Tenerife Quickie

We flew to the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands which are a part of Spain. The hotel is nice and we can see the Atlantic Ocean from our balcony. Mostly we just walked around Puerto de la Cruz, the city we are in. There's a heavy marine layer making it a bit coolish.

Shotcut, GoPro

I did some math today. Worked on yet another kind of centroid and made some progress. I think it will fit into the current paper if I can get it completely fleshed out. I also studied the statistics behind "adverse childhood experiences" (ACEs). I learned about ACEs as a CASA, but it turns out that the methodology there might be useful in the STEM data set analysis I'm doing with Whitman data. In some sense I'm trying to find "risk factors" for success in STEM at Whitman. I think it could turn into a nice advising tool.

***

I spent a bit more time figuring out how to do timelapse and slo-mo on the GoPro. Interestingly, the GoPro has good hardware, but it's up to the photographer to do the post processing to get timelapse or slo-mo. As such, I spent a lot of time this evening figuring out how to edit video with shotcut (the program I mentioned yesterday). I mostly have it figured out now. I did a timelapse of sunset at Plaza de Espana:


(this is at 1 frame every 5s)

I did a slo-mo of a guy busking the plaza with soap bubbles:
(this is a 240 fps video slowed to half speed)

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.