Bits and bobs

[A hamster owned by Cheung, a member of an online hamster community who volunteered to foster abandoned small animals in light of the cull in Hong Kong. Photograph: Bertha Wang/AFP/Getty]

The day started with trying to find out about algorithms, first the word itself, then companies with names including the word.

Murray's version of the OED tells me that algorithm is a corruption of the word algorism, an anglicisation of the name of the Arabic mathematician who brought us Arabic numerals. There is even talk of etymological perversions. And while half a century later the Onions shorter version is much shorter, it still give no clue as to the modern use of the word. Perhaps it was a term coined by mid twentieth century mathematicians and engineers, during the birth of modern computing.

Etymologists must be a reasonably stuffy lot, even in the US, as my Webster's, printed if not significantly updated in 1971, sticks with the same vague story, although it does go so far as to allow it as a proper word. Which doesn't help here as we do not usually use Webster's for Scrabble.

As far as companies are concerned, I have two sources. Top of the list is the commercial operation at reference 1, which turns up 21 of them, doing all kinds of interesting stuff, from fleet management to managing creatives and celebrities. Trying clicking and you get some basic information plus a lot of advertisements, in my case for a holiday cottage company which I use occasionally. A company which Google proper has moved on from, offering me advertisements triggered by much more recent activity. Then, digging a bit deeper, we have Companies House at reference 2, which turns up 198 of them, quite a lot of which are dissolved.

I then moved onto yesterday's Guardian, the page about killer hamsters, where we had a short piece about a spat in Yorkshire between the Catholic diocese of Hallam and its 19 faith schools. It seems that the diocese want to shove the schools into academies and the schools are resisting, presumably not being keen on losing their autonomy. Not clear how many academies the bishop (one Ralph Heskett) is thinking of. All so much simpler when more or less all publicly funded schools were looked after by Local Education Authorities - whereas recent (Tory) governments seem to lurch between leaving groups of schools to run their own affairs, more or less on commercial lines - thus pandering to their free market enthusiasts - and massively centralised control from the Education Department (or whatever it might be called these days) in Whitehall. While there are still some people at least who think that having a management tier at county level gets it about right; gets the right balance between the freedom to thrive, a spot of oversight and the provision of common services. You might think you can read all about it at reference 3, but the best I could do was the manual at reference 4 to be used by the diocesan inspectors when they check up on the faith & morals of the schools on their patch. Check ups which are sometimes called canonical inspections.

We are promised a judicial review, that is to say another pay-day for the lawyers.

Lastly, on the bottom half of the page we have an advertisement from a company called Allwyn who wants to run the National Lottery for us, so taking the bread out of the mouth of Camelot, who seem to have been running the lottery since it was invented in 1994. Apparently Allwyn is a European leader in the business of running national lotteries: perhaps they are young and go-ahead while Camelot have got a bit old and lazy. Maybe it is time for a refresh, time to write off all that investment in the Camelot operation.

I remember that Branson/Virgin had a go at pushing Camelot out, some years ago now. He must have thought he had won, but then foundered as his finances were deemed to be too dodgy, with a lot of them, appropriately, hidden away in the Virgin Islands. Yet another pay-day for the lawyers.

But uppermost in my mind is the way that we have managed to sanitize the business of extracting money out of the mainly poor people who like a flutter - people who would no doubt complain if the extraction were badged as taxation. Better, I suppose, than bunging another few hundred million quid a year to Denise Coates of the Bet365 online betting operation at reference 8.

References

Reference 1: https://www.companieslist.co.uk/?find=algorithm.

Reference 2: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/search?q=algorithm.

Reference 3: https://hallam-diocese.com/.

Reference 4: https://hallam-diocese.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2021/11/Catholic-Schools-Inspection-Handbook-Draft-2022.pdf.

Reference 5: https://www.allwyn.co.uk/.

Reference 6: https://www.national-lottery.co.uk/.

Reference 7: https://www.camelotgroup.co.uk/.

Reference 8: https://www.bet365.com/#/HO/.