Transition Day

I had a relatively normal work day today. I spent a bit of time working with cluster algorithms, read another chapter of Algorithms to Live By, and ran a load of laundry.

I'm back in the habit of walking Laura to her class and then to the gym in the afternoon. The Corpus Christi gate in Plaza de San Francisco continues to develop:

After dinner, I caught the airport bus to... well... the airport. Laura got met me on the bus after her class.

We flew to Bilbao in northern Spain for the weekend. The highlight being the Guggenheim museum. The bus, flight, bus went smoothly and we got to our hotel in Bilbao at around midnight.

Corpus Christi

Living in Sevilla, the 2nd most Catholic city in the world, I'm learning or re-learning a lot about Catholicism. In the Plaza de San Francisco, they are preparing for YAP (yet another procession).

This plaza, just down the street from the cathedral will be the main spectating area for the procession to celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi. This Catholic feast day is exactly two months after Maundy Thursday (the Thursday before Easter Sunday). The workers on the scissor lift are building the "gateway" for the procession.

Also visible in this photo are the recently erected shade tarps that are popping up over plazas all over Sevilla:

As we approach the solstice and the very hot time of the year here, the city puts up these shade tarps over many of the plazas and heavily used pedestrian avenues. The provide a bit of relief from the high blazing sun.

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I've been having some discussions with Justin and Sharon about developing a course for Whitman's first-year course sequence. The first-year course has recently been changed to allow groups of faculty to develop a syllabus that fits their area of expertise and interest to teach to the incoming first-year students. The new format will start in the 2020-21 academic year. We're working on some mash-up of data, algorithms and applications to art, humanities, science and social sciences. It's pretty broad right now, but we hope to meet in August and sharpen it up a bit. It's been fun chatting about it with them.

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I've been working through a clustering course on datacamp. I'm still struggling with methods of interpreting clustering algorithm results on high-dimensional data. I had some ideas today about applying dimension reduction to the resulting clusters and comparing their principle components. I haven't really ironed out the details yet though. There's not much literature about this, or, at least, I'm not finding it, haha.

That's a wrap

Today was my last day of my Spanish class. I'm the only person that started at the beginning of the course last fall and continued uninterrupted through the year until now. Everyone in this picture:

started sometime later in the year. Moritz (German) is in front and across the back from left to right are Valentina (Italy), me (US), Marisa (Spain, teacher), Laura (Italy), Mike (UK), and Lisa (Canada). The class will continue for a few more weeks without me. I decided to stop now to focus a bit on my own work and to accommodate upcoming travel and visitors. I enjoyed the class. For me, it was a low-key way to get some practice with the language.

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Laura and I went back to the Bulebar Cafe for another night of "Pint of Science". This evening someone from the University of Sevilla talked broadly about big data:

It was in pretty fast Spanish, so I was only getting about 20% of it. I did manage to get an IPA from the US. It was pretty good and only 3.50 euros. The availability of different kinds of beer here in southern Spain is pretty limited, so you have to strike when you can:

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In Algorithms to Live By the authors talked about "overfitting". I've been impressed with their ability to map these ideas from data science to real life. In this case, overfitting is the problem of tracking the known data so closely that you are unable to handle new situations. IRL this is equivalent to developing a strong habit or reaction to a set of circumstances and then reacting poorly to a similar, but in some way novel situation. While there are many such examples, the extreme example they provided was in the training of FBI agents. In training, a common lesson they practice is taking a gun away from an assailant. In training the student may do this exercise many times in a row and at the end of each round they hand the weapon right back to the instructor. In one instance, this habit became so ingrained that an agent, after disarming an actual assailant, immediately handed the weapon back to the assailant--a distressing case of overfitting.

Cookies and Watermelon

Laura made some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies today:

After 11 months, she's finally got the very finicky oven figured out.

We also splurged and bought a whole watermelon at the grocery store. Pretty good:

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We bought and shipped some souvenirs home. The shipping was more than the cost of the items, but worth it to us.

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I started reading The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal. It's this year's Nebula Award winner, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. Very good so far.

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I read a lot about non-negative matrix factorization. I'm still trying to figure out how to assess said factorizations and to figure out how to use them for dimension reduction.

Pint of Science

Shot this timelapse of the full moon rising over Sevilla the other night. Sadly, I still haven't figured out how to get the gopro to focus the moon. I think I need a neutral density filter. Anyway, it's still kind of pretty:

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These guys have been busking this week in our neighborhood. They're pretty good:

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Today is Day 1 of the worldwide "Pint of Science" event. This is an annual effort to organize scientific talks in bars around the world. Palma let us know about the event going on at her sister's bar. Laura and I went this evening to see a math talk:

It's clear that things are aligned properly when I can watch someone talk about countable and uncountable infinities and drink a beer at the same time:

 Watch out Walla Walla, we're doing this next year.

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Laura and I did a bit more souvenir searching this morning. In this ceramic shop around the corner, you can order custom painted tiles. This fellow was working on one such commission:

We're slowing converging on a few items. I think we're going to mail them home.

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The weather was lovely today. The sky was so blue above the buildings:

Standard operating procedure in European cities is using bollards to separate streets from sidewalks. I liked how this street used basic cannon balls as bollards:

It's like they had an artillery exchange here a long time ago and instead of cleaning up the balls, just lined the streets with them instead.