International Women's Day

Palma texted us to let us know that there was going to be a women's march here in Sevilla for International Women's Day. I checked with Laura to see if she wanted to go and she said yes, so off we went. Serendipitously, shortly after joining the march on the other side of the river, we ran into Palma. We walked together through the entire course. She provided a lot of useful context. About mid-way we were joined by Mario. The march went down the street in front the cathedral. I couldn't help but think about the centuries of patriarchy baked into that building as we went by. It ended at Plaza Nueva. Palma stayed to find her sister in the march. Laura and I walked home with Mario.

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On a totally unrelated note, I noticed these books by Borges on one of the bookshelves here in the flat. He's a Spanish language (Argentine) writer whose work we read in Encounters at Whitman last year (when I was teaching it). I really liked his work, but I don't think my Spanish is near good enough to read these, haha:

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I read another chapter of Hello world today. Today's chapter was about the use of AI in medicine. There is a lot of room for advancement in automated diagnosis, but our medical records are so hard to digitize that it may be many years before we can fully apply these new machine learning technologies.

Resurfacing

I was not a good task-switcher today. Other than a trip to Costco with Laura at midday, I worked on a proof. It's complicated, but I think it's solid. I'll worry about making it concise later. Right now it's in the hands of my collaborator. I don't envy him the job of reading it. Here's a hand-drawn figure that lays out some notation I used:

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When I did venture out across the bridge today, I notice that some workers were resurfacing the bike lanes:

No doubt this is all in preparation for Holy Week (semana santa) in April and faria in May. From everything that we've heard, read and seen, these events are massive. The city will be at absolute capacity with visitors and events.

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I talked to Kathy for a while today. She's busy, but sounds good. I swapped a text with Jim who is closing out his career as an active firefighter today and moving to an administrative position within the dept. Swapped messages with Jo-Anne who is trying to plan a visit to Sevilla in early April.

Rainy Day

A rare rainy day here today:

Though it cleared up nicely around noon, it stayed pretty breezy all day.

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I've posted about the little parking lot/cul de sac across the street before. During the week, the proprietors of the various businesses on the first floor of the building park their cars in the lot. They really pack 'em in. As a result, whenever one of them needs to go out, it becomes this massive reshuffling of cars. It boggles the mind how non-productive this is. I don't know where they're all coming from to get to work, but if it were me, I'd be on public transportation.

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Speaking of not knowing where it comes from, there were watermelons in the supermarket today for the first time in months. They were a bit expensive, but I'm really curious to know where they are grown. I guess Africa somewhere:

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Spanish class was difficult today. I just couldn't get my mind into it. I know the problem however. Right before class I was deep into a proof that I've been struggling with for several days. I was making progress when I had to abruptly leave for class. During class, I was thinking more about how to finish the proof, than how to do Spanish verbs in past tense. Next time, no math right before Spanish. Only Spanish right before Spanish.

New Leaves

While folks back in Walla Walla have just wrapped up one of the coldest Februaries ever and the cold weather shows no sign of relenting 5 days into March, here the leaves of the deciduous trees in Sevilla are already growing out:

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I had a relatively productive day today. I had a math problem devolve into a topological quagmire, but realized after a couple of hours that I should just back off and say what I mean rather than try to come up with some elegant topological statement. In the end, the paper will be clearer.

I read a bit more of Hello World by Hannah Fry. She described the mountain of data that is compiled by data brokers about every person that uses the internet. Anonymity is a myth. Further, the kinds of information these companies have either directly or inferred, if misused, can be downright dangerous. These companies know, with high probability, if you're ill, if you're unfaithful, who you voted for, if you're pregnant, if you're depressed, if you're suicidal.

Europeans have wrested back some control over their personal data and its uses, but in the US, it's a total free for all.

Still trying to wrap my head around the groupby() function in pandas. It's a pretty useful way of extracting specific subsets of data from a larger dataset. I'm hoping to use it on some academic data I have from Whitman's office of institutional research on which students earn hard science degrees.

All I got was this t-shirt...

The t-shirt I got in Morocco this weekend bled all over one of Laura's shirts in the laundry today:

I guess I shouldn't be surprised since it cost a whopping $5. Funny story, I found the t-shirt and asked the proprietor how much. He said 80 dirham (about $8). I was about to agree when Laura decided to haggle. She came back with 45 dirham. The proprietor came back with 70. Laura hit him with 50, he came back with 70. Laura started to leave, the proprietor caved and gave it to us for 50 dirham. After the transaction, the proprietor was clearly impressed with Laura's haggling skills (and by comparison, disappointed in mine, which are non-existent). He seemed actually happy to have someone haggle so fiercely with him, haha.

Regardless, even though I washed it in cold water, it ran a bit. We were able to bleach Laura's shirt and it's as good as new now. The shirt itself seems none the worse for the wear. My guess is there's plenty of red dye in it to last many washings.

Finally, I checked, and the Arabic script above is just the word "Morocco". Also, the design of the shirt itself is just based on the Moroccan flag:

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Had a good math day today. I sketched out a proof that I think holds water. Getting close to starting a draft of a paper.

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Spanish class was good today. I think my listening skills are improving. Speaking, not so much.

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I talked to Rachel for a while. Always good to catch up with her.