Interior Spaces

The relatively ordered streets of Sevilla hide a ridiculously complicated interior. Every time I go up on the roof to hang laundry, I look around at the interior spaces below and am astonished at the maze of confusion:

On the other hand, lots of folks seem to have their own private rooftop sanctuaries complete with chairs and astroturf. I kind of wish we had that. It would be nice to have a private place to sit outside. In our building, it's against the rules to just hang out on the roof. You're only allowed to use it for laundry.

It was a partly cloudy day today, but pleasant. The sunset was nice from the roof as I took down the laundry:

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I did a lot of math and managed to task switch to a DataCamp course on Decision Trees. I also started reading about the history of "center of gravity" and "centroid" for a paper I'm starting to write. These ideas are so old and so basic that you can't attribute them to a single individual. As long as there have been engineers and builders, there have been people figuring out the center of gravity of shapes. That said, there's a lot of interesting math history about who did what with centers of gravity. Even Leonardo Da Vinci is said to have computed the center of mass of a tetrahedron and a pyramid of any number of sides.

Mallorca → Sevilla

The sunset yesterday evening was lovely:

There were a few people along the shore to watch and a busker playing some songs on a guitar (quite good). It wasn't the raucous event  of a Key West sunset, but beautiful nonetheless.

After dinner, we watched a classic lounge singer in the hotel bar for an hour. The standard stuff, Sinatra, Diamond etc, plus a few Spanish tunes thrown in for authenticity. His banter was mostly in German even though he was a Spaniard. This is because Mallorca appears to have more German tourists than any other nationality by far. There are German restaurants and bars, beer and pretzels and the staff all spoke at least German and English in addition to their native Spanish.

***

This morning we woke to heavy fog:

So different from the sunset the night before. We grabbed breakfast at the hotel, checked out, and headed down to the bus stop to catch the 8am bus to the airport. The trip back was uneventful. We reached Sevilla on time, caught bus back into town, and were in our flat around 12:15pm. All in all, a good trip.

We both practiced a bit of Spanish before heading to our respective classes at 4pm. After class, I did a fast 5 mile walk along the river. I did a little math, took a shower, had dinner and put on my PJs. Ready for bed now.

Sevilla → Mallorca → Mallorca → Menorca → Mallorca

Laura and I decided to spend the weekend in Palma, a Spanish city on the island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean. It's only about a 75 min direct flight from Sevilla, so we thought it would be a snap, haha. We had an early flight out of Sevilla so we got up around 4am, hiked to the bus stop and caught the bus out to the airport. We got there pretty early and hung out at the gate. Our flight (Vueling Airlines) left on time and we headed towards Mallorca. Though it was sunny, there was a persistent fog bank at the airport. The pilot warned us that it could be a problem. We tucked in for landing. With the wheels of the plane feet above the runway, the pilot gunned the engines and we flew back up into the sky steeply. We did a long, 15 minute loop back around for another approach. Once again, with wheels just above the tarmac, the pilot gunned the engines and we flew off. Shortly after this aborted second landing attempt, the pilot informed us that we were diverting to Menorca--a small island about a 15 min flight north and east of Mallorca.

It's not really clear to me what the decision-making process is for getting a plane within feet of landing and then deciding to abort (twice). Isn't there someone on the ground that can advise the pilot so that such a dangerous maneuver isn't necessary?

We landed in Menorca without incident. We sat on the plane for about a half hour, presumably waiting for the airport in Mallorca to clear. After a while, they booted us off the plane (so it could be used elsewhere) and we all wandered into the Menorca airport.

The most frustrating part of this whole thing wasn't the fog, weather happens. It was the utter lack of communication and guidance for the abandoned passengers once we deplaned in Menorca. Also, the little communication that did occur happened in Spanish. OK for us, we kind of got it, but there were a large number of folks on the plane that didn't speak Spanish.

Luckily, I had Laura. She alertly identified the right people, listened in on conversations of other passengers, and talked to folks at the ticket counter. Eventually, she found the correct line and got us re-booked on an Iberia flight at 3:15pm. She also got us some food vouchers for the airport restaurants. We killed a few hours in one of the restaurants (which, pleasantly, had some good lunch dishes), and left for our 25 min flight to Mallorca--getting there a mere 7 hours later than planned.

Just to get some exercise, we decided to walk from the airport to the hotel. It was about 4 miles. There were a few pedestrian unfriendly stretches near the airport, but once we got down to the beach area, it was a nice walk. At one point, we walked along a dirt road with some very old looking stone dwellings:

We made it to our room and enjoyed a nice meal at the hotel:

***

This morning we walked farther along the beach to some cliffs. We passed along some lovely shoreline properties. I particularly enjoyed the "Beware of Dog" tile on this entryway (it's worth zooming in on, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near that dog):

The cliffs were lovely:

The water was very blue and clear. We saw lots of sailboarders and even a snorkeler out there:

Back on land, cycling is a massively popular activity. This sign showed popular bike routes all over the island (it's about 150km across at some points):

There have been a number of stages of the Vuelta a Espana here in Mallorca.

We leave tomorrow.

Task Switching, F

I failed task switching again today. I was checking some math I did last week by applying it to some examples. Things were not working out. So I redid most of the work looking for my mistake. I also emailed a collaborator on the work with a warning that some notes I'd written up and shared last week were wrong. He got back to me and in his response, I figured out what I was doing wrong. I'm about halfway through fixing the issue, but it took most of the day and I was unable to task switch away from it. Oh well.

***

Another lovely day in Sevilla. I've been meaning to photograph these flowers down by the river for a while now:

They look a bit like poppies, but they're not.

***

I read an interesting article in the New York Times about the dwindling middle class in Spain. The economy is ok, but the jobs aren't very high paying and there's increasing wealth inequality. The barely left-leaning national gov't fell apart today and there will be elections in April. The recent success of the right-wing Vox party here in Andalucia's local elections has folks nervous there there could be some right-wing nationalists elected in April to national positions. I don't see any reason why Spain should be immune to right-wing whack jobs since none of the rest of us (US, France, England, Germany etc) are. We'll just have to wait and see.

Pineapple right-side up cake

Happy Valentine's Day! Laura made me (and her class) a pineapple upside down cake. Lacking a non-stick spring form cake pan however, forced them to be right-side up cakes. They were still mighty tasty:

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The water works guys must've worked through the night because our water didn't return until this morning.

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I made some progress on a data science project I've been working on recently. I was a failure at task-switching though. I basically worked on the same thing all day. Tomorrow I'll do better.

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I did manage to switch over to reading Everybody Lies this evening. He described the proliferation of A/B testing on-line. Websites randomly offer visitors small variations in wording, icons, arrangement etc. They keep track of what people prefer and use those preferences to determine the final form.

I also learned about the myth of elite schools. For example, students that got into both Harvard and Penn State, but chose different schools had the same outcomes in terms of later earnings. Even though Harvard is perceived as more prestigious, it does not change outcomes for similar students.