I posted a photo a couple of days ago of a nearby street with Spanish flag pennants in strands from building to building along the street. I speculated that it had to do with the imminent start of the school year. However, today some kids with different decorations and a ladder went along our street and hung similar decorations:
I asked Mario about it and he ranted a bit (lightheartedly) about how people in Sevilla hang decorations off of other people's balconies without asking all the time. This one is in preparation for a "procesion" held by some or other local Catholic organization on September 15th. The streets along the procession route all have these decorations. I can tell you that the owner of the tapas bar across the street in the building that literally was just painted was not pleased that random people were coming along and leaning ladders on the fresh paint and hanging things off of the building, haha. If looks could kill...
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In other news, I took a bit of a different route this morning on my walk. The orange trees lining Av. Concejal Alberto Jiménez-Becerril are beautiful:
More rowers:
This outflow seemed to be related to the cleaning of a fountain located above this point on the bank of the river:
Finally, I pass by this church almost every day when I walk with Laura to her language class. While it won't be interesting to anyone else, I was struck by how perfectly symmetric the light and shadow on this alcove happened to be. I supposed this symmetry happens once a day, but the change of daylight as the year progresses to winter made it so this symmetry occurred at the moment I happened to walk by:
The shadow cast by the arc of the alcove frames the cross in an almost symmetric shadow.
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I haven't had a chance to jump back into my data science competition. Partly because I realized as I sat down to refine my effort that keeping track of those refinements was a challenge. I decided to step back and develop a method for systematically tracking the dozens of trials and modifications one performs in competitions like this. My goal is to have students doing this when I get back to Whitman. As a teacher, I have to provide them with the tools they need to be successful at the process. It's been nice to have the time this year to really dwell on the development of this class and on my own research.
Saw this praying mantis down by the river this morning:
I can't remember when exactly the praying mantises appear back in Walla Walla, but it's definitely late summer. This looks pretty much just like the ones back in WW, same species? It would be surprising, but who knows?
It's interesting how much sport rowing occurs on the river here. I saw these folks working out this morning:
Then, just now, at 9pm I spotted this 8-person crew out for practice:
I assume there are competitions at some point. I'd like to see some racing.
Public school starts here on Monday. Laura and I noticed some school-aged kids putting these Spanish flag banners across one of the streets here. This is kind of close to one of the public schools in the neighborhood. I don't know of any other significant upcoming events that might warrant the decorations, so I'm going with the first day of school:
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I'm attending a math conference in Utah on Sep 28-29. I'm flying from Madrid to Miami to spend a couple of days with Rachel, then on to Utah for the meeting, then back to Miami, then flying from Miami to Sevilla. Laura and I are going to up to Madrid for a second visit the day before I fly out (we originally came to Spain through Madrid and spent a couple of days there before coming down to Sevilla). We're going to take the high-speed train from Sevilla to Madrid. It goes about 220mph. I'm looking forward to that.
I went to Clic language school this morning with Laura to get the low down on the Spanish language course I plan to start next week. I'm not going to go the intensive route like Laura, just 3 hours a week. I was surprised when my possible instructor came out to meet me and gave me an oral placement test. I was super nervous, but did ok. The instructor was really kind.
One of my goals on this sabbatical is to figure out how some of the many data science competitions out there like, DrivenData and Kaggle work. Today I downloaded the introductory competition data set from DrivenData, applied what I've been learning so far about machine learning, generated a competition entry and uploaded it:
Did ok for a naive logistic regression with almost no tweaks, 57th out of 418. Looking forward to playing around with it tomorrow and adding a few more sophisticated approaches. I think students will find this compelling and fun.
As we near the autumnal equinox, we're losing daylight as fast as at anytime of the year. It's definitely noticeable here. Here the sun light skims the tops of the building on our block as the day comes to an end:
There's a pastry shop around the corner from us that comes highly recommended. Knowing it wouldn't be open this evening, Laura and I walked by anyway to see its hours of operation. It opens at 10am. Not sure if we'll hit it tomorrow, but at least we know when it opens. I took a shot of the street it's on called Calle Pureza. The original shot is at an angle because it was a low-light situation so I had my phone on a tripod hanging off of the side of an orange tree. I decided it would be cool to rotate it and put it on a black background (using Gimp). The result:
Fun fact, I used the Pythagorean theorem to create a black canvas of the correct size to contain the rotated image. The original image was $4640\times 3480$. That means I needed a background canvas that was at least $\sqrt{4640^2 + 3480^2}=5800$ on a side to accommodate the maximally rotated image. That's what you see above, a black square of dimensions $5800\times 5800$ with the rotated image overlaid.
Laura made an excellent chicken/pesto/pasta dish this evening. Just makin' it up as she goes, so don't ask her to do it again! A+ for presentation too:
After dinner we walked down to the Catedral de Sevilla just to see what we could see. Along the way we visited one of Laura's favorite hidden plazas, Plaza del cabildo. It is enclosed by a curved building and is not noticeable just walking along the streets nearby. I was in a mood to point my camera straight up. Here it just catches the arc of the roof edge:
The plaza is lined with several shops. This one is a rare coin shop as you might deduce from the name printed above the window:
We passed the nearby Real Alcázar de Sevilla. The corners of the enclosing walls explain clearly why the rook chess pieces look the way they do:
We still haven't made time to tour the inside of the Catedral de Sevilla, but here are a few external shots. So much detail on these main entrances:
One of the taller towers of the Catedral (also more upward pointing camera work:
Also, enjoyed watching this tourist happily not getting the hang of this Segway, haha:
Today was a breezy, cool day with puffy clouds. It's really the first opportunity I've had to just go to one of the many parks here in Sevilla and sit with my Kindle. I was not the only person with that idea:
Also, as in the US, Saturday is a big wedding day. Here's a newlywed couple working with their photographer down by the river, just beneath the bridge:
Speaking of weddings, bachelorette parties seem to be a popular and visible thing here. This crew was walking down our street with the bride-to-be leading the way:
Not sure if alcohol was involved, but I'm certain it was imminent. The friends all wore sashes saying "Amigas Cachondas" which translates politely to "racy girlfriends". Looked like they were going with a pirate theme. These parties also occur on small chartered river boats like this one:
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I started a new audiobook today, Don Quixote by Cervantes. I wasn't sure how it would go, but it's really good. Written around 1600, it's amazing how many of the usual tropes we see in modern fiction can be found in just the first couple of chapters of Don Quixote. Also, it's funny. Downside, the audiobook is 38 hours! Largely this is the result of a lovely, but very deliberate (i.e. slow) narrator. Fortunately, I've found that running the audio speed at around 1.3x still leaves the narration perfectly acceptable and cuts the run time down to around 29 hours. I listened to it on my morning walk this morning. It's somewhat surreal to be listening to a book that was written by an author in Sevilla over 400 years ago.
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Last night I mentioned that we walked down into the cathedral area and saw some flamenco dance. Frankly, it was more just modern dance, but hey, any excuse for art in my opinion. Here's the video that I didn't want to wait for last night:
