pumpkinstrokemarrow

Used to be the name of TB when we first moved to Epsom. And a very interesting place it was too. However, the concern today is with handicapping the gee-gees having talked to a former apprentice jockey about same, at TB. My starting puzzle was that if, in a handicap race, the idea is that all the horses start equal, why do jockeys have to fuss about their weight? The answer seems to be, in part, that there are lots of races which are not handicapped. The other part is, I think, that you want races to be fast and so, in consequence, you want jockey to be light. Or to be more precise, the total weight, including the weights, that the horse has to carry, to be small. So the handicaps are set on the basis of jockeys being light. There is a catch though. If the jockey sweats too much and is very light he is unlikely to have the energy to drive the horse to a good race. And the horse will have a lot of dead weight flapping about in the back of the saddle - whereas it is much better to have such weight as there is in the jockey. Two features of all this impressed me. First, the quality of the horseracing websites. There is clearly lots of money in racing and well worth the industry's while to put up good quality web sites. With the same pedanticity about the rules as one finds in pubs about card games for money. Second, the business of handicapping is an information system, with some of the same issues as the computed sort. So there are information flows in and information flows out and there are lags. The handicap is not just a static peice of information that everyone knows - with the additional wrinkle that the handicapper will not have as much information about any one horse as the people running the horse. The consequence of all this is that an entirely legitimate part of the game is playing the handicap system.

Another informant from TB has been telling me something of the mysteries of primary care trusts, which also include information systems. It seems that the trusts have some of the qualities of the insurance operations that run health in the US. That is to say, they collect a great deal of information from their providers. Now I have it in mind that in the US they get about the same amount of health care as we do but at twice the cost - with a large part of the differance being the cost of administering health insurance - which in their case includes logging the administration of every pill to every patient. Let us hope that in our rush to emulate our overseas allies we do not go too far down that particular road.

He also tells me of an unfortanate side effect of the bean counting drive (which is, to my mind and in moderation, in itself, a good thing). Let us suppose that there are two versions of a very nasty disease knocking around, say version A and version B. As far as the patient is concerned they are pretty much the same. But the vaguaries of the bean counting system can mean that the treatement available for A is quite differant to that available for B. Not very clever.

To London the other day. Past another peice of rubbish masquerading as art, this time by the row of rather precious shops, cafes and what-have-you that have sprung up next to the Festival Hall. An arrangement of things which you might find on a building site - wheel barrows, cement mixers and so on - with a bit of Christmas decoration to top it off. One does wonder who authorises the payment for such nonsense. Does he or she get invited to interestingly exotic arty parties on the strength of or in the hope of authorisation? Possibly involving controlled substances?

Clearly spoke about Wetherspoons far too soon. Wanting to take refreshment at Holborn at about 1700 later the same day, went into the little corner pub which has been there for years. Certainly sold warm beer and might even have had a tenant. But it was small, crowded and seat free. So we go around the corner into the ground floor of Africa House (which I think used to be occupied by some part of the civil service) where there was a Wetherspoons with both warm beer and seats. And it came with a friendly and helpful barmaid. Next thought was that there must be much more drinking now than there was. When I used to work near Holborn, the corner pubs was all there was, so there must be hundreds more pub seats (or at least bar seats if we are being picky) in the area now than there were then. Not too mention all the booze being pulled out of the supermarkets now which did not exist then. Maybe it is all down to our being a lot richer.