Happy New Year!

Today starts the Chinese year of the pig. I wished a couple of my students back in Walla Walla that are from China a happy new year. One came back with that fact that the pig is the end of the cycle of animals in the Chinese new year rotation. Pig is last because it lost the race among the animals in the cycle. Next year is the year of the mouse, so I guess the mouse won the race. Anyway, thanks for the Chinese culture lesson Linqi.

I cooked Emily's Christmas present today for lunch. She brought me a box of jambalaya mix from the US when she came to visit in December. I found some sausage at the store today, chopped it up and use the mix to make jambalaya. It was pretty good, but wow the sausage here is greasy. Eight hours later and I'm still kinda tasting it.

Rachel sent me a good book today called A Guide to Reproducible Code in Ecology and Evolution. It's got good advice for anyone embarking on a data science project.

Speaking of Rachel books, the Factfulness chapter this evening admonished us to be careful when assigning blame--especially to individuals. Catastrophic failures are never attributable to a single individual. Similarly, wild successes are never attributable to single individuals. Dig a little deeper and look for the systems and policies that enabled the failure or success. They're almost always more mundane and subtle than we expect.

Baby Beluga

The song Baby Beluga has been stuck in my head this afternoon. Laura and I saw a beluga-shaped aircraft flying over the city today as we walked to our respective Spanish classes. Here's a horrible photo of it:

Turns out this is an Airbus A300-600ST Beluga. Its odd shape is to accommodate the transport of large aircraft parts as part of Airbus's internal operations. Like every other major city in Europe, Sevilla has an Airbus manufacturing site. It was interesting to see. So ungainly and hard to believe it flies.

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Speaking of Spanish class, my teacher from last semester replaced Piedad as our regular teacher. It was nice to have her back. She has a better idea of what our abilities are and what we hope to get out of the class.

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After Spanish, I went for a walk along the river. The light in the evening this time of year is pretty:

On the way home, I stopped by an Amazon drop point to pick up the peculiar batteries I ordered for my Dell stylus last week. Turns out, that's all that was needed--a fresh set of batteries. It's back to working again.

San Luis de los Franceses

This afternoon Laura and I went to visit the Parroquia of San Luis de los Franceses. This is one of the younger churches in Sevilla coming in at around 300 years of age. It was built as aJesuit monastary but only operated as such for about 30 years until the Suppresion of Jesuits caused it to be repurposed to other church functions. It's a beautiful, baroque church with ornate altars and high painted ceilings. It sits in a relatively ordinary neighborhood with streets so narrow, that it's difficult to capture the entire edifice in one photo without a wide-angle lens:

Inside there were altars and relics. Skulls abounded:

The ceilings were beautiful. Mirrors were provided to save patrons' necks:

An interesting feature of the former monastary is this side chapel that was constructed so that there would be a place to say mass while the big church was being constructed:

In this side chapel there were numerous relics on display. Here for example, are the ribs and collar bones of some saint or other:

This is the door that a priest would use to enter the altar area. I like the floating baby head above the door. Floating baby heads are a big deal in Catholic iconography, at least here in Sevilla:

This courtyard was filled with lush vegetation and skulls-er, I mean old clay pots. I thought they were skulls, cuz why not? there's skulls everywhere else, but no, they're just old clay pots:

This is the crypt beneath the church. Personally, I was disappointed at the complete lack of dead bodies, or at least skulls!

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In other news, one of my Whitman students asked me for advice on where to hike around Walla Walla, so I put together this simple google map to help her out. I also warned her repeatedly that if she encountered snow or mud on the road to one of these, that she should just turn around. It's really easy to get stuck up there (been there, done that).

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The super bowl starts around 12:30am here. I'm thinking I might miss it this year.

Day of Rest

I didn't do much today with respect to my research or machine learning. I did do some Spanish, but even there, only a bit. I guess you'd call it a day of rest.

I watched the movie "It", named for the Stephen King novel of the same name. It wasn't very good (see what I did there).

Did a couple of loads of laundry, vacuumed, took out the trash. I guess it was a day of cleaning as well.

Laura went to Costco. When she got home, we went right back out to the Mercadona to get food in for today and Sunday (remember, everything's closed on Sundays here).

This evening Laura was on a conference call back to Whitman for several hours. We made an attempt to go out and get something for dinner, but waiting until 9:30pm on a Sat night to eat here is like going to Disneyland on the 4th of July--long lines. We just went back home and ate what we could scrounge around the house. Probably better off since I'm not a fan of eating a big meal so late in the evening anyway.

Keith called this evening. He's adopted my mom's cat and one of her dogs, Jake. They both seem to be thriving in his care. I'm glad it's working out.

Centroids of Arcs

This morning I computed the centroid of a circular arc and was pleasantly surprised by some of the results. I think the exercise would fit well into a calculus textbook. This little interactive app I built shows how the centroid of a circular arc evolves as the arc length is changed: https://www.geogebra.org/graphing/s6mybsje

In more serious work, I'm still reading about nonlinear optimization in hopes of getting a grip on a larger problem I'm wrestling with.

In Spanish verb practice, I focused mostly on present tense verb conjugation today. I went through about 25 verbs today--hoping to develop a bit of an instinct about speaking the correct conjugation quickly.

My river walk was very windy today:

Perhaps the windiest day I've experienced here in Sevilla.

Mexican food, one of our staples back in Walla Walla, is hard to come by here. Laura has developed a pretty good method of making refried beans from pinto beans:

We had bean burritos for dinner and they were muy excelente.

To celebrate Friday, we hit the helado place for dessert. I went with my old standby, "brownie".

We're big fans of the Whitman women's tennis team. In honor of their home opener today vs. Seattle U. we sent them a selfie of us on the Triana bridge wearing our team sweatshirts: