Thinking: Open Questions

Kepping a Research Journal

Inspired by this page on Jess Martin I thought it would be interesting to keep a running list of the questions I am exploring both for my personal research and academic. I like the idea of a research notebook, aas a kind of peek into my brain and a useful reference for future me to look back at what I was working on when. Here is the inaugural list:

Dec 28 2023:

Autonomous racing (à la f1tenth)

I’ve been really into Formula One lately, and I like the idea of pushing it fully to an engineering challenge without the incredible athletics of the F1 drivers.

Aerodynamics

Same thing as above but it also ties into the next thing which is:

Heat pumps (Compressor Design)

I had a conversation with my roommate’s Dad ages ago about his search or a heat pump and I thought it would be a good exercise to try designing one. Especially since I haven’t done much with fluids, thermo or heat transfer in a while

Tools for thinking

This is actually what ended up leading me to Jess’s page. I’ve been thinking about how to design tools for effectively thinking. What is the most seamless way to get what’s in my head out and in a form that can be further analysed. I’m particularly fond of the idea of an infinite canvas combining multiple modalities of information from audio, to video, images, links, text, etc. Combining this with a set of tools to organise and identify trends could be a pretty powerful tool.

LLMs

Also following the thoughts about tools for thinking but also cause they’re unavoidable at this point and I took a pretty interesting course on machine learning last semester.