Hey friends!
Welcome to ./engineered_mind.sh – the newsletter if you want to engineer your mind & your life. Subscribe for free and join more than 450 people for exclusive content coming every Sunday!
Technology
Tensors
You might have heard of tensors before. A tensor is a “container” which can hold data in N dimensions. There are different types of tensors, often expressed in terms of their order (tensor of 0th, 1st, 2nd and higher order).
More commonly these tensor forms are known as scalars, vectors and matrices. Below is a simple demonstration of the common types of tensors. I will explain tensors in an upcoming video in a very easy way, tell you where they are used and won’t talk about any transformations or “covariance and contravariance”, no worries!
Separate videos on the implementation in Python, NumPy & MATLAB will follow to strengthen your understanding.
Aerodynamic Drag
Air resists the movement of a vehicle passing through it. Resistance increases with the square of the vehicle’s speed: twice the speed produces 4 times the resistance. The engine power required to overcome this drag increases with the cube of the vehicle’s speed: twice the speed requires 8 times higher power. Thus, even a small reduction in drag can result in a large increase in fuel economy. Dr. Ferdinand Porsche was among the first to reduce drag through body design. The Porsche 924 benefits from 70 years of Porsche aerodynamic development. Its drag coefficient is a low .36. And it requires only 15 hp to cruise at 55 mph! (Source)
CFD – The Basics for Numerical Simulations
This week, I interviewed Tobias Holzmann on my show about OpenFOAM, things to take care of in terms of numerics and a lot of other interesting topics. When it comes to numerics and the fundamentals of simulation, there are a lot of things users can mess up. Tobi took the time to put together a great book which you can either download for free or get the paid full version (not a sponsored post, I just think it’s a great resource)!
If you’re inquisitive and want to learn more about the equations behind CFD, check out my playlist here!
Download the paid full version from Tobias here.
Upcoming Podcasts
This week, I will release two new episodes!
Monday Episode
Doug Farrell has been programming for a long time in several languages and he has worked in process control, embedded systems, retail CD Rom software and both Internet and Intranet web applications. Currently Doug is fortunate enough to code in Python, with a large slice of JavaScript just for fun. He’s also writing a book for Manning Publishing called “The Well-Grounded Python Developer”.
Friday Episode
My second guest for this week is David Josephs. David Josephs studied aerospace engineering and astronomy, he’s an aspiring data scientist, vivid open source contributor, chess player and ML researcher. His interests go from explainable models to time series over parametrized deep learning and a lot of other exciting topics like RL and myoelectric control to map brain signals in the body to motions in the extremity to control prosthetic limbs.
Went Live This Week
This week, I uploaded a podcast with Adam Kelly who talked about synthetic data & machine learning in Unity.
For the course 3D Rendered Datasets with Blender for Beginners, use the coupon code EM21 to save 20%.
Visualize Ideas
"Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it." – Andy Rooney
Follow me on Instagram to see more of my designs! You can order my canvases my sending me a DM on my socials.
Tool of the Week
Alfred
Alfred is an award-winning app for macOS which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more. Search your Mac and the web, and be more productive with custom actions to control your Mac.
I bought the Powerpack of Alfred back in July 2020 and used the functionalities almost 6,000 times since then which averages to 30 times per day (see below). Before that, I was using the Spotlight Search for Mac, which is too slow for me and doesn’t allow a quick setup of pre-built text snippets that I can insert as standard answers for emails, DMs etc. – it really is a time saver and saving 5-10 seconds per task definitely adds up!
Favourite Animation
Meme of the Week
Schrödinger's Cat
Closing Remarks
If you have any wishes for video topics, you can submit them in this form. Apart from that you can always reach out to me via Twitter or Instagram or LinkedIn, so let’s connect!
Join the Discord server where you can connect with like-minded people.
For any business related issues or collaborations, feel free to write me an email to engineeredmindbusiness@gmail.com!
And of course, if you want to support the podcast, newsletter & YouTube channel and want have access to special perks, feel free to have a look at my Patreon profile!
See you next week and in the meantime, make sure to keep engineering your mind!
Jousef