Recently in Politics and Religion Category

This page began as: Some Ruminations on History, and on our American Regents, on the occasion of the second Coronation of His Imperial Majesty George III back in 2005.

I remain fond, as a nominal UK native, raised in the USA, of this idea of numbering American Presidents as if they were real Monarchs. And, this page has been overdue for a touch-up, after all we witnessed, over two years ago, to condign fanfare, the Coronation of Barack I. In keeping with the original theme of this page, it is worth noting that while tales of descent from African kings that Barack I was told as a boy turned out to have been apocryphal, he may well be able to claim descent, on his mother's side, from a Scottish king, and shared ancestry with as many as seven American regents.

In 1789, our first president under our current constitution, George I, effectively succeeded British king George III, of the House of Hanover, as America's supreme authority. Britain's , of course, saw his legacy tarnished when he allowed his military become entangled in a stubborn insurgency in a distant part of the empire that didn't quite turn out the way he had planned. There have been two more homegrown Georges, now, since then. We've effectively come full circle.

Reckoning time in terms of the reigns of one's country's regents is a time-honoured Anglo-Saxon tradition, I'm told, and one I've informally observed without thinking about it myself over the years. "That technology was already considered obsolete during the Nixon Administration", would be the kind of thing I'd find myself saying.

I'm amused by the idea of naming our Heads of State in the same traditional manner as Popes and Kings, using a single Christian Name, and a Roman Numeral. The results of doing so to America's forty-three regents are shown in the table to the right. Doing so gives one pause, and causes one to ponder the considerable imperial trappings of the American presidency.

We have witnessed no fewer than five true cases of dynastic succession, accounting for fully ten of forty-three reigns. It is difficult indeed to fathom how such numbers could have arisen by chance, or even through merit.

Our first dynasty, the House of Adams, saw the son of John I, John II retake the throne in 1825.

The second, the House of Harrison, witnessed the ascension of Benjamin I, the grandson of William I in 1889.

In 1893, the Cleveland Restoration saw Stephen I reclaim the throne himself from Benjamin I, whom had in turn taken it from him.

In 1933, the inauguration of Franklin II, a cousin of Theodore I returned the House of Roosevelt to power. Interestingly, even though Franklin II and Theodore I themselves were fifth cousins, Franklin II's consort, Anna Eleanor, was herself a Roosevelt, and indeed, was the niece of Theodore I. The Hapsburgs, and Europe, held no monopoly on aristocratic inbreeding, it would seem.

Martin I was of purely Dutch ancestry. He and his wife Spoke Dutch at home. Martin I and Theodore I were third cousins twice removed.

The ghastly murder of the youthful, urbane and widely admired Irishman John V in 1963 brought Lyndon I to the throne, but this reestablished no Johnson dynasty, for he was of no relation whatsoever to Andrew II. The House of Johnson is a false dynasty.

Indeed Andrew II.and Lyndon I are among only a relative handful of those who have occupied the throne whom are not at least distant cousins to at least some of the others who've sat upon it. The other American Commoners: Andrew I, James III, Chester I, William III, Dwight I, John V, James VI, Ronald I, and William IV. James VI is related, however, to genuine indigenous American Royalty: Elvis Presley.

Finally, the first Coronation of George III, the son of George II, and the scion of the House of Bush, in 2001, consummated America's first father-son dynastic succession since the restoration of the Adams Family. Barbara Pierce Bush, the consort of George II, and mother to George III, is herself a distant cousin of Franklin I.

Our coronations are traditionally the occasions where we put aside the rancor and division that accompany our often contentious imperial ascension process, and 2005 we united behind, and swore our allegiance to George III, he having prevailed over both a challenger (the would-be Albert I), and an usurper (an aspiring John VI) to lay claim to his crown.

Barack I took his crown in 2009 by vanquishing a fellow son of a Scottish King William I and yet another prospective John VI.

Were we more like say, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, we'd further festoon his title with such honourifics as Monarch of the Forty-Eight Contiguous United States of America and Alaska and Hawaii, Defender of the Faith, and Emperor of Mesopotamia, but we Americans are an egalitarian lot, and tend to eschew such airs and pretensions.

Despite the fact that the United States is nominally a constitutional republic, and not a monarchy, eight of America's forty-two regents have, tragically, and ironically, nonetheless (inadvertently, one must presume) enjoyed the imperial prerogative that a King (all have been male) may serve for life. Four, William I, Zachary I, Warren I, and Franklin II (our longest serving regent), died on the throne of natural causes.

We have, sadly, witnessed four regicides in the course of our brief history. Abraham I, James V, William II, and John V, all saw their reigns brought to an end by assassin's bullets. In 1981, Ronald I was shot and severely wounded, and nearly followed suit, but for timely medical attention. Indeed, historians believe that both James V and William II could have survived their wounds given better medical care.

Gerald I, and Harry I both survived assassination attempts unscathed while on the throne. Franklin II survived an assassination attempt unharmed during the interregnum prior to his coronation. Theodore I was shot, but survived during his Bull Moose campaign to restore the House of Roosevelt in 1912, a battle that split the Tories between him and William III, thereby paving the way for the eventual ascension of the scholarly pacifist Thomas II.

There are many who believe that only assassin's bullets and scandal thwarted the dynastic ambitions of the House of Kennedy and the eventual elevation of John IV's siblings Robert I, and/or perhaps even Edward I to the throne. The untimely death of Kennedy Crown Prince, and paparazzi favorite, John Jr. in 1999 further diminished the family's dynastic potential.

Amendment XXII to the constitution effectively limited the reign of any given individual to no more than ten years. Even before this, reigns were customarily short, especially by comparison with European standards, in keeping with the precedent set by George I. For example, the reign of Queen Victoria spanned those of fully eighteen American regimes, from Martin I, through William II. Indeed, Franklin II was widely excoriated for breaking George I's precedent, and his breach thereof helped lead to the passage of the twenty-second amendment.

One regent, Richard I, was forced to abdicate in 1974. Alas, not for love. His successor, Gerald I, thereupon became America's first utterly unelected Head of State, having been appointed, not elected to the rank of Vice-President of the Realm, after the heir apparent who would have been Spiro I was forced to abdicate in disgrace, restoring at last the sacred principle of rule by Divine Right.

God Save the King

O Lord our God arise,
Scatter his enemies
And make them fall;
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all!

© 2005, 2011 by The Laputan Press, Ltd.

In keeping with the spirit of Catfish in the Memepool, I've located another 'blog where huge swaths of this notion had emerged quite independently in an at times uncannily similar manner. I'm grateful to this site's author for his superior research into the Christian names for Stephen I, Thomas II, and John IV. Here is another hit. Here is a fascinating rundown on the ancestry of the presidents from Burke's Peerage.

The memepool is, after all, mankind's most magnificent achievement...
--Thomas Jay Peckish II

The role of a Computer Science Department should be to provide a forum for the study of its indigenous subject matter, code, bits, The Program, and not a permanent venue for the Special Olympics of mathematics...
--Thomas Jay Peckish II

In the Beginning there was the Word, or at Least the Byte...
--The Rev. Thomas Jay Peckish II

I was greeted the other morning by an email from a colleague to one of our local mailing lists inquiring as to whether this artfully crafted conference web page parody was my Machiavellian Invention. Anytime something a tad puckish comes along, they blame me. Were this really a "Machiavellian Invention", the authors would have loaded it up with AdSense tiles and tried to get it Slashdotted.

Multiple sources are telling the Laputan Press that Waterfall 2006 is the heretofore unacknowledged brainchild of a prankster by the name of Mike Cohn...

Having somehow missed the CFP, I informed one of the organizers that I'd just take Salmon Ladders: Adding Feedback to the Waterfall Model Saves Fish, and Keeps your Project from Spiraling Down the Drain somewhere where it was wanted. I received this rather brusque reply:

A talk about feedback ("going upstream") would be entirely inappropriate at this conference. Feedback is only needed if there's a chance you might get things wrong. If you do things right, you won't get things wrong. All it takes to do things right is to Follow The Bloody Process. Already, we see that not enough of the speakers realize the importance of this simple principle. We don't need any more apostates.

This all said, the mirth and glee on the part of the agile insurgency associated with the ritual mocking and flogging of this dead horse is sadly misplaced. This horse is very much alive and with us. Once again, commando coders working in teams of sizes 10⁰ and 10¹ go about their work oblivious to the machinations of the infantrymen in the trenches of the 10² and 10³ world, where callous officers are still re-fighting World War I. Herein lies a tale, albeit for another day.

To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, the big-iron SEI worlds and the XP Agile cultures are two peoples divided by a common tongue. I'm amazed how many times over the last twenty years I've heard commando and infantry people us the same language to describe radically different realities, completely oblivious to these differences in style and scale. At each of these scales, its denizens take it as implicit that their reality is the reality. Such assumptions are largely unspoken, and surprisingly pervasive. When one's context changes slowly, if at all, the temptation to postulate that which is stable and persistent in that context must hold universally can be hard to restrain.

This kind of context sensitivity is one of my favorite things about patterns.

More Waterfall 2006 commentary can be found here and here. Tags: Waterfall Agile Programming

It looks like our neighbors up in America's unfinished attic are changing their lead dog and veering their sled-of-state a touch to the right. It seems as if some among the current team had been sneaking a snack or two from the wrong bowls.

Catfish congratulates PM-elect Stephen Harper on his avalanche victory... …he seems to be the beneficiary of some bizarre hemispheric karmic balancing act involving Chile and Bolivia…

All and all I'm reminded of my favorite Canadian joke, a tidbit I picked up from the old National Lampoon sometime during the early seventies:
Q: When Wake Up Little Susie was number one in the United States, what song was number one in Canada?
A: Who cares, but three weeks later it was Wake Up Little Susie.

Lest anyone think I've singled out The Dominion, the "Lebensraum-lite" undercurrent underlying the versatile geopolitical jape with which this post opened can also be retargeted to construe Australia as "Indonesia's unfinished basement", or Siberia as "China's unfinished attic"…
--TJP2

Robert Biddle subsequently added, re: Wake Up Little Susie:

In fact, this was also the number one song in Canada the week before it was in the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number-one_hits_of_1957_%28USA%29 http://www.1050chum.com/index_chumcharts.aspx?chart=21 As if I care...

Given that the terms of the current United States Constitution remain in force and are duly honored, and barring calamity or disgrace, the reign of His Imperial Majesty George III will come to an end, with the Coronation of his successor, whomever he or she may be, exactly three years from today, on 20 January 2009, at 12:00 EST, 11:00 CST.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether this is good news or bad news.

That's right, this is our third ruler named George. His father was our second. The father of our country was the first. Our last ruler under British authority was also called George III. His poll numbers weren't the greatest either. What goes around...

It may seem odd that I notice this date every year, but it has a way of being a personally auspicious occasion. Witness, for instance, this post. We reckon time by the reigns of our regents, and since the days of Franklin II, this has been our official ceremonial day of transition. Of course, I'd pretty much beaten this topic to death last year too...

As part of a effort to try to figure out what this "tagging" craze is about, I've created a Technorati Profile. Let's see if I regret it.

It seems likely that I'll need to upgrade Movable Type to really put this stuff through its paces, and thereby begin to form an informed opinion, but that will have to wait. As ace, recovering System Administrator Thomas Jay Peckish II always says: "Don't mess with it if you don't have time to break it..." or something a lot like that.

Now, an MT upgrade could well allow Catfish to allow comments too. Hmmm…

In the meantime, at least my bilingual pun drew a chuckle from a prominent member of the Pan-Teutonic Tech-Journalistic Community...

So, anyhow, here goes: tag Technorati Tags Tagging Technorati Tags Thomas Jay Peckish II

So, here's what Technorati coughs up for TJP2. I'm still working on getting the hang of how to get these things to work:

Posts that contain Thomas Jay Peckish II per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

I came across this utterly fascinating, four-year-old interview with Carver Mead in a weblog calling itself Laputan Logic, of all things. The "dark age" he refers to is the last seventy years...

I last came across Mead at the very first International Conference on Neural Networks in San Diego in 1988. His iconoclastic embrace of neural networks, which were then themselves just emerging from a twenty-year "dark age" brought on by their having been declared heresy at the hands of orthodox AI Perceptron critics like Minsky and his ilk, had impressed me at the time...

All politics is local.
--Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill

All software engineering is politics...
--Thomas Jay Peckish II

If it had been disclosed that Albert Einstein had been using some sort of mental performance enhancing substance, would people have demanded that he return his Nobel Prize?
--Thomas Jay Peckish II

Some ruminations on history, and on our American Regents, on the occasion of the second Coronation of His Imperial Majesty George III.

In 1789, our first president under our current constitution, George I, effectively succeeded British king George III, of the House of Hanover, as America's supreme authority. Britain's , of course, saw his legacy tarnished when he allowed his military become entangled in a stubborn insurgency in a distant part of the empire that didn't quite turn out the way he had planned. There have been two more homegrown Georges, now, since then. We've effectively come full circle.

Reckoning time in terms of the reigns of one's country's regents is a time-honoured Anglo-Saxon tradition, I'm told, and one I've informally observed without thinking about it myself over the years. "That technology was already considered obsolete during the Nixon Administration", would be the kind of thing I'd find myself saying.

Lately, I've become amused by the thought of naming our Heads of State in the same traditional manner as Popes and Kings, using a single Christian Name, and a Roman Numeral. The results of doing so to America's forty-two regents are shown in the table to the right. Doing so gives one pause, and causes one to ponder the considerable imperial trappings of the American presidency.

We have witnessed no fewer than five true cases of dynastic succession, accounting for fully ten of forty-three reigns. It is difficult indeed to fathom how such numbers could have arisen by chance, or even through merit.

Our first dynasty, the House of Adams, saw the son of John I, John II retake the throne in 1825.

The second, the House of Harrison, witnessed the ascension of Benjamin I, the grandson of William I in 1889.

In 1893, the Cleveland Restoration saw Stephen I reclaim the throne himself from Benjamin I, whom had in turn taken it from him.

In 1933, the inauguration of Franklin II, a cousin of Theodore I returned the House of Roosevelt to power. Interestingly, even though Franklin II and Theodore I themselves were fifth cousins, Franklin II's consort, Anna Eleanor, was herself a Roosevelt, and indeed, was the niece of Theodore I. The Hapsburgs, and Europe, held no monopoly on aristocratic inbreeding, it would seem.

Martin I was of purely Dutch ancestry. He and his wife Spoke Dutch at home. Martin I and Theodore I were third cousins twice removed.

The ghastly murder of the youthful, urbane and widely admired Irishman John V in 1963 brought Lyndon I to the throne, but this reestablished no Johnson dynasty, for he was of no relation whatsoever to Andrew II. The House of Johnson is a false dynasty.

Indeed Andrew II.and Lyndon I are among only a relative handful of those who have occupied the throne whom are not at least distant cousins to at least some of the others who've sat upon it. The other American Commoners: Andrew I, James III, Chester I, William III, Dwight I, John V, James VI, Ronald I, and William IV. James VI is related, however, to genuine indigenous American Royalty: Elvis Presley.

Finally, the first Coronation of George III, the son of George II, and the scion of the House of Bush, in 2001, consummated America's first father-son dynastic succession since the restoration of the Adams Family. Barbara Pierce Bush, the consort of George II, and mother to George III, is herself a distant cousin of Franklin I.

Our coronations are traditionally the occasions where we put aside the rancor and division that accompany our often contentious imperial ascension process In 2005 we united behind, and sworer our allegiance to George III, he having prevailed over both a challenger (the would-be Albert I), and an usurper (an aspiring John VI) to lay claim to his crown.

Were we more like say, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, we'd further festoon his title with such honourifics as Monarch of the Forty-Eight Contiguous United States of America and Alaska and Hawaii, Defender of the Faith, and Emperor of Mesopotamia, but we Americans are an egalitarian lot, and tend to eschew such airs and pretensions.

Despite the fact that the United States is nominally a constitutional republic, and not a monarchy, eight of America's forty-two regents have, tragically, and ironically, nonetheless (inadvertently, one must presume) enjoyed the imperial prerogative that a King (all have been male) may serve for life. Four, William I, Zachary I, Warren I, and Franklin II (our longest serving regent), died on the throne of natural causes.

We have, sadly, witnessed four regicides in the course of our brief history. Abraham I, James V, William II, and John V, all saw their reigns brought to an end by assassin's bullets. In 1981, Ronald I was shot and severely wounded, and nearly followed suit, but for timely medical attention. Indeed, historians believe that both James V and William II could have survived their wounds given better medical care.

Gerald I, and Harry I both survived assassination attempts unscathed while on the throne. Franklin II survived an assassination attempt unharmed during the interregnum prior to his coronation. Theodore I was shot, but survived during his Bull Moose campaign to restore the House of Roosevelt in 1912, a battle that split the Tories between him and William III, thereby paving the way for the eventual ascension of the scholarly pacifist Thomas II.

There are many who believe that only assassin's bullets and scandal thwarted the dynastic ambitions of the House of Kennedy and the eventual elevation of John IV's siblings Robert I, and/or perhaps even Edward I to the throne. The untimely death of Kennedy Crown Prince, and paparazzi favorite, John Jr. in 1999 further diminished the family's dynastic potential.

Amendment XXII to the constitution effectively limited the reign of any given individual to no more than ten years. Even before this, reigns were customarily short, especially by comparison with European standards, in keeping with the precedent set by George I. For example, the reign of Queen Victoria spanned those of fully eighteen American regimes, from Martin I, through William II. Indeed, Franklin II was widely excoriated for breaking George I's precedent, and his breach thereof helped lead to the passage of the twenty-second amendment.

One regent, Richard I, was forced to abdicate in 1974. Alas, not for love. His successor, Gerald I, thereupon became America's first utterly unelected Head of State, having been appointed, not elected to the rank of Vice-President of the Realm, after the heir apparent who would have been Spiro I was forced to abdicate in disgrace, restoring at last the sacred principle of rule by Divine Right.

God Save the King

O Lord our God arise,
Scatter his enemies
And make them fall;
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all!

© 2005 by The Laputan Press, Ltd.

In keeping with the spirit of Catfish in the Memepool, I've located another 'blog where huge swaths of this notion had emerged quite independently in an at times uncannily similar manner. I'm grateful to this site's author for his superior research into the Christian names for Stephen I, Thomas II, and John IV. Here is another hit. Here is a fascinating rundown on the ancestry of the presidents from Burke's Peerage.

We tried the experiment whereby you drive down the cost of labor to nothing in the United States during the antebellum period, and that didn’t work out very well, did it?

--Thomas Jay Peckish II

After a longer than usual absence from cultivating this space, I had the distinct displeasure of having to remove over 100 postings from some of the most sleazy, repugnant bottom feeders around. In the unlikely event that anyone else stumbled across any of the vile bilge I had to dredge through, my apologies...

Never has so much been promised by so many for so little...
--Thomas Jay Peckish II, channeling Winston S. Churchill...

Anyone can walk on water if it is cold enough.
--Thomas Jay Peckish II, reciting an "old" Canadian Proverb...

If you need a mission statement, you are not really on a mission...
--Thomas Jay Peckish II

Where have the Ph.Ds gone? - The Times of India

An interesting take on international scholarship from the Times of India that mentions UIUC. I guess I'm part of the problem any way I cut it...

There are answers. There is no answer.
--Thomas Jay Peckish II, in a Post-Modern Mood...

A major problem with self-deprecating humor is that most people are more than content to simply take one at one’s word.
--Thomas Jay Peckish II

http://physicsweb.org/article/news/7/7/13 An article on how a few zealots (fixed opinions) seeded / secreted in a population can turn it in a certain direction. This phenomenon, combined with the virtual intimacy of mass media, can have a disproportionately influencial impact on a population. Recall the immediacy of virtual disaster: TV kidnappings, sniper shootings, and terrorist atrocities engender a visceral sense of peril that goes way beyond the objective threat they pose. If we've seen carnage, we don't bother to calculate the odds. By a similar token, we regard our immediate friends and aquantances as more credible than "talking heads". A virtual zealot who buys in at "buddy" could wield considerable influence. Meld this with the virtual tribal zeal of sporting affiliation, and you've got a potentially decisive combination...

The OOPSLA 2002 gala event was held at the Experience Music Project Museum. I'd been looking forward to it for months.

We’d all timed our drugs (such as they are these days, a dangerous mix of caffeine and Merlot) so as to have them kick/we’d peak in just as we got to Paul Allen’s Hendrix Mausoleum at the base of the Space Syringe, ‘er Needle.

I was quite amazed by the lengths to which the folks at the EMP went to make our rock and roll experience as authentic as possible. Indeed, some of the most disagreeable aspects of said experience were uncannily reenacted in meticulous detail.

We were promised full access to the building for as long as we needed it when we were shown it last year. Indeed, we were told that our booking was the inaugural deal for EMP’s use for this sort of event.

Instead, our attendees were greeted at the doors by a phalanx of beefy bouncers who could have been flown in from the Meadowlands, and herded to the back doors for a vivid taste of that quintessential cheap seats experience.

Indeed, many were told not to enter the building at all if they wanted food. They were directed instead to a waterlogged plastic rain tent across busy Denny Way, where a platoon of off-duty Seattle cops sat complacently, evidently just in case any rowdy hackers revolted at their treatement and rioted.

There were portapotties, waterlogged tents with drenched dancefloors. These rugs were best cut in galoshes.

The reason for all of this was MTV’s Paul Allen/Bill and Melinda Gates benefit, replete with stars like the Dave Mathews band, J. Lo, and God knows what rap acts.

We got black curtains and velvet ropes. The young and hip and beautiful were ushered past like royalty, while guards glowered at middle aged techies as if each was a potential gatecrasher.

Heaven forbid that a beer gut, bald spot, or PhD recipient might appear on MTV, or that an actual techie might show up at Paul Allen's building for a Gates Foundation sponsored event...

The apoplectic pundits have spent the last two weeks decreeing the death of irony. And then this. I can' t tell you how much the Highjackers in Hell piece has done to bolster my spirits. Such a people as can produce humor such as this can never be vanquished.

The horrible truth: productivity is inversely proportional to team size.
--Peckish's First Law of Software Engineering

I think it has something to do with communication overhead. It may be most pronounced at 10**2. After that, inter-group firewalls intervene… To save Peckish's Law, you need to define team size as the actually number of people with whom you must coordinate/communicate.

Communication and decision-making dominate, I'm afraid. Negotiation rules the day. As team size increases, it becomes increasingly more useful not that you do the hard stuff cleverly, but that you do the easy stuff adequately/reliably…

My favorite team size is 10**0. Beyond that, it's all politics
--Thomas Jay Peckish II, on Team Size...

Neural Nets will eventually bring about true AI, but contemporary rule-based agents rely on distillations of our intelligence, and not their own...
--Thomas Jay Peckish II

Programming is about sculpting memory in the same sense that Genesis was about throwing a few quarks together...
--Thomas Jay Peckish II

People are more complicated that the weather...
--Thomas Jay Peckish II

Mud made the monkey, memes made the man...
--Thomas Jay Peckish II

Mud made Monkeys. Memes made Men. In the sense that the meme pool infuses us with a "spirit" of sorts, we are indeed unique among all creation.

I don't believe the American people want a gelding in the White House.
--Stephen Grover Cleveland

EI: 3 out of 10
Extrovert+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+Introvert
                        |
                       30%
SN: 15 out of 20
Sensation+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+iNtuition
                                              |
                                             75%
TF: 8 out of 20
Thinking +----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+Feeling
                             |
                            40%
JP: 13 out of 20
Judging  +----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+Perceiving
                                         |
                                        65%

Your Jungian Personality type is ENTP