Caltech

First Day!

Ah, the first official day of our short stay in Ahmedabad. The day began bright and early, with breakfast at 8:30 in the morning. Still kind of jet lagged, we lethargically made our way across the IIT campus (pictured below) to the mess hall where we were getting used to eating. I hadn't had Indian food since the last time I went home, so despite how mediocre the IIT students said it was, I thought it was fantastic.

 

Following breakfast, we had our inauguration to the program, with talks given by Prof. Roop Rekha Verma, Rita Ma'am, and Jaison Sir (Rita and Jaison were the IIT-side organizers of the program). Prof. Roop Rekha Verma was the former Vice Chancellor of Lucknow University (in northeastern India) and taught philosophy. Now, she is a social activist and writer, dealing with cases of violence between different religions and violence against women. She was truly inspiring, setting a tone that would pervade throughout the next 10 days.

She talked about her work creating and managing a grassroots organization that deals with violence against women. The organization is called Saajhi Duniya, and is located at http://www.saajhiduniya.org/ . Vermaji (in India, we add "ji" to the end of names to show respect i.e. Gandhiji) explained how many grassroots organizations tend to focus on only action without having the necessary mix of a philosophical framework along with societal interventions. Her ideas were very interesting and her opinions were strong, to the point that a small argument began between her and an audience member about the kind of India that should be shown to foreigners. She had talked about many of the societal problems faced by India and the audience member wanted to remind us about the diversity and cultural richness of India.

Later that day, we interacted with the IIT students and were able to discuss with them the ideas put forth in that session. The thing that really stuck in my mind was the question about how to deal with India. India is a country of extremes, with, for example, extreme poverty living a few blocks down from extreme wealth. Contradictions like that send your head spinning and I can imagine that it must be even worse for total foreigners. This question of how to rationalize India is unanswerable, I believe. It requires that we take an infinitely diverse nation of individuals, idiosyncrasies, and ideas, and try to fit them into a box with our western perspective. An impossible task. The best we can do is appreciate India.

The Search Begins

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.

 

India.

The word hangs in the air, conjuring exotic visions of a far away land filled with camels, jewelry, and call centers. But stepping out of the plane, the humidity was the first thing to stick. You could tell it had just rained or was about to; the air was heavy. Ragged and tired from the full day of traveling we had just been through, we walked towards the exit of the Ahmedabad international airport. A warm welcome awaited us when we met the IIT students who had come to pick us up. It took all of my willpower to not fall asleep on the 20 minute car ride to IIT from the airport, but the entire time, the only thing I could think about was how great it felt to be back. For me, the best part was being back in my mother country speaking my native language, Hindi.

 

The IIT campus was relatively small and the dorms were smaller. They were simple, but spacious and complex at the same time. Our hosts had even installed A/C units (Water Coolers, they were called) in our rooms as they knew our poor American bodies couldn't withstand the intense heat. JD and I shared the room below.

 

We arrived at the campus at around 5 AM Gujarat time, and were dead tired the second we entered our rooms. Despite this, I and the three others (Auggie, JD, and Edward) stayed up till breakfast at 8 talking to one of the IIT students named Atharv. I'll cut the story short here for now, and let JD tell you about the amazing food we were served for breakfast.

Yakatate!! Japan(ese Milk Bread)

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.

After that, I stuck the bread in the oven for long enough to watch one episode of anime (Kamisama no Inai Nichiyoubi, or Sunday Without God, which is a terrible adaptation of a decent light novel series). The end result actually looked pretty great despite all the mistakes in the middle of making the dough...

It was pretty magical seeing the mess of a doughball turn into something that looks and smells edible!

Results:

Delicious. There is no doubt that this bread is delicious. It's soft and moist with a hint of sweetness, and, before I knew it, I had eaten 1/4th of the whole loaf. Oops.

Besides that though, the texture was almost, but not quite, correct. It's soft and moist, but, when pulling it apart, pieces did not cling to each other with fibers of bread. It's also not as chewey as it was supposed to be. This is probably because I didn't knead the dough enough...

The flavor was also almost, but not quite correct -- it was too buttery for the bread. Next time, I'll probably substitute some of the butter with vegetable oil or something. 

Final Verdict: 9/10 Very tasty, but not what it was supposed to be.

New Car

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.

This week has been awesome since I've set up a bunch of tours and workshops around the ring so I've been going out with some of the other summer students and learning about different aspects of the physics and engineering around here. It's nice also since first, all of the summer students are from different parts of the world so I have been getting to know people coming from France, Germany, the UK, Thailand, Japan, China, Mexico, Brazil, Iran, and the list goes on... but also, the students are a mix of physics and technical students working on all different experiments at CERN. The Caltech group works on the CMS experiments but I have been learning about many students' projects at ATLAS, ISOLDE, LHCb, ALICE, and ALPHA. Also, since some of the students are technical students, the projects don't just cover physics topics but also include building new packages for ROOT, the programming language we use in high energy physics, as well as engineering new sensors and parts for the detectors. Granted the majority of everything around here is based around coding but it is still pretty cool to see how varied the work is. 

Last night was a pretty long night since the group has set up biweekly summer student updates so we video chat in with Caltech and each summer student makes a presentation on their work. The idea was to make it a lunch time meeting which means that the meeting starts for us at 9pm. It's not that bad though. I've been setting up the meeting rooms here on the CERN side and I failed the first week so we ended up crowding around my laptop. I succeeded yesterday at getting a room but couldn't get the video and sound to work so we ended up running off my laptop again, just with more space to sit. With this progressive trend I'm sure next time I won't just find a room but we may also be able to use the media equipment... one can hope at least. 

After the meeting there was a summer student party in the pump hall here on the CERN campus. The theme was a radiation party with free glow sticks ... a little bit more general than the last party which was themed for collisions. The idea was that girls were given anti-particle IDs and guys were given particle IDs with the goal of finding your respective antiparticle. Extra credit went to those who were the first to reconstruct the Higgs with 2 b and 2 anti-b quarks, antineutrino and lepton of the same flavor, and another quark pair. As one of the technical students mentioned, it was the only party they've ever had to study before going to. Despite the physics geekiness of the themes the parties are actually quite legitimate and pretty fun. I suppose one would call them more "normal" in comparison to Caltech parties. 

I suppose I must finish off with the one bit of sad news for the week. The beloved Nissan Maxima that Professor Newman provided us with last summer and this summer so far has finally reached the end of it's practical life. We found out last year that the car was made in 1987 and it has definitely served its purpose. It's a bit beat up with scratches everywhere, holes in the back seats, wires hanging under the steering wheel and locks that go off on their own, but that's what gave it its character. It served us well and actually still works, it just isn't worth the insurance anymore. Anyways, it has been a good car and as one who gets emotionally attached to my vehicles it is hard to see it go. Luckily for us the Newman's have been kind enough to get us another car to use. It's a relatively new Fiat and looks pretty nice. It's also going to be more fun having a manual transmission around here. Welp, here's a tribute to the semi-sketchy car that all young adults need to have an experience driving in their lives. 

 

Macaroni and Real Cheese

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.

The cheese we had wasn't very quality--it was your Generic Supermarket Brand, but at least it's not cheese product or cheese food. Since we were turning the cheese into mac and cheese, we didn't feel too bad about using terrible cheese.

Proof that we're using real cheese (although the grated cheese looks kind of like fake powder cheese in this photo). The cheese sauce recipe was found in a cookbook somewhere by someone, and it used roux (mildly cooked flour-and-water mixture) as a base--roux is French, so this must be legit.

Protip: Get a legit pepper grinder. This way, your pepper grinder won't break on you halfway through grinding and dump tons of peppercorns in your food.

To make it slightly more fancy, we're making baked mac and cheese. Baking the mac and cheese gives it a nice carmelized crust that is delicious. It also makes the flavors mix together better. Or something. The crust consituted of breadcrumbs, reall crappy powdered cheese, and garlic (because garlic is delicious).

We baked it for quite a while until we decided that we wanted to eat food already, so we turned the broiler on so the mac and cheese would crust.

The finished product:

Final verdict: peppercorns/10

Looking Ahead into the School Year

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]

Creative pumpkins!

+ David Garibaldi Art Show and After (Paint) Party: This is my latest idea for the upcoming year. I'm hoping to hire David Garibaldi, an amazing performance painter, for a show at Caltech. I'd love to host a massive paint party for the students afterwards since everyone will be all hyped up from the show. [NEW]

 

David Garibaldi on America's Got Talent.

+ Coffeehouse Holiday Bash: Celebrating the December holidays at our coffehouse with assorted holiday food and drinks, a cappella performances, holiday movies, trivia, cookie decorating, pictures with Santa and his "reindeer" (who was Tom's dog last year) and elves, etc... [NEW LAST YEAR, HOPING TO BECOME ANNUAL]

Us with Santa and his elf!

Winter term:

+ Winter Wonderland: I hire a company to set up a synthetic ice rink on campus near the houses along with some fake snow for sledding and snowball fights. Tom gives out lots of warm food and drinks to keep people full and happy. A white Christmas in California! [NEW TWO YEARS AGO, HOPING TO BECOME ANNUAL]

+ Be A Kid Again: Around the time girl scout cookies come out, I have a giant "kiddy" event at Tom's house where I'll get a giant bounce house, hire a face painter, put on some Disney movies, and most importantly, rent puppies for students to play with. Tom also orders a LOT of girl scout cookies for us to eat. Best way ever to relive your childhood. [NEW TWO YEARS AGO, HOPING TO BECOME ANNUAL]

Spring term:

+ ASCIT Movie Night: Tom buys hundreds of movie tickets each year and treats students to a new movie at the local theater. Two years ago, we saw The Avengers, and this past year, students had the choice between Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness. [ANNUAL]

+ Europarty: A party hosted by me and the exchange students...it's a fun cultural event that usually attracts grad and foreign students. [ANNUAL]

+ Cirque Du Soleil Show: This year, as my final event, I'd love to try and get a low key Cirque Du Soleil show held on campus somewhere...I haven't thought out the details much, but I feel like the entire Caltech community would enjoy an event like this! [NEW]

And if money allows for it...

+ Concert: I would also love to get a famous musician/band on campus for a concert. My class (class of 2014) never got the opportunity to have an on-campus concert, so I think it'd be awesome as a parting event.

Termly:

+ Rathskeller Nights: The past two terms, I've rented out the Rathskeller, the bar and game room at the Athenaeum on campus, for students to hang out and enjoy some subsidized food and drinks. It's really nice being able to socialize and enjoy the scene here since the Ath is usually a members-only facility. [NEW LAST YEAR, HOPING TO BECOME TERMLY]

+ Throw in a couple of parties here and there as well, and we call it a year!

Events held every other year (and not being held this year): 

+ Big I 

+ ASCIT Formal 

See my first post for detailed descriptions of these events.

If any of you readers are prospective students, feel free to throw out ideas as to what events you'd like me to add to the upcoming year!

 

First Glimpse of Ahmedabad

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.

For breakfast and lunch we mostly ate at the canteen at IIT. I'm a vegetarian and I really like Indian food, so for me I loved the food here which was simple yet delicious and fulfilling. For breakfast we had idli (lentil and rice cake) with some kind of masala sauce along with buttered and jammed toast and boiled eggs. Vansh's plate is pictured below. 

 

 The program didn't officially start until tomorrow so we spent the rest of the day touring the campus and city. Two very friendly students, Parthvi and Shrankla were responsible for showing us around so they took us to the Swaminaryan Akshardham temple pictured below. The Hindu temple mostly told the story of Swaminaryan, a central figure in the Swaminarayan faith. Followers believe Swaminaryan is the manifestation of Narayana who descended in human form to destroy evil. The temple had elaborate exhibitions including walk through dioramas, an IMAX theatre, and a laser light show. It felt a little too commercialized and extravagant for a temple but it was still impressive nonetheless.

 

For dinner, Parthvi and Shrankla took us to a South Indian restaurant famous for dosas, a fermented crepe made from rice batter and black lentils. A very large dosa is pictured below.

 That's all for now. Vansh will talk about the first official day of the program.

Magnets and Networks

Hi everyone,

This week has been incredibly awesome so far! On Monday I participated in a workshop for Network Theory at the LHCb, a detector at the LHC which specializes in studying CP Violation, the asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the universe. The workshop included a tour of the detector facilities which was exciting since this is one of the areas I am considering looking at for graduate school, however, the program was more focused on data acquisition than the physics of the experiment. Our guide was still really cool and answered all of our questions relating to the physics as well. The workshop started off with us going down into the tunnels to sea the detector and then we headed to the "cold zone", or the radiation free zone to see the electroncis systems and the layered systems of servers for pulling in, processing and storing the data from the detector. It was pretty interesting since the focus was more on the computing side of the experiment which is something that I have very little background in. After the tour we were given a project which consisted of constructing our own data acquisition network. There were four of us in this workshop and we were effectively creating a server and playing with switches to be able to create multiple layers which data could be passed between and filtered at each stage. It was truly a learning experience and was quite difficult, particularly since we were all from different countries. I am pretty decent at reading off IP addresses now in German though. 

Okay I didn't take this picture since I forgot my camera but here is the LHCb. It is quite a bit smaller than ATLAS and CMS but it is also a more specified experiment.

  

 

I also had a tour of the SM18 Magnet facility. This is where that take in and test all of the magnets for the LHC. It was pretty cool to get to learn the physics behind the magnetic system for the accelerator but I found it even more interesting how they introduced simple concepts that I had never questioned before. For instance, I never had thought about how cooling the superconducting magnets with liquid Helium to around 2 Kelvin shrinks  the magnets themselves. Apparently when the LHC is cooled down the total ring of magnets shrinks by 80 meters, a pretty significant effect that needs to be considered in determining the magnetic field for the accelerator. So yeah, pretty cool stuff we never think about. You learn something new every day.

Tacos Tacos Tacos

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.)

Tacos consist of three to four things to cook, depending on your tastes: 1) a thing made from flour to hold the stuffing, 2) mexican rice, for the stuffing, 3) beans, for the stuffing, and, optionally, 4) meat, for the stuffing.

For the thing to hold the stuffing, Friend L decided to make our own tortillas. It was pretty easy -- make a dough, flatten, then cook on pan with oil. 

Protip: when recipes call for "dust work surface lightly with flour", they actually mean "dump large amounts of flour on your work surface until you can't see the surface anymore".

Protip: it's a lot easier to filp things when you dual wield.

We didn't flatten the dough balls enough, so the tortillas looked more like naan instead. At least we know what to do if we ever want to make Indian food...!

For the rice, we followed instructions on the internet and obtained various ingredients from various places. Instead of cooking the rice on a stove, we dumped everything in a rice cooker because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

We didn't have long-grained rice so used medium grain instead, which was completely wrong but it can't be helped. As expected from rice cookers, the rice turned out quite well.

The beans were a little bit more work; Friend L had been soaking the dried pinto beans in water ever since last night, and we started slow-cooking the beans well ahead of time, but they still weren't done by the time they're supposed to. We left the beans in the slow cooker for another hour but they were still hard... We ended up taking out the beans we wanted to eat and microwaving them instead. That worked quite well.

Protip: beans always takes longer to cook than you think it will. Plan ahead of time.

Friend L also bought organic ground beef, which was delicious and fatty and possibly the easiest thing to make besides the taco shells. Making the meat was just doing the generic "brown onion and garlic, brown beef" sort of thing. We tossed some extra jalapeno peppers in the meat for taste.

The end result was pretty great. I think the rice was my favorite part of the dish. Rice and beans and flour turned out to be super cheap, too! (The ground beef, not so much...)

A Different Kind of Surf

Back in the good old days, I played Tony Hawk Pro Skater and watched the skater kids after school pop ollies in the quad. Skateboarding was explosive, mystifying, and absolutely terrifying. 

As a prefrosh, I had no idea a lot of Caltech people longboarded. A longboard is a skateboard that is about 3 ft or longer, with softer and larger wheels. During Rotation, Longboarding Club takes prefrosh to go skate every night. My friends dragged me to these sessions, and I witnessed how much better everyone's balance was compared to mine. That shy girl I was talking to at frosh camp? A natural, in flip flops. That guy who's never seen a longboard before? Going down the big hill after just 30 minutes. It took me one week to get the hang of it, and I'm glad my friends gave me some positive peer pressure.

Longboarding is relaxing. Carving and commuting is comfortable and easygoing. I guess it fits my more chill and less courageous side :)

But that's not the whole picture. There are tougher disciplines within longboarding: namely freeride, dance, freestyle, and downhill. The first three borrow from each other, and the last one is the most dangerous and competitive. Freeriding is like snowboarding, fast-paced and slippery. Dancing is about moving your feet on the board with style. Freestyling involves a lot of flip tricks and combines dancing with some skateboarding. Lastly, downhilling is racing, drifting, and tucking at speeds above 40mph (yikes!). 

I'll have more on longboarding soon. Meanwhile, here's a terrible pic of an alum and me doing cross steps behind Schlinger. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A cross step is a basic dance move and I will someday be good at it.