Timeless

This is the usual lunchtime crowd outside of the small bar/restaurant in front of our building:

There is probably nothing that characterizes Sevilla more for me than this. People standing around, drinking beer, talking, outside one of the hundreds of such establishments throughout the city. Also, there's a sense of timelessness about this scene. I'll wager it's indistinguishable from the same scene 50 years ago and will be indistinguishable from the scene 50 years hence.

***

I finished up the last section of my paper today. The bulk of the work was creating this figure:

 

A couple of slow read throughs and I'll submit it.

***

Found a couple of potential gyms today, but they weren't open, so I'll finish scouting them on Monday. For exercise today, to avoid running, I rode a bike share for about an hour. Lovely weather. Thank goodness for the river path though, the streets and regular bike lanes were pretty crowded today.

Pasión y Muerte

One of the first processions of this Easter week happened in our neighborhood this evening:


I suppose the most striking thing about these processions are the costumes of the cofradias. Though the video is not very good, you can see people in dark robes with pointed hats. Unfortunately, they resemble the KKK in the United States even though these folks started using this garb centuries before the KKK (or even slavery) existed in North America.

As processions go, this one was low-key and doesn't go to the cathedral. Just a preliminary before the main processions starting Sunday and going through Easter week (a.k.a. semana santa).

***

Another work day today, much like yesterday. I studied basic statistics this morning--doing some exercises related to probability density function and cumulative distribution functions. This afternoon I finished the last major section of my paper. I realized that I needed one more figure for that last section, so I'm spending some time tomorrow getting that ready.

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I scoped out the gym near Laura's school today, but it doesn't quite have what I need. The only cardio equipment they have are treadmills. I'm looking for ellipticals or stairclimbers, so I'm going to keep searching.

Graceful Pigeon

I'm still hunting for some good subject matter for the GoPro, either timelapse or slo-mo, but for now you'll have to settle for a pigeon down by the river:

Slo-mo can make even a ratty river pigeon look graceful, haha.

***

Mostly just a work day today. I worked on All of Statistics this morning. A quick review of probability density functions, bivariate and multivariate distributions. This afternoon, I worked on my draft paper. I actually started a new document yesterday, filled in an outline of sections and started pulling stuff out of the earlier draft. It's been working well. I've been able to strip down and simplify a lot of it. I have one major section left for tomorrow. Once that's done, I'll let it rest for a day or two and re-edit.

***

The Mariners are playing a day game in KC right now, so I get to watch them live, which is unusual. It's 6-6 in the bottom of the 9th. Hopefully extra innings.

Gym Time

All this running seems to have caught up with me. I've been nursing a sore left foot for a few days and I think my body is telling me that there's been too much running this year. Before coming to Spain, I rarely ran for exercise (for precisely this reason). I either used aerobics machines in the gym like the elliptical or stairclimber or road my bike on hour-long training rides. Here, without those options, I've been running along the river. I think I've developed a mild case of metatarsalgia, so I'm gonna stop for a while and do something else. Laura checked out the gym that occupies the same building as her language school for me today. I think I'll try that for the remainder of my time here.

***

Still playing around with my GoPro. This evening I did a 2fps timelapse for about a half-hour. I sped it up to 60fps (30x) and got this:


It was pretty breezy during the shot. You can see the puffs of air on the surface of the river.

***

Laura found an app called Paso a Paso that is developed by someone here in Sevilla to keep track of all the religious processions during Semana Santa. Looks pretty useful.

Imperative

For homework, my Spanish teacher asked us to look for uses of the imperative out in the "wild". I saw this sign while walking Laura to class today:

It's just your standard caution sign for some public works project:

¡¡Peaton!! 

Acera en obras 

Disculpen las molestias

Which translates roughly to: Pedestrian! Sidewalk work. Excuse the inconvenience. The imperative here is the formal you plural (ustedes) form of the verb disculpar (to excuse, to forgive). I like this example because most of the examples we had in class were from advertisements, "buy this", "sign up for that", "save money" etc. This a non-commercial use of the imperative, haha.

***

For exercise today, I rode around a bit on one of the bike shares. I took my GoPro with me and did some more slo-motion photography. The camera can do 1080p at 240fps. I can take that 240fps and slow it down to 24fps (a slow motion factor of 10) which is pretty good. I'm still looking for some actually interesting subject matter, but today I did get a nice slo-mo of a bubble floating by the fountain at the Plaza de Espana: