Caltech

Summer Snow

 

There’s a ton of venues for hiking in the San Bernardino mountain range just north of Pasadena. Some trails start just 20 minutes from campus, up by JPL. However, if you’re looking for an adventurous all-day hike, with snow to trek through in the summer, the remains of a 1950s plane wreck along the trail, and a higher summit than any other place in Southern California, the place to go is San Gorgonio Mountain in the San Bernardinos, about a two-hour drive from Pasadena. I went there a few weeks ago with a group of friends, some of whom you can see in the picture above. We were surprised at how much snow was still on the mountain! We left Pasadena at around 9 am and started on the Fish Creek Trail, which has about 3,400 feet of elevation gain, at 11. Every so often we would run into other hikers on the trail, but there weren’t as many as I would have expected for a weekend.

 

San Gorgonio Mountain has been the site of a few tragic plane crashes over the years. A couple of hours into our hike, we came across the remnants of the Douglas C-47 Dakota that crashed into the side of the mountain in 1953. Most of the plane is still there, as you can see from the picture above, which is part of a wing. Below is one of the propellers.

 

We hit several large patches of snow along the trail, as you can see in the picture at the top of the page. I was fascinated that the snow wasn’t melted, because the sun seemed to be hitting it pretty directly, and the temperature was probably in the high eighties. The snow crossings were the most epic and dangerous part of the hike, because if you lost your footing you would probably end up sliding quite a ways down the mountain.

And here’s the view from the summit, at 11,502 feet! The mountains in the background are the at the same elevation as ones behind Beckman Auditorium in my previous post; since they seem so high from the ground, it was crazy to have to look down to see them.

  

It was 5 pm when we reached the summit and 11 pm before we arrived back at our car. Despite losing the trail for a brief period on the way down (it was dark out, but fortunately we had a GPS and could collectively make a good guess about which way to go), we made it safely back to Pasadena.

Next time I’ll talk about food…yay! 

Boba, Barbeques, and International Frisbee

At Caltech, both the house dining rooms and Chandler, the lunchtime cafeteria, are closed on weekends during the school year. We’re left to fend for ourselves—which is actually awesome, because it encourages us cook our own food in the house kitchens or gives us an excuse to go out to restaurants. During the school year people eat out a lot on weekends or cook simple food; during the summer there are more structured cooking groups (which I’ll talk about in a later post!) and more time to visit restaurants outside of Pasadena.

Xida (another rising junior in Lloyd) recently got a car, and he and Sam (a rising sophomore) and I decided to go to Arcadia (a few miles from Pasadena) for dinner. We ate at a restaurant called Au79 that serves some light dinner food but specializes in boba drinks. I hadn’t really heard of boba before I came to Caltech. Colloquially, boba refers to a number of milk-based drinks that have tapioca “pearls” at the bottom (which are technically the boba, but we call the whole drink boba). Here are Sam and me with our boba drinks.

During the school year, our house, Lloyd, frequently has midnight boba runs. Someone with a car will decide to take a study break and will tour the house taking people’s orders, and then will grab a few friends and drive to a boba place and pick up the order. It’s always chaotic when they arrive back in Lloyd:  there’s a huge scramble in a common area with everyone trying to find the drink they ordered and pay back the person who made the trip.

A couple of days later we had a barbecue hosted by Caltech Dining Services for SURF students. It took place on the Olive Walk, a brick walkway (which you can see in the picture below) between the three North and four South Houses. Towards the beginning of the barbecue I caught this group of frosh driving around a golf cart they’d borrowed from somewhere…(that’s the Olive Walk they’re driving on, and beautiful Lloyd House in the background).

And, turning 180 degrees, we see SURFers having an amazing time at the barbecue in front of the Fleming cannon.

 

I met a bunch of students visiting for the summer from Cambridge University (including a few from the Ukraine!) and some students from the University of Iceland. Both Cambridge and the University of Iceland have summer exchange programs with Caltech, giving Caltech students the opportunity to do research at those universities in return. 

After the barbecue I headed over to the huge lawn in front of Beckmann Institute with David, a SURF student from Northwestern; Catherine, a freshman in Lloyd; and our new Cambridge friends to play frisbee.  It was too dark to take pictures, so you're going to have to just imagine us playing Ultimate on the grass below.

 
 

Until next time…

--Laura

 
   

Working on Supercomputers

Megan began her blog by welcoming you to Tokyo, and I’ll begin mine by welcoming you to Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles! My friends Kenzie, Elisa, Ben and I celebrated the end of our sophomore year (and my 20^th birthday!) by exploring Little Tokyo and singing karaoke. Little Tokyo is surprisingly close to Pasadena—only about 11 stops on the Metro Gold Line.  The nearest Gold Line stop to campus is about a 20-minute walk, so it’s very accessible. Here we are with our super cool Japanese snacks before heading to the karaoke studio. All four of us started our SURFs a few days after this. Kenzie and Elisa are doing off-campus research at the University of Washington and MIT, conducting geology and biomedical research, respectively. Ben and I are staying at Caltech. Ben’s partying it up doing theoretical computer science (investigating explicit constructions of tensors!) and I’m working on a natural language processing project in…

 

the Powell-Booth Laboratory for Computational Science!  I have an office on the second floor that I share with three other SURF students.

Andre is going to be a senior at Caltech; some of the matrix computations he is doing are on the whiteboard behind him. 

 

Stephanie is in my class and is a mechanical engineering major. She and Andre are both working in materials science. 

 

Andy is visiting from Stanford and is designing an algorithm for decomposing large matrices. 

 

The hallways in Powell-Booth look like those of a typical, pretty modern building. However, if you venture far enough, you’ll find a huge room full of supercomputers: the heart of the Center for Advanced Computing Research. Fifteen years ago, this room housed the Intel Touchstone Delta, which at the time was the fastest, most powerful computer in the world.  When I saw the computers currently in the basement of Powell-Booth I was reminded of a scene from the movie Angels and Demons…incidentally, one of the main projects these computers are used for is the processing of data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. 

 

One of the supercomputers is made from a bunch of Play Station 3s hooked together! It turns out that in addition to running video games, their cell processors function well for doing heavy-duty computations.

 

 …and there’s the Play Station logo.  I’m not going to be using any of these computers during my SURF, but Andy might run some of his code on one of them.

My next post will have fewer computers and more food…see you then!

--Laura