Life in the Fast Train

Laura and I went up to Madrid today. I'm flying to the US out of Madrid for a conference tomorrow. We used that as an excuse to go up a day early and do a little sightseeing. The day started at a relatively humane 8am. We walked across the bridge and caught the 21 bus out to the train station. We were pretty early, so sat around for about an hour until our train to Madrid boarded. They took our tickets as we got on the escalator to the platform. At the bottom of the escalator there was a bag scan and metal detector. On the other side of the security check, I snapped this picture of the train (actually a couple of trains):

The seats were comfortable and the ride smooth. At one point my phone told me we hit 171 mph:

Everything ran on time and we arrived in Madrid at around 1:15pm. A short walk across the train station took us to the metro station. We still had our metro cards from when we visited Madrid in July. We just recharged them and took the metro out to our hotel (near the airport). Check in at the airport hotel went fine. I also made a 9:20am reservation on the hotel's airport shuttle for tomorrow. We took 5 mins in the room and went back down town to visit the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía--our primary goal for this trip. This is a largely contemporary/recent art museum. They have some Dali and Picasso and many others. There was also a Russian dada-ist exhibition.

Here are a few pieces that caught my eye and that I actually remembered to snap pictures of. This one is in the "cubist" collection. I didn't remember to note the artist's name.

 Here I like the quote above the painting:

 These next two were by Dali. Done when he was young and definitely not like his more surreal stuff:

 This was in the room with the Dali's. Not my favorite pieces, except, I love the expressions on the two horses' faces:

This giant metronome actually worked:

The museum closed at 7pm. I snapped this picture of the stairwell as we left:

And of the front of the musuem:

We walked over to the Parque de el Retiro. Along the way we passed a statue of the famous Spanish artist Murillo. Mostly an interesting coincidence since we visited his feature exhibit in the art museum we visited in Sevilla yesterday:

In the park itself, there were a lot of people. It was a beautiful evening and I'm sure the throngs were not unusual:

Like everyone else, Laura and I took a selfie in front of the lake:

That's all from Madrid. Laura heads back to Sevilla tomorrow. I go to Miami for a few days, then to Utah for my conference.

Working Moms

The shortening days definitely evident as we move into Autumn. This morning I noticed that the sun hadn't even cleared the cathedral in el centro:

When I first started my morning walk/runs, the sun was way up by the time I got out there, usually around 8:30am. Now it's just barely above the horizon. I imagine at some point I'm going to have to delay my morning activities a bit just waiting for daylight.

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A week after the procession that wasn't, a couple of young volunteers went down our street today with a ladder and a pair of scissors and took down all of the decorations:

They were not super confident with the ladder. One of the painters that was doing some touch up on the building across the street gave them some pointers on how to raise and lower the ladder and move it around. While they worked hard, the two seemed to be a liability lawsuit waiting to happen. They worked most of the day and it was hot.

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During the daily shopping trip today, Laura spotted some ginger snap cookies. We both like them, so we bought some. Pretty tasty, could be a regular thing:

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This afternoon, after the laundry was all done, we went to el Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla. There were paintings and sculptures with Sevilla connections dating back to the 15th century. The overwhelming majority of the art was religious in nature and Catholic to be specific. There were no photos allowed, but I snapped a couple of quick ones (no flash) of pieces I really liked. For example, this piece of tile dated back to 1490--two years before Columbus landed. I liked this because we live in the ceramics district of Sevilla:

This painting of Triana by Emilio Sanchez features la Puente de Isabel II (el mejor puente):

It dates back to around 1890 and, if our building existed then, it would be in among the buildings on the right. My favorite was this painting of women working in a tobacco factory from 1915 by the artist Gonzalo Bilbao. I liked it because we see a woman in the foreground breastfeeding her infant and the child's empty cradle next to her on the factory floor. We also see the women around her seemingly supportive. The challenges of the working mom from over 100 years ago:

The museum is housed in a block-sized building with a number of lovely courtyards:

There was so much in this museum, that I think I could go back several times and enjoy myself. Perhaps, once I get back from my conference next week, I'll head over there again.

The Really Low Water Fountain

A few weeks ago the city installed a new water fountain on the main street here in Triana. Recently, I noticed that not only are there high and low fountains for accessibility, but there's a really low fountain... for dogs:


Hey, it's a hot city and there are a lot of dogs!

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La Puente de Isabel II (our bridge, the best one) was particularly lovely this evening as I read down by the river:

If you have a really sharp eye, you can see some tents being erected on the far side of the river. Not sure what the occasion is, but we'll probably find out tomorrow. Might be a big deal, there seemed to be a lot more traffic today than usual around here.

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We took the bus up to Carrefour this morning. We went looking for a reusable ice pack since I've got a muscle that's been bugging me after my morning runs. We found one, but it's not ideal. I think it's mostly for use in coolers not for putting on sore muscles. We'll probably just amazon.es ourselves a more appropriate one.

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Math was good. I found a couple more useful references. One that discusses centroids of convex polytopes and another that shows how to compute centroids using boundary integrals. I have an idea about how to glue these ideas together to get at some stability results for the Lloyd algorithm on convex polytopes.

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Laundry tomorrow so we'll be ready to go up to Madrid on Sunday morning. I need clothes for the week since I fly to Miami on Monday.

Evicted from the dock on the bay (or in this case river)

This banner appeared above our bridge (the best bridge) today. It says "Seis Siglos de Esperanza" or "Six Centuries of Hope" on one side and "1418 Esperanza 2018" on the other side. It's clearly the 600th anniversary of something, but I haven't quite figured out what. Maybe Laura can figure it out. It's definitely religious and involves a "procesion" based on my random googling, but I'm pretty hazy on the details. That said, it's rare to be around for the 600th anniversary of anything so that's interesting. Unfortunately, the procession is next week while I'm at a conference. Laura will have to fill me in.

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In keeping with my new tradition of going to a park or somewhere outside to read, I found a bench down by the river. As I went down there, I noticed a bunch of high school aged kids on one of the many private docks along the river. I also noticed that the gated access to the dock was locked. I wondered how they managed to get in there, but not for too long, and found my bench and started to read. Not long after that, an elderly woman went up to the gate and started yelling at the kids. It was clear that they were trespassing. They sheepishly vacated the premises:


It's tough to find a good place to hang out if you're a kid.

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I got back into my hobby of making short mathy/artistic animations recently. In particular, I've been playing with a random number generator based on Perlin noise. Instead of random jumpy numbers, it provides a smooth, but randomly varying set of numbers. You can use this stream of numbers to create more organic looking animations. Here's one:

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Emily made it to Brookhaven today and is preparing/training for her all nighter tonight. With the training and the experiment, she's looking at not sleeping for about 24 hours.

Rats! (literally)

There's a garage on the way to the supermarket. It's always struck me as strange to have a garage in an inner-city, though I know that there are a lot of cars in the city that need fixing. Simply finding a place to put all the cars while they're being worked on and waiting to be worked on seems like such a hassle. Today I noticed that one small solution to that problem is to park one car under the lift while the other car is on it. Here we see the red car getting its left front brake worked on, while another car is tucked neatly underneath. Efficiency in action:

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My back has been a bit dodgy lately. I think it's mostly due to me sitting and working/doing math all day. In my usual work, I sit, but I also get up, teach, go to meetings, walk across campus etc. Here, I mostly just sit. I decided to take some steps today to avoid that kind of long-term sitting. First, I noticed that I could put my computer on a high shelf above my desk and create a pretty functional standing desk. I switched back and forth between sitting and standing and that seems to have been good for my back.

I've also been reading books on data science. Instead of reading a chapter in the house here, as I usually do, today I decided to find a bench or someplace similar outside to read for a while. I ended up down by the river on a set of stairs that led to a platform just above the waterline. I read there for a while when out of the corner of my eye, a rat decided to creep up next to me on the platform! I was startled and a bit skeeved out and shooed it away. I backed up the steps a bit and sat down to continue reading when another rat started rustling around in the nearby brush. I finished the chapter, but it wasn't a super tranquil time in my life. In the future, I'm just gonna stay up on the benches way back from the river.

Here's a picture of a tourist boat that went by:

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Emily is on her way to Brookhaven National Lab today to do some X-ray diffraction on their particle accelerator. Her beam time is basically all night Thursday night (8pm-4am). I guess it's such a high-demand instrument that it's used 24/7. She takes a break and then runs an experiment on behalf of another person from her lab all day Sunday. It'll be a busy couple of days for her. Science!

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I talked to my mom on the phone today. It was good to catch up with her.