π Day

Not that I really celebrated, I just wanted to put the symbol π in my blog. I did do math today, but none of it involved π.

***

Mario and Palma brought back one of the chairs expertly repaired by Palma's father. It's now in fine shape and will easily last the remainder of our time here. They took two more chairs back to their flat for repair:

Off they go to their house to effect repairs!

***

I continued experimenting with the gopro. Today I pointed it out the window and plugged it into my spare battery pack. I was happy to see that it recorded continuously for 6+ hours and only stopped because it ran out of memory. I think that with lower resolution and/or framerate or larger sd card, I can easily get it up to 10 hours or so:

At the moment, I'm using shotcut, a free windows video editor, to stitch together and down sample the video to make it more manageable. That too is going well. The job should be done in another hour or so.

***

Laura reminded me to look for pictures from our Morocco trip on the tour company's facebook page. I found one of Laura and one of me:

This is during the camel ride on the beach along the Atlantic Coast of Morocco. Check Laura's blog to see if she posted her photo. I liked it so much, I sent it to her mom, haha.

New Camera

I've been wanting to experiment with some video and bought a GoPro from amazon.es. It came today and I've been experimenting with some of its features. It's an interesting device. On the video side, it's capable of 4K resolution at 120FPS. I found out that my relatively new Dell laptop (less than one year) is incapable of playing such videos. I'm mostly interested in long-form video of nature scenes, so I'm not really going to be able to do any actual photography until I get back to the US. I'll play around with it for regular photos and video for my remaining time here so that by the time I get back to the US I'll be ready to do more serious work.

Here's still of the Triana Bridge. Just out of the box, defaults, pretty crappy:

Here's a 4K, 60fps video of the bridge. It's on vimeo, not sure how faithful vimeo is to resolution and framerate:

***

I had Spanish class today, then went for a walk along the river. I noticed these two putting up a new pair of murals:

I'm not sure if they're related or independent of each other.

***

I worked on data science mostly today. Still playing around with the Whitman STEM degree data. Getting better at using pandas and python to manipulate the data.

Making Plans

Today Laura arranged our return flight to the United States on June 28th. She also set up a visit to Budapest in April. It will be the first time back there since we lived there in 2003-04. Our hotel during the visit is within a block of where we lived. I'm looking forward to seeing it again--what's changed, what hasn't.

***

I spent most of the day making 3 figures for my paper. I made a lot of progress with matplotlib and in the end started generating figures that are of pretty high quality:

Tomorrow it's back to doing actual math.

***

This plant came with our flat way back in July. Mario offered to take it to his house for the year, but I asked him to leave it. It's done pretty well:

I hope it can make it through another 3 months.

Making Figures

Did a load of laundry and mopped the flat today. The floors in the flat are all tile. Easy to clean, but for someone like me, whose feet are always cold anyway, tile in the winter has been a challenge. I wear slippers most of the time, but still tend to get chilled when I'm inside for a while. That said, we're getting to the point in the spring here where being chilly won't be a problem. It was 80 degrees and sunny today. It's still chilly in the evening. My goto move when I'm cold is to close the door in my study (secretly the second bedroom) and turn on the heater. Then, I put up my hoody and I'm pretty good:

***

In math today, I spent the day trying to convince matplotlib to make some nice figures for the paper I'm writing. I figured out how to render nice rectangles and polygons with dark boundaries and nice light grey interiors. For some reason, this is somewhat challenging in matplotlib, but it's worth it because they look professional and I'm able to use LaTeX fonts for labels etc so they integrate well into the paper with respect to look and feel.

***

I had Spanish class today. One of the challenges I've been having recently in there is that recently two students that are way more advanced than me, have joined the class and now the teacher is mostly pitching to them. It's still useful, but things move too quickly for me to meaningfully contribute. On the plus side, this has caused me to reflect on my own teaching and to think about whether I may be guilty of this same issue when there are strong math students in the class.

Home from Córdoba

Here's a bit of a recap of our visit to Córdoba this weekend. Córdoba at about 350K people is about half the size of Sevilla and about 90 miles northeast of here. Generally speaking, I'd say it was a bit cleaner and a bit greener than Sevilla. Lots of lovely old streets and plazas. It's main claim to fame is the Mezquita-Catedral de Córdoba. This structure follows the typical trajectory of religious structures in Spain over the last 2000 years. It started out as a Christian church, was converted to a Muslim mosque in 784, then converted back to a Christian church in 1236. It's a mixture of Christian and moorish architecture. Visiting this structure was our main purpose for visiting.

We took the train up to Córdoba on Saturday. There's a really cool scale model of Sevilla in the train station now. We looked at it for a while before getting on the train:

There's a lot of lovely greenspace in Córdoba:
 

We visited the Mosque-Cathedral on a bright sunny day. Inside was kind of dark, but this only served to highlight the shafts of colored light coming in through the stained-glass windows:

There were a lots of Renaissance paintings in the church. You tend to see lots of different styles and skill levels. I love how "buff" the baby Jesus looks in this particular rendering:
 

The choir chairs were made of ridiculously intricately carved hardwoods:

Surrounding the Christian chapel were the Moorish pillars and arches of the old mosque:

The main altar in the church was quite ornate:

Like the cathedral in Sevilla, this cathedral has a bell tower which offers the highest view of Córdoba:
 

Naturally, we had to go up and have a look. Here's the garden:

The Cathedral rises up out of the old Mosque:

The city of Córdoba sprawls away:
 

Proof that we actually climbed the tower stairs instead of paying someone to go up there and snap a few photos for us:

Of course, before the Christians and the Muslims there were the Romans. This old Roman bridge is restored and now acts as a pedestrian bridge:

It's beautifully lit at night too:

Today we went to the botanical garden in Córdoba. It was a well laid out and informative showcase of the plants and trees of this part of the world, Spain, northern Africa and even the Americas (the latter because many of these plants were brought back from the Americas during Spain's era of trade with the Americas):
 

The botanical garden clearly has an educational outreach program too. This botany bus must go out to local schools and events. I love the plants growing on the roof of this functioning bus:

I love old abandoned buildings, even in the US. I'm always curious about their stories. Why are they empty? What happened to their owners? What were they used for? In the US, especially in the West, those stories are usually at most 200 years old. Here in Spain, those stories can be 2000 years old:

On the way to the train station to go back to Sevilla, we had pizza for lunch at La fabbriča • pizzería. Really good, would definitely recommend:

We made it back to Sevilla pretty easily. Overall, a nice visit.