Sorry for the extremely belated post. I know I’ve been really out of touch lately, and I’ll talk more about it here.
This past weekend, we went out with a bunch of friends to celebrate a friend’s birthday! We first grabbed a brunch at a really cool cafe and then went to the Getty Center. Let me tell you the story in slightly more detail and then gush about my single favorite place in LA.
A while back, the Avery seniors decided to host a fake ditch day on Thursday 2/11. It seemed like the perfect sort of day, just after midterms were due but before too many other sets came up, and it left more room in the year in case we wanted to run another ditch day. We began our planning, divvied up roles…
Hi all! Long time no see again. Let’s just go through the laundry list of all the fun things I’ve been up to, then I’ll tell you a bit more about my life here at the good ol’ California Institute of Technology.
Welcome back to the latest iteration of Yubo forgets to blog! I will catch you up to speed as well as talk about all my commitments this term, probably in two posts so as not to make the post too long I got used to just wearing perpetually damp sneakers those few days, since I don’t have anything remotely sensible for rainy weather. Apparently with El Niño coming up, though, this will be a persistent problem. I tried to go to Target to buy an umbrella, and they were out of stock. In the about 5 minutes I was in the checkout area, at least five more people asked for umbrellas. I guess we don’t stock for rainy weather here in sunny sunny Pasadena…
And so it happened that Jorge Cham was invited to the Caltech Physics Colloquium to give a talk, on everything related to research except actual research. As expected, it was a talk laced with lethal doses of humor in the usually uneventful halls of Bridge Lecture Hall, but it hit on some extremely resonant ideas with me, some of which I will aim to share below.
Last week we got a visit from Michelle Feynman! To understand why this is exciting, one much first understand the unfairly-not-household-name Richard Feynman.
I’m not sure if the interview process I went through is very typical, but my day was scheduled to start at 11AM on Friday and go until 5PM. I generally do my best when I’m fully relaxed though, so I took the effort to wake up extra and walk over to Fisherman’s Wharf to relax. The result? I had a full clam chowder bread bowl at Boudin’s,the place to do it, before going in.
Sorry for the long delay in posting; summer is a time when the days begin to blend together, and a long time flies by without being noticed. I’ll catch you all up in two posts, one talking about everything fun I did (serving as a photo dump) and one with reflections on everything being learned this summer.
This past July 4th weekend I was able to go up to San Francisco to meet up with a bunch of friends, all from different phases of my life, and it was an absolute blast of a time getting to see everybody! I could give the full itinerary, but it wasn’t really the most touristy and consisted of a lot of just “chilling.” If anything it was a welcome contrast to the breakneck pace at Caltech; even as I love pushing myself harder intellectually than I’d have ever expected, I can’t like hanging out with good friends any less.
A few more food adventures kicked off the beginning of summer for me; I promise I’ll get back to more productive matters in a bit.
While I’m positively bursting to tell the story of my most two important points, I will go in chronological order and first talk about the delicious, delicious cookies I baked with a friend.
Having a birthday so near the end of the school year as me is always a dilemma, since so many friends can’t make it being busy for finals. Nonetheless, we still managed to have a nice celebration or two.
Well, I just posted about Ditch Day, what better than to talk about my firstFake Ditch Day!
So as promised in the last post (though at this point much belated as usual), I promised I would talk a little bit about the Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge that we attended last weekend. So here we go.The Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge is exactly what it sounds like, apuzzle challenge. We went in with four computer science majors (my three apartment-mates and me) expecting to have a programming competition, but instead we stood bamboozled by logic puzzles that eluded our collective understanding; the questions would be something like a picture followed by a question mark, with many other pictures beneath it from which we must answer the question. The answers were submitted through an online webpage. This was rather unfortunate but it was still very fun to laugh at each other while struggling through a task clearly not made for us. The CPC lasts all day, with puzzles first released at 10 and further ones released incrementally throughout the course of the day until the deadline for total submission comes around at 7.
So I’ve already discussed once about Faculty in Residence hosting a meal, but the regular MVP of student activities is Tom Mannion, whose official title is “Senior Director, Student Activities and Programs” but is more colloquially recognized as the “chair of student happiness.” Why he is so called comes as no surprise to any Techer, who has almost certainly regularly attended Mannion events. This particular instance was a cheese tasting hosted by the great man, and I’m here to tell you exactly how it started and how it went down.
I promised that I would post again if I got a cool physics lab, and it turns out I really liked this most recent one, and not only because it wasn’t much work (in case I haven’t mentioned it before, this class lets you choose the labs you do, so it is important to choose wisely, and this is one wise choice!) but also because it showcased some spectacular effects. Below is my poor phone’s attempt at taking a picture in a dark room of the observation
Kip Thorne, the scientific advisor for blockbuster hitInterstellar, gave a talk at Caltech a week and a half ago (sorry, I got really under water with work) about the process of making the movie. It was actually a super cool talk that showed us how a physicist can come up with a movie concept and bring it to life, and it also showed how from a physicist’s dream a movie takes on a life.
This winter break I went on a family outing, just my parents and me, to Hawai’i (pronounced Hah-vye-YEE). This wasn’t initially my idea; I’d have prefered to stay home and help out my parents around the house, doing the chores with which their aging bodies now struggle. But nope, the day after my finals in France I was informed that in a spontaneous decision my parents had decided to send us to Hawai’i between Christmas and New Years, a serendipitous turn of events by all means. We were unable to find accomodations at our island of choice, the ever-gorgeous Maui, so we in yet another fortunate stroke of luck booked for the Island of Hawai’i instead, or colloquially known as the Big Island.