La Feria ha terminado

Today was the last day of La Feria. There will be a lot of worn out and melancholy Sevillanos tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the grounds to revert to the barren, empty space it was several months ago. The preparation of the site seemed to be at least two months. A couple of horseback riders went down our street today, heading for la Feria one last time:

***

Laura and Juli walked around a bit along the river to the north. Later they took the metro across the other branch of the river just to show Juli that side of things. They plan to see the fireworks show that signifies the end of la Feria.

***

I continued reading Algorithms to Live By. It's an interesting premise. The scope of the book is to present ideas from computer science algorithms to everyday decision making. The first chapter is about the problem of choosing an optimal element from a collection of ranked elements. I.e. working through a list of job applicants in the hope of finding the best candidate. They extend the optimal approach to other kinds of situations like selling a house, finding a mate, etc.

***

I talked to Betty a bit on the phone. Also, I went to the gym. It too has been pretty empty this week of feria.

High noon

The sun as the season advances it gets warmer every day here and the sun reaches a little further into the courtyard of our building:

***

Today was not a super productive day. I read a bit more of The New Childhood but also gave up on it. Too much opinion, not enough rigor. I also spent a bit of time with All of Statistics, but am still stuck on a couple of exercises. Concentration wasn't the best today because I didn't sleep too well the previous night. I don't usually suffer from pollen allergies, but I must have a bit more congestion at night that's making a bit tough to sleep well.

***

I ate leftovers for dinner before a Laura got home from class (which is typical for me). However, when Laura and Juli got home, they decided to go out to dinner. I went with them and had a couple of beers while they dined. We went to a small local place near the Mercadona called Meson de Candil. The service was particularly good. As I mentioned I only had beer, but Laura and Juli reported that the food was pretty good:

One highlight was a large group apparently returning from a day at la feria. We all enjoyed observing the "kids' table" here featuring 4 girls in their flamenco dresses.

Comfort zone

The College president, Kathy Murray, asked me to be the convocation speaker to open the 2019-2020 academic year in late-August. Convocation is a kind of complement to commencement (i.e. graduation) for the incoming students and their parents. It's an honor to be asked, but to me it's a frightening prospect. I definitely thought about it a bit before accepting. Now I have 3 months to fret about it.

***

I continued reading The New Childhood by Jordan Shapiro after a bit of a hiatus. The more I read, the less I like. He shares in the book that he is a divorced father of two. He also shares that he and his two boys spend a lot of time playing video games and on computers in general. After that, his position starts to sound like a justification for how permissive he is with his sons vis a vis "screen time". Some of his points contradict his own words from earlier in the book. For example, he lauds "parallel play" at one point and then complains when his sons' friends come over only to separate into their respective screens and play on-line (which is effectively the example of parallel play he lauds earlier).

I'm going to give it a few more chapters before giving up on it completely.

***

I mostly worked on stats today. There are a couple of challenging exercises that are slowing me down.

***

I also did a little more lifting today at the gym. The streets are still pretty empty because of feria.

***

Laura set up a trip to Bilbao (in northern Spain) for two weeks from now.

Say yes to the dress

Today I made my way down to the fair for the first time since it got going on Sunday. We entered through the main gate with many others:

The tourists and non Sevillanos were easy to spot. We were the only ones not dressed up in suits or flamenco dresses:

This part of Sevilla is normally barren, empty space, but for feria it is transformed into a city within a city. The empty grid of streets is populated by tents both private and public. The primary activity seems to be drinking and socializing. The thoroughfares resemble a scene out of the 19th century:

The local firefighters had a tent of their own:

At the end of the fair area is a collection of the usual carnival rides:

What was most interesting here was seeing formally dressed folks riding in cramped and unpredictable carnival rides.

***

I did manage to get some work done today. I made some headway in analyzing the clustering algorithm today. It's interesting to let an algorithm decide how to sort some data and then have to come through and try to put some kind of human interpretation on the result. This is not the way I've approached data in the past.

A horse's life

The street where my gym is seems to be the strategic place to park for a few horse-drawn carriages during this week of feria. In addition to dressing up for feria, la alta costura seems to be to arrive at the feria grounds by carriage. Between trips, this spot, which is close to la feria and shaded in the afternoon seems a popular place for the carriages:

On the way out of the gym today, I captured this photo of a young girl petting one of the horses while the coach drivers chatted with each other.

***

Language class for Laura is a bit wonky this week. She had class from 11:30-2:30 today. She managed to make some lemon cupcakes before class and carted them off to the school at about 11:10:

***

I noticed this little tile sketch above a shoe shop today while walking. I liked it, so I thought I'd share it:

***

I managed to get a couple of clustering algorithms to work today. Now the big thing is to figure out why the clusters are what they are. All the examples in books are on 2 or 3 dimensions. My data has about 90 dimensions. Any kind of explanation of clusters will need to be analytical, not visual. There do seem to be some techniques out there for this purpose. I spent a lot of today reading about them.