It's All About Record Keeping

For about 100 years after the "discovery" of the new world, Spain had a monopoly on all trade and economic activity relating to the Americas. The center of that monopoly was the city of Sevilla. During that monopoly, Catholics, tired of merchants using the space around the cathedral for vulgar trade and shipping activities, forced the creation of a building to house these "unsavory" activities.

Some time later, the river from Sevilla to the ocean became un-navigable. Spain subsequently moved all of this trading active to Cadiz, on the Atlantic coast. The trade building in Sevilla became a tenement building. It stayed that way until after the Napoleonic era. At that point, Spain converted the old trade building, now a tenement, to an archive. All documents pertaining to the new world were consolidated into this one building in Sevilla called:

The Archive of the Indies. Inside is row-upon-row of original documents:

On shelves like these:

They even have fire extinguishers everywhere. Presumably to avoid the kind of tragedy that occurred most recently in the National Museum of Brasil:

Of course, you can't just open a box and look at the documents, though visiting scholars are allowed to do so in special rooms on the premises. However, there are a number of sample documents on display. Here are a few I like. All were behind plexiglass so there is an unfortunate glare. This is a map of the Mississippi River region from the 1500's. If you look closely at the bottom you see a bit of the arc of the Gulf of Mexico:

This is a map of the Dominican Republic (for Rachel), also circa 16th century:

This is a crib sheet of Spanish to "native" language translation. If you really zoom in you can recognize some of the Spanish words in the left-hand columns. Presumably the native words in the right hand column are phonetic spellings:

There were other artifacts too. The inside of the lid of this "treasure chest" had a fantastically intricate and complicated latching mechanism. Turning a crank in the middle caused this complicated collection of levers to retract all of the latches around the edge of the lid simultaneously:

Finally, like many other museums in Sevilla, there were a Murillo exhibit going on. This is the 400th anniversary year of the famous Spanish painter's birth in 1618. This sketch of Murillo depicting the baby Jesus lying asleep on a cross with his arm draped over a human skull is really bleak. The angels watching over him from above are sad, presumably knowing his destiny:

I've really gotten to like Murillo as I've looked at his work around Sevilla. He was a very thoughtful painter with a fantastic ability to convey complicated theological ideas through his imagery.

***

Started using github a couple of days ago to develop a software project. I have to say, it was a lot easier to get going with it than I expected. The newly release desktop tool is wonderful. It really keeps you organized.

***

Really warmed up today, maybe 80 degrees. Supposed to get cool over the weekend, maybe lows in the 40's. That would easily be the coldest weather we've experienced here so far.

Bullet Points

• There are a lot of small children in our building. They make a lot of fun sounds. Laura and I love the sound of our building in the evenings. Happy families.
• Spanish class was good today. I met a guy named Martin from Berlin that moved to Sevilla to do a two-year post doc in genetics. He knows less Spanish than I do and was having a bad day. I hope our conversation afterwards cheered him up a bit.
• The weather was sunny and warm today.
• The workers continue to work on painting the building.
• I managed to create a github repository for the project I'm working on. This in spite of the fact that poor github was having major technical difficulties today.
• Emily is struggling with getting back on the right time zone. Definitely not conducive to studying for her qualifying exam on Fri. Somehow she'll make it work tho.
• I watched workers deconstructing the lane buoys on the river this morning after the weekend's boat racing. Very efficient.
• We went to the Primark (think Target for Europe). I needed another pair of pants since one of the pairs I brought with me to Spain has a tear. We also bought some towels for the various house guests we'll be having over the next couple of months.

Now Is The New Later

The title of this post is from a t-shirt Laura and I saw on our travels today. For whatever reason, the wearing of t-shirts with random English phrases on them is a thing here. Usually, they're pretty inane phrases, but we both liked this one--in spite of the fact that it is also inane.

***

Emily made it back to Santa Barbara in one piece and reunited with her pet bunny Benjamin. She's exhausted and dealing with a 10 hour time change, but she's young, she'll deal, haha. She has her final PhD qualifying oral exam on Fri, so it'll be a stressful week for her.

Talked to Rachel today. She's getting her first PhD prelim paper together, already cleaning up a draft. She's also working on a "citizen science" project in one of her classes this semester (actually her only class this semester). We had some fun chatting about it today. It's actually based on an idea that Laura came up with a couple of weeks ago.

***

Sunny today. Managed to do two loads of laundry using the clotheslines on the roof to dry the clothes. During the week, when the workers are about, we have to use our indoor clothes rack. Clothes usually take most of the day to dry when indoors. When they're on the roof though, they usually get dry in about 90 minutes. Since we didn't get the second load up there until around 6:30pm, we kind of ran out of daylight and had to take them in early and a bit damp. Also, there was this random swarm of insects that decided to occupy the roof. They were kind of "flying ants". There were thousands of them up there. We had to spend a bit of time making sure we didn't bring any back into the flat when we brought in the second load. A couple did make it in, but it could've been worse.

All the clothes are mostly dry now. Even the sheets on the bed. The bed's made and just waiting for me to jump in.

***

We went to a Mexican tapas place on the Alameda this evening. The tapas were basically just varieties of corn tortilla tacos.

But, they were all good. The walk over and back was nice. It was pretty mild today. The expected rain never really showed up. The Alameda is kind of off the beaten path for mainline tourists. It has a couple of actual Roman columns at one end of the plaza:

***

The sky was lovely this evening as we took down that second, still damp, load of laundry from the roof:

Spanish Migrants

With the Italian gov't taking a hard turn to the right, Spain is now one of the last places for refugees from north Africa to land as they cross the Mediterranean Sea. Spain is also one of the last progressive gov'ts on the continent still showing some compassion for refugees. Even here, there are right wing politicians attempting to use the refugees as a wedge issue. What's interesting is that the flow of refugees from the middle-east and Africa is not really any higher than historical averages, but the number of politicians willing to stoke the worst parts of human nature against these unfortunate immigrants to gain a political advantage in their countries does seem to be at historic highs.

***

I saw a few boat races this morning during my walk. I would have went down and watched more, but it rained all day. Luckily, it's a two-day event and tomorrow is supposed to be sunny and 75 degrees.

***

It's Balloon Stampede time back in Walla Walla. Mick sent me a picture of the balloons taking off this morning.

Looks like the weather was perfect.

***

I got this picture of the center of Sevilla this evening during my trash run:

Still kind of damp and foggy out there. Speaking of which, finally had to put the heavier blanket on the bed yesterday. It's getting down into the 50's at night now!

***

Did some math, read a bit, watched a bit of Netflix, practiced some Spanish. Pretty ordinary day. Thought about Emily on her 24-hour plus trip from Ethiopia back to Santa Barbara. As I write this she's about an hour from landing at LAX. Then, it's the shuttle up to Santa Barbara. If nothing else, this PhD program has given her the iron butt needed to be a long-distance flyer.

Sevici Load Balancing

The bike share program here is called Sevici, a portmanteau of Sevilla and "bici" the Spanish word for "bike". The bike station nearest us is always empty in the morning. The next nearest one is also typically pretty depleted in the morning. I've always wondered how the service handled load imbalances like this and suspected that there had to be some way of shifting bikes around to balance the load. This morning I saw that load balancing in action as a worker was replenishing our depleted station:

***

All week there have been workers on the river setting up lanes for what appears to be an imminent boat race. This morning I saw that they had the "starting line" set up in the water:

I went home and googled "sevilla regatta" and found 2nd Sevilla International Rowing Masters Regatta – October 20-21, 2018 Spain. Hoping to see a few races this weekend. If nothing else, the splash videos at the race web site are fun to watch.

***

Almost got something worth calling a draft paper today. This paper has some accompanying python/jupyter worksheets. Next on the agenda is to set up a github page. Apparently github satisfies some kind of data archive standard so that you can put data and programs on the site and get DOI numbers for use in journal article references.