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- Starting my Master's Thesis on the Curiosity rover NASA mission, book notes on better health, software, and thinking, and a new QuickAdd beta feature
Starting my Master's Thesis on the Curiosity rover NASA mission, book notes on better health, software, and thinking, and a new QuickAdd beta feature
Christian Bager Bach Houmann
September 24, 2023
Hey there.
I hope you've had a great week.
I’ve been transitioning between semesters, and am now entering the final year of my Master’s. This means the preparation for my thesis has begun with this semester.
I’m super excited about this project because it lies at the intersection of science & space and artificial intelligence — all of which I’m deeply interested in!
We somehow managed to get a member of multiple ongoing NASA Mars missions to act as a supervisor for our project. So here’s what we’re going to be working on.
The NASA ChemCam is a specialized tool on the Curiosity rover that determines the chemical makeup of rocks and soil on Mars. It's currently working in the Gale Crater region of Mars. Our thesis aims to enhance the accuracy of the predictions from the current calibration models with improved (machine learning) models.
If you’re interested in following along, we’ve made our report public — even as we’re writing it! You can find everything on our project GitHub. The latest report is under releases as report.pdf.
So, after a longer hiatus & a very busy me, we’re back with an edition that aggregates everything I’ve published since last time!
What I've made for you
I have a bunch of book notes to share with you. Let’s dive in!
 | The book focuses on simple, actionable strategies to improve metabolic health, thus reducing the risk of chronic diseases and increasing longevity. The book is straightforward and provides easy-to-follow advice for increasing your health. Great book. Gets a recommendation from me. |
 | The book provides nice insights into how 37Signals build software. There are great lessons to learn about shipping products, fast. It is very opinionated, which helps get the points across. It is freely available online. Very fast read. |
 | Great explanations. Good depth. Somewhat narrow in scope, but that’s perfect for this kind of book. If you’ve studied Computer Science, this is a fast read - even with doing the exercises & implementing the algorithms. |
 | Good book. The authors discuss various mental models and concepts to help people make better decisions and understand the world around them. Low ROI for me as I've already read so much about mental models. If you don't know a ton of them, I'd highly recommend this book as an entry point. |
QuickAdd Beta Feature: Chunked Prompts
QuickAdd is one of my Obsidian plugins. It recently received an AI integration, so you can add AI to your existing workflows in no time.
What do you do if you have some text you want to have summarized? Easy, ask ChatGPT to do it.
Now, what if you have a large body of text you want summarized?
Do you ask ChatGPT to do so by repeatedly copying over parts of the text?
That's tedious, and we don't do that here.
Let me introduce Chunked Prompts for QuickAdd.
This will chunk your text into pieces that fit into the input window for the various models. The feature inserts these chunks into your predefined chunk and makes requests to the OpenAI API for each of them.
It's even able to merge multiple chunks together if there's space.
This is incredibly useful for summarizing or transforming large bodies of text. Here are some of the things I've done with it:
Summarized my book notes that couldn't fit in ChatGPT
Made flashcards from 200-page PDF contents
You can read everything about it here — including how to set it up for yourself.
Quote
Man conquers the world by conquering himself.