Making Movies

We made it back to Sevilla in one piece and on time today. We left our hotel this morning at around 6:15am and walked to the bus station to catch the bus to the airport. We had a minor scare when the building we thought was the bus station was closed and dark. But, a quick lap around the building and we found all the buses out front on the street. We found the airport bus and felt like we had plenty of time for the 45 min ride to the airport. Unfortunately, the traffic to the airport seemed unusually heavy. At one point, the bus driver called her dispatcher and asked for and received permission to skip all of her remaining stops in an effort to get the passengers she had to the aiport as quickly as possible. Even so, we were about 20 mins late (according to the bus schedule). We left ourselves plenty of buffer however and still arrived at the airport an hour before our flight. We passed through security quickly, the flight was on time, we arrived in Sevilla, caught the airport bus to our neck of the woods and were home by 1pm Sevilla time.

A fun trip. It would be fun to go back, rent a car, and drive around to all the different places to hike on Tenerife.

I was going through some of my gopro footage this evening and found this nice panorama of the Teide volcano:


I also found a nice slo-mo of the waves crashing into the rocks along the shore outside of our hotel:

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Also along the lines of making movies, there was some location shooting along the river today for some kind of period piece, maybe 19th century. There were a couple of old-style boats, a mock up of a dock, and lots of actors in period costume:

On the other side of the bridge, on the same side of the river, the mounted patrols were keeping order. These two kids had their bags of beer safely out of line of sight, haha:

Teide Volcano

We got up early to get breakfast and catch our tour bus up to the Teide volcano national park. You could already see the clouds building on our side of the island (as they do nearly every day at this time of year):

We drove into the interior of the island which invariably means winding up switchbacking roads. We stopped briefly to look back down on the town, but the clouds had already moved in:

We drove up to the base of the volcano and took a cable car up to nearly the top of the Teide volcano:

Looking back down on the town, there were even more low clouds obscuring the beach area:

The geology is fascinating. I would love to tour a volcano with an actual geologist. In this area around the top of the volcano, we could smell (and see) sulphur:

Selfie proof that we were on a volcano, haha:

The various lava flows over the past couple million years have left their marks. The most recent is from the 18th century:

I did a timelapse of our descent from the volcano:



The land around the volcano is dry and scrubby:

Looking back on Teide after we went up there. The whitish patches near the peak are the sulphur fields from the earlier picture:

The terrain is actually reminiscient of the land around the tri-cities in central Washington:

We're back in the hotel now. I'm using the wifi in the lobby to post this.

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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.