Eulogy for an old friend

This week I found myself thinking about a friend I met during my PhD at the University of Birmingham, Dr Jonathan Maxwell. I met Jon (as he preferred to be called) when he was still an undergraduate via the karate club I joined there. For several years we’d been friends, but a few years after I’d left Birmingham, around 2002 or 2003, we lost touch: the email I had was no longer valid and he’d moved on from Portsmouth University where we’d last been in contact.

On Thursday I decided to try and get back in touch. A few years back I’d come across one of his papers (he’d gained his PhD in Sports Psychology, studying implicit learning) during a search for papers on machine learning. This paper indicated he was based at the Institute of Human Performance at the University of Hong Kong. I looked up the web site of the institute but he wasn’t in the staff list. I double checked the paper and he’d definitely been there.

I figured he must have moved on again, but searching for him or his papers or looking at his co-authors’ institutions and checking to see if he’d moved to one of them shed no light on the matter. Eventually I did an image search and I found a picture of him! His hair had turned grey and had receded a bit but it was definitely him. So I clicked on the picture…

The link took me to his obituary at the Institute of Human Performance. He’d died in January 2009 at the age of 39, leaving behind his pregnant wife and two sons. I was, of course, shocked and saddened to hear this. Someone only a few years older than me, who’d been a good friend of mine at Uni and who kept himself in good shape, had died suddenly and unexpectedly. So many thoughts and questions have gone through my head since finding out, but in the end here is what I have to say:

Jon, I’m sorry we lost touch and I’m sad you’re gone.

I’d like to tell you about the things I’ve been up to since we last saw each other, when I stayed for a weekend and we watched Gladiator on DVD at your flat in Birmingham with a meal (pizza or curry, I can’t quite remember) and, of course, a few beers. Could that really have been 10 years ago?!

I’d love to tell you about my 2 years in Groningen, the Netherlands, using neural networks to model an aspect of language acquisition, whilst in my spare time researching Dutch and Belgian beers, and even learning some Dutch!

I’d love to tell you about my return (for 5 years) to my home town of Glasgow, including buying a flat there and getting involved in a political campaign, NO2ID.

And of course,  I’d love to tell you about my present life in London working for an exciting start-up company.

I’d love to hear about your life and work in Hong Kong.

I’d love to have met your family and friends there.

In other words, I’d love for us to catch up and share some beers over a curry again…

However, now it’s too late, and I am sorry we don’t have that chance now.

I’m sorry it was over 2 years before I found out you’d passed away and I’m sad you’re not around for your wife and children.

I am sorry you passed way due to a rare medical condition, one which physical fitness and general good health are no protection against. It was a condition you didn’t even know you had, one that is difficult to diagnose. Sometimes  life  really  sucks! But on the other hand…

I enjoyed the curries, the beers and the bottles of wine (you chose the latter particularly well!) we shared.

I enjoyed the nights out we shared at pubs and clubs in Birmingham and watching the 5 nations (for it was 5 back then!) with you, even when you teased me about how England would beat Scotland (I hate to admit you were usually right!)

I apologise again for the black eye I accidentally gave you when we were mock sparring on the dance floor at the Guild! (How drunk were we?) Black-eye aside, that was a good night, one of many…

I was also happy to have been a subject in one of your PhD experiments on implicit learning and found the work you were doing very interesting.

So thankyou Jon, for some great times and good memories.

I am glad to see that you established a strong academic career with a solid record of publications in your field.

I am glad you found someone to settle down and start a family with, and had the chance to experience the sheer joy I’ve seen in the friends and relatives of mine who have also started families.

I’m glad you and your wife made a big impression with the people you met in Hong Kong, and I’m glad that you made good friends there who, I was so moved to learn, looked after your wife and family in their time of need after you were gone.

I am glad that, in the time you had, you made a good life for yourself and your family in Hong Kong and that it looks like you were very happy there.

For if there is a lesson to be learned from your life, it is that we should strive to make a good life for ourselves and those we care about and to make the best use of our time in this world not just because that time is limited and we don’t know when it will be up, but also because we can have a good life and we can be happy if we work at it.

So finally, it’s time to say goodbye Jon. You were a thoughtful, generous person and it was my privilege to have been your friend.

Happy New Year!

To all the readers of this blog, I wish you a happy 2009!

The new London Olympics logo has had it…

…see Tim Worstall for details.

Happy New Year

Sorry for the lack of posts in December, I hope you’ve all had a good Xmas and I wish you a Happy 2007!

I didn’t know Norwich had an embassy in Syria

From this news report:

Denmark and Norwich have begun to urge their citizens to leave Syria after their embassies were set on fire in the country…

A belated Happy New Year, plus the focus of this blog

I wish a belated Happy New Year to the readers of this blog!

Also, I’m sorry for the long gap in posting here. I took a bit of a break from things over Xmas and whilst I managed a few posts at the Magna Carta Plus (MCP) blog, I didn’t manage anything here. During this period though, I’ve been thinking a bit about the focus of this blog, given that my civil liberties articles will mainly go to MCP.

Essentially the focus on this blog will shift to issues such as the end of oil and its consequences (anyone wishing to understand the middle east should look into this issue), developments in international politics and the fortunes of the British political parties in what seems to be a year of transition as David Cameron gets going as Tory leader, the Liberal Democrats hold a contest to elect a new leader, and Labour prepare for life after Tony Blair (given his promise to stand down before the next election). I also intend to cast an eye on Scottish politics, after all Scotland is my home country and I do live there, plus there’s an election next year to Scotland’s parliament.

Given that oil is running down just as demand surges from countries such as China and India, that the British government seems intent on further trashing the rule of law, that Iran and the international community are in conflict over the former’s suspected moves to acquire nuclear weapons and that Sharon’s stroke has probably thrown a spanner in the works in the Israeli/Arab conflict, we may have interesting times ahead of us…

Wikablog

As if producing 2005: Blogged whilst writing his own blog and contributing articles to other blogs wasn’t enough to fill his time, Tim Worstall has banded together with some other bloggers and set up Wikablog:

Well, the point is that there are a lot of blogs out there — a billion trillion gazillion, according to some experts — and it’s difficult to find out what they’re all about without visiting every one of them and reading it. How tiresome. Here at Wikablog, you can, in just a couple of minutes, create a page about your blog or someone else’s with a few words saying what it’s about. Then other people can add to it. And you can add links to other similar blogs, and talk about the blog’s history, and recount the tale of the great Himalayan Blog Controversy of 2002, and whatever else you like. Soon enough, any blog can have a detailed page on here, telling us all everything we could ever need to know about it short of bothering to read it.

I think I’d rewrite that paragraph to say “Wikablog is a directory of blogs maintained by its readers”.

Anyway I shall soon be adding this blog to the Wikablog.

2005: Blogged by Tim Worstall

Apologies for the lack of posts recently. Things got a bit busy and blogging went on the back burner for a bit. Anyway now I’m playing catchup on some items that caught my attention.

As readers might already know, Tim Worstall has waded through thousands of British blogs and selected articles from them to produce a book called 2005: Blogged, which was published on the 18th November. Tim describes this book as follows:

So one of the things we hope to do is to get people to realise quite how much good writing there is out there available to them. We, the cognoscenti, already know. Well, we do to an extent. I’ve found, while doing the research (I skimmed through 5,000 blogs and read in much more depth a 1,000 of them to make the selections), that it isn’t true that we do in fact know all of the good ones. Certainly, I found that there were whole areas of personal and music and culture and so on blogs that I knew nothing at all about. (BTW, if you have someone you think I should know about drop me a line. Final closing date for alterations is early October.)

I’d also better point out that this isn’t just me and my muckers, isn’t all right wing or economics, it’s an attempt, however limited by space, to give an idea of the huge variety out there. Yes, of course there is Pootergeek, Norm, Samizdata, Harry’s Place, there’s also Dead Men Left, Chicken Yoghurt, Green Fairy, Angry Chimp, Twenty Major…..over 100 different bloggers from all sides of every question. There’s pieces on sex, sport, music, politics, elections, bombings, piss ups, books…..there’s even a couple of pieces of the lost John B archives.

It really is an attempt to highlight the great pieces over the year. There are angry pieces, funny ones, intensely sad and ones that should, at least they do me, engender great venom and bile against their targets.

It might also serve as an explanation to people about what you do in that darkened room for so long each day. “Umm, what is this bloogger thing then dear? ” and instead of tirades about the Citizen Journalist you can just point them to this selection.

I have not read the book, but knowing a bit about the blogosphere, ISTM that there is at least the potential for some great reading here. There is such a wide variety of blogs out there on all sorts of subjects that you’re bound to come across some real gems. After all blogging has allowed anyone armed with a computer and a ‘net connection to spew out prose. This book might help you track down some of the gems. I think that Tim writes an interesting blog (hence my link to it) so hopefully his skills as an editor will have made the book worthwhile. It might make a good Xmas present for someone…

More on the Stockwell tube shooting

This story seems to get more and more disturbing as times goes on. Whilst of course we’ve still to have the report from the inquiry and thus don’t yet know the full facts, the recently leaked documents suggest that almost every aspect of the story we were initially told is incorrect.

According to this BBC report on the matter, the leaked documents suggest that Mr Menezes did not jump the barrier at the station, but entered normally, picked up a newspaper and proceeded to the platforms. He only ran when a train was near and was sitting down when the police boarded the train, he stood up after the police shouted “police” and was then restrained by one officer whilst another shot him. He was not wearing a bulky coat and nor was it the case that he ran when police challenged him.

This account suggests that until the police boarded the train, Menezes was not aware of being followed. It also suggests that he did not do anything unusual, indeed he was simply going about his business, and the only reason for the police to think he was up to no good was that he emerged from a building under their surveillance and they thought he was one of their targets.

Now it seems to me that for a decision to shoot to be justifiable, the police needed to have evidence that the suspect had a bomb on him or under his control at the time they were surveilling him. Nothing I’ve read so far suggests they did, and it looks more and more like the only reason they had for shooting him was misidentifying him as someone they’re looking for. If this is borne out by the inquiry then heads should roll.

Blog revamp

You might notice that my blog is looking a bit different! My old template had acquired a few bugs I couldn’t eliminate for some reason so I ditched it and chose a new one (from Blogger’s standard selection — the old one was chosen from there too) which I’ve now tweaked. Constructive feedback is appreciated on the new choice.