A horse's life

The street where my gym is seems to be the strategic place to park for a few horse-drawn carriages during this week of feria. In addition to dressing up for feria, la alta costura seems to be to arrive at the feria grounds by carriage. Between trips, this spot, which is close to la feria and shaded in the afternoon seems a popular place for the carriages:

On the way out of the gym today, I captured this photo of a young girl petting one of the horses while the coach drivers chatted with each other.

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Language class for Laura is a bit wonky this week. She had class from 11:30-2:30 today. She managed to make some lemon cupcakes before class and carted them off to the school at about 11:10:

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I noticed this little tile sketch above a shoe shop today while walking. I liked it, so I thought I'd share it:

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I managed to get a couple of clustering algorithms to work today. Now the big thing is to figure out why the clusters are what they are. All the examples in books are on 2 or 3 dimensions. My data has about 90 dimensions. Any kind of explanation of clusters will need to be analytical, not visual. There do seem to be some techniques out there for this purpose. I spent a lot of today reading about them.

Office space

With Marge and then Juli visiting, I moved my office out of the guest room and back into the little nook off of the kitchen.

I have to say it's been better this time than when I did this in Dec for our visitors then. In Dec the room was pretty cold and sitting in there for extended periods chilled me to the bone. Now it's pretty comfortable. Good thing because I spent most of the day in there today, haha. I was mostly doing data prep for an unsupervised learning exercise. Nobody tells you when you start in data science that at least half the time you are wrestling with data trying to get it into a form that is amenable to machine learning algorithms. Tomorrow I'm going to play with a few different clustering algorithms now that my data is ready.

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I did go out this afternoon to walk with Laura to her class (mine is canceled this week because of feria) and then went to the gym. At some point I should go look at feria while it's actually happening, but haven't done so yet.

Dressing for it

Feria is underway. People all over the city (tourists, and long-term American residents excluded) were dressed in their finery and headed to the feria grounds. Many of them in horse-drawn carriages:

Laura and I planned to head over there ourselves to see the "day-feria", but time sort of got away from us. In the end, it will probably be a little less crazy tomorrow, so until then...

Another side-effect of feria is the rest of the city is a ghost town:

Julie bought lunch today and then came home with a variety of pastries for our evening snack:

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I worked a bit on my data science project this morning. At one point, when I woke up my computer, I was presented with this random photo on the windows login screen:

Turns out this is Chefchaouen, Morocco a.k.a. "the blue city" which I've visited twice this year and would go again in a heartbeat. Thing is, in this age of no digital privacy, I have no idea if this is truly a random coincidence, or if it's just windows somehow showing me what it thinks I want based on what it knows about me by monitoring my every digital interaction over the past 6 months.

Opening Night

I didn't bring too many articles of clothing with me to Spain. Now, 10+ months into it, the clothes I have are getting kind of worn. In addition, I've intentionally lost a bit of weight. The combination prompted me to go the Primark today with Laura to get a couple of pairs of shorts and some pants. It was pretty crowded over there, but I managed to find some pieces that will at least get me through the rest of my time here. I'm going to retire a couple of articles of clothing by leaving them in the dumpster area down by the bridge (where we bring our regular refuse). People regularly scour that area for usable items like clothing and shoes. I left an old pair of shoes there a few months ago and someone claimed them before I was 20 meters away.

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Feria starts tonight at midnight. The grounds are all prepared now. Laura and I wandered down there this evening to have a look at the grounds before the crowds showed up. Walking south through Triana from our house, you get to Calle Asunción, which is a lot like the main street in our neighborhood. A mostly pedestrian way with shops and cafes. At the end of this street is the main entrance to the feria grounds:

Here's a closer view:

Tonight at midnight, this entrance will be lighted, and the week-long feria begins. The sandy grounds which are empty the majority of the year are now covered with tents called "casetas" along temporary avenues. The casetas are typically green/white or red/white striped canvas. They erected in the weeks leading up to feria and are "owned" by families that have had these spots for generations, or other organizations:

People dress up in their finest. Some of the casetas are quite large:

The avenues are decked out:

Already the street cleaning is underway. Tonight there will be thousands of people in this makeshift city:

Inside the casetas, the tables are set and waiting for friends and family to arrive:

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On a completely unrelated note, this license plate hanging in a restaurant window caught my eye as we walked home:

Clustering

I started reading about clustering today in my data science review. I have some ideas on how to apply clustering to my Whitman STEM data set. The thing that's interesting about clustering is these algorithms help you find patterns in your data that you may not be aware of. It's a form of unsupervised learning.

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This afternoon, I walked Laura to class and then headed over to the gym. The jacarandas around Sevilla are in full bloom and they're really beautiful:

The various trellises are filling up too:

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Juli is getting onto Spain time. She spent a lot of time walking around this afternoon seeing all the places she hasn't seen in about 20 years. She seems to be enjoying herself.