Corpus Christi

Living in Sevilla, the 2nd most Catholic city in the world, I'm learning or re-learning a lot about Catholicism. In the Plaza de San Francisco, they are preparing for YAP (yet another procession).

This plaza, just down the street from the cathedral will be the main spectating area for the procession to celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi. This Catholic feast day is exactly two months after Maundy Thursday (the Thursday before Easter Sunday). The workers on the scissor lift are building the "gateway" for the procession.

Also visible in this photo are the recently erected shade tarps that are popping up over plazas all over Sevilla:

As we approach the solstice and the very hot time of the year here, the city puts up these shade tarps over many of the plazas and heavily used pedestrian avenues. The provide a bit of relief from the high blazing sun.

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I've been having some discussions with Justin and Sharon about developing a course for Whitman's first-year course sequence. The first-year course has recently been changed to allow groups of faculty to develop a syllabus that fits their area of expertise and interest to teach to the incoming first-year students. The new format will start in the 2020-21 academic year. We're working on some mash-up of data, algorithms and applications to art, humanities, science and social sciences. It's pretty broad right now, but we hope to meet in August and sharpen it up a bit. It's been fun chatting about it with them.

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I've been working through a clustering course on datacamp. I'm still struggling with methods of interpreting clustering algorithm results on high-dimensional data. I had some ideas today about applying dimension reduction to the resulting clusters and comparing their principle components. I haven't really ironed out the details yet though. There's not much literature about this, or, at least, I'm not finding it, haha.