Jan 13 2019

Book review: Justinguitar.com Beginner’s Course by Justin Sandercoe

This review is a bit of a departure for me, it is of beginners_courseJustinguitar.com Beginner’s Course by Justin Sandercoe.

I’m a big fan of book learning, so when I decided to learn how to play the guitar a book was the obvious place to start. To be honest I picked the justinguitar.com book largely because it was ring-bound, a quick search reveals many other options but envisaging how I would use the book a ring-bound version seemed to make sense.

It turns out this somewhat arbitrary method of selection has worked out quite well. The book is accompanied by a substantial website (https://www.justinguitar.com/), which includes free video versions of the lessons in this book, amongst much other, mainly video, material. The videos are typically less than 10 minutes long, which is ideal. Looking around similar video courses Justin Sandercoe is, by comparison, clearly a very good teacher. His videos are quite casual in their feel but focussed and well put together. There are also purely app based guitar course but that seemed a bit modern for my tastes.

The book is divided into 9 stages, in each stage new chords are introduced as well as associated techniques, such as rhythm patterns and in the later stages scales and fingerstyle picking. A key element of learning chords is “fingering”, which finger goes where.

I got on really well with the chord change aspect of each stage, you’re invited to record how many chord changes you can do in a minute – which is absolutely my thing! I have a spreadsheet recording how my pace has increased over time. I have made satisfying progress. I also feel somewhat triumphant that I can do apparently notorious F-barre chord although don’t ask me to change to and from any other chord at any great rate.

There is an associated songbook, each stage enables a few different songs. I haven’t made a great deal of use of this yet. I found each stage came with a list of 10 songs but I didn’t know which to focus on to improve my skills. Possibly the answer is “any of them”, choose the ones that appeal to your musical taste.

The emphasis is very much on the rhythm side of guitar playing which isn’t where crowd pleasing showing off lies. Sandercoe does have videos showing you how to play classic guitar riffs (like Smoke on the Water, Seven Nation Army, Creep) but these aren’t included in the book. I found these more motivating than the songbook.

It has taken me a couple of months to get through the first 6 stages of the book. I’ve jumped ahead for a few things – starting to play scales, experimenting with fingerstyle playing and playing a 12-bar blues shuffle. As it stands my chord change rate is a bit lower than the goal for the whole book and I’m not very good at strumming and changing chords, certainly not strumming anything but the simplest patterns.

Learning chords from the book works really well. I found learning strumming patterns required the CD sound tracks at the very least and really needed the video lessons, certainly for the more complex patterns.

Beginner’s Course includes listening exercises at each stage, I must admit I didn’t do well with these. I practiced them using an unrelated app which probably didn’t help – I felt I wasn’t making progress. The focus of the app was very much on the speed at which you could recognise chords rather than accuracy.

There’s a little bit of music theory included in this beginners course – simple stuff relating to where notes appear on the guitar fretboard but there’s no real discussion of how chords are constructed and the relevance of musical scales and chord progressions. I’ve looked elsewhere for this since I’m interested, I think Sandercoe actually introduces quite a lot of this material indirectly.

What I’ve really enjoyed in playing guitar has been managing to do a recognisable rendition of Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes within a couple of weeks, playing the 12-bar blues shuffle from the beginners course book, making a passable attempt at Creep by Radiohead. I think my next task is to hunt out the videos for songs that Sandercoe has done which appeal to me and give me motivation to practice some key skills. At the moment I have my eyes on Smells Like Teen Spirit (power chords), Jolene (finger style playing). Hey Joe (riffs), Thunderstruck (fast, simple riffs). It helps that these tracks will impress the girl in my life (Mrs H, aged the same as me).

This review is different from most of my book reviews, it is more about how this beginners course works for me than a review of the book in itself. Learning to play the guitar competently is the work of years, this book is a good start on the path.

Jan 06 2019

Book review: Mapping Society by Laura Vaughan

mapping_societyMy next review is of Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography by Laura Vaughan. This book covers four broad themes around mapping which are presented in the order in which they first occurred. As well as discussing contemporary material there is some re-analysis in terms of “space syntax”. This is a modern theory of urban spaces which measures things like accessibility and connectedness for road layouts. This feels very familiar to me since I use a similar approach to estimate the age of buildings on the basis of street layout.  

The first theme is the disease map: maps of deaths due to disease, typically during epidemic outbreaks. Snow’s map of cholera deaths around the Broad Street pump in 1853 is the best known of these. His innovation was to use the map to identify the cause of cholera as being waterborne, and to use the map as a device for presenting his case. At the time the prevailing theory of disease was that it was airborne – the miasma theory. Snow’s map was not the first of its type though. Vaughan, wisely, doesn’t get into the discussion of the “first” such map but presents Seaman’s map of yellow fever deaths in New York, dating from 1797 as an early example. She cites a study finding 53 published maps of cholera deaths by 1832.

These maps of disease were used as to motivate the introduction of sanitation laws which became widespread during the middle years of the 19th century.

The second theme is poverty. Maps of disease often included data on sanitation and also poverty. Charles Booth’s work on London towards the end of the 19th century is the most notable in this area, his initial study was repeated 10 years later and then a further 30 years on in a separate survey. The novelty here was to measure levels of poverty in some sort of quantitative way, for this he is sometimes called the first social scientist. The fears of society at the time were that ” the poor” formed a cohesive mass that could rise up. Booth showed this was not the case, the poor were poor in many different ways and for different reasons. Poverty was often found in close proximity to wealth. Work like Booth’s was used to motivate changes in building regulation. Booth observed that irregularity of income was important as well as absolute level. One of the observations from this period is that areas of poverty, often identified at the scale of households, where correlated with inaccessibility – being off the beaten track. The poor were not found on the main streets but rather tucked away in poor housing set back behind better accommodation. New infrastructure such as canals and railways could introduce new pockets of inaccessibility – leading to poverty, or at least attracting the poor to areas thus cut off.

Booth’s work helped to motivate slum clearances and ultimately social security policies such as state pensions. Slum clearances proved to be a mixed benefit, all to often the slum is replaced with more desirable accommodation which displaces the original occupants to be replaced by the slightly more wealthy. The problems that the urban environment engenders can be very persistent. The spatial distribution of deaths in Paris due to cholera in 1849 are quite similar to those from the heatwave of 2003.

The third theme was nationality, race and immigration. These arose around the end of the 19th century, in both San Francisco’s Chinatown area, where the outcome was pretty malign in that Chinese immigration was banned and also in the East End of London, where there was a large influx of Jewish immigrants who came as a result of the Russian progroms. The book cites the Venice Jewish Ghetto, founded in the 16th century and where we get the word “ghetto” from. In the US there were maps of race, W.E.B. du Bois, himself an African-American pioneered this work in Philadelphia.  

The final theme is crime, in fact much of this chapter is about licensed premises. In the latter half of the 19th century the drinking habits of the working classes were of intense concern. In the US this concern eventually led to Prohibition but both the UK and US had temperance movements. In the more distant past, public houses and bars served as the “front room” for poorer families. Their own homes were quite probably overcrowded, unheated and insanitary – the local pub was a warm pleasant place to spend any free time. They were also a place to find work, both legal and illegal.

Vaughan highlights that we don’t see maps of the form found in the 19th century in the late 20th century. Typically maps from this later period are on a larger scale, we don’t see data presented at such high spatial resolution but they cover a wider area. For example, the national census in the UK typically presents data at the Lower Super Output Area scale which covers approximately 1000 dwellings. Sometimes data is available at postcode level, such as the Police.UK crime data, a postcode will typically contain approximately 30 addresses. Devices such as mobile phones mean that high resolution data collection at scale is feasible with more modest resources than previously required. However, we would not publish the data in the manner of the 19th century maps because it is personal information, essentially maps such as Booth’s and Snow’s identify individuals including there health and wealth status.

Mapping Society is a beautifully produced book, with colour figures throughout rather than relegated to central pages, it gives some background to those iconic maps with which many of us are familiar. 

Dec 31 2018

Review of the year: 2018

My reading rate is somewhat reduced this year, 26 books covering both fiction and non-fiction in 2018 compared to 34 and 32 in the two previous years. In the autumn, Thomas and I started learning to play the guitar, Thomas taking lessons at school, me working independently – maybe this is what distracted me from reading. I wrote a blog post on this.

Anyway, to the books. I started the year with a Christmas Extravaganza – short reviews of books on walking, maps, birds, Vermeer and Caneletto. I read some work related books on machine learning, data strategy, and behavioural marketing. This last one was an attempt to read about something a bit different from my usual data science/technology area of interest but it turns out that behavioural marketing is marketing targeted using data which is already my patch. Nabokov’s Favourite Word is Mauve, on the statistically analysis of word frequency distributions, felt like it fitted this category of work-like books.

A couple of the books were quite long: The Devil’s Doctor – Philip Ball’s biography of Paracelsus and The Silk Roads, by Peter Frankopan. Frankopan’s book is a history of the world viewed through the lens of the overland route to China from Europe which has it’s centre of gravity in the Middle East. I was a bit surprised when this coverage came all the way up to the present day. Lucy Inglis’ book Milk of Paradise, on opium and its derivatives, morphine and heroin, had a similar geographic coverage to Frankopan’s book with trade routes passing through the Middle East to China and Asia.

William Armstrong: Magician of the North by Henrietta Heald and Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis by Kim Todd were biographies of individuals. Armstrong was a Victorian industrialist famous for his house, Cragside, which was the first to be lit with electricity. Merian was a naturalist and illustrator in the 17th century, she is better known outside the UK – clearly a very remarkable woman. These days I prefer ensemble biographies such as The Philosophical Breakfast Club by Laura J. Snyder which covers William Whewell (pronounced: who-ell), Charles Babbage, Richard Jones and John Herschel, and were involved in the reform of British science in the 19th century. Sentimental Savants by Meghan K. Roberts follows the move from savants as monastic figures into men embedded in families in 18th and 19th century France. What’s your type? by Merve Emre finished the year with a biography of Katherine Myers and her daughter Isabel Briggs-Myers who created the Myers-Briggs Personality Test.

Other Minds by Peter Godfrey Smith is possibly my favourite book of the year, it is the story of thinking and octopuses. Godfrey-Smith’s idea is to understanding thinking better by studying the most radically different thinkers he could find.

Inferior by Angela Saini is the story of scientific studies of women. It is a rather sorry tale of men clearly desperate to find biological basis as to how women are inferior whilst ignoring societal factors. I’m still endeavouring to read more books by women. For most non-fiction and fiction this is no hardship, niche technical books present a challenge since the number of women authors in this area is close to zero.

Finally, we have The Anatomy of Colour by Patrick Baty, a history of paint and interior decoration. Aside from the outright art books, definitely the most beautiful book of the year.

This year we went on holiday to Westendorf in Austria, Thomas’s first trip abroad. We know Westendorf well – we’ve skied there several times and been once in the summer. We went with my mum, who has been going so long the tourist office gave her a “long service” award this time around! The weather in Westendorf was scorching, much like the UK had been for a chunk of the summer. Fortunately the bedrooms in our apartment were in the basement which was nice and cool.

westendorf

On the domestic front, we have had our driveway replaced with resin-bound gravel. Probably the largest construction undertaking that we’ve done, approaching 15 years after moving in we finally got around to replacing the rather uneven gravel and original concrete slabs at the front of the house. It took rather longer than expected, most likely due to the installers discovering that the existing driveways and paths were sitting on sand and other uncompacted material rather than any sort of properly made base. Having completed the driveway, the front garden and fences looked a bit tatty too so we got those fixed too. All it requires now is for Mrs H to get more plants. If you want to enjoy the whole process in pictorial form, there is an album (here). A before and after are shown below.

before

driveway

On a related note: we paid off our mortgage!

Politically I’m in limbo, Brexit  has deeply upset me – it sees my friends and colleagues from other EU nations treated as second class citizens, cast into Kafka-esque Home Office procedures. The future for my son seems less open and outward looking, with reduced opportunities. I gave up listening to the Radio 4 Today programme after getting on for 30 years regular listening. Some of this is specifically to do with the Today programme: John Humphreys has long struck me as greatly over-rated, over-paid, and unprepared – getting by on bluster. More recently outright brexity. More widely the BBC uses its requirement for “balance” as cover. It gets regularly reprimanded by the regulator for bringing in Nigel Lawson to counter climate change scientists. Question Time panels regularly comprise 3 brexiters and possibly one remainer, if that. Its headline news programmes have ignored serious stories about the Leave campaign, or even actively prompted the Leave side.

I’m looking forward to more learning guitar in 2019, more reading and hopefully better mental health. Brexit will have either happened or not happened fairly shortly.

Dec 22 2018

Book review: What’s your type? by Merve Emre

whats_your_type.What’s your type? by Merve Emre is described well by it’s subtitle “The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing”. It is the story of Katherine Cook Myers (1875-1968) and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers (1897-1980) who developed the test based on the foundations her mother laid.

The Myers-Brigg Test presents users with a set of forced choice questions which it then converts into 16 personality types based on four axes: introversion/extraversion (E/I), thinking/feeling (T/F), sensing/intuition (S/N) and judging/perceiving (J/P). Your type is denoted by the four letters one from each axis.

I’m fairly sure I’ve taken a Myers-Briggs test in the past and I’ve completely forgotten the outcome, I’ve taken a related test more recently. For which I came out an “architect” – INTJ. I am proud of my label!

The story starts with Katherine Myers. It is fair to say that she was an unusual mother, writing a column on child-rearing “Diary of an obedience-curiosity mother” which was published for many years in the American Magazine. These were the notes of her highly structured programme of child-rearing, as applied to her daughter. They appear to have picked up a theme of the time, in using knowledge for self-improvement. There was a similar movement in Victorian Britain.

This episode leaves you with the impression of a fiercely intelligent woman channelling all her energy into the only outlet the society of her time gave her: the raising of her daughter. She had two other children who died young. Isabel’s marriage and departure was clearly a wrench for both mother and daughter.

Katherine then “found Jung”, the psychologist Carl Jung – more specifically Jung’s psychological types. This fitted with her desire to classify people, and find a place for each in society. Her mission then became to render Jung’s types into something more useable. She corresponded with Jung, and met him once. There was clearly a degree of hero worship and obsession in her interactions with him.

Katherine’s approach to type was very much an individualised “expert” one, Isabel’s contribution was democratisation – making a questionnaire and answer scheme such that customers could apply the tests themselves. Like her mother, Isabel was clearly very capable – winning a prize for her novel “Murder Yet To Come” in 1929. A second novel, “Give Me Death” sounds profoundly racist, it features a Southern family whose members commit suicide on discovering that their line contains “negro blood”. This reflects racist/eugenicist overtones in some of Katherine’s writings.

During the Second World War Isabel’s test was used at the Office of Strategic Studies (OSS) as part of a battery of tests applied to evaluate the suitability of people as spies. During the war, Katherine, amongst others tried to “diagnose” Adolf Hitler with a view to predicting the possible outcomes for the war. Unsurprisingly there predictions were not particularly useful.

After the war Myers-Briggs became involved in the Berkeley Institute of Personality and Assessment Research. This followed on from the OSS work and saw relatively small numbers of candidates taken on weekend “house-parties” for assessments. The candidates were a wide range of the great and the good, but scarcely any women.

Later the Myers-Brigg test moved to the East coast, to the Princeton Educational Testing Service (ETS) which designed and administered the SAT. For a number of years they tried to give the Myers-Briggs test a solid scientific foundation but were ultimately not satisfied with it. The original Jungian psychological types were somewhat subjective, and the Myers-Briggs test had a habit of providing different types on retesting.

The Myers-Briggs test was ultimately to find a home in the Centre for the Applications of Psychological Type (CAPT) which Isabel founded with Mary McCaulley, a psychologist from the University of Florida. Uptake of the Myers-Briggs Test grew enormously in the years after Isabel’s death in 1980.

The new thing that the Myers-Briggs Test introduced was a degree of dispassion in its outcomes. None of the types are described as “bad”, or really can be construed as such. The tenor of the test is positive. It is about finding ones place in society and the world of work. This may run counter to individualistic ideals but it struck a chord with many organisations and individuals. It is an astrology for our times, it gives us a team to join, and guidance on how to live our lives.

In some ways the strongest impression I got from the book was of the Myers-Briggs testing regime as a modern day cult, this is only addressed directly by the author in the Introduction and Conclusions regarding her travails with the CAPT, the current guardians of the Test.

Nov 17 2018

Me and my guitar

guitarPerhaps I’m having a mid-life crisis, or perhaps it is the appearance of slightly paunchy, balding rock heroes of my youth at Glastonbury or maybe it is just that my son has started guitar lessons, but I have bought a guitar.

I’ve never played a musical instrument, I don’t count the obligatory recorder of the 1970s which every child abused.

It turns out this post is going to be a bit of a “gear” post.

I got a Squier Affinity Series Stratocaster HSS from Dawsons music in Chester. Squier is Fender’s cheaper brand, introduced so that they could make some money instead of other companies making it on their Stratocaster knock-offs. Included in the pack are the guitar, an amplifier and some plectrums. I have to say I’m pretty impressed by the build quality. The inclusion of the amplifier makes it a pretty weighty package so don’t plan on walking home with it!

Starting on an electric guitar seemed to surprise some people, I don’t believe it’s a particularly odd choice. A starter electric guitar is a bit more expensive than an acoustic but you have the motivation of becoming a rock God, rather than the nun from Airplane! I thought maybe I could practice more quietly by plugging in headphones but in the end that hasn’t mattered.

Shortly before buying the guitar I’d done a little strumming on my son’s three quarter size acoustic guitar and got Justin Sandercoe’s Beginner’s Guitar Course, attractive since it comes ring-bound. I also got the accompanying Songbook. You can try out Justin’s lessons for free on his website. I’ll probably review the books in another post but I came to them because Googling for guitar lessons brings him up fairly high on the rankings, he explains things well (check out some of his videos) and is clearly a popular choice for guitar lessons.

I got a headstock tuner – this is a little device that clips onto the guitar headstock and helps you tune up. The steel strings on my electric guitar seem to stay in tune for a few days, whilst acoustic, nylon strings need tightening up most days. There are any number of smartphone apps which will fulfil the same purpose but the headstock tuner is more convenient, and I suspect more accurate. I also got a capo, which is a clamp that goes across all the strings of the guitar and can therefore change the tuning – I haven’t used this much yet. My tuner turned out to be a little too cheap and I’ve had to fix it with superglue.

On my list of things to get are are equipment for changing guitar strings, apparently not required until about three months in and guitar strap locking washers (which I don’t need for now since I play sitting down). I’m sure other gadgets will be tempting me, and I notice that people seem to rarely own just one guitar!

I also got some headphones, playing with the amplifier on low is fine but you tend to hear the direct noise of the strings which isn’t particularly pleasant, and now I have a tiny amplifier that plugs straight into the guitar and on to the headphones, and a music stand. Fortunately guitar gadgets are cheap compared to SLR camera lenses!

The thing they don’t tell you about learning to play the guitar is the pain in your fingers. Oddly, non-guitar players assume this is in your strumming hand. It isn’t. The problem is with your fret hand, which has to hold down thin wires quite hard. Asking for protection on online forums gets you the same response as asking a beginners question on a computing forum. You get called useless and are given no help. Three weeks in and I have callouses on three fingers of my left hand, and the pain is much reduced.

I suspect there will now be a series of blog posts on matters musical and guitar.