Baby Beluga

The song Baby Beluga has been stuck in my head this afternoon. Laura and I saw a beluga-shaped aircraft flying over the city today as we walked to our respective Spanish classes. Here's a horrible photo of it:

Turns out this is an Airbus A300-600ST Beluga. Its odd shape is to accommodate the transport of large aircraft parts as part of Airbus's internal operations. Like every other major city in Europe, Sevilla has an Airbus manufacturing site. It was interesting to see. So ungainly and hard to believe it flies.

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Speaking of Spanish class, my teacher from last semester replaced Piedad as our regular teacher. It was nice to have her back. She has a better idea of what our abilities are and what we hope to get out of the class.

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After Spanish, I went for a walk along the river. The light in the evening this time of year is pretty:

On the way home, I stopped by an Amazon drop point to pick up the peculiar batteries I ordered for my Dell stylus last week. Turns out, that's all that was needed--a fresh set of batteries. It's back to working again.

San Luis de los Franceses

This afternoon Laura and I went to visit the Parroquia of San Luis de los Franceses. This is one of the younger churches in Sevilla coming in at around 300 years of age. It was built as aJesuit monastary but only operated as such for about 30 years until the Suppresion of Jesuits caused it to be repurposed to other church functions. It's a beautiful, baroque church with ornate altars and high painted ceilings. It sits in a relatively ordinary neighborhood with streets so narrow, that it's difficult to capture the entire edifice in one photo without a wide-angle lens:

Inside there were altars and relics. Skulls abounded:

The ceilings were beautiful. Mirrors were provided to save patrons' necks:

An interesting feature of the former monastary is this side chapel that was constructed so that there would be a place to say mass while the big church was being constructed:

In this side chapel there were numerous relics on display. Here for example, are the ribs and collar bones of some saint or other:

This is the door that a priest would use to enter the altar area. I like the floating baby head above the door. Floating baby heads are a big deal in Catholic iconography, at least here in Sevilla:

This courtyard was filled with lush vegetation and skulls-er, I mean old clay pots. I thought they were skulls, cuz why not? there's skulls everywhere else, but no, they're just old clay pots:

This is the crypt beneath the church. Personally, I was disappointed at the complete lack of dead bodies, or at least skulls!

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In other news, one of my Whitman students asked me for advice on where to hike around Walla Walla, so I put together this simple google map to help her out. I also warned her repeatedly that if she encountered snow or mud on the road to one of these, that she should just turn around. It's really easy to get stuck up there (been there, done that).

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The super bowl starts around 12:30am here. I'm thinking I might miss it this year.

Day of Rest

I didn't do much today with respect to my research or machine learning. I did do some Spanish, but even there, only a bit. I guess you'd call it a day of rest.

I watched the movie "It", named for the Stephen King novel of the same name. It wasn't very good (see what I did there).

Did a couple of loads of laundry, vacuumed, took out the trash. I guess it was a day of cleaning as well.

Laura went to Costco. When she got home, we went right back out to the Mercadona to get food in for today and Sunday (remember, everything's closed on Sundays here).

This evening Laura was on a conference call back to Whitman for several hours. We made an attempt to go out and get something for dinner, but waiting until 9:30pm on a Sat night to eat here is like going to Disneyland on the 4th of July--long lines. We just went back home and ate what we could scrounge around the house. Probably better off since I'm not a fan of eating a big meal so late in the evening anyway.

Keith called this evening. He's adopted my mom's cat and one of her dogs, Jake. They both seem to be thriving in his care. I'm glad it's working out.

Centroids of Arcs

This morning I computed the centroid of a circular arc and was pleasantly surprised by some of the results. I think the exercise would fit well into a calculus textbook. This little interactive app I built shows how the centroid of a circular arc evolves as the arc length is changed: https://www.geogebra.org/graphing/s6mybsje

In more serious work, I'm still reading about nonlinear optimization in hopes of getting a grip on a larger problem I'm wrestling with.

In Spanish verb practice, I focused mostly on present tense verb conjugation today. I went through about 25 verbs today--hoping to develop a bit of an instinct about speaking the correct conjugation quickly.

My river walk was very windy today:

Perhaps the windiest day I've experienced here in Sevilla.

Mexican food, one of our staples back in Walla Walla, is hard to come by here. Laura has developed a pretty good method of making refried beans from pinto beans:

We had bean burritos for dinner and they were muy excelente.

To celebrate Friday, we hit the helado place for dessert. I went with my old standby, "brownie".

We're big fans of the Whitman women's tennis team. In honor of their home opener today vs. Seattle U. we sent them a selfie of us on the Triana bridge wearing our team sweatshirts:

The end of January

Another month in the books. We arrived in Spain 7 months ago. In some ways, it seems longer, in other ways, shorter.

This morning I took the derivative of an integral with respect to a parameter in its domain of integration. the result was unexpectedly intuitive and, therefore, the exercise was enjoyable. Not quite sure how to use it in what I'm trying to do overall, but sometimes you just do stuff.

I did more Spanish. I think I need to conjugate haber, hacer, ser, estar, tener, querer every day for a while.

Even though rain was threatening, I ran a load of laundry and hung it on the roof. Then I went out for a run. It sprinkled on me while I was running, which worried me. It was also quite windy. When I got back home, I went straight to the roof. All the clothes were there and relatively dry. I took them all in and hung them on the indoor rack for the rest of the day. They're dry now, so that was a success. Here's the grey view of Sevilla from the bridge at the far end of my run:

I've started a data science project that attempts to characterize students at Whitman that complete STEM degrees using their first-year academic information. As with all data science projects, there is going to be a lot of data wrangling before I can actually implement the clustering algorithm. Data science is a lot like house painting. You spend most of your time prepping the house to be painted rather than actually painting.

I continued to read Factfulness. Today Rosling distinguished between the frightening and the dangerous and pointed out how ill-equipped humans are to separate the two. Spiders are frightening, but not dangerous. Cars are dangerous, but not frightening. Fright is a response that evolved over millions of years in the species. It used to correlate well with danger, but not so much anymore.