It's Not Dead

I've been seeing this cat on my walks/runs along the river lately. Today it was stretched out on the path:

As busy as this path is at this time of day, the cat demonstrated remarkable equanimity. I don't think it was dead, haha.

After dinner this evening, I took the trash out and decided to keep going. I walked over to the cathedral area. Not many people around this time of year even though the weather has been wonderful:

This is the first time I've seen the Giralda since they removed the renovation scaffolding on this face:

You can definitely see the improved surface.

On the way home, I passed through Plaza Nueva. There are three bike stations there, just like this one:

Every morning the one near our house is empty, but these stations seem to always have hundreds (or at least dozens).

***

I continued reading Everybody Lies today. I read about an interesting study of successful people (defined as having a Wikipedia page about them). Turns out they're much more likely to come from diverse, urban areas than homogeneous rural areas. A study on upward mobility shows similar patterns. There are places in the country that have fantastic records of upward mobility and other places that are like caste systems where there is virtually no upward mobility. As the author points out, big data doesn't just identify where things are going wrong, but where things might be going right.

Wiggle, wiggle.

I had a productive morning of mathematics. I also had a nice Spanish class this afternoon. One of my classmates, Jake, is from the UK. He's probably around 23 years old. He's come to Sevilla for a few months on his own dime. He's basically a street dancer and supplements his income by busking around the cathedral on weekends. He shared that this weekend the police were particularly aggressive about clearing out buskers. He was chased out of a number of locations that he'd used before. To his credit, he has looked into getting a permit. However, in classic Spanish bureaucracy, while there does appear to be a busking permit on the books, no one knows where you can apply for or get one. Even the police have no idea, as Jake claimed was discussed in one of his encounters this weekend.

***

I continued to read Everybody Lies. An interesting revelation about large internet companies like facebook and google, even when the entire country seems to be up in arms about some issue or other, behind the scenes on facebook and google, data scientists know that often times the outrage is disproportionate. I.e. that there exists a greater number of people that are quiet supporters of the issue or simply ambivalent.

***

I went for a bit of a walk after class today. I still admire the scope and variety of graffiti here. This wall looked particularly striking in the dusk:

Our bridge in the calm dusk:

I've only recently noticed this plaque commemorating the famous Camino de Santiago on the east end of our bridge:

I didn't realize that there were segments of the route here in Sevilla, or even in Andalucia. I thought the majority of the route was in northern Spain. If you look at the map here:

you can see that the primary route is in northern Spain, but that there are a number of "tributary" routes including the one that terminates in Sevilla called "via de la plata". I guess this marker is a waypoint on that trail.

Finally, there's an old English sheepdog in our neighborhood. I saw him out for his walk this evening along the river. I like they his fluffy butt wiggles when he walks:

Pizza Day

Laura made pizza for lunch and pizza for dinner. For lunch, she employed a technique we've used before here in Sevilla--she used pitas as crusts for "personal" sized pizzas. I've always liked them, but she is less than thrilled with the pitas-as-crust recipe. This afternoon, she found some yeast and made a pizza dough of her own. We had that for dinner:

I managed to snap a picture before it was gone. I liked this one too. Plus, you can't have too much pizza.

***

Other than pizza, it was a pretty low-key day. Did some laundry, some math, continued reading Everybody Lies, talked to Rachel briefly, and watched a bit of Netflix.

Birthday Weather

Today was my 52nd birthday (and Emily's 25th). With the weather sunny and 70, this is definitely the best weather I've ever experienced on my birthday. Following a long tradition of trying to get photos of Emily and me together on our birthday, I screenshotted our phone call today (sorry Em):

Here she's explaining how she's hoping to apply machine learning algorithms to predict which of a certain class of chemical compounds might be worth exploring a bit more deeply. She just came off of a two day workshop on applying methods of machine learning to materials science.

Laura made me a nice birthday card. Around the border are random facts about the number 52:

I also had phone calls from Keith and Jo-Anne today.

***

While not for my birthday, there was a fun group of women singing as an ensemble in the street in front of our building. They were accompanied by one of the regular street guitar players:

They were having fun with their heart-shaped balloons.

***

I took a chance and ordered a new pair of running shoes from amazon.es. They arrived in the dropbox over at the mall today. Laura and I walked over and picked them up this afternoon. They fit pretty well (which is always the risk of ordering shoes in the mail). I ran with them this afternoon too. So far, so good.

***

Laura made me a goulash (beef) poured over gnocchi for dinner. It was excellent. Overall a good finish to a good day.

Everybody Lies

Another lovely day in Sevilla. This in contrast to the misery that is currently the weather in Walla Walla. Nothing but cold and snow there for the next few days. Here, though it was never really winter here, it's clearly moving back to warmer weather here. The beautiful weather along with it being Friday afternoon had lots of people hanging out by the river:

Happy people, enjoying each other's company and the end of winter, such as it is.

Also along the river, the tourist boats were dodging a plethora of rowers:

Not everyone was happy today though. On my way back from walking with Laura to her school for class, I passed this little guy:

He was not pleased. It was cute, so I surreptitiously snapped a photo.

***

I got a birthday card from Kathy and Ric today. It was in a padded envelop with a bag full of Milk Duds. Happy birthday to me! Unfortunately, as appealing as the Milk Duds were, the guy on the birthday card kinda made me lose my appetite:

Thanks Kath.

***

I started reading Everybody Lies by Seth Stevens-Davidowitz today. This is another data science book. This guy specializes in drawing conclusions about people, culture, societies, etc using Google search and other internet usage data. The unique aspect of this kind of data is that most people use Google unguardedly--thinking that a query, post, or click is private and anonymous (in fact, it mostly is). You can learn a lot more about people this way, especially with respect to sensitive topics like sex or race, than you can by giving them ordinary surveys. People lie very systematically on traditional surveys. For example, it's believed that pollsters missed out on the Trump phenomenon because people didn't want to admit that they were going to vote for Trump. So far, it's been a good read, but I'm only two chapters into it.