How many people have got votes in the U.S. electoral college on three or more occasions?

The answer is twenty-two:

George Washington:
1) Elected President in 1789, with 69 votes of a possible 69
2) Elected President in 1792, with 132 votes of a possible 132
3) despite announcing that he did not want the job again, got 2 votes out of a possible 138 in 1796.

John Adams:
1) Elected Vice-President in 1789, with 34 votes of a possible 69
2) Elected Vice-President in 1792, with 77 votes of a possible 132
3) Elected President in 1796, with 71 votes of a possible 138
4) Runner-up in the 1800 presidential election, with 65 votes of a possible 138

John Jay:
1) Runner-up in the 1789 election, with 9 votes of a possible 69
2) A long way behind in the 1796 election, with 5 votes of a possible 138
3) A long way behind in the 1800 election, with 1 vote of a possible 138

George Clinton:
1) a long way behind in the 1789 election, with 3 electoral votes out of a possible 69
2) Runner-up in the 1792 election, with 50 votes out of a possible 132
3) A long way behind in the 1796 election, with 7 votes of a possible 138
4) Elected Vice-President in 1804 with 162 votes out of 176
5) Elected Vice-President in 1808 with 113 votes out of 175 (also got 6 votes for President)

Thomas Jefferson:
1) A long way behind in the 1792 election, with 4 votes of a possible 132
2) Elected Vice-President in 1796, with 68 votes of a possible 138
3) Topped the electoral college vote, jointly with Aaron Burr, in 1800 with 73 votes of a possible 138; subsequently elected President by the House of Representatives.
4) Elected President in 1804 with 162 votes out of 176

Aaron Burr:
1) A long way behind in the 1792 election, with 1 vote of a possible 132
2) Some way off in the 1796 election, with 30 votes of a possible 138
3) Topped the electoral college vote, jointly with Thomas Jefferson, in 1800 with 73 votes of a possible 138; subsequently chosen as Vice-President by the House of Representatives

Charles Cotesworth Pinckney:
1) A long way behind in the 1796 election, with 1 vote out of a possible 138
2) Some way off in the 1800 election (where he was effectively Adams’ running-mate) with 64 votes of a possible 138
3) Runner-up for President in 1804 with 14 votes out of 176
4) Runner-up for President in 1808 with 47 votes out of 175

Rufus King:
1) Runner-up for Vice-President in 1804, with 12 votes out of 176
2) Runner-up for Vice-President in 1808, with 47 votes out of 175
3) Runner-up for President in 1816, with 34 votes out of 217

John Quincy Adams:
1) Got the only vote not cast for James Monroe in the 1820 Presidential election
2) Came second in the 1824 electoral college vote for President, with 84 out of 261, but subsequently elected President by the House of Representatives
3) Runner-up for President in 1828, with 83 votes out of 261

Andrew Jackson:
1) Topped the electoral college vote for President with 99 votes out of 261 in 1824, but lost the election in the House of Representatives; also got 13 votes for Vice-President that year
2) Elected President in 1828, with 178 votes out of 261
3) Elected President in 1832, with 219 votes out of 286

Henry Clay:
1) Came fourth out of four in the electoral college vote for President in 1824, with 37 votes out of 261; also got 2 votes for Vice-President that year (again coming last, of the six candidates)
2) Runner-up for President in 1832, with 49 votes out of 268
3) Runner-up for President in 1844, with 105 votes out of 275

Martin Van Buren:
1) Got 9 votes out of 261 for Vice-President in 1824
2) Elected Vice-President in 1828, with 189 votes out of 286
3) Elected President in 1836, with 170 votes out of 294
4) Runner-up for President in 1840, with 60 votes out of 294

Thomas Andrews Hendricks:
1) Runner-up for President in 1872, with 42 votes out of 349 (the Democratic candidate, Horace Greeley, had died, and Hendricks got the majority of his votes)
2) Runner-up for Vice-President in 1876, with 184 votes out of 369 (even though the Tilden/Hendricks ticket had won the popular vote)
3) Elected Vice-President in 1884, with 219 votes out of 401 (and then died a year after the election)

Grover Cleveland:
1) Elected President in 1884, with 219 votes out of 401
2) Runner-up for President in 1888, with 168 votes out of 401
3) Elected President in 1892, with 277 votes out of 444

William Jennings Bryan:
1) Runner-up for President in 1896, with 176 votes out of 447
2) Runner-up for President in 1900, with 155 votes out of 447
3) Runner-up for President in 1908, with 162 votes out of 483

Theodore Roosevelt:
1) Elected Vice-President in 1900, with 292 votes out of 447 (and became President on McKinley’s death in September 1901)
2) Elected President in 1904, with 336 votes out of 476
3) Runner-up for President in 1912, with 88 votes out of 531

Franklin D. Roosevelt:
1) Runner-up for Vice-President in 1920, with 127 votes out of 531
2) Elected President in 1932, with 472 votes out of 531
3) Elected President in 1936, with 523 votes out of 531
4) Elected President in 1940, with 449 votes out of 531
5) Elected President in 1944, with 432 votes out of 531 (and then died in April 1945)

Richard M. Nixon
1) Elected Vice-President in 1952, with 442 votes out of 531
2) Elected Vice-President in 1956, with 457 votes out of 531
3) Runner-up for President in 1960, with 219 votes out of 537
4) Elected President in 1968, with 301 votes out of 538
5) Elected President in 1972, with 520 votes out of 538 (and then resigned in August 1974)

Walter “Fritz” Mondale:
1) Elected Vice-President in 1976, with 297 votes out of 538
2) Runner-up for Vice-President in 1980, with 49 votes out of 538
3) Runner-up for President in 1984, with 13 votes out of 538

Ronald Reagan:
1) Got 1 electoral college vote for President in 1976, from a “faithless elector” pledged to outgoing president Gerald Ford
2) Elected President in 1980, with 489 votes out of 538
3) Elected President in 1984, with 525 votes out of 538

George HW Bush:
1) Elected Vice-President in 1980, with 489 votes out of 538
2) Elected Vice-President in 1984, with 525 votes out of 538
3) Elected President in 1988, with 426 votes out of 538
4) Runner-up for President in 1992, with 168 out of 538 votes

Al Gore:
1) Elected Vice-President in 1992, with 370 out of 538 votes
2) Elected Vice-President in 1996, with 379 votes out of 538
3) Runner-up for President in 2000, with 266 votes out of 528 (despite winning the popular vote)

19) Persuasion, by Jane Austen

Again, driven to read this at last by my posts here and here. It’s a very nice story, of repressed emotions, shallow pretensions, and the tentative process of picking up a relationship after eight years of interruption. The heroine, Anne Elliott, is perhaps a little too flawless and downtrodden by her useless family, but she does manage to find her way to self-determination in the end. There were a couple of passages in the penultimate chapter that almost seemed to lurch into feminism. A good read.

18) The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Finally shamed into reading this by this meme, though it was also part of my 2006 reading resolutions.

Am I unusual in finding the grand sweeping philosophical monologues about the nature of God and Man very skimmable? Apart from the tendency of the characters to go into long diatribes reinforcing how each of the three (or four) brothers represents a different facet of personality, it’s a fairly engaging story; the characters – and especially the small-town Russian setting – sketched vividly and memorably, and the plot accelerating towards the end to the conclusion. I was particularly taken with the story of the schoolboys which constitutes Book Ten of the narrative; I did wonder at first if it was going to turn out to be at all relevant to the conclusion, but in fact I think it does tie in very nicely to the last chapter.

Anyway, I’m glad that is over.

…interview went well. So they are calling in references, and putting it to their Board. (I assume they are not going to ask the Board to approve not offering me the job!)

I should hear at the end of next week. (I will be in Ankara Wed-Fri, worse luck.)

According to Ari Vatanen MEP:

“The biggest problem in the European Union is not unemployment, pollution, low prices for wheat or not even the enlargement – it is the lack of love.”

Well, it’s a point of view.

“The leader of Kalmykia (a Russian region), Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, claims he was abducted by aliens in 1997, not 1999.”

…job interview tomorrow.

While I do generally like the new livejournal comment tracking system, I must remember that now I’ve turned off the old system, I no longer get automoatic notification of replies to my comments on other people’s journals, or of comments to my posts in places other than , unless I remember to ask for them.

A couple of belated replies going out now (to and . Apologies to anyone else who has been missed.

There are two Doctor Who stories largely set in a more or less contemporary parallel universe, the 1970 Jon Pertwee series “Inferno” and the 2006 David Tennant two-parter “Rise of the Cybermen”/”The Age of Steel”. I rewatched the latter, and the relevant episodes of the former, to compare and contrast the two takes on the same theme, thirty-six years apart, and in particular (this being my own personal area of greatest interest) to consider the two stories’ takes on the politics of a parallel Britain, and what that tells us about how the world has changed since the year Edward Heath came to power.

There is one notable similarity between the two settings. In both, Britain has lost its monarchy. In the Brigade Leader’s world of 1970, we are told that the royal family were all shot after the second world war, and the dictator of the Republic appears in photographs on every wall (in fact depicting the BBC’s chief visual effects designer, Jack Kine). In Pete Tyler’s world of 2006, the “President of Great Britain” is played on screen by Don Warrington. We are not told what happened to the royals in this case (or to Northern Ireland).

The Doctor’s reaction in the Brigade Leader’s world of 1970 makes it quite clear that the fate of the royals is a Bad Thing about this world, one of numerous early signals that it is a much nastier place; this is backed up by the fact that almost every sympathetic character in our world has a nastier counterpart in the Brigade Leader’s world, with the exception perhaps of those who were already nasty on our side. At that time, of course, dictatorship was a lot closer to the audience in both time and space. The second world war had ended twenty-five years earlier, if not in the living memory of the kids in the tea-time audience, certainly in the memory of most of their parents. Portugal, Greece and Spain were still dictatorships, and Communism still had almost two decades to go in eastern Europe. The royals were seen as a contributing factor to Britain’s political security. (Gosh, it’s difficult to remember those days; indeed, the fall from grace of the royals and the fall of Communism happened about the same time.)

In 2006, Pete Tyler’s world at first looks rather more attractive than ours. The very first thing we see are Zeppelins, which, let’s face it, are just cool (it’s a safe bet that very few in the audience could remember their deadly use in bombing raids nine decades earlier). There are mildly interactive billboard advertisements; the president is Afro-Caribbean. Nice people who are dead in our world (Pete Tyler himself; Micky/Ricky’s grandmother) are alive here. It seems like the Doctor and friends have come to a better place – but it rapidly becomes clear that we haven’t; the President tells Pete that it is “a sick world”, his government is in the pocket of an insane plutocrat who also controls the media, the homeless are being rounded up for scientific experiments, working class areas are under a curfew, and even the rich have to get hold of whisky though the black market – “pardon me, Mr President!” (though given my earlier suspicions about Northern Ireland, that may well be whiskey).

In the Brigade Leader’s world, the violence of the system is overt – the Doctor’s first exposure to it when the Republican Security Forces start shooting at him, he leaves it as Squadron Leader Liz Shaw shoots the Brigade Leader dead, moments before they are all engulfed by magma from the Earth’s core. Pete Tyler’s world, however, finds redemption rather than holocaust. In “Doomsday” we find out that the “People’s Republic” have taken over Torchwood and put him in charge of it, in contrast to our world where it is a law unto itself.

So, what do we learn from this? One thing that I think hasn’t changed is the acceptability of parallel-world storylines. The notes on the “Inferno” DVD point out that the 1970 audience could well have been familiar with the 1969 Gerry and Sylvia Anderson film, Dopplegänger aka Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, which featured a similar storyline, and the John Wyndham short story “Random Quest”, in which the central character is shunted into a world where the second world war didn’t happen, was filmed for “Out of the Unknown” that same year (directed by Christopher Barry, who also directed the first Dalek story for Doctor Who). Indeed, if anything I felt that the explanation of what was going on was a bit more painfully explicit in 2006 than 1970.

The political difference: the threats to Britain’s social order are perceived today as much less visible and more insidious than they were in 1970. Then, the enemy was visible and armed, defending scientists who were likely to bring us all to Hell. Now, they are more subtle – corrupting our own government in order to remove our brains.

Scary, isn’t it? But that’s the point of good drama.

17) Kosovo’s Endgame: Sovereignty and Stability in the Western Balkans, by Aristotle Tziampiris

For the second time time this month I review a book on Kosovo given me by the author. He has done two important things with this book: first, it’s a pretty good comprehensive review of all the available academic and thinktanky literature on Kosovo as of late 2004, including also the full text of the key international documents on Kosovo’s future – UN Security council 1244, the Constitutional Framework, and the Serbian government’s proposals; second, I suspect it is the first book by a Greek author published in Greece which advocates Kosovo’s sovereignty in international law, subject to numerous conditions and restrictions, most of which I agree with (apart from the unworkable idea of total demilitarization).

Unfortunately there are two major problems with the book as well. The first is that the initial chapters contextualising the Kosovo problem seem to be trying to strike a balance between glib journalistic analysis of the situation and getting into the more theoretical aspects of international relations, and the argument therefore seemed to me to fall between two stools, not really clear which audience was being addressed. The second, which I suspect is not the author’s fault, is that the book is effectively two years too late. There is no reference at all to either of the reports of Kai Eide, the Norwegian ambassador to NATO, appointed to assess the situation in Kosovo by the UN, published in late 2004 and late 2005, which have completely altered the international political context; still less to the mission of former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari as the UN Special Envoy to resolve Kosovo’s status.

There is a very peculiar introduction by the author’s employers, a military think-tank near Athens, stating that the decision to publish the book was based on a rigorous independent academic assessment from which the author was excluded; further (and the bold face is as in the original text), “It should be emphasised that the opinions, arguments and analysis contained in this study are wholly the author’s.” These seem to me to be bizarre stipulations; it should be taken as read that any think-tank’s publications are peer-reviewed, and that the named author alone takes political responsibility; and I am really puzzled that the publisher feels moved to emphasize these points. Perhaps I am not sufficiently aware of the nuances and procedures in the Greek academic world, but the fact remains that if the Defence Analyses Institute had approved this text even twelve months ago (and preferably eighteen months ago) it would have been a lot more timely.

Yep, Peter Hain says that Northern Ireland needs “a Dr Who-style success”. But it’s not quite what you think…

16) Epic, by Conor Kostick

I know the author a little and I know the publisher rather better; but what really flagged it up to me was ‘s review, a year and a half ago. It’s a YA novel set on a resource-poor future colony world where participation in a WoW-type game is practically mandatory, and your success in battle determines who gets access to what resources. We’ve seen games used as the centre of sf stories before; on the spectrum that has Jack Chick’s take and Catherine Asaro’s typically dismal “A Roll of the Dice” at one end, and Iain Banks’ The Player of Games at the other, with Poul Anderson’s Hugo-and-Nebula-winning “The Saturn Game” somewhere in the middle, I reckon that Epic is well up in the top half, say about level with Sherri S Tepper’s True Game trilogy. (This classification will be of no help at all to you if you hate banks, like Asaro and find Tepper incomprehensible. But at least I tried.)

Knowing Conor’s politics I was wondering if or how he would manage to bring in the revolutionary overthrow of the system, and he does it through a combination of a young hero and his friends teaming up with older mentors (one the central character’s father, the other the ideological guide for the revolution). However he manages to keep the suspension of disbelief and (I would have thought) in a style attractive to the target readership. If you don’t want your teenagers exposed to insidious lefty propaganda, don’t let them read this book. On the other hand if you want them to be intellectually stimulated as well as entertained, you could do a heck of a lot worse.

See also Sherwood Smith‘s glowing review on the SF Site.

Answers to the World Language Test I posted about earlier. I got three wrong – they are in italics.

1. What immediate family of languages does English belong to?
Germanic

2. Which of the following is not a Romance language?
Greek

3. What is the official language of the African country of Angola?
Portuguese

4. Which of the following is not a Celtic language?
Danish

5. What is the language in common use in the city of Zurich, Switzerland?
German

6. What country has the largest Spanish speaking population?
Mexico

EUROPEAN LANGUAGES:
7. Of the following, which is most closely related to the English language?
West Frisian

8. A minority language is a language spoken by a minority of a population of a country, often times within an ethnic nation of that country. Which of these is not a minority language spoken in France? (Yes there are more languages than just french)
Friulian

9. Of the 4 languages previously listed, which one of them is a Celtic language?
Breton

10. Of all the minority languages in Western Europe, which is the most spoken and in a process of rebirth with anywhere from 10 to 12 million speakers?
Catalan

11. In what city would you expect to meet speakers of this minority language from the previous question?
Barcelona

12. Which of these is not an official language of Belgium?
English

13. Which of the following belong in the Slavic family of languages?
Bulgarian, Czech, Slovenian

14. Now for a couple easy questions. From what language are all Romance languages derived from?
Latin

15. The language from the previous question is itself a part of what family of languages?
Indo-European

BONUS: The following two questions are bonus questions, they are worth twice the points of a regular question if you get them right, but are of course significantly harder. As expected, if you guess wrong you get no points, however if you skip the question you’ll be given the point tally of a normal question. Up to you whether to attempt them. Good luck!
16. What was the language spoken by the first confirmed European explorers to reach the Americas? (Hint: This is harder than you think)
Old Norse – so no need to worry about Columbus and his crew.

17. What is the last documented Romance language to have gone extinct?
Dalmatian – Iberian and Cornish not Romance languages, and Galician still alive.

ASIA: Onward to Asia, which is, believe it or not, even more complicated in terms of languages than Europe. But fear not, this section is somewhat shorter than the previous.
18. Farsi is an official language of Pakistan.
False – further north and west.

19. The official language of Bhutan is?
Dzongkha – I knew this because it was one of 14 languages spoken fluently by a polyglot former colleague

20. Back to Europe for a second. What European language is commonly spoken in the Chinese city of Macau? (Besides English of course)
Portuguese

21. The Korean language is part of which language family?
This is still under debate. – surprised me but Wikipedia confirms it. I guessed anyway since I reckoned it wouldn’t be one of the options if it weren’t true.

22. The official languages of Singapore include all the following except…
Thai – Tamil yes, Thai no.

23. Tatar is a minority language spoken primarily in which of these Asian countries?
Russia – sneaky, of course, because people like to forget that Russia has all those Asian parts

24. Is Spanish currently an official language of the Philippines?.
No – slightly surprising, but US colonialism was obviously effective.

OCEANIA: Just a brief look at Oceania to end this section.
25. Fijian is the name for the native language of Fiji.
True – in English anyway.

26. The following are all common languages of Papau New Guinea except…
Maori – wrong islands.

AFRICA: Sorry, it doesn’t get any easier, hang in there you are almost done.
27. How many countries in Africa have speakers of Swahili? (Both official or not official)
10 – I took a wild guess at this but it turns out to be correct.

28. Bantu is a family of African languages primarily spoken in which region?
Southern/Central Africa

29. This African language was highly influenced by the settlement of Indonesians in the area it is spoken about 1500-2000 years ago.
Malagasy – spoken in Madagascar

30. What African language is derived primarily from 17th century Dutch?
Afrikaans – rather easy!

31. Is Arabic an official language of Mali?
No – the official languages are French and the Berber language Amazigh.

THE AMERICAS: The Final section. These languages are probably the least known in all the world, just a few more questions though.
32. The official language of Peru (besides Spanish) is…
There is none. – turns out Quechua is only official in the areas where it is spoken, rather than all over Peru.

33. Greenlandic (East Inuit) is an example of a(n)…
Eskimo-Aleut language

34. Navajo and Hopi are both languages with speakers in the state of Arizona, USA and also both derive from the same immediate language family.
False – turns out that Navajo is Athabascan, Hopi is Aztec.

35. Which of these South American countries is bilingual, speaking both Spanish and their indigenous language of Guarani?
Paraguay – a bit of a guess but got there by remembering where the Iguazú falls are.

36. What is the primary indigenous language of modern-day Quebec?
Cree – again a bit of a guess, but I knew the first two were geographically unlikely and hadn’t heard of Slavey (which it turns out on further research is spoken much further west, around the Great Slave Lake).

BONUS: One final bonus question. Same rules as before apply. If you do not attempt it you get a regular score. You get twice the points of a regular question for the correct answer.
37. Papiamento, a creole language spoken on the Caribbean islands of Curaçao and Aruba, is based primarily upon which three European languages?
Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch – the clue here is that Curaçao and Aruba are both Dutch colonies and this was the only option of the four that included Dutch.

I first became aware of this issue waiting for my plane at Dulles airport on Friday last week, via the scrolling newbars on CNN. I knew I wasn’t missing much, since with CNN it makes little difference whether or not you have the sound on; the story seems to have blown itself out now, but I have just two small points of my own to make on this, and also want to flag up some interesting posts from different parts of my f-list.

My first point is on the nature and character of the Pope himself. It is rather easy to forget that the Papacy, divinely inspired and sustained or not, is a human institution. (For a brilliant take on the Papal investiture as an inhuman institution, see here.) Stratfor, who are very heavily invested in the “clash of civilisations” paradigm, have a long piece about it asserting that:

he could have no doubt what the response, in today’s politically charged environment, was going to be… each of the pope’s public utterances are thoughtfully reviewed by his staff, and there is no question that anyone who read this speech before it was delivered would recognize the explosive nature of discussing anything about Islam in the current climate.

Well, I’m not at all sure that that claim is true. Some of my reasons for doubt are public knowledge: the speech was actually made literally on the day the Pope’s most senior official, Cardinal Sodano, resigned as Secretary of State, to be replaced by Cardinal Bertone. In normal times, I’m sure the Secretary of State may well be one of those who looks over speeches, if the Pope chooses to let anyone look over his drafts at all. But as he’s clearing out his drawers, waiting for the new guy to come in, knowing only that this is a speech about the relationship between faith and reason at the Pope’s former university – sounds on the face of it like one you can allow to find its own safe landing. Similarly, the Vatican’s press officer for 22 years retired last July, and the new guy is noticeably still finding his feet (though dealt with the fallout from last week’s speech about as well as one can in such a situation). So I think it is entirely credible that the Pope’s advisers let this one through.

Did the Pope himself, as Stratfor put it, “recognise the explosive nature of discussing anything about Islam in the current climate”? I am inclined to doubt it, not least because it is precisely those explosive consequences for which he has subsequently expressed the greatest regret. ( objects that the effigies of the Pope being burnt in certain countries last week weren’t half as good as the ones burnt every year in Lewes, Sussex.) An Australian Muslim commentator puts his finger on it: the Pope is by background an academic theologian, not a politician. I strongly suspect that he is largely insensitive to the social context of either his own remarks or of his source material. ( points out why Manuel Palaeologos was a very poor choice of Christian writer to quote from, given what was actually happening in his lifetime.)

Many scholars, whether in theology and philosophy, or in the hard sciences, tend to feel that the words of previous experts in their field are the only matter of importance, and the social context in which those words were wriiten irrelevant. My own critical academic formation, at the hands of Jim Bennett, Simon Schaffer and Peter Bowler, sensitised me to the sociology of knowledge agenda, that the theories are difficult to understand if separated from the theorists. Scholars in branches of learning that make particular claims of truth find it difficult to accept that the truths they discover might be in any way determined by the environment in which they are discovered.

I would very much expect that the Pope is among those who regard the sociology of knowledge as foolish and wrong-headed. For him, the debate between the emperor and the unnamed Persian scholar (the one named Islamic expert in his speech, Ibn Hazm, was several centuries earlier and several thousand km further west) was, until last weekend, an interesting and mildly funny detail in the history of the discourse between faith and reason, one he felt able to refer to as a shared joke with his former colleagues in Regensburg. I am quite certain that he does not regard it in that way now. Stratfor fall into the trap which we analysts of international politics often do, of over-analysis; in fact the Pope was just being genuinely thoughtless.

My second point is also based on my history of science days, and relates to the wider debate on the nature of religion. (On which topic has different thoughts.) Catholics are not in any position to accuse other religions of being violent, of course; but likewise, nobody should make the mistake of accusing Islam of being anti-rational. It’s easy to forget in today’s world that in the century after it became the seat of the Caliphate (AD 762) Baghdad was probably the prime centre of civilisation and learning in the world. In my own work on twelfth-century European scholars, I often felt a keen sense of frustration at their inability to grasp the concepts articulated by the Muslim scientists whose work they were trying to build on. There is a strong element of rationality in Islamic thought, and the mere fact that it doesn’t excite either Western reporters or Muslim demonstrators shouldn’t mean that the rest of us forget it. (There is also of course a strong pacifist mystic tradition which I have also encountered.)

The most insightful post I’ve read on this – saving the best for last – is by , who writes sanely of the “Stupid Storm” (with “stupid” to be understood as the first part of a compound noun, rather than as an adjective modifying “storm”) around this and other issues. Go read it.