Christopher Christian - R.I.P.

My friend Chris Christian died on Easter Saturday. He had been suffering from the complications of a cancer that was first diagnosed and treated in late 2003, and for which he had been taking various drugs and chemotherapy since.

I met Chris through a university friend, when he was living in the same flat in St Margarets, in south-west London, as my friend's older brother. Chris was tall, slim, with a beard and a slightly wicked smile. He was into trains, buses and many other things nerdy, and oddly into jazz-funk-and-soul. He made a number of trips to India to travel on its railways, and when younger and single was not averse to a weekend of track-bashing. I had no idea there were people who hung around military airports monitoring the flights in and out and publishing the results until one dinner party in the mid-80's.

He had a long career as a chartered company secretary in the bluest of blue-chip companies, and as the lawyers moved into the company secretary's role, Chris studied for and passed a law degree at evening college. Like everyone else, he suffered a short period of redundancy in the nineties before joining EMI, where he stayed until the end.

Chris is survived by his wife Sandra and son Peter. Everyone who knew him will miss him.

The Art of Philosophical Name-Dropping

One of the books I was reading on holiday was A N Whitehead’s Process and Reality. It’s part of my catching-up-with-metaphysics reading program. There was a really neat quote I liked and wanted to use. It then struck me that quoting A N Whitehead (unless it’s the “western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato” quote which everyone knows) is one of those ways you scare people with the implied level of your erudition.

The first rule is: leave the Big Names alone. Say you're reading Aristotle, Plato, St Thomas Aquinas, Locke, Hume, Kant, Descartes, Russell and that ilk, and you will just look like someone who hasn't got past the starting line. If anything, admit to never having got past the first fifty pages of e.g. The Critique of Pure Reason or the Prior Analytics. This makes it look like you don't need to try that hard.

The second rule is: you need to be careful with the attempt-to-impress-with-erudition. Dropping Whitehead’s name can mean you’re slightly cranky or working in a backwater. Hegel is a real danger zone. More people speak reasonably fluent Hegel than you might think. Very, very few people now speak Schelling or Fitche. Lots of people speak Sartre, quite a few speak Heidegger, and to judge by the availability of The Phenomenology of Perception in cheap paperback, quite a few speak Merleu-Ponty as well. Jaspers and Husserl are and will remain safely and impressively obscure.

Here are some simple but effective substitutions: instead of John Stuart Mill, mention William Whewell; Norwood Russell Hanson instead of Karl Popper; Henri Bergson instead of William James; Spinoza for Descartes; W V O Quine for A J Ayer and Michael Polyani for Paul Feyerabend.

Mention F H Bradley and someone may attempt to blow the dust off you. Mention Lucretius to anyone under sixty and they won’t know who you’re talking about, anyone over sixty may well have translated passages in Greek classes at school. Leave Nietzsche and Schopenhauer alone: they attract a fanatical following. Don’t go near Marx – he wrote a lot and you will be expected to know every line. Engels is okay – especially as you can plausibly restrict your reading plausibly to the classic Condition of the Working Class in England. People who name-drop J L Austin are Americans trying to look clever. Quite a few people speak fairly fluent Wittgenstein and he’s not much fun to read. If you really have read Charles Saunders Pierce, you will never need to prove yourself as a philosopher in any other way.

My personal bombs to drop? Michael Polyani and Gaston Bachelard. You can safely say that “everything interesting and true about post-modernism is in Polyani” and Bachelard is charming and interesting to read. The Poetics of Space is a classic – everybody’s heard of it, very few have read it.

Holidays - The Departure

I don't really do holidays. My idea of the perfect holiday is to arrive at the hotel, be put to sleep by the gas that knocks Patrick McGoohan out at the start of The Prisoner, sleep for thirty-six hours straight and spend the next week lying in the sun getting less groggy. I don't think Kirker do that.

What I really can't do is the flights. Now, there's a huge difference between travelling on business and travelling on your own dime. On business, if anything goes wrong, you just make other arrangements and expense it. I have done that a few times. Also, you tend to travel on flexible tickets, so it doesn't matter if you miss the flight. On your own dime, that flexibility runs to, what, maybe half your monthly disposable income? Plus, holiday destinations usually don't have five or six flights a day like Paris or Berlin.

Which means that the most stressful part is getting to the airport. If anything goes wrong, you're stuck at the airport with nowhere to go for a long while and that's assuming there's a spare seat on the next plane. Plus you're out the fare. Travel insurance might cover that, but it can't get you a seat on a full plane or fly a plane on Wednesday when the next flight is Saturday.

You can't forget anything either. You can just make it through a normal working day if you forget your wallet or entry card or train ticket. Then you have to turn back. But you can turn back. Forget your passport, check-in card, itinerary, taxi reservation, driver's licence, credit cards... and you can't get through the airport. You might just bluff your way without the credit card by calling your bank at the other end, but if you fail, you're not going to be eating for the trip. Do you have any idea how often I check that I have these things? When I pack. An hour after I pack. In the taxi, witing for the train, in the departure lounge. It's as if I do not at that point believe in the permemance of objects: paperwork can vanish, just on its own. Even if you never opened the case.

Which is followed by the bit where you go through the airport. My airport experience has been getting better, but only because 1) I check-in online, and 2) I don't carry a large suitcase anymore. All that security theatre doesn't take up as much time as I keep thinking it might. European flights are manageable.

So now we're inside. And there's the bit where your plane is delayed on the inward journey, and the bit where you queue to get on the plane. To walk down a zig-zag chute to take a bus to a plane parked in a far distant corner of the airport. And the pilot tells you there isn't a runway slot for half-an-hour. And the child cries or yells for two hours straight, or the asshole in front of you slams their seat back into recline before the seat belt sign has even faded. I'm tall-ish, I have long legs, and a thirty-two inch seat pitch is too short for you to recline and me to feel comfortable.

On arrival there's the question of the weather. A country that used to be known for unbroken sunshine and gentle breezes has a week of gales and showers, weather they have not seen since old Uncle Jose married Aunt Maria, and that was before television. Yeah. Right. Everywhere I've been, they haven't seen weather like that since Uncle Jose married Aunt Maria. I'm the Wolfgang Pauli of weather?

And then, finally, I'm there and unpacked. And there's me. And a place I don't know, where I know no-one. For a week. I still haven't worked out exactly what state of mind I'm in when I do that. Some of it is a presence-in-the-place, and some of it is denial-that-this-is-all-there-is. Because where I really am is with-me-in-a-different-place. And that's only half a holiday.

The other half is where you get to be someone else for a week.

It's The Pianists That Made The Jazz Great

For me, the high period of jazz was between about 1945 and 1970 - roughly between Charlie Parker's first be-bop album and Miles Davis' Bitches Brew. I'd like to sing the praises of the pianists, all of whom I can't name, but some of whom I can. Wynton Kelly, McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, Herbie Hancock, Bobby Timmons, Cecil Taylor, John Hicks, Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver. To name but maybe a third of them.

I'm going to frame this. Think about when, say, Miles or Coltrane or Cannonball or Shorter or any of the other superstar virtuoso frontmen stop and the pianist takes a solo. Do you notice any real change in the quality of music? McCoy Tyner could complement Coltrane's fierce soloing, just as Wynton Kelly could swing with his very own joy, contrasting Miles' more brooding, intense playing. You notice the difference in style, in voice, but not in quality. Or to put it another way - these guys could keep up with the best extemporising musicians of the twentieth century. You and I and your music teacher and the kid who won the Leeds Piano competition would not have a chance. Some were composers in their own right: Zawinul, Timmons, Taylor, Monk. Some had the technical skill and background to head all the way over to European avant-garde music: Taylor, Hancock, Corea.

I'm actually going to say this: without these pianists and others, the jazz of that period would have been good and sometime great. With them, it was great and sometimes timeless.

Would Kind of Blue have been the same without Bill Evans' floating chords? Here they are in Blue In Green.


Would You Gotta Have Freedom be what it is without John Hicks' piano?


Would My Favourite Things be one of my favourite things without Tyner's chords?


And here's Cecil Taylor being, well, pretty mid-Twentieth century avant-garde, except with a touch of swing and blues...

Things I Saw Where I Lived and Walked: Part 15

Bushy Park in winter, a gravel-pit yacht club one summer Saturday afternoon, a beach in Devon name unknown, the backyard of a friend's house in Topsham. All 1980's except the back yard, late 1970's.

Jung, Pauli, Myers-Briggs And Being Plain Normal

There's a very well-known psychological inventory called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. It's used a lot. At The Bank they like the "colours" questionnaire, which is a simplified Myers-Briggs. Myers-Briggs is based on the ideas in Carl Jung's book Psychological Types. People therefore think Myers-Briggs is very profound.

I've just finished reading a book called 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession by Arthur Miller, which is about the professional relationship between the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung. Pauli went to Jung for analysis, stopping but continuing a correspondence with Jung about his dreams between 1932 and his death in 1958. This reminded me that Jung was a Viennese in the early twentieth-century. His psychological types were not based on studies of thousands of regular Joes and Joannas like you and me. Psychologists didn't do that then. Jung based his thinking on the people he hung out with and saw in his therapy sessions. Now here's the thing: Carl Jung wasn't an academic psychologist based in Manchester. He hung out with some of the best minds of the twentieth century, and that means some of the best minds ever, anywhere. People came from America to be cured. When he and Freud traveled to the USA, their visit was on the front page of the newspapers. You needed to have serious money to do therapy with Dr Jung - or be seriously well-connected in the intellectual and cultural world. So when he talked about overly intellectual people, he wasn't talking about the data-bashers in the basement, he was talking about some of the greatest physicists who ever lived. He was thinking about people at the far upper extremes of the Bell Curve (he never saw people at the lower end of the Curve).

Those profiles aren't about and don't apply to you and me. We're smack in the middle of the Bell Curve. We may do some things better than we do others, but we don't do anything really, really well, and we don't screw up really, really badly. (Well, you didn't anyway.) But trainers, psychologists and recruiters use the Myers-Briggs test and solemnly tell some people that they are ISTJ's and others that they are ESPN's.

Whereas what they really are is people who did better at Maths or Fine Art than they did at football or cooking. Let me put this into perspective. You ran faster than the Fat Guys and the Nerds in the class, and you made it into the school team, which won the regional finals. That makes you a better runner, and possibly gave you more practice in self-discipline, than the Fat Guy. But you're not a contender for the British Olympic team. They're the guys with the talent and self-discipline that's so extreme it does speak to something in their psychological make-up. When you go out into the world of work, some of that self-discipline and ability to practice and defer instant gratification will help you on your way - but it isn't going to distort your life. Or try this: perhaps you drank more than some of the other guys at university, but you didn't drink like I did and you didn't go on with it into your late thirties, so that your breath smelled of last night's whisky the next morning on the train. Every weekday. That's how you know you're not a screw-up either, and I am. The odd hangover doesn't speak of your character, but years of morning whisky-breath do. Most of the differences between ordinary Joes and Joannas aren't about their psychology, but about the long-term effects of small differences in their skills, when magnified by the distorting mirrors of job market and economy.

The kind of qualitative questions that psychological profiles are based on work best when dealing with extremes (well, duh!) and that's what Jung was doing. Try to apply it to regular folk and the meanings get blurry because the differences are smaller. We're all a little bit this and a little bit more that. Jung was looking at people who were a whole lot this and very little that.

It doesn't help that stereotypes get in the way. That Seven Dials, he crunches numbers and writes code, he must be a rational decision-maker and fact-based and non-intuitive. Whereas I'm almost the exact opposite. The most coldly calculating people I've run across are innumerate. Artists must be intuitive and mathematicians rational - whereas both are creative. And creativity is not what the un-creative think it is - it's mostly hard work and lots of background reading and research. Nobody just has great ideas in a vacuum - but people who never have ideas think that's how it must happen. In other words, a lot of the time, the people doing an inventory-type profile don't even really understand the words. It's even entirely possible that the people who put it together don't either.

Never mind World Peace... how about a standard data type and format for dates?

It's an utterly lost cause as the code to handle dates will be buried deep inside the database engines. Every major application seems to handle dates its own way. This makes moving the damn things around a real pain.

SAS: dates are integers. Day Zero = 1/1/1960. Date arithmetic is simple, but date functions sparse. Date formats are pre-historic.

Oracle: dates are… really complicated, but to_date(date_string, format) and to_char(date, format) are really powerful. Date arithmetic is simple and there are some useful date functions. Date formats are whatever you want them to be.

Teradata: dates are (year-1900)+month*100+day. Date functions are few and date formats are… there’s one. Date arithmetic is simple if you don’t try to be clever.

Excel: dates are integers. Day Zero = 1/1/1900. Date arithmetic is simple, and format(date, formatstring) in VBA is really powerful.

ANSI SQL supports add_months(date, +/- n) which is reasonably useful.

None of them handle week numbering (YYYYWW) consistently well at the turn of the year. This year gets some really odd things in Oracle.

I'm guessing other databases have their own quirks.