Victoria - 7. Big Wood and Big Data

Tracy Smith’s Victoria Scavenger Hunt has occupied my skeptical children for four days now, so I would just like to share it with readers here. Smith is a technical writing expert, and web content designer, based in Victoria and Waterloo, but she is also a physically active, outdoors enthusiast and fan of the arts. Her Victoria Scavenger Hunt is a ‘local version’ of what to see in the centre of Victoria, and it takes children from the Wharf seals to Terry Fox, and from the Bug Zoo to the various petting zoos. Even for an adult, it’s a wonderful entry into a world that is definitely not in all of the tourist brochures.

This morning, we decided we had had enough of the urban harbor, and drove out of the city towards Sooke and Mystic Beach, Juan de Fuca trail in the middle of what B.C. is known for – big ferns and big wood, and also, as we soon discovered on the trail, big moss. There is something really soothing about being in the envelope of green. Your blood pressure decreases, your breathing slows, and you have time to think, to daydream, to rest. This is a popular trail. It has the hanging bridges you see in movies with deep ravines; mile-long sidewalks carved out of a single tree; big waterfalls; big mussels; and when we reached the end of the path; a rope swing over the sea.  Did I mention big trees?

We ate our lunch along the beach alone, and as we ate, a family of seals watched us on the incoming tide.  This reminded me of a Gaelic song, ‘Suilean Dubh’, dark eyes, and as I sang it, they tilted their heads. “Come home with us,” they called. ‘I would love to,’ I thought. It was a ‘mystic’ place – quite, serene, full of earth’s declining beauty. Something we all need to see and give thanks for.

Since our day was already full of ‘big’, and it was π-day, we took in the University of Victoria’s ‘Big Data PechaKucha’ presentation on the way home. ‘PechaKucha’ is a new Japanese computer science movement towards rapid presentation. For example, Astronomers now deal in ‘petabytes’ (PB), 1,000,000 gigabytes (GB)! That’s big data. And research labs working in social networking can now identify which person is at the top of the food chain in any one social network, like facebook, in seconds simply by entering that data. Petabytes about our lives is collected daily, examined quickly, and decisions made for us in seconds. Like the mystic trees on Juan de Fuca, the thought is overwhelming (only not in  a calming, soothing way at all)!