Saturday Morning at the Bus Station

I went to bed early last night, so just getting to this now while I wait here for the bus to Málaga.

I wrote a lot of math yesterday. Not sure if I can publish any of it, but it's nice to try to carefully craft and present a mathematical idea. I'm hoping to get Laura to read it over and give me some input.

I did some of the figures using python and matplotlib, learning how to use them as I went. That's all useful for the data analytics part of my sabbatical.

Didn't sleep well last night, that's almost always the case the night before travel.

Getting on the bus now. Looking forward to seeing the bike racing. More this evening.

Trainspotting

On days where I walk in the mornings, I usually try to walk somewhere that I can explore a bit. This morning I walked to the main train station here (about 2 mi from the house).

There are a lot of escalators around here that don't have steps. These ramps down to the train platforms are essentially moving ramps. They take up much more space than traditional escalators. I'm not sure the justification for them:

 From above the train platform, a couple of the high-speed trains they use here in Spain. These trains go about 200 mph at cruising speed:

Definitely not your Amtrak Metroliner, haha. Laura and I hope to try them out at some point, maybe take one to Madrid or Barcelona.

I spent the rest of the day doing math. Still hot here, but there was a brief cloudy period here around 5pm. It seemed perilously close to actually raining, but in the end, the clouds parted without rain and the sun resumed. I have to say I'm looking forward to actual weather at some point. I mean, I don't need it to get cold or snow or anything, but just something to break the monotony.

Bench Warmers

Not sure why, but saw this horse getting unloaded down by the river as I was heading out for my run. Still there when I got back 35 mins later. A horse's life:

 Been trying to get a picture of this bench on our main street for several weeks, but, dang it, there's always somebody sitting on it! This morning, it was clear. It has a nice depiction of the buildings and the bridge:

 Nearing the end of three weeks of painting, the crew is on the last big face of the building across the street from our flat:

 Here's three of them going at once on the lift:

 They should have the upper stories done tomorrow. I'll be interested to see how the deal with the ground floor. We're guessing they do all the stuff that needs the lift (a rental) first, then all the stuff that doesn't need a lift.

The city installed this modern looking drinking fountain out on the main street (quite near the bench I pictured earlier). Given the heat, I'm sure it will be a welcome addition to the neighborhood:

 I chatted with Emily this evening around 6pm my time (9am her time). You can see her new pet bunny, Benjamin:

 Went out for a quick gelato this evening. The street was hopping:

Tried "oreo" gelato, was not as good as my regular "brownie". Next time, going back to the brownie.

Tram Routes

After somewhat underestimating the utility of Sevilla's one and only tram line (Laura discovered it actually goes a little further than I thought), I decided to walk its length this morning (which already calls into question its utility). The plus side of this was to get a better understanding of where the tram goes and to see a part of the city that I hadn't yet explored. This is the entire extent of the line (marked on the map in red) about 2km. There are plans to extend it in both directions. I guess ya gotta start somewhere:

During my walk, one of the trams photo bombed me:

Sights from along the way. The benches integrated into the Triana river wall have built in iron arm rests that also carry the iconic circles associated with the Triana bridge (I mentioned this a couple posts ago):

 One of many large buildings associated with the University of Sevilla:

 A dog with wheels at the Jardines de Murillo:

 Yet another monument to Christopher Columbus:

 One of many gates that lead into different parts of the gardens:

 A wall surrounds the entire grounds:

 I like how there are arbors all around the city that provide shaded walkways:

 I met these two friendly dogs while walking with Laura to her language class:

Lizards are everywhere.

I found a really cool app that I've been messing around with entirely too much. It's called Physics Toolbox Sensor Suite. It gives raw access to all of the sensors in your phone like GPS, compass, accelerometers. It can record the sensors into csv files which you can do analysis on.

I took it with me on my run this morning and recorded a timeseries of the GPS coords. I've been messing around with Pandas, Python, the haversine function and calculus to see what kinds of information I can extract from the data (other than that I'm a slow runner, haha). I think there's a lot of potential for this in the calculus classroom as well as the computer science classroom.

Later I want to explore the accelerometers next and do some discrete Fourier analysis on time series. In theory, I should be able to identify an activity like running, walking or cycling by examining the frequency spectrum of the accelerometer data. Something like that would be a fun project in my engineering math class.

Basically I'm just geeking out on having raw access to all of these cool sensors that I know all of my students have (because they all have smartphones). The accessibility is there, just a matter of putting it to use.

This isn't quite on target for my sabbatical, but I don't mind, haha.

Saw the first real cloud/storm here off in the distance this evening:

Noticed this beautiful tile mural on the Triana Market building today:

Finally, saw this little lizard in our building courtyard today: