Incense and Heatmaps

October 12th is a national holiday in Spain. It commemorates the landing of Columbus in the Americas. A lot of Spaniards are sort of ambivalent about that event now, but a day off is a day off, haha. In a lot of ways, it was quieter than normal, at least earlier in the day when I went out for my walk. Speaking of my walk, I was this ode to autumn at the base of the bridge on the Sevilla side:

This is worth zooming in on. The little sign in the middle says "Bienvenido otoño" ("welcome autumn"). The leaves are all hand made--either crocheted or decorated dried leaves. This was clearly left by folks that miss traditional autumn colors. I have to say, I miss them too. It gets cooler here in the winter, but the trees don't drop their leaves.

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I continued to work of my frequency analysis. Emily suggested a heatmap instead of an animation. I figured out how to get python/matplotlib to do a heatmap and was pretty happy with the result:

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This evening there was another religious procession. Streets closed, marching bands, throngs. After the procession Laura and I went out to San Jacinto to get some dinner. One of the street vendors was selling incense burners. The vendor was actually burning incense in one of them. It smelled just like the incense from catholic churches back in the US:


He was busy too. Lots of people looking for incense burners I guess.

Animated Spectra

I tagged along with Laura on her language school's "cultural activity" again today. I guess it was a good thing too, since Laura and I were the only ones that partook. Our guide was Lucia again (same as last week). She's on the left in this picture:

Of course that's Laura on the right and one of Lucia's students in the middle.

Lucia took us to an art gallery maintained by the University of Sevilla called CICUS. The exhibit was small and had the theme Ausencias (absence):

An appropriately vague and squishy theme that was fun to think about in the context of the pieces inside. I only took one picture inside the gallery of this piece:

The black is just electrical tape on a white wall. The white is light from a projector. The light was animated and moved around in ways that complemented the black tape design. Sadly, it was out of alignment. I desperately wanted to fix the projector, but thought maybe it was supposed to be out of alignment. However, on the way out, we noticed a flyer for the the exhibit that featured a photo of this piece in which the light was aligned with the background. Then I really wanted to go back and fix it, but instead I left.

Lucia did a nice job speaking Spanish with us. I could understand about 80% of what she was saying.

The gallery was off of a courtyard at the CICUS. The tilework was lovely:

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After the tour, Laura went to class and went home and worked on math. I did finally manage to create an animation in python. This animation is a spectral analysis of measurements of me walking/running taken using the inertial sensor in my phone (all smart phones have them). With a bit of Fourier transforming and finding the peak of the spectrum, I was able to see that when walking I have a step pace of about 2 steps/sec. When running, it's around 3 steps/sec. Here's an animation of the spectrum for my 30 minute walk/run:


None of this is really my research, but learning these technological tools will help with a variety of classes next year.

Automatic Ladders

Had my second day of Spanish language school today. I started a light-intensity 12 week course. It meets twice a week for 1.5 hrs. The class is small, just 3 students and a teacher. The content is pretty basic, but the speaking and listening is right on target. I think it will be good practice. The teacher is pretty good. She seems well-prepared, experienced, and tolerates terrible Spanish (which is good for me).

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I seem to have the beginnings of a cold. My first Spanish cold. I hope it's not too bad. Mostly just coughing right now. No real congestion.

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On the way home today I saw some movers moving furniture out of a 2nd story apartment. They had a ladder leaned against the building that had a motorized platform that was capable of raising and lowering furniture off of the balcony and down to the ground. I'm sure that people that live in big cities have seen these before, but I'm from Walla Walla, so I thought it was interesting:

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Mostly did math after Spanish class. Discovered that doing animations in jupyter is ridiculously difficult. Still not there yet.

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Took the trash out. On the way back, I took this shot of the street in front of our flat:

Just another night in Triana.

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.