This was the week from Monday september 10 to Sunday september 16.

Nerd stuff

I fought with VTK renderer window reparenting on three different platforms. Suffice to say that the 2018 is probably also not going to be the year of the Linux desktop.

Serendipitously (seems to be a theme) I came across UMAP, a great new technique for dimensionality reduction which functions in the same space (weak math pun, sorry) as t-SNE.

My first impressions are great because UMAP is fast, it can be trained, and I really enjoyed this recording of its introduction at SciPy 2018:

Outdoorsy stuff

The highlight of my week was undoubtedly the weekend visit to the West Coast National Park to go greet the brand new flowers of spring.

During my morning run I was greeted by a herd of Eland antelope.

Although enormous, they are wary of humans, especially ones running across the savannah in their general direction.

In stark contrast, the ostrich male and female I then ran into were quite vicious, running fairly aggressively to and fro across the the hiking path before me, huffing and puffing. They probably thought that I was a threat to their young.

These birds are not to be trifled with (see for example this section on wikipedia), but I had to push on, so we played the waiting and shuffling game for a few minutes before I could continue.

At least I knew for sure that I would have the privilege of taking an entirely different route home.

Sometimes one’s arrival on the west coast is perfectly timed, and other times not at all, just like life. This time, the flowers were out in full.

There were brilliant fields of yellow, orange and purple, up and down the mountain-sides.

As if the flowers were not sufficient, we were treated with stunning views of the Grecian-blue sea, and with sunsets like these: