Sunday, July 02, 2017
IV
I like to watch for interesting dynastic descendants, and I like to watch for dynastic names that go beyond III. The whole I II III thing is growing obsolete, but IV and V have always been rare. Ran into a double hit in an article about sneaky dealings among the Episcopalians.
Should the number be treated separately as an integer variable? Probably not. It's an ordinal, not a cardinal; and it's an ordinal that isn't always properly sequenced. Henry Ford II was actually Henry Senior's grandson.
In more modern languages you could handle it as an associative index...
As a dict in Python:
HermanHollerith =
{
'I' : 'Herman Hollerith',
'II' : 'Herman Hollerith Jr',
'III' : 'Herman Hollerith III',
'IV' : 'Herman Hollerith IV'
}
print HermanHollerith['IV']
Herman Hollerith IV
¶ 3:21 PM 
An attorney representing the Bishop of Los Angeles before a church hearing panel investigating him for misconduct, has conceded the Rt. Rev. J. Jon Bruno had entered into an agreement to sell the rectory and parish properties of St James Episcopal Church in Newport Beach. On 22 June 2017 Julie Dean Larsen, the deputy chancellor of the Diocese of Los Angeles, wrote to the hearing panel chaired by the Bishop of Southern Virginia, the Rt. Rev. Herman Hollerith IV, that her client had not been able to answer their questions of June 9. 14 and 21 if he had made a deal to sell the property, because he had signed a confidentiality agreement with the buyer.Hey! We got a IV and we got an unexpected descendant. Herman Hollerith IV. Is he really the IV from THE Herman Hollerith? Looking up, the answer is yes. Unlike many inventors, the original didn't get tangled up in lawsuits or lose everything when his company was sold. He stayed with IBM as a consultant and made a comfortable amount of money, then retired. His descendants remained prominent citizens. Of course the name should be written as a Hollerith constant, 21HHERMAN HOLLERITH IV to honor the constant Hollerith tradition.
Should the number be treated separately as an integer variable? Probably not. It's an ordinal, not a cardinal; and it's an ordinal that isn't always properly sequenced. Henry Ford II was actually Henry Senior's grandson.
In more modern languages you could handle it as an associative index...
As a dict in Python:
HermanHollerith =
{
'I' : 'Herman Hollerith',
'II' : 'Herman Hollerith Jr',
'III' : 'Herman Hollerith III',
'IV' : 'Herman Hollerith IV'
}
print HermanHollerith['IV']
Herman Hollerith IV
¶ 3:21 PM
