Early Road

TL;DR -- Right outside of Washington, D.C., is a lot of history. We like to pay attention to trails (becoming roads) and to rivers. An important road is on the VA side. Last year we mentioned that Gen. Braddock used it to get out west during the conflict that trained the US forces under the auspices of the Crown. 

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This is a quick post to be filled in later. Last year, we looked at Gen Braddock and how he came through Northern Virginia up to northern New York during the Indian-French affair. Also, we looked at details of the earlier period. We like to consider the influence of roads and rivers (both a boon and a barrier) on the expansion of what became the U.S. of 250 years.  

The post emphasized the pre-1776 timeframe:

• Lord Fairfax -- the focus was the Lord as owner. We mentioned Braddock since the beginning of his jaunt has been Alexandria VA which was about half-way to Mount Vernon of the Washingtons. Remember, this was of the earlier conflict where the colonials learned their military tactics under the auspices of the King's Crown.  

See Siege of Boston, about the colonials in 1775/6 not being a unruly crowd. 

Back to roads. The Vestal's Gap road was an animal trail and then used by the Native Americans and later by the colonials. Now, it consists of highways and even Interstate sections going from the Potomac port at Alexandria up over the mountains. 

Early in the 20th Century, Claude Moore bought land in Northern VA and worked to honor the colonial heritage through preservation.  

• Vestal's Gap Road - By the late 1720s, the trail had been travelled enough to become a road. It eventually led to a gap in the Blue Ridge mountains, where an enterprising businessman named John Vestal operated a ferry crossing the Shenandoah River. A young George Washington used the road to travel to Winchester and points west, where he surveyed the Fairfax propriety for Lord Fairfax.

Lanesville Historic District

We have said that the 250th this year was of a conflict started earlier (even before 1775). So, on July 4th of 2026, remember please that the conflicts went on until 1783. 

Remarks: Modified: 06/26/2026

06/26/2026 --

UAP or UFO

TL;DR -- UFO morphed to UAP. We even have a whistleblower. And, LLM is no longer the new kid on the block, we have plasmoid life. Even with football. American or other? 

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With the quantum computer getting so much press, and the issues of energy usage there is about as bad as what we are seeing with data centers for AI/ML (GenAI/LLM), perhaps its time for a bit of information drop. As in, we are aware but think that humans need to be studied too. 

Without further ado, we'll switch gears here. Have we not heard enough about LLMs the past couple of years? We have seen the Dulles area (DC) host numerous (more than wise?) data centers, that ruin the landscape while drawing more resources (water, energy) than probably rationally supported. 

So, let's start with some links, starting with Wikipedia. What we are dealing with, too, is an old subject with a new name: Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (Formerly known as UFO). Assuming that there have been UFO encounters (there have been a number of books on the subject - written by people who survived the event), perhaps, we might learn something. 

• David Grusch, whistle blower - former Air Force officer notes that money has been spent on this subject without oversight. 
• NASA hosted a team for this theme (2022) - this predates ChatGPT's emergence. Did it allow a cover or increase the potential usage? That LLM grabbed the attention of millions around the world, in Nov of 2022. I did not even wake up to the fact until Feb 1 of 2023. 
• buckets'o'bits is how we can talk of LLMs. Now, if we have high-tech visitors, perhaps that would be ripe for learning a thing or two (or being lab subjects - whatever, it's SciFI laden which is too bad -- as science touts its abilities). 

Okay, there will be more. In the meantime, Grusch mentioned plasmoid types and alluded to attributes that would be interesting to study. So, what's not to like, as long as we don't fry ourselves interfacing with such. 

Rebecca Hardcastle Wright, PhD 

Remarks: Modified: 06/17/2026

06/17/2026 --

Twelve years ago

TL;DR -- A cousin blogger had an interesting post today. She went back a few years to bring a post forward that remembered an ancestor who was hanged in the events of 1692 in Salem MA. That is, hanged by the neck until dead. We have had several posts on the theme but reference two of them: the first image looks at a family wirh two hanged on the same day as several others; the second image is about a hypothetical meeting where all ancestors involved from any side (pro, con, critical, ...) is identified with their relationship established. That event was 334 years ago.  

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Nutfield Genealogy, on FB, pointed today to a post from the blog dated 10 Jun 2017: Bridget Playfer Wasselbee Oliver Bishop, hanged as a witch in Salem. Going by today's date, we are talking 334 years ago. There was a question today on FB: Is there a victim of the 1692 witch trials in your family tree? 

Well yes. Lots and lots of families. So, first, we will look at one of them through posts with one of them from twelve years ago. Then, we will consider a slew of families who were on all sides of the controversy. 

A great-grandmother (Lucy Foster Wilson Gardner) of Dr. Frank (Gardner author) had two persons hanged in September of 1692. The Thomas Gardner Society published an article on Lucy's pedigree titled Trials of the Wilson Family that appeared in The Essex Genealogist and was accompanied by a Ahnentafel for Lucy. 

Later, we had posts about the family, such as Andover Ordeal, that recounted one generation which, after the witch trials, lost all of the children except one who had children one of which became Ann's forebear.  

The following image is taken from The Essex Genealogist (August 2014) and shows three generations of Wilsons. In Gen 1, Joseph Wilson married Sarah Lord. She and her daughter were imprisoned for several weeks but were cleared in 1693. For Gen 2, we see John Wilson, son of Joseph, marrying Mercy Wright whose grandfather was Samuel Wardwell who hanged with several others. In Gen 3, John Wilson, son of John, married Hannah Frye whose great-grandmother was Mary Ayer Parker. This widow of fifty-five years of age was hanged. One motive was getting her land as her husband had left her well off. Later, her sons were able to get their property returned. 

Now, switching gears, we had a couple of post dealing with a hypothetical meeting (Imagine a meeting). The intent was to bring back everyone who was involved in the incident, except for the victims. This table shows relatives of Dr. Frank as if we are talking two generations back (rather than a couple hundred years. 

Hathorne and Corwin were noted judges. For Dr. Frank, his grandmother was John Hathorne's sister who opposed her brother. Several jurors were grandfathers. One of the officiating ministers was an uncle. But another grandfather, graduate of Harvard (Rev. John Wise), was highly critical of the proceedings as opposed to Cotton Mather who was a cousin. 

There have been several posts on the subject. We will point to one: Meeting, again. 

Remarks: Modified: 06/10/2026

06/10/2026 --

Great Awakening

TL;DR -- Great Awakening. There have been several from one of which we got Princeton University. But, we can analyze the emergence of GenAI/LLM similarly with respect to the "animal"spirits related to its potential as boon or bane. There is the other side of the coin: great disappointment. 

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The topic? It will be familiar to some. And, there seems to be a U.S. nature to this phenomenon, however we can look at these affairs from a more general framework and learn a thing or two. 

In this case, we are talking about GenAI / LLM which is known as "AI" now. Was that an awakening, of any kind? That is something to discuss which we will be doing while the fad rages on for a while and after the expected burst we can expect to participate in the analysis. 

Here is Wikipedia's take on the matter: Great Awakening. Apropos to the event's characteristics, there is a related phenomenon: Great Disappointment. The main theme relates to spirituality and religion, but there have been comments with respect to the psychological aspects: True-believer syndrome; Cognitive dissonance; and a lot more. 

Our interest is that Princeton University was founded in 1741 after the first of the Great Awakenings due to a conflict within the Presbyerian church. Tying this to the 250th which is coming up, John Witherspoon, president of the college from 1768-94, was a "signer of the Declaration of Independence".  Princeton is the fourth-oldest of the Colonial Colleges. The first three were Harvard (see our series on the Presidents), William and Mary (Virginia), and Yale. 

Colonial Colleges

Given what we have learned so far, our plate of topics is more full. For this post, let's switch the attention to the 'tAI'n't of recent years. Depending upon one's views, the 2022 entry onto awareness of OpenAI's ChatGPT was the greatest thing ever or the worst affliction cast upon humankind. We have seen plenty dicussion on both sides to the situation over the past three and 1/2 years. 

No doubt, those discussions will continue due to the lack of an theoretic basis with which to frame an analysis and to the shaky reports that have been provided during that same time. Each of the LLMs (which we will use for the class of systems) underwent changes over the years. Lots of that activity was undertaken in order to overcome some deficiency that was noted or to bring in missing pieces. 

Cutting this short, today I read the believers' accounts of the "agentic" approach that happened of late. Briefly, this is a model-based approach that takes output from several LLMs and determines some potential bit of action (truthfully established - questionably?) and then performs that action (which can be sensor/actuator based - or API-centric with respect to something somewhere and somehow accessed). You see, "agents" in the model are types with names and characteristics and functional ability. 

Nothing new, folks. That type of processing goes back to the early days of simulation many decades ago. Back to the beginning and even before the bunch of mathematicians met at Dartmouth in order to start "artificial intelligence" as an academic study. We can go into that at depth, as John was involved early with that thrust and continued to have involvement over his career in engineering support. 

From our viewpoint, there was work in the 70s, 80s and 90s that never got studied since this was done in the commercial/industrial environment that has goals and motivations that are not academically attuned, though many doing this work have advanced degrees. "engineering support" consists of the activities of scientists and mathematicians to support engineers in their problem solving. One aspect of this deals with tradeoff analysis which is the basis of modern approaches. 

Too, the computer has been applied in this arena from the getgo. There is much to discuss. The theme though: was the LLM emergence a boon (great awakening) or a bane (great disappointment). Per usual, we will most likely find some balanced view. Perhaps, the main lession will be just that: how to handle the complications related to modern problem solving in a manner that does not cause harm but provides support for our American Dream: life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness (for all citizens - not the brainy or rich or whatever other attribute of the priviledged state is applied. 

Remarks: Modified: 06/08/2026

06/08/2026 --