Spring

On this first full day of spring, I went to Parque de Maria Luisa to see what I could see. Turns out, there are a lot of flowers in full bloom here in Sevilla this time of year other than the azahar (orange blossom). I sat by this reflecting pool for a bit and read a book:

The smell of the orange blossoms was quite strong. When I got up and turned around, I saw why:

This tree is well on its way to having its leaves back:

The purple bougainvillea on this trellis were going strong:

The statue of Maria Luisa herself presided over a varied display of flowers:

The sun was so bright, it washed out this photo of the north tower of the Plaza de Espana:

In one of the lesser parks on the way home, I noticed these red/orange flowers:

It was pleasantly cool today.

***

I mostly read elementary probability and statistics today. I'll get back to working on the paper tomorrow.

Density

I'm still working on my paper. I'd been mulling over adding an important generalization to the results, but was a bit afraid of how hard it might be. This morning, in a fit of energy, I decided to just start at the beginning of my notes and start incorporating a density function into the narrative, theorems and proofs. It took most of the day, but I got it done. The proofs didn't need too much fixing and all the results still held. With a density function, the results are more useful to a couple of other areas of math and also more useful in applications like image compression. Sometimes the dread of something is way worse than the actual something.

***

Happy first day of spring (which doesn't officially start for another hour at the time of this writing)! It was actually a bit cool here today, but still wonderfully sunny. My run along the river was actually more pleasant in the cool breeze.

Walla Walla seems to be emerging from its long, cold winter too. It's 56F there right now. Probably the warmest temperature of the year so far there. I hope next winter is much milder than this one was.

***

I've mentioned before that there are thousands of orange trees in Sevilla (and throughout southern Spain). The trees are now starting to bloom. The blossoms look a bit like honeysuckle blossoms. Even better, they smell like honeysuckle blossoms. Walking around the city the past 10 days or so, you often get strong wafts of the orange blossom smell. The orange tree is such an important part of Spanish culture that the language has a word specifically for "orange blossom", azahar.

Spanish Dragonfly

I woke up in the middle of the night with a good idea on how to improve a proof in a paper I'm writing. Unfortunately, it kept me up for about a half-hour. Eventually, I fell asleep again. Fortunately, when I woke up in the morning, it was still a good idea. I spent most of the day re-writing that part of the paper (including re-generating some figures).

***

I started reading the boldly titled All of Statistics by Larry Wasserman. The claim is that this book provides a quick and rigorous introduction to statistics for people that already know mathematics. So far it's been good. I worked through the first chapter on probability theory. I proved a couple of exercises. Turns out probability theory is a lot like set theory and I really like set theory.

***

It's been really lovely here in Sevilla these past few weeks. In the afternoons, it's warm enough to open the windows in the flat. When I got home this evening after my daily walk/run along the river, I was startled by a loud, intermittent buzzing sound. After a while, I zeroed in on the sound and it seemed to be coming from behind this framed poster in our hallway:

I warily took down the frame and turned it around:

and found this Spanish dragonfly. I took the frame out into the building courtyard and managed to get it to fly away. Glad I figured it out because I really didn't want this thing alighting on me in the middle of the night, or even buzzing annoyingly behind the poster frame. Now everybody is where they're supposed to be.

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:

***

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.