Robin Wilton's esoterica

A few weeks ago, a colleague and I were chatting about some of the strange things that can happen when you're travelling (whether for work or not). He suggested I should blog about some of them, so I've decided to start an 'Alarms and Excursions' series which I will try and publish on Fridays. Can't promise I'll have something every week, but let's see how it goes. I'll put them in the "Life..." category (for ease of filtering...).

Sent To Siberia

It's true - I got sent to Siberia once for a week, by a previous employer. This was in the mid-nineties, and while Russia had opened up to an amazing degree, it was still (and probably continues to be) a place where strangeness is commonplace and the weirdness is world-class.

Just to clear one thing up at the outset: I was there in September, not winter, and the weather was, as a result, almost entirely comparable to the England I had just left behind. Several of my colleagues had the full-on Siberian winter experience, and the shared suffering of it bonds them together to this day. One of them got temporarily bonded together himself: his eyes started watering on the walk to the office, and the cold was so intense that his eyelids froze shut. They had to take him by the elbows and steer him into a heated building. I, on the other hand, had it easy.

I have to say, this was the only business trip I've ever been on where I got back and said: "If they ever ask me to go there again, remind me to say 'no'. Don't let me try and justify it - the answer needs to be 'no'".  I hasten to add, this was nothing to do with the people we were working with, who were kind, fascinating and hospitable. It was just an accumulation of stress factors - the consequences of which we'll come to in a moment.

Part of the problem was a distinct lack of sleep. I was there to teach a week-long course, so the tendency was to turn in fairly early rather than going wild in the evening. The opportunities to go wild of an evening in Irkutsk were not plentiful - but they existed, and unfortunately most of them were located in our hotel. There was the disco, for instance, which would keep the local high-rollers noisily occupied until it was time for the next stop: the casino.

By the time the casino chucked them out in the small hours, most had had a fair bit to drink, some would have started fights, there was occasional shootings, though not while I was there. All this, though was just a prelude to the next phase of the night's entertainment: 4x4 racing in the hotel car park.

For this, you need: several like-minded buddies and an appreciative clutch of lightly-clad female admirers; a couple of cars parked so as to light up the car park with their headlights; another one with the doors open and the stereo cranked up to maximum, for sound-track; then you're all set for a couple of hours of fun... usually between about midnight and 2am.

I was surprised at how ill-fitting the single-glazed windows were, for a Siberian hotel room; certainly not much good at muting the stereo, the screech of tyres or the revving of engines.

Once the drag-racing dies down, there's an opportunity for a couple of hours of sleep - but then the trans-Siberian Express arrives at the railway station across the river, and as it's now so quiet, all the noise of the shunting, station tannoy, freight-handling and so on bounces across the river beautifully and in through the leaky single-glazed windows. So no sleep for another hour or so, by which time the cheerful grey light of dawn is starting to pour in through the thin 70s-orange curtains.

On the last day of the course, the participants had been hoping to knock off early and take a 'booze cruise' down to Lake Baikal, but due to the intransigence of one of their colleagues earlier in the week, progress had been so slow that there was no time for this. A lucky escape from vodka-overdose, we thought, heading back to the hotel. But there was no escape. The drinking just took place in the hotel bar instead. It all went manageably well until, shortly before midnight, the project manager phoned his partner in the UK and got the happy news that she was pregnant. Well, that was it. A fresh set of vodka-bottle tops was removed, crushed and discarded with flair, and we started all over again.

Such sleep as the alcohol allowed that night was fitted, as usual, into the period between the 4x4 racing and the station tannoy, at which point we were off to the airport for the 7am flight to Moscow. It was not a good flight. The combined effects of a week of sleep-deprivation, generally odd food, the previous night's over-indulgence and general stress-rebound were overwhelming.

Actually, I lie: the flight itself was merely uncomfortable. The taxi-ride from Sheremetyevo to the hotel in Moscow was what finished me off. About 5 minutes from the hotel I started to get tunnel vision. My fingers were tingling, and by the time the taxi pulled up I couldn't feel my extremities. "Clive", I said, "I'm afraid you're going to have to pay for the taxi... I can't see."

I sat on the kerb while he did that, and gradually my vision returned. I was still quite groggy, though, so once we got into the beautiful lobby of the hotel (all marble and suede), I put my coat on one of the sofas, lay on the floor and but my feet on my coat, to get them higher than my head. My colleague deployed his Amex card to get us some orange juice, and ministered to me with Dioralyte. Clive, you're a tsar.

The lobby was regularly patrolled by several pairs of security guards who looked like they had just been de-mobbed from the Spetsnaz. My strange behaviour didn't elicit the slightest reaction from them.

You have to try harder than that to get a flicker out of a Muscovite's weird-shit-o-meter.

From "Notes on Hilbert Space", here.

DEFINITION: A Hilbert space is an inner product space which,
as a metric space, is complete.

We will not present an exhaustive "mathematical" discussion of this
subject. Rather, by using examples and analogies, hopefully you will feel more "at
ease" with "Hilbert space" at the end of this short discussion.

REMARKS:

(1) Consider the space of functions, , where f is a "square-integrable"
complex-valued function on the real interval [a,b], ie, This space will be denoted as
.
One can directly verify that is a complex vector space, ie, , etc. We will return to clarify
in what sense one can "visualize a function as a vector".

(2) By introducing a "dot-product", this complex vector space becomes
an inner product space. This inner product provides us with a positive definite
"norm" for each vector,

(3) Define a "distance" between two functions by . This turns into a metric space. We
shall explain the fact that is a Hilbert space next.

OK - the 'Definition' sentence consists of words which look normal, but when you read it they just turn into a sort of "wah wah wah" noise like Charlie Brown's teacher. The sentence I have highlighted in orange lulled me into an entirely false sense of security, which persisted right up to the word "functions" a few lines further down. The author may be of the view that what follows is not a "mathematical" discussion, but it certainly isn't a discussion in anything a non-mathematician like me understands.

(On the other hand, I bet he can't ask for a beer and a receipt in as many languages as I can...)

ho hum

The government has announced that half a dozen of its private-sector clinic projects will be scrapped before initiation, as well as shutting down another which is already operational. For context: of around 60 deals in the first two waves, two have already been cancelled, about 40 are still running, and 10 more have just been given the go-ahead. The broader picture is that the Health Secretary, Alan Johnson, has announced that there will not be a third wave of such projects.

These private-sector service providers essentially provide out-sourced diagnostics and treatment for the National Health Service (NHS), such as MRI scans, hip replacements and cataract operations. One cricitism levels at the programme is that the contracts drawn up often pay a 'bulk rate' for the operations - including a profit margin - in advance, regardless of either service utilisation or success rates.

From my perspective, two implications leap out of this announcement.

First, the cancellation of some of the projects (and the announcement that there won't be a third wave) will cast doubt on the health care provision strategy in areas such as the one where I live. Here, local healthcare services have been drastically cut back before any replacement provision has been put in place. To illustrate the scale of the issue: a search on the website rather inappropriately named "NHS Choices" displays a promising list of 'hits' for local hospitals... but you have to page down to page 5 before you find one which has an Accident and Emergency unit, and it's 13 miles from here in the middle of a busy city. Not the easiest place to get to in case of... well, an accident, say, or an emergency.

The nearest Minor Injuries Unit is five miles away. As the front page of the Primary Care Trust's (PCT - regional healthcare administrative body) website announces: "The Minor Injuries Units at Devizes, Savernake, Warminster, Melksham and Westbury have been closed." There are now two minor injuries units in the county. The announcement concludes by claiming that "The new arrangements will
ensure safe, high quality care consistently, as patients and health
staff will know what is available and when"... rather glossing over the question of how safe, high quality care is enhanced if it is not accessible.

It would be rather less irritating if they simply said "we've closed most of the Minor Injuries Units because we couldn't afford to run them" - as opposed to trying to dress it up as a positive benefit. "It's much easier for you to know what MIU care is available now, because there's so much less of it".

The second implication is that private sector firms doing business with the government will be keeping a very careful eye on the cancellation clauses in these healthcare contracts. Not only do the service providers get paid whether or not they successfully treat anyone, there are also probably compensation fees which fall due if the contract is cancelled prematurely. I say 'probably' because the details are veiled behind a claim of 'commercial sensitivity'.

If any of this rings a bell, it may be because very similar language was used about the cost projections for the national ID Card scheme. Not only were the initial budget estimates hidden behind a similar veil, but there has since been the commitment from the Conservatives and Lib Dems that, given the opportunity, they will cancel any ID Card procurement contracts entered into by the current government. The outcome of the NHS cancellations may therefore be of considerable interest to companies entering into the procurement phase of the ID Card programme.