Bunny Bumps

Another rainy day in Sevilla. I managed to go out for a run in one of the breaks in the weather. Later I went for a walk with Laura and got rained on a bit.

We walked along another pedestrian street in Triana, close to the feria grounds. It too has a freshly painted bike lane.

***

Sundays I try to call people. Of course, being 6 hours ahead of the east coast and 9 hours ahead of the west coast, I can't really do that until after 3pm our time. That said, I managed to talk to Jo-Anne, Rachel, and Emily. Rachel is dog sitting Penny this week and so was enjoying some time with Penny while we talked. Emily is in the process of adopting a second rabbit, Apricot, in addition to her current bunny Benji. I didn't realize it until she started the process, that it is challenging to bring a second rabbit into a household. The rabbits can actually fight and not get along to the point that the second rabbit has to go back to the shelter. Apricot and Benji seem to get along at times and then at other times have conflict. Emily was sitting on the couch while we talked, giving the two rabbits some together time (normally they're kept separate until they can reliably stay together without fighting). Here Apricot is grooming Benji, which is a good sign. Hopefully this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship:

CAAC

a.k.a. Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo. The exhibits here turn over every few months. We hadn't visited since Rachel and Taylor were here in December, so we figured it might be a good time to go back. This string art reminded me of work of a former art major student of mine, Maddie Webster:

I think this is work by the Spanish artist Soledad Sevilla (not from Sevilla, haha). While we were in the museum, it rained like heck outside. The rain falling into the open courtyards was pretty:

This "Russian doll" painting is permanent and recently commissioned from Ana Barriga:

I see Trump in there and maybe Putin and possibly Zuckerberg?

These are some drawings by a well-known Spanish architect, Prada Poole:

He seemed to be into low-energy, inflatable, mathematical constructions:

The museum itself is in an old ceramics factory:

The sky cleared enough for us to walk home without getting wet. This courtyard in Centro Cerámica Triana was open today. It's not part of the museum, but instead a small private museum right around the block from our flat:

***

The city continues to gear up for the Semana Santa processions. There will be roughly 60 processions in the city during the week leading up to Easter. Posters for the different processions are starting to appear in shop windows. This one is in the window of a bar around the corner:

I like the juxtaposition with the beer advertisement in the window. "This crucifixion and resurrection brought to you by Cruzcampo!" There are many other tastless captions running through my head right now, but I'll refrain.

Some sun, some rain

The day started cloudy and cool. I did a timelapse of the sky this morning:


Happily, it cleared up this afternoon a bit for my walk. The preparation of the grandstands in Plaza de San Francisco for the processions of Semana Santa continues. Today, red velvet drapes were hung. I hope they're waterproof because it rained like heck later:

While it was still sunny, I snapped these flower photos along the river. Everything is in bloom:

This lean-to structure on the grounds of the public works building has always had vegetation growing on it. But here in the spring I see that a lot of it is flowering vegetation:

This evening I'm watching a live baseball game using my mlbtv subscription--Mariners at White Sox. I started off pretty ugly, 6-1 in the second, but as I write this in the 6th inning the Mariners are up 8-6. The Mariners have had a surprisingly good start to the season.

Manhattan Voronoi Tessellations

Sometimes it's nice to visualize a math problem. Visualization can provide insights and also sanity checks. This is a Manhattan Voronoi tessellation with a Gaussian density function.

Tomorrow I'm going to implement a Lloyd iteration to compute a Manhattan centroidal Voronoi tessellation. I anticipate that the resulting tessellation will be more regular and aesthetically pleasing.

***

This afternoon I continued doing exercises in probability theory out of the book All of Statistics. The exercises continue to be challenging and interesting. Today I focused mainly on conditional probabilities and independence of events.

***

During my walk/run today, I passed through a park on the west side of the river that I had not visited in a few weeks. The fountains were all going and there were a lot of flowers:

The weather forecast shows cool weather and rain for the next several days, so I'm glad I got out to enjoy the sunshine today. Also, managed to get in a load of laundry. Might not be able to hang clothes on the roof for a couple of days either.

Stats and feria

I continued working on learning advanced probability and statistics using All of Statistics. Today I worked through the Monty Hall problem. Moral of the story, when Monty asks you if you want to change your door choice, do it.

***

I watched little Spanish Netflix before class, but still felt a little behind the curve today.

***

I walked through the feria grounds today. The large scaffolding at the main entrance now has its facade:

Ready to go, only one more month until feria. A large number of the family tents are also now in place:
 

This is essentially a 9-day party with people hanging out at each other's tents getting massively wasted. Definitely not my scene, but I'm sure Laura and I will wander through it once for the mere spectacle.