Reading about ultrarunners is quite fascinating. The angle of the story which is that Dean Karnazes has some kind of magical DNA which lets him do these things effortlessly definitely seems like a misrepresentation.
These guys are amazing athletes but they experience fear and doubt just like everyone else, and don't run these distances effortlessly. Imagine the discipline required to push yourself to your limits for hours or days at a time.
That it is such a taxing endeavor both physically and mentally is what makes it all the more incredible. One of my favorite stories about ultrarunners is the time Scott Jurek ran the Badwater Ultramarathon for the first time.
There were a bunch of reasons it was objectively a terrible idea. Half way through he collapsed vomited and seriously considered giving up. He managed to keep going though and made up a ton of time in the second half of the race and ended up winning and set a course record despite being behind at the half way point:
http://www.seattlepi.com/sports/article/Seattle-man-amazes-e...
Pretty cool! One feature I think would be useful is the ability to set where a form should redirect to after submission, that way I can set where users go to after submitting a form.
It looks like you have some familiarity with a variety of different technologies which is fantastic.
The most important thing is just to pick a direction and get started. It doesn't have to bee anything more specific than "I want to build something using Raspberry Pi".
Once you pick a direction you can start working through some basic tutorials and learning the ropes. At this point after understanding what's possible you might get some ideas about what you might want to do.
If you don't have ideas yet that's ok, but now you're pretty well equipped to research what other people have been doing with your platform. You could build somewhat different alternatives to existing projects, or work on trying to contribute an extension to an existing project.
If just looking at projects doesn't spark any ideas start talking to people. Start with people who might know something about your topic at your university, or reach out to individuals in the community.
The key to a research project is just getting interested in one idea or question. Once you develop a little curiosity about on little thing it's like pulling on a thread that's connected to a much larger tapestry. Maybe your original idea has already been done but you find something else that's closely related that hasn't been done. You'll quickly be able to follow this tiny thread to a much larger world that will be of great depth and in general can be very interesting. If you have the diligence to carefully review existing work it's not hard to steer yourself to a totally uncharted area (this is probably a lot of work for a senior thesis but if you find it fun then go for it).
Also don't worry too much about originality. Re-creating something that already exists is a good learning experience, and might lead to other interesting ideas, like taking an existing thing and using it for a slightly different purpose. Just make sure to give credit where it's due. This isn't a PHD thesis and I don't think you'll be knocked for not making some brilliant original discovery. The key thing is to get started and follow your curiosity.
While most of the recent popular coverage has been full of hype, Aaronson provides a concise summary of what's been going on before taking on the hype which appears to have left the poor man at his wit's end. Honestly I was rather confused also as the skepticism D-wave was met with at the beginning appears to have been replaced with a lot of hype without any mention of the actual physics of what's happening.
The position of most of the scientific community at the outset regarding D-Wave quantum computers was that it was uncertain what was going on at all. Nobody knew for sure if the D-Wave computers were really using quantum entanglement when they ran or not. Obviously a computer that does computations without doing at least some of the weird things allowed by quantum mechanics wouldn't be much of a quantum computer.
It appears that the D-Wave computers could indeed be taking advantage of entanglement. However since the D-Wave computers are not very isolated from their environment, the delicate effects they attempt to harness are sometimes disrupted when the computer interacts with its environment (aka decoherence to use the Quantum Mechanics term).
Overall it looks like D-Wave is making some progress on demonstrating their computer does really harness what's allowed by quantum mechanics. This is exciting, though ironically they have not caught up to their own overstated claims of what their machine does. Perhaps with more work they can better isolate their computer from it's environment and graduate from quantum annealing to reversible adiabatic quantum computing. Or maybe someone else working with some other physical system which has an intrinsically lower coupling to it's environment might beat them to it. An exciting time for the field nonetheless.
Getting a speed up on a particular class of problem could have a great deal of practical importance, but building a scalable computer that fully takes advantage of everything allowed by the laws of physics is the holy grail of quantum computing, and it doesn't look like D-Wave is there quite yet. Still an exciting time for the field nonetheless.
Car suspension tuning is a very subtle and difficult black art. It's all about what's happening dynamically in response to transient inputs (go around a corner, hit a bump, etc.).
I believe Lotus does a lot of engineering consulting helping other manufacturers dial in suspensions. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla had them consult.
Even some of the big car companies have trouble dialing in suspension on their own (I'm looking at you underdamped Japanese cars). European brands tend to be really good at this, and can take the same raw materials that everyone else is working with and create superior setups. Porsche somehow manages to start with the 911 where they stick the engine way out behind the rear axle (high polar moment of inertia, poor front/rear weight distribution) and make it handle beautifully. VW cars also tend to have great suspension tuning. Being able to keep the weight low to the ground in the Tesla contributes to a low center of gravity and I imagine must really help enormously.
Also the body under-tray is beautiful, like something you'd expect to see on a purpose built race car, probably helps a lot with the aerodynamics. I imagine more and more cars will get similar under-trays to improve aerodynamics and fuel efficiency.
It's interesting there is strong anti-dive geometry built into the car, probably to avoid problems with throttle lift oversteer caused by inexperienced drivers. I wonder if the current Model S handling leaves anything to be desired when driven to it's absolute limits and how the car would handle with some of the anti-dive geometry removed. Removing this geometry is a common mod on some cars.
I think this is good advice and an accurate view of how to get ahead (as much as I hate to admit how much of an advantage everyone with deep pockets has). It's definitely hard as a little guy to get started but there are ways to get some attention if you can afford to invest in buying installs.