Reflections - An interview with SPVR

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A one hundred and fifty day lockdown

You can't have read much of my writings if you do not know that numbers are close to my heart. And today has a big nice round number attached to it. We are all familiar with the Google search engine. Most of us will use it today. The name is a mis-spelling of the name for the number you get when you multiply 10 by 10 one hundred times. The name Googol is the term for that number. For a brief period of time, it was the biggest number with a name. But after Kasner and Newman came up with that name, they rapidly came up with Googolplex which is the number you get when you multiply 10 by 10 Googol times. We can in our Parliament make the Googol, if not the Googolplex real. There are 129 MSPs. If we allow people to sit randomly in seats, how many possible outcomes are there? The first person to sit down can choose from 129 available seats. The second person can choose from one less, 128 seats. But the first person left 128 possible arrangements of the remaining seats. So the number ...

101 Primer for being video-online: Part 1 - Preparation

Somebody asked me for this. And like any such description of how I do what I do, it might not suit everyone. Tomorrow we'll talk about some "techie" bits and the "performance". One of the enduring mysteries for someone working at home is why it works well for some and badly for others. The voice drop-outs, the frozen picture, the awkward framing of the participant, can all contribute to a sense of amateur hour at the local pub. Remember them? I first started using video-conferencing for real when I was part of a joint information technology project which was a collaboration between a team in Perth, Australia and Edinburgh, Scotland. We had a weekly project meeting at 0800 for Scotland, 1700 for Australia. It was over what we would think of as an impossibly slow communications link. And it worked. Until the clocks changed when we missed each other for a week. Today video-conferencing is widely available, mostly free, and can use equipment and connections of...

The public health bird is on the wing

We are at a stage in dealing with the C-19 pandemic where we look even more to numbers to guide our response than at any previous point. That doesn't mean we have lost sight of the human impact of a disease for which there is nothing in the pharmacological toolbox with which to fight it. There is a range of interventions that are being used to manage the effects of the virus in patients. The use of ventilators is one. So our main objective, as it has been from the start, is to stop the spread from person to person. One of the very interesting things to emerge from Professor Harry Burn's evidence to the COVID-19 Committee yesterday was in relation to face masks. Now he is someone to whose advice I have always listened carefully. We were fortunate to have him and Professor Linda Bauld, a public health specialist, before our Committee. Harry told us that masks worn by those who are infected reduces the number to whom they pass on the virus, to one-tenth of what it would oth...

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