As I’m sure you are aware this week was the 170th anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. What? You didn’t know? I think I even hear some of you asking who the heck Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov is. Well, he was a composer from Mexico. OK I’m kidding he was Russian. He’s best known for The Flight of the Bumblebee, a fun, fast, almost frenetic orchestral piece. To celebrate his birthday the CBC posted an article with a link to a really cool performance of the piece by flutist Mark McGregor and rapper Kia Kadiri. It’s a great performance. McGregor is a very talented flutist, but Kadiri is amazing. Very creative verse and astoundingly fast. She’s really brilliant. I wish I had that kind of talent with language. Oh I can write prose and the occasional verse but I can’t deliver them with her precision, speed, and clarity.
http://www.cbc.ca/1.2576451

What do you get when you combine professors from two utterly dissimilar and unrelated fields? That was the question behind a program from the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC (The University of British Columbia). The goal is to see what interesting results will come from this sort of unusual cross pollination. Recently they connected Jacqueline Firkins of the Department of Theatre and Film, with Dr. Christian Naus, a Cancer Researcher. The result was a series of gowns whose patterns and textures are derived from thin slide images of cancer cells and tumours. It’s proof that beauty can come even out of the ugliest of things.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/19/health/gallery/fashioning-cancer/

But art comes in many forms. For example there is an art to just doing a job well, especially a big complex job. This story comes from Vancouver where two 80 year old houses were scheduled for demolition. Instead, a grassroots effort was put together that gathered contributions from businesses and individuals to preserve the houses by moving them to a new location. The houses were prepped and everything set for The Dorothies big day. (They are called that because the two houses are mirror images of each other and the wives of the first owners of the houses were both named Dorothy.) The move wasn’t far but it would block two streets and require taking down and replacing power lines, telephone lines, and trolly lines. So early Monday morning at 9:30 the move started. Everything went like clockwork and in just two hours the houses were standing on their new location, in perfect condition, all wires were back in place, the trollies were going again, and traffic was flowing again. To quote one of the great philosophers of our time “I love it when a plan comes together”.
http://www.news1130.com/2014/03/17/the-dorothies-are-on-the-move/
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/twin-dorothy-houses-together-again-after-vancouver-move-1.2575927
The houses are being converted into town homes and will help provide affordable housing, somethingVancouver could really use.

Sometimes the best writing though, can be found in the news. This week the BBC reported on a case where thieves robbed a cash machine by tunnelling into the shop where the machine was located. Then, one night they broke through the floor, robbed the machine and the store and got away with £80,000. The part I liked was when they said the police were looking for “people acting suspiciously, possibly covered in soil”.

Ya think?
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-26663093

But not to be outdone the CBC reported on a case from Nanaimo. People and animal control were searching for a pet emu that had escaped from someone’s yard. The emu had escaped but the CBC made a point of saying that “Lucy the Emu is on the run in Nanaimo, B.C., but is not considered a flight risk.”

One again, Ya think?

On Friday Lucy, was recovered, but not after he (yes it’s a he. They named it Lucy before they knew,) had messed up his owner a bit. Emu’s can deliver a really nasty kick, especially when someone tries to put them into a van to take them home. Emu’s have an instinctive fear of being grabbed and put into vans. It goes back to their dinosaur ancestors in the Jurassic. Not many people know this but Allosaurus would capture their prey by driving around in their vans and luring other dinosaurs in with the line “Dude, I got some killer weed, wanna party?” Yes it really does go back that far.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/lucy-the-runaway-emu-has-been-found-1.2582625

Then, here’s some footage of killer whales frolicking around a fishing boat . Of course it’s all fun and games until you realize they’re massacring a pack of seals. Oh well, it’s just another event on the water that Marsha and I missed.
http://www.cbc.ca/1.2581463

One bit of good news. We filed our taxes last week so that’s all done, and I do mean all done. The taxes were sent off, and in less than five days the refunds were in our bank accounts. Gotta love the Canadian tax system, electronic filing, and direct deposit.

Thought for the week.
As many of you know the Washington Redskins are under pressure to change their team name. They need to change it to something that's not going to offend people, does not have unfortunate historical contexts, and yet is modern and inspiring. How about the Washington Multiplexers? A multiplexor is a computer part so it’s cool and high tech sounding, It's a computer part so it's not going to be connected with any unfortunate history. It’s just the thing for a 21st century team.
I can just imagine the cheers:

Packet data, packet data, rah rah rah
Come on team kick ‘em in the ASCII
Vikings are SCSI, Multiplexors Rule
Gimme an M, gimme a U, gimme an L, gimme a…
Ok that last one might take most of a quarter, and honestly, I don't know how many Redskins fans would actually be able to spell multiplexor.
So, I guess maybe not.

That’s it for this week.