Constitution Day

Other than the stores being closed, not much happened here in Sevilla to commemorate Constitution Day. The constitution of Spain, developed in the wake of the Spanish dictator Franco's death, was finally approved by a referendum of the people on Dec 6, 1978. This year marks the 40th anniversary of that referendum. One might think that an anniversary that is divisible by 10 would be special, but it doesn't appear to be. I suppose the 50th will be special, but I'm not likely to be in Spain for that. Although, who knows, after the US becomes a 3rd world country, maybe I'll immigrate to Spain.

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The bridge was lovely this evening:

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Sevilla takes its Christmas decorations very seriously. Each street has its own design for lights. I managed to snap this just walking around the neighborhood this evening (except for a couple that I added just to fill out the 3x3 square):

I don't like the rectangular ones as much as the others. But, to each his own I guess.

Av. de la Constitución

We walked up to Av. de la Constitución this evening just to see what we could see. Also, since tomorrow is a national holiday, Constitution Day, it was particularly apropos. It marks the establishment in 1978 of the current form of Spanish governance. It looked lovely in its Christmas lights, but really smokey from all the chestnut roasters:

There was a nativity in the alcove of one of the government buildings at the end of the avenue. Definitely not something you'd see in a gov't building in the US (that pesky separation of church and state, haha):

Just around the corner from this we heard what sounded like a political march. We went around to investigate and saw a group doing a Take Back the Night sort of political demonstration.

It was attracting attention and a number of TV newscasters.

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I worked a bit more on my weather project today. Using a nearest neighbors classifier I started getting reasonable results. Still with not much sophistication, I'm able to predict frozen fog 12 hours in advance with about 50% accuracy, but still a lot of false negatives. I have  few ideas on how to improve it. It's a surprisingly rich project.

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Spanish class was interesting today. Our teacher tried to explain when to use the preterite past tense or the present perfect tense (which is also a past tense). I kind of have it down, but I'm far from being able to use it on the fly in conversation.

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I talked to Emily today while I walked along the river. Research seems to be going well. When I got home, we switched to video and Laura and I both got to "chat" with Benji the bunny.

Los Pintores

The paint crew came to the flat this morning right on schedule (if not a bit early). They removed the shutters:

There was some confusion about how to label them so that they would be put back in their original positions. Based on what we saw and understood, I'll be surprised if they make it back to their former spots, haha.

The shutters were painted somewhere else–I'm guessing on the roof. I think they're still there as I write this drying. Once the shutters were pulled out, one of the painters stayed and painted the railings outside the windows. This required the windows to be open and for one of us to hang around the flat. I'm glad I decided to move my office into the little nook behind the kitchen. Not only was I able to work in there, but I was able to keep the door closed to minimize paint fumes and run a little space heater to keep warm. The rest of the flat was pretty cold.

The railings are now painted. Laura talked to the painter at the end of the day. He said he would come back on Thu at 10am to put the shutters back. I'm glad we'll have all of this work finished before guests arrive next Wed.

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I made some progress on my machine learning weather project. I finished preparing the data and took a run at it with a keras deep-learning neural network. I got a 95% accuracy on my test data on the first pass, which might seem pretty good, but when the positive classifications are only 4% of the entire data set, you realize that's crap. Indeed, I could write a really simple classifier that always predicts negative on this set and get a 96% accuracy rate. I'll take hit it with a bit more sophistication tomorrow. The lesson I'm really learning is that preparing your data for a machine learning project is as challenging as the actual machine learning process.

Purple Skies

We've had a lovely stretch of weather here. Easily the best December I've ever experienced in my 51 years of living in wintry locales. This evening as I walked home from language class, I crossed a different bridge and had a lovely view of our bridge (the best bridge) in the dusky colors:

I have a bit of regret because I didn't have my tripod and this was a bit of a low-light situation. It would've been much sharper on a tripod. I held my hand as steady as possible, but sometimes it's just impossible. This was a view from the same position but looking more west towards the sunset.

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Class was good today. I was a little worried because the warm-up listening exercises I did at home before class were horrible. I was afraid I'd get there and not understand a word of what the teacher was saying, but in the end I actually had a pretty good listening day. Listening is improving more quickly than speaking. I probably should work a bit harder at finding opportunities to speak.

That could happen tomorrow since the painter is supposed to come to the flat tomorrow for access to the shutters and railings outside our front-facing windows. He's a nice guy, but he's a real, live Sevilliano and he's hard to understand–not like my very kind and patient teacher.

Rugs

Mario and Palma stopped by this evening bearing gifts. They were concerned about the cold tile floors in the flat and the fact that we didn't have any rugs, so they brought a few over. One for the living room and a couple for the bedrooms. They look very nice:

The rug also dampens the sound in the room and makes it a little cozier, so a good addition!

They also brought over some extra dishes and a pyrex cooking pan. They know that we're expecting guests over the next several weeks and want to make sure that we can accommodate the extra people.

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Tourists here love the horse-drawn carriages. The weather this afternoon was beautiful and this ride across the bridge looked quite pleasant:


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Elections for Andalucia were held today. Elections are always held on Sunday here. Spain has 17 autonomous regions (like states would be to the US). Sevilla is a city (and a province) of the autonomous region of Andalucia. Andalucia has a parliament and the election today determined the composition of that body (equivalent to when we elect state representatives to a state house). Andalucia has 8 provinces Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Granada, Huelva, Jaén, Málaga y Sevilla: