God is in the Details

Today we did a tourist-y thing and went to the Catedral de Sevilla. I'm not going to recount all of the superlatives associated with this edifice (see the wikipedia link). Suffice to say it's huge, it's old and it's impressive. Spain is a very catholic country. Within Spain, Sevilla is a very catholic city. The Catedral is part of the city's identity. Each neighborhood church is connected and represented by some part of this massive cathedral. Further, it's a living entity with daily masses and a regular congregation. The artifacts contained in the myriad side chapels, nooks and crannies are often taken out into the streets for processions associated with various catholic organizations within the city.

Here are few pictures I took. These are just some that I found interesting. You can find much better pictures on-line. First, most of the side chapels had some kind of tomb inside. The tombs usually contained the remains of important figures in church history. They were invariably ornately carved pieces of art:

The Catedral de Sevilla holds the remains of Christopher Columbus:

It also displays a variety of relics (a nice way of saying human body parts) of saints. This display literally had bits of bone, hair, and teeth of saints:

We climbed to the top of the Giralda, a tower that was originally an Islamic minaret, but when Spain was taken back from predominantly Islamic rule, the minaret was converted to a bell tower and the associate mosque knocked down and replaced with a catholic cathedral. The view of the Triana neighborhood from the top was fun. If you really blow this up, you can see our bridge (the best bridge):

There is an enclosed square in the Catedral that used to be a place of ablutions for muslims at the former mosque. It is now an orange grove with lovely fountains. Of particular interest to me is the fact that the fountains feed a network of irrigation channels in the pavement that water the trees in the grove:

This fountain had an orange leaf and a ripe orange floating in it. You also see the surrounding irrigation channels:

Obligatory selfie:

Included in the admission to the Catedral was admission to the nearby El Divino Salvador another catholic church. Though the structure itself only dates back to the 17th century, it has been the site of a mosque, church and/or roman temple since 200BC. Once again, you can find a lot of photos of this church on-line. Here are a few that stood out to me:

This massive "float" is carried around Sevilla during religious processions. It's all made of metal and must be massively heavy. As with so many of the artifacts we saw today, I can't get over the intricacy of them. Each figure, flourish and shape is/was the result of some conscious living artisan. Each detail was placed with purpose and thought. You get a sense of this when you zoom in on the above and see this:

This is a choir room. I like the massive music stand in the middle:

Here's an example of the giant hymnals that were presumably placed on these great stands:

This is one of my favorite statues of Jesus. He's kind of sitting on a stool, in the "thinker" pose, but clearly worn out after a three-day-long crucifixion:

Finally, it was beautifully sunny here in Sevilla. The sun coming through the stained glass was lovely:

That was our day of tourism.

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In other news, I figured out how to record and plot my own GPS data on my own maps in python. Here's an example:

I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do with this new capability. It uses mapbox and plotly.

Ciencia Divertida

Saw this crew along the river this morning:

Surreptitious photo, so not a good angle. When I got home, I zoomed in and saw this:

Along with the fun Einstein icon were the words "Ciencia Divertida". Turns out they were flying my colors. I wish I'd stuck around to see what they were up to. Science is definitely fun.

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Speaking of science, while out along the river, I collected some accelerometer data from my phone while I walked/ran at three distinct speeds. I took the data home and did some frequency analysis using a fast Fourier transform. Here you can see for my "medium" speed, there is a peak frequency of 22 on this 10 sec recording. That means that my pace was 2.2 steps per second. The same analysis on the "fast" speed data gave a pace of 3 steps per second. This is not technically my research, but I will definitely use this the next time I teach Fourier analysis in my engineering math class.

Dumpster Fires

They have dumpster fires in Spain too... only they keep them in actual dumpsters not in their gov't institutions. After last night's blog entry, I took the trash out. As I was shoving cardboard into the cardboard recycling container I felt a spray of water. It turns out there was a fire crew on the other side of the bins spraying down my bin and the bin next to it because it was on fire. Now, I know I come off a bit oblivious sometimes, but I did notice the emergency vehicles on the other side of the bins, but I didn't really notice that the bins were smoldering. I guess I figured someone would stop me from approaching an active fire scene, but, this is Spain, I guess they're more relaxed here. Here's a photo of a bombero (firefighter) checking out the smoldering bin:

Here's the same bin this morning. It's seen better days:

***

Mostly worked today. Still obsessing over discrete Fourier transforms. Collected some accelerometer data on my morning walk and analyzed that a bit. Very easily able to extract my walking pace from the data using the dominant frequency of a discrete Fourier transform.

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This evening Laura and I walked over the Festival de las Naciones at the Prado de San Sebastián. This is a collection of arts and crafts stalls, restaurants featuring cuisines from many countries, and a stage for performers. We walked around a bit. It was crowded. The one act we watched on the main stage was a collection of dance performances by a local dance school. It was basically a dance recital. Some traditional, some modern, all fun. The Argentina tent looked good, but I'd already eaten dinner:

The US cuisine was kinda boring:

The fountain was pretty and well lit with lights in the trees:

The main stage:

Here's one of the young dance ensembles we saw:

Backsliding

Woke up at around 9:45am this morning. Clearly backsliding on the jetlag. I didn't do much today. Did a load of laundry and dried it on the drying rack in the guest room. This load included the bed sheets. Everything is dry now and back in its place. I guess this will be sustainable for a while. It may be tough if/when we have visitors in that guest room where the drying rack is currently located.

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I've been having fun gathering raw GPS data from my phone and doing analysis on it. The past couple of days I've been obsessing over noise in the signal and attempting to quantify its effect. I've been reading about low pass filtering and discrete Fourier transforms. At the same time, I've been doing the analysis in python and becoming comfortable with the jupyter environment, the pandas and numpy libraries, and visualization with matplotlib. All of this should be useful when I return to teaching next year.

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I went out for a walk this evening, both for exercise and to collect more GPS data, haha. For the first time, I walked along the river the night before instead of the morning after. There were large groups of people partying even a 8pm as I walked through. The beverage of choice seems to be the 40oz beer (or the metric equivalent). Pretty much a one-to-one correspondence between bottles and people.

The streets were generally busy this evening. Along San Jacinto someone was selling these LED figures/toys:

They were kind of pretty all arrange in the waning light.

Geoduck

We went to Bar Santa Marta for dinner. I had a geoduck (pronounced "gooey duck") tapas. Very weird texture, not much taste, would definitely pass next time. Here's what they looked like before getting sliced up into the tapas:

They're basically clams with a borderline obscene shape when out of the shell.

We went with Wang Zhi, someone from Laura's language school:

After dinner, we kind of just wandered around. We saw this giant fish in a pescaderia:

We also saw this flamenco dancer:


And we saw this rock/jazz trio, Musgö, that featured a harp:


I was hoping to find some of their music on-line, but so far no luck. EDIT: Here's a youtube video, and the harpist's, Mar Gabarre's, youtube channel.

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There's a new store going in on the main street (San Jacinto) in our neighborhood.

The sign went up today "ALE-HOP". I got kind of excited and took this picture. We could always use a bar that does more than just the usual beers around here. Sadly, this is not an exotic beer house. ALE-HOP is a gift store. We definitely don't need another gift store.

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Found this fun, simplified map of Sevilla in the local mall. I like the style: