Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Av. de la ConstituciĆ³n

We walked up to Av. de la ConstituciĆ³n this evening just to see what we could see. Also, since tomorrow is a national holiday, Constitution Day, it was particularly apropos. It marks the establishment in 1978 of the current form of Spanish governance. It looked lovely in its Christmas lights, but really smokey from all the chestnut roasters:


There was a nativity in the alcove of one of the government buildings at the end of the avenue. Definitely not something you'd see in a gov't building in the US (that pesky separation of church and state, haha):



Just around the corner from this we heard what sounded like a political march. We went around to investigate and saw a group doing a Take Back the Night sort of political demonstration.


It was attracting attention and a number of TV newscasters.

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I worked a bit more on my weather project today. Using a nearest neighbors classifier I started getting reasonable results. Still with not much sophistication, I'm able to predict frozen fog 12 hours in advance with about 50% accuracy, but still a lot of false negatives. I have  few ideas on how to improve it. It's a surprisingly rich project.

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Spanish class was interesting today. Our teacher tried to explain when to use the preterite past tense or the present perfect tense (which is also a past tense). I kind of have it down, but I'm far from being able to use it on the fly in conversation.

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I talked to Emily today while I walked along the river. Research seems to be going well. When I got home, we switched to video and Laura and I both got to "chat" with Benji the bunny.