Friday, March 22, 2019

Terror Bites at Twenty Thousand Feet

no, not snakes on a plane - machine learning on telemmetry from all planes, continuously distributing and updating a model of what is working, wearing and possibly worrying in pilot's interactions with the controls, readouts and each other, and warning everyone when their 737 Max really shouldn't be flying...

Friday, March 15, 2019

The Inflationary Tendencies of the NHS

so i just went through the slightly weird procedure of having a virtual colonography - if you have to have someone look inside you from the lower end, this is much less horrific than a full on colonoscopy, so recommend (apparently its more accurate too) but it's slight odder

what they do is stick a balloon up, inflate it to a gazillion atmospheres to stretch the walls beyond credulity, and, while you are lying in an undignified position with what feels like a weather gadget in your intestines, wobbling (luckily not full of helium else you might end up like the strange uncle in the original mary poppins movie), they put you through a CT scanner...kudos the amazing Godfrey Hounsfield, who the radiology nurses today hadn't heard of (had a nice chat with them - one from north London near where I'm from, about schools and music venues and pub quizzes, witness, the school leaver who saved a zillion lives by persisting with the computer tomography invention and deservedly got a Nobel for it) -

some of you may recall my previous inflationary procedure, which entailed having a bubble of sulfur hexafluoride inside my eye for a while - i must say this one was probably less alarming.
recently, i had occasion to have a serious hearing test (hard, I can tell you), and they didn't put bubbles of air or weird chemicals in my ear, but they did virtual sound stuff which was really amazing, anechoically speaking.

while you might say "so that's why health care is costing so much more than in the past", I would totally disagree - these procedures stopped me being i) dead ii) blind iii) deaf, which would have (over the past 10 years) cost you lot a shedload of money supporting me or my family, instead of me doing it and making money for other people too. plus actually, the virtual colonography is faster and better than the older procedure (actually so was the eye&ear ops) so the thruput is betterer too...

you just have to equip enough places to do this (we do way way better than bl00dy private healthcare systems coz we statmux the scarce resources really really well (if you don't know what statmux means, thing "sweat that resource"...)

no pennecillin was harmed in the making of this blog