Caltech

Feelin' Sharp

I finally did it. Four weeks into summer - that's four weeks of trying to slice apples and chicken thighs with a knife older than me and duller than my teeth - I worked up the motivation to go on Amazon and purchase my own: a gleaming, German-steel chef's knife. Deciding which knife(s) to buy was actually quite an ordeal. The top two contenders were a Sagler chef's knife, relatively pricey at $14.99 for the one item, and a set... Read more →

Dourmet Dishes: Lemon-Watermelon Slushie

This is the part of a series of posts on food that can be prepared in a dorm kitchen amidst the craziness of life at Caltech. I don't want to scare you away, but it gets pretty warm in Pasadena. I got out before the triple-digit dog days of summer but did catch a few days of some serious heat in the spring. My roommates and I would sit at our desks in our apartment and work, the din of... Read more →

Pine Trees

One thing I love about NorCal is the trees. Pine, spruce, fir, all of them. I'm here for my internship this summer, and they're quite the novelty - we don't have this many around Caltech, and definitely not at home. They remind me of road trips as a kid with my family, driving up winding mountain roads with the windows down, taking in the splotchy sunlight, brisk air, and this incredible smell - how do I describe it? Citrusy, wintry.... Read more →

Dourmet Dishes: Imperfect Produce Review

This is the part of a series of posts on food that can be prepared in a dorm kitchen amidst the craziness of life at Caltech.* If you use Facebook and live in LA, you may have recently been seeing ads for Imperfect Produce. Imperfect Produce is a grocery delivery service that rescues undesired fruits and veggies, whether oddly-shaped and or just surplus, from being wasted. It reroutes the destinies of these googly-eyed garden harvests from the garbage to our... Read more →

Episodes from the Office: Not My Confrontation (continued)

This is part of a series of stories of workplace interactions that cracked me up, made me cringe, or maybe even both. Sado's typical cheeriness now sounds forced. Although I'm still standing by the doorway, I feel caught in the crossfire. Back and forth it goes, tense but to my surprise, never bubbling over. Then I realize that the debate is not so much tense as it is intense - although each thinks the other is wrong, they are good... Read more →

Episodes from the Office: Not My Confrontation

This is the first of a series of stories of workplace interactions that cracked me up, made me cringe, or maybe even both. My boss frowns, shakes his head. I hand him the diagram I'm holding and he looks it over. "Where will you read the data from?" he asks. "I was thinking..." I begin timidly, and then check myself. "I mean, I would be using the DTST." "Okay." And then abruptly, "There's some misunderstanding here. Is Sado still...?" he... Read more →

The Fun Budget

If you know me, you know that I'm frugal to the point of fanaticism. Grocery shopping takes extra time because I compare per-ounce prices of food across brands and sometimes stores; although I'm not a vegetarian, I end up eating like one because meat is expensive; I rarely purchase a non-expendable item at a store without checking Amazon first. While this is good for my wallet, it makes going out with friends hard. It hurts to spend $15-20 on a... Read more →

Starting Work

My first week working(/interning) at a tech company hasn't gone quite as expected. I've spent most of my time watching the World Cup and surfing the web at my desk. I'm slacking - there's just nothing else to do. Before I can start working, IT has to create my login to the online code repository, and my busy mentor needs to find some spare time to meet with me and the design lead (once he returns from vacation) to figure... Read more →

Summer

This morning, I woke up in a pink room. The comforter and pillows are a glossy pink, the bed frame is Apple's rose gold, the carpet is a musky magenta, the mini plastic trash bin could belong to Barbie, and there's a giant Hello Kitty plushie on the desk. This is where I'm living for the summer. I arrived around midnight after a long drive from Caltech and then crashed for a good ten hours to make up for all... Read more →

Super Cool Physics Demos

Over the last few weeks, we've seen some neat demos in Ph 2c: Introduction to Statistical Physics and Thermodynamics, including the formation of super cool, superfluid helium. Here are the highlights: Formation of superfluid helium. With the aid of two staff members, my professor pumped liquid helium into a chamber cooled by liquid nitrogen and showed us the fountain effect and creep, two characteristic demonstrations of superfluidity. Nitrogen at triple point. Question: What freezes and boils at the same time?... Read more →