Week 12, 2021
March 29, 2021 Categories: Weekly Notes This was a tough week. I felt a general lack of motivation in all aspects of life. There was enormous mental friction in doing even the simplest of tasks like laundry. I am not sure why. But just the realization that there is a mental blockage reduced its potential and I was able to control some of it.
Work
The week was all about troubleshooting with remote diagnostics, asset monitoring and product documentation. Also spent time on delivering performance and testing reports to customers. A week of less programming and statistical analysis and more client-facing ## work. I am a huge electric vehicle nerd and thus my YouTube feed is full of EV news. Some EV range testers ran the Tesla Model 3, Mustang Mach-e, and the VW ID.4 beyond their 0% State of Charge. They found that the Tesla drove 22 miles after reaching 0% whereas the Mach-e only did 6 miles. I just thought that was super interesting. Battery pack manufacturers usually leave some room at the bottom SOC to protect the batteries. SOC estimation is an interesting problem. Some battery manufacturers map it to the cell voltage (since there is a linear relationship between the battery voltage and its SOC). I wonder what Tesla does. Side Project Virtually met with one of the professors to resolve a problem with my Google Earth Engine code. Right now I am tasked at creating a pipeline to provide the right type of data to the neural network that is also currently in the works by another project mate. We got 180 fires and after a lot of pre- processing we are very close to exporting rastors (images) of the fires from Google Earth Engine.
Books
A weird week with reading. I was jumping between reading about Weight Lifting, Deep Learning, and Philosophy. Practical Programming for Strength Training | Mark Rippertoe and Andy Baker I read only around 30 kindle pages of this book. One important concept that I grabbed is the distinction between a novice, intermediate, and advanced trainees and how their bodies respond to weight training. The book talks in depth about the Stress > Recovery > Adaptation cycle of each of these stages in a trainee’s life. It gets a little boring most times. Deep Learning with PyTorch | Eli Stevens, Luca Antiga, and Thomas Viehman So far I am on page 113 of this 500 page PDF book. So far the book talked about Tensor object which is the fundamental tool in the PyTorch library. The book explains how the library uses storage on the CPU or GPU. It introduces the concepts of size, offsets, and stride. Also learned about PyTorch’s interoperability with NumPy. This week’s target was to get to 150. A lot of pages short. Meditations | Marcus Aurelius Just stared with this book. Barely 20 pages in. Nothing to share about it yet.
Fitness
Gym: 4 days in the gym and spent just over 3 hours in strength training. Mostly leg workouts. I have been measuring my heart rate and I am steadily working on keeping the average heart rate during training as high as possible. Also, my gym is opening the swimming pool next week. Looking forward to some great cardio. I am hoping to spend more than 5 hours with strength training next week. Let’s see how it goes. Bike: I biked around 27 miles this week. A little short of last week’s total miles. Hoping to maintain this mileage next week as well.