promised me!  Also, inspiration for the Mannton Dance Edit of "Just Dance" (originally by Gaga) came from my hopes of finally getting these photos :)  Google it!

Then that Thursday evening before I left for my trip, I met up with some new friends at Ecole Polytechnique; they're from Brazil and are just beginning research internships at Ecole.  Although I tried to convince the guys, Davi and Ricardo to come with me to Ibiza, I only ended up getting Lysandra to join me on a two day voyage to Milan.  The next day I went to work briefly to wrap up everything before leaving, and I was invited to a little party that the secretaries were throwing.  I said goodbye to some fellow interns.  I rushed as fast as I could to the Gare du Nord in Paris.  And bam, with about a few minutes to spare I hopped on the train, first class to Bruxelles.  My epic trip through Belgium, Italy, and the Spanish island of Ibiza are to come.  Hope y'all are having fun with your summer!  :)

Yours truly, with stories of Ibiza, Bruxelles, and Italy to come,

Anton ;)

IT'S ALIVE. IT'S ALIIIIIVE!

My code is working.  My code is working.  AWESOME.

Before I discuss this AWESOMENESS, I will first recount my last week or so in and near the "city of lights."

So where to begin...  I got a new camera (as in I exchanged the old one for this new one)! :D  Looks like I'll actually keep this one, too!  And please if you're a pickpocket in Paris, don't steal this one!  But because of my glorious experience with having my last one insured, I am most definitely going to get this little bugger insured as well.

That was Saturday.  The next day there was little a bike race in town.  You might have heard of it, it's called the Tour de France, and the cyclists are incredibly fit people representing teams and countries from all over the world .  They bike all over France and a bit in Spain; it's really amazing how huge the mountains they tackle are!  Anyway, I found a really cool place to stand near the street, so I had the opportunity to see the "parade" fly by several times.  AWESOME.  I was with another international exchange student, Brendon.  He just graduated from Princeton with a physics degree o_0 and liked the uni so much that he's going back there for more at grad school!  Anyway, we were going to try to meet up with others, but it was a madhouse near the finish at the Champs Elysees. 

We ended up just getting some delicious sandwiches and checking out the exterior of the Louvre, which is one of the most famous museums in Paris and maybe even in the world...  I have been to see its art once before and of course saw the Mona Lisa, but that was 5 years ago, so I might choose a Sunday, when supposedly you can get in for free, to check it out again!

Monday it was back to work again!  However, Tuesday we had another little picnic at Cite Universitaire as a way to say farewell to several students that are here doing research as part of a program sponsored by NSF through the University of Michigan.  These guys were really great to get to know a bit throughout the weeks.

Anyway the picnic was a blast.  Fun people, good food, and some extremely disturbing stories that were kind of hilarious but I would never share them on here!  After we had eaten, we heard some people from the fourth story of the building next to the courtyard we were in yelling in celebration of something.  So we joined their cheers and a moment later, they came to the balcony and began yelling down at us, inviting us to come up and join them.  Well at first it seemed a bit sketchy, but after they insisted we merge our feasts, we could not resist.

So we tried to get into their building, which was the Belgium House (at Cite Universitaire each dorm building is named after a country from which the majority of its residents come).  Well my friend Katie (a biochemist  from MIT) and I looked very suspicious trying to get into the building by waiting for someone to exit and just "happen to" hold the door open for us.  Thankfully tho, some of our crew had already made it up before we had, so they asked the host of the little soiree to come downstairs to welcome us, which is how we met Serge.  Very friendly, nice, and good host! haha

Anyway, he invited us up where we met with the others that we already knew as well as some people from la Maison de Belgique (Belgium House).  There was a freaking UTOPIA of food in that kitchen!  Luca, from Italy, made like several fresh pizzas for us, there were several different beverages to which we added slices of delicious strawberries (as a joke, I was allowed 2 slices ONLY in each drink; if I put more than 2 in, it was against tradition ;)  Then they had two different types of cake for dessert.  It was incredible.  Everyone we met was extremely nice and geez they shared all that stuff with complete strangers (us)!

So why don't I talk a bit about my project.  The past few weeks have been hell because I basically had figured out everything for the shape optimization algorithm except how to exactly calculate the velocity field with which I needed to advect the level set equation.  I had my entire algorithm written in Scilab and I kept TESTING AND TESTING AND TESTING and never had any luck getting the right velocity field.  When I would apply it to my initialized mesh, the mesh would blow up or do something else really stupid, which was pointless because the whole point of this vector field is that if you use it (the correct one at least) then the compliance is minimized.  The compliance is the total work that the forces acting on the structure do (on a microscale so that we can use linear approximations for the elasticity equations).  This means that you're getting a structure that is not deforming that much when you apply a force, and if it's not deforming that much, it means it is (in common terms) strong and rigid.

So finally I figured out how to get the right velocity field!  And deliciously optimal structures are materializing from initialized meshes!  I honestly thought for a long time that I would not get to this point and thus would have nothing to show my mentor, but I was wrong!

Check out my progress :)

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~karrman/Doc1.htm

I'll write about more stories soon!

Always,Anton

Guess who's back with a brand new track...

And here I thought that life with a 9 to 5 job could never be as busy as Tech!!! 

Maybe that's because it's uh... NOT a 9 to 5 job anymore.  So my project is so close to being finished (kind of).  I've basically learned everything I need to know, and written all the little parts of code I'll need, la dee da... Now it's time to streamline everything!

Here's the thing: the level set routines that I've been using are all made for a matrix mesh that is oriented a certain way...  If you want a point (x,y) on the level set, you just just take the (i,j)th component of the matrix and multiply by dx,dy repsectively...  Well for the finite element routines, BLEH it's made so that the rows are different y values, so to get (x,y) you have to call the (j,i)th element.  And there's no sense of length associated with the finite element routine; so the analysis is dependent on making sure the mesh is discretized with an element aspect ratio of 1...   Otherwise the computation just looks.... nasty... Too bad...  So it sounds easy, but it actually turns out that there are many subroutines that have been written with one context or the other, so we can't just "flip" or transpose the mesh because other things will get very sad.   So that's what I'm trying to figure out right now! :)

IN OTHER NEWS :)
Continuing from where I left off!

So the rest of the weekend with Sarah was incredible!  On Saturday evening, her two aunts (sweetest ladies EVER!) had us over for dinner!  It was great: we started off with snacks and if you recall, I mentioned earlier that aperatif is both an appetizer as well as a liquor drink...  Well when they offered me an aperatif I just assumed they were talking about appetizers...  But they actually offered me a drink called crema mandorla, which is an aged combo of almond extracts and Marsala wine...  To be polite I drank it and it was rather sweet, so naturally I loved it!  I told them I would need to memorize the name of it so I could maybe one day enjoy it again... (REMEMBER THIS LITTLE PART OF THE BLOG)...

Anyway, so for dinner we had some delicious things including about a million croque monsieurs (grilled sandwiches, the flavors we had included banana, chocolate, apple, as well as ham and cheese; OMG YUMMO).  And that was the main course!!!  And then for dessert we had some raspberry ice cream with fresh raspberries and whipped cream that was made from scratch (I ADORE this last ingredient, btw).  Not only that, but all of us even took shots at the piano!  It was so fun and I was so happy to play the piano again!  One of Sarah's aunts is suffering from Parkinson's disease, but that didn't stop her NO NO she got on that piano AND ROCKED THE HOUSE WITH EVERY ELDERLY BONE IN HER BODY!!! :D

Well I had such a great time with them, I told them I would have to have a photo of us all!  But I had forgot my camera :(  "NO PROBLEM," said Sarah, "we can just back tomorrow."  Which we did.  AND YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE THIS, THEY HAD ACTUALLY BOUGHT ME A BOTTLE OF CREMA MANDORLA!!!!!!  Like sweetest ladies ever?  I'll never forget the delicious food, their supreme kindness, and our bouts on the piano!  Wonderful! :)  I will meet Sarah again just before I leave, when I will ask her to give thank you notes to the great hospitable people of Bethune :)

Also, later Saturday night one of Sarah's besties, Emily, came over to visit.  We had some pretty good stories and ended up laughing quite a bit!
Sarah and her friend Emily :D

And then Sunday it was off to Lille!  Sarah drove us for the hour long voyage, and when we arrived at her flat there suddenly she started FREAKING OUT.  She had forgotten her laptop in Bethune, which held all of her work that she needed to have during the week for her physical therapy internship and university studies... Zut alors!  After she had made several frantic phone calls requesting family members back in Bethune to bring the laptop to Lille, she suddenly realized that BAM, it was in the suitcase!!!  Whew :D

Well to be honest, although Lille is cute and everything, nothing is open on Sunday (like most towns in France, shame...)

Sarah and me in front of the Opera House of Lille...

However we still checked the place out and even found the cute little park (where Sarah loves to go on distance runs) at which there was a zoo (AWESOME) so I took tons of pix and vids of monkeys and other strange animals :D
The monkeys had pronounced mustaches...   AWESOME
Otherwise, it was back to Paris that evening!

Monday evening I met a friend from high school, Kathryn, whom I had not seen for several years! She's a civil engineer at Davis, so I can actually talk to her about my project and when she nods "uh huh uh huh" she ACTUALLY gets it and is not pretending :D  She's on a study trip throughout Europe with a bunch of people from Davis; I had the chance to meet and hang out with some of them that evening while getting crepes and while later hitting up a little jazz bar down the way from Port Royal...
Kathryn's the one in the middle; great high school memories from our physics classes lol...  Notice my runaway hairdo.

The jazz musicians that night :)

Anyway, before I end this session, I'll just include a little story about how I got my ticket to Lille...  So I found this guy selling a ticket on a site.  It was $22 first class O_O rather than $39 second class, the latter I would have had to pay on the official TGV site...  Anyway, I met up with the guy, got the ticket and had a cup of coffee with him and darn it, the ticket worked!!!  Woohoo.  It was kinda funny, he actually was an immigrant from Africa that had overstayed his carte de sejour (like a green card).  This was sketchy as heck but ended up just being AWESOME ;-)

Anyway, coming up....

Tour de France, getting my new camera :), buying tickets for my ACTUAL vacation (btw I haven't had more than one work day off since Spring Break FML)... :) and trying to deal with some musicians...

You'll hear from me soon! :)

Best,

Anton

I LEFT PARIS... and went to Bethune, then Lille. AWESOME

HELLO! (again :D

I am writing you from a small town in the NE corner of France :D  I'll start from where I left off though!

So how about another introduction!  I spent this last Wednesday night in the Latin Quarter with a great friend from Lloyd Hovse (my house :) Marissa Cevallos.  She just graduated from Caltech with a physics degree, specializing in astrophysics (o_0) not easy! :P  I was in the mood for some curry, so we hit up this little Indian restaurant named Safran.  Afterward, we had some delicious dessert crepes from a little street-side vendor (*slurp*) and then found a severely inappropriate place to hang out afterward...  Let's just say that I felt a bit uncomfortable at first but next thing you know Marissa was attempting to teach me salsa: for me, it was a dance fail :D  but either way it ended up being really fun regardless :)

We missed the last metro so we took the Noctilien bus back to Palaiseau where two younger guys helped us find our way back to Ecole Polytechnique.  And then I spent my second night in a row on the floor because there was no way I'd let Marissa do that, her being my guest and all!

The next day I worked on my project again and found a great paper (by my mentor :D that explicitly gives the velocity field which I must substitute into the level set equation and then solve in the context of optimizing an elastic structure's compliance :)  I'll explain it better a little later :D  The paper is here tho...

And then Friday it was off to Bethune to visit an old friend from high school!  Her name is Sarah Castelain and as part of Bethune's Rotary Exchange Program, she spent a bit more than a year at my high school and while there even ran cross country and track!  Trop cool, n'est-ce pas?

Anyway so I got to Bethune in the late afternoon on Friday (it's a little more than an hour train ride from Paris), but she wasn't going to get home from her job in Lille (an hour's drive a way, where she attends a university and works during the week at a hospital as a physical therapy intern) until later, so while I waited I got some flowers for her and her family in appreciation of their hospitality.  Turns out her mom and dad were vacationing in the mountains this weekend and her other brothers were elsewhere, so when she finally arrived at the house, it was just us.  And geez were we starving :D

So we went to Auchan, the most beautiful place ever.  I definitely took Costco for granted while back in the US; I mean I never realized how amazing it is that us Americans could get so much food for such great prices etc etc.  Well in France there is no Costco, but there is Auchan!  And they're amazing; tons of selection, along with good, plentiful, affordable supplies of food.  I love to eat so this place was basically heaven :D

Anyway, we bought some stuff for dinner that night and even a few things for me to eat for lunch the next day (I'll explain soon why I never ended up eating them ).  After we got back to the house, we realized that we wanted to watch Harry Potter 6 at the local cinema, but if we did it we had to rush big time...  Well we had a problem: we had bought all the ingredients for a quiche except for the most key part: the crust!  But NOT TO WORRY :D we used a pie crust that Sarah already had in the fridge!  The quiche we made was uber-yummo: we had two cheeses: one that is similar to gruyere and the other was goat cheese :D  Then we put a seasoned tomato sauce on the bottom, mixed the eggs with sour cream and voi-freaking-la: A SCRUMPTIOUS quiche.

And then for aperitifs (appetizer, but fyi also a word for cocktail, don't know why :P we had some bread with this delicious tomato sauce that is very popular in the southern part of France.  It tasted a bit like pizza sauce and was delicious!  Oh something else exciting: Sarah also has a frier!  (Note to self: self, get a frier)  It was awesome; she could put fries in this thing and BAM the next moment it's like we're chowing down on delicious fries from MacDo (how the French say McDonanalds) except it was in the delicious comfort of our home :D

Well we didn't have time for dessert because we had to head out to HP6 :D  I was expecting the English version when we arrived and just assumed there'd be French subtitles...  WRONG.  It was completely dubbed in French so I maybe understood about half of what was going on.  Thankfully however, I've read that series several times through, so I knew (from a global perspective) what was up for the most part ^_^

When we got back we had some delicious pistachio ice cream (awesome) and then hit the hay :D

So the next day Sarah had to work :( BOO...  And we thought that her bro, Jean (pronounced "John" with a light "n") would have to work as well.  BOO :(  So I was all prepared to wake up late, eat a bit of breakfast, and head out on the town (all alone) to get to know Bethune a little better.  Well, when I woke up I was pleasantly surprised (after just meeting Jean) to learn that he didn't have to go to work until much later.  Well he made a phone call to his girlfriend and planned on going over to her place to have lunch.  Talk about hooking a brother up, I somehow got invited to this meal!!!  How funny was this tho; I had just met Jean, and here his girlfriend's family was inviting me over to have lunch.  See, French people are just way friendly.

My breakfast by the way consisted of sweetbread and nutella and this delicious drink that is really popular in France; it's basically concentrated juice to which you just add water, and fyi the grenadine flavor is tasty!  So Jean (super friendly and not nearly as shy as Sarah said he was) and I walked to his gf's house which was about 10 minutes away (other side of town lol).  We got there and I met the whole family.  They not only brought out drinks, snacks, etc but they also prepared an extensive lunch that consisted of a delicious mix of chilly vegetables (crudites), pasta salad, yummo potatoes, tasty chicken, a camembert cheese plate (the dad, Frederic, loved camembert; me too btw ^_^), and then finally a delicious apple pie with creme whose flavor matched it perfectly... all followed by coffee for everyone of course.

They were all super friendly/nice, smart, fun to talk to, and they were really polite about my French.  I ended up taking a photo of everyone to remember them :D

From the left: Me (Anton :D, then Jean next to his gf Maurine on the couch, then behind them were the two other daughters Celia et Barbara,  and then the mom is Laurence, the dad Frederic and the son Robin.  The family name is Rimetz (pronounced Ree-may) and they're from a mix of European countries but in the end consider themselves francais, bien sur :)

After the delicious snacks, then meal, then coffee, Jean and I "remercier"-ed then (thanked them :) and then steered ourselves through the center of the town where we found an awesome church and turret.  Supposedly Bethune has a lot of history relating to the wars France has been in during these past few centuries; it's cool that there's a rich history but a bit depressing that it's due mostly to wars. 

So strangely enough we found a woman dressed up as Marie-Antoinette.  For some reason in France, after women get married they do goofy things (in French: elles font des betises) and one of these goofy things that this women did was dress up as M-A and dance with strangers, and photos were taken (I have one of Jean and then one of me :)

Coming up: the rest of my afternoon/evening, how I bought my ticket to get here in the first place, amongst other AWESOME THINGS

Hope everyone is well!

Always,
Anton ;-)

Paris continues to be AWESOME.

Well as always, it has been a WHILE :)

So where to start...

Well I'll go back to last Friday evening when something terrifying happened: I got locked INSIDE my lab.  Now that wouldn't be that bad if it was not that late and there were people around and lights still on etc etc.  I lost track of time after finally figuring out something awesome for my project and BAM it was 10:30 PM.  I was the only one around and the majority of the lights had been turned off.  Well I was trying to get out of lab so I did what you have to do: I swiped my badge on the magnetic reader next to the door.  But bad news, the master lock for the swipes had been turned off, so I was essentially locked INSIDE the lab!  I began to panic and thought as I entered different staircases and hallways trying to find a different door that some psychopath was going to come after me and it was gonna be like one of the those awful slasher films where I finally get to the door to escape and of course it won't budge; then the killer does me in as my futile badge swipes do nothing for me... 

Well lucky for me that ended up NOT happening; I finally found a door that wasn't on the master lock like twenty minutes later (whew) and got home fine :)  I hit the sack and woke up the next day.  I looked at the clock and thought awesome it's 5AM I can go back to sleep... Yeah it was actually 5 *PM* -_-  So much for getting my digital camera that day... 

Anyway so that evening I went out to a Vietnamese restaurant in Paris' China Town; I had some delicious noodles with a fantastic meat assortment: shrimps, chicken, et al. :D

Sunday I decided to lie low at Ecoly Polytechnique.  Monday I bought my new camera :)  OK Why do I keep getting lost in Paris?  I swear I find like perfect directions on Google maps but I keep missing the places I want to find!!! I spent like an hour trying to find a freaking FNAC (France's version of Best Buy, but about twice as expensive).  Anyway I got a camera that I don't really like so I'm gonna take it back and get another (woohoo exchange policies).

OK now for the exciting part: Bastille Day in Paris :)
For those of you that don't know this is France's Independence Day.  It was awesome.  There was a free concert at the Champ de Mars, which is where the Eiffel Tower is.  So I went there with like 20 other international interns and researchers, the majority of whom were actually from MIT.  Before we did that though, we got in the museums at Les Invalides (Napoleon's tomb) for free because it was Bastille Day :D
 

Napoleon wanted to be buried in style.
And fyi as I'm typing this it just started pouring outside and there's violent thunder and lightning.  AWESOME.

Anyway, so we saw the museum and hospital there; the building's original purpose was a hospital for war veterans...  We went to two museums: one for the middle ages one for WWII.  The middle ages one was basically oriented toward violence: chain mail, knight armor, swords, guns, knives etc.  and the WWII was a lot of paintings.

One of the guns in the middle ages museum was like longer than Mike (who is from Cornell, also doing a research project here this summer):

When we finally got to the Champ de Mars, there was a concert and Johnny Hallyday performed (he's like France's version of Elvis).  Also, there was an amazing fireworks show afterward and the even projected images on the tower so it looked like it was dancing really.  The best vid I found so far is here!

Well after the show, I did something a bit stupid: I left my bag on the Champ!  You have no idea what a mad house it was trying to get out of there!  There were literally hundreds of thousands of people!  So I just kinda left without regard to my bag!  It had some important stuff in it, you know credit card, drivers license, ipod, my dorm room key, my lab access badge etc etc.  So finally I get to a bus stop and I go OMG I LEFT MY BAG BACK THERE and of course my friends are like seriously Anton (it had been hours by now that we had left) there is no way you're going to find it there.  Figure it out tomorrow!  So finally we grabbed a cab with a woman studying at Orsay (close to Ecole Polytechnique) and split the ride back.  Because I didn't have my room key though, I had to sleep on the floor of my friends room: NOT COMFORTABLE.

Well it turns out that another of my friends had grabbed my bag for me, so there were no worries there.  I was freaking out when I woke up in the morning though; I was prepared to head over to the Champ to find it, or otherwise go to the Prefecture de Police and see if it was in Paris' lost and found.  When I got the email that he had it I was so relieved you have no idea...  He had it in his office right down the hall from me.  AWESOME.

Coming up: more nights out on the town, figuring out my project (and btw, where's my mentor?), getting photos from the Gaga concert, seeing my friend in Lille/Bethune, buying train tickets from sketchy websites :D

Always,
Anton