Friday, October 12, 2018

Incense and Heatmaps

October 12th is a national holiday in Spain. It commemorates the landing of Columbus in the Americas. A lot of Spaniards are sort of ambivalent about that event now, but a day off is a day off, haha. In a lot of ways, it was quieter than normal, at least earlier in the day when I went out for my walk. Speaking of my walk, I was this ode to autumn at the base of the bridge on the Sevilla side:


This is worth zooming in on. The little sign in the middle says "Bienvenido otoƱo" ("welcome autumn"). The leaves are all hand made--either crocheted or decorated dried leaves. This was clearly left by folks that miss traditional autumn colors. I have to say, I miss them too. It gets cooler here in the winter, but the trees don't drop their leaves.

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I continued to work of my frequency analysis. Emily suggested a heatmap instead of an animation. I figured out how to get python/matplotlib to do a heatmap and was pretty happy with the result:

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This evening there was another religious procession. Streets closed, marching bands, throngs. After the procession Laura and I went out to San Jacinto to get some dinner. One of the street vendors was selling incense burners. The vendor was actually burning incense in one of them. It smelled just like the incense from catholic churches back in the US:


He was busy too. Lots of people looking for incense burners I guess.