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Marking 50 Years Since Alan Turing's Death
erroneous writes "Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of Alan Turing: mathematician, code breaker, and computer pioneer. He was today commemorated in his home city of Manchester, UK." Here are stories at the BBC and at The Register.
got sig?
I believe at this point everyone here at slashdot knows he was homosexual. Why? Because it has been impossible to bring up Alan Turing without some idiot once again bringing up he was homosexual. As if we are all supposed to care... That's not what we are here to discuss. Technology, however is.
Forced to take hormones to cure his homosexuality.
Yet another reason not to use "that's teh ghey" as a term of disparagement.
(Not to mention it just sounds stupid.)
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
cure should be in quotes, i daresay, since it isn't a sickness....
Except that it has one teeny tiny problem of being a major factor in the man's life. It's why he committed suicide -- it's like trying to talk about Frederick Douglass without mentioning that he was multiracial.
Yes.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I just wanted to post in homage to the guy. I have difficulty calling anyone my hero, but if I did put people in such a position, Alan would be there.
It's terrible that the world saw more value in vilifying him as a homosexual than eulogizing him as a genious.
I am merely grateful that I and others have such a man to look up to in a field that so often seems at present to have so little diversity.
Friend, you are mistaken. "This field" may have "little diversity" in its clothes, hairstyle, and fiction preferences, yes. But, in the arena in the mind, you are very mistaken. I've never seen some beautiful things--come in so many forms--from the minds of tech/CS/math people. It's just that, by mainstream's standards, many of their works and endeavors are dismissed over more glamorous and glittery things such as Britney Spears new video, crap prime time TV, a hot new sports car, a stylish outfit, or looking buf on the beach.
IMHO, it's the artists, super-engineers, and super-scientists/academics who have the most diversity--it's just that, as you no doubt know, that diversity and pusle of life isn't seen with the eyes. It's seen with keen insight into their words, works, and actions. If the people you hang with are truely talented and driven but aren't "diverse" enough for you, then it's because you don't really know them.
G-Force music visualization
It's too bad we still haven't come far enough, considering a leader of a democratic nation wants to amend the constitution in order to deny rights to the homosexual segment of the population. One has to wonder if President Bush would approve of forcing chemical castration on homosexuals today.
Diversity means a mix of people from different privilege levels in society. Engineers are from the most privileged class in the world - middle and upper class straight white males. To suggest there is diversity because some people think slightly differently than others in this field is to ignore the problem, shirk responsibility, and contribute to the continued oppression of non-straight non-white non-male people.
I know I probably shouldn't respond defensively, but, well, that's me.
I was thinking more about little diversity in terms of gender, sexuality, race... now, admittedly my school (Ohio University) isn't exactly known for its diversity (95% white), but it's my impression that overwhelming majority of people in CS programs are white guys. I know I can count the number of females I've seen in my CS classes on my hands. One hand, come to think of it, and I'm hardly polydactic.
That said, I also never implied that my fellow CS majors were boring people, or that they were weren't diverse enough for me, just that it can be hard to feel like the only in your program of study. Having one of those people who are seemingly in every CS book ever be part of that same group (like Grace Hopper or Ada King for female figures) can be a huge deal.
Oh, and no diversity in clothes, hairstyle and choice of fiction? I don't know where you go to school (if you are a college student) but in those areas at least my fellow CS majors are hardly homogeneous!
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so he was gay. big deal.
For gay men like me, these days, in an increasingly civilised society, its not such a big deal. I can't yet marry a partner and its legal for me to be sacked because I am gay, but its not too bad.
But within my lifetime, it has been a very big deal. Forty years ago, I would have been imprisoned as a criminal. Isn't that a big deal?
For Alan Turing it was such a big deal it lead to his death.
Think of all that we lost; all he could have given us, because in his time it was a big deal.
(I'm not a christian, I don't really know much about the christian mythology but the early Apple logos featured the whole tree)
We haven't come far? You're kidding.
I wonder what measuring stick you use to judge things by. For homosexuality to go from being listed as a mental disease to nearly a non-condition and almost societally accepted and on the national scene, debated openly, well, that's a damn huge difference.
If you want to lack intelligence and only look at the end goal as the all or nothing, so be it. People will laugh you off while the strides towards your end goal will really be by those willing to compromise and take small steps to yank a nation, who has a huge host of problems beyond dealing with the so-called gay agenda, into realizing there are better things to focus on.
This is a democratic nation after all. The changes you want at the speed you want would only truly occur under a totalitarian form of government, not a democracy (technically a republic but you get the point). And I really freakin doubt a totalitarian government would really ever even recognize homosexuality as a legitimate and normal human condition.
Maybe not as fast as you'd like, but generally compared to other societal changes in the US, quite rapid. imo, homosexuality has come further along the path of acceptance than race relations, esp. if you look at the timescale we are talking about.
As to political pandering, grow up. Considering your anti-Bush statement, you're not a better person than our president, now are you.
No.
do I get modded +5 insightfull for that now?
Turing's 1936 paper "On Computable numbers, with an application to the entsheidungsproblem"
was the seminal work on artificial intelligence and computation. Cellular automata are more an outgrowth of this work. They aren't even that different from Turing machines - they maintain a state and have rules for changing that state depending on their neighbours.
And Wolfram certainly hasn't discovered much that's impressed anyone else working in the physics / computer science world.
:wq
How would it sound to you if someone else had posted:
"I think, that the real problem is, that some of the blacks don't act really normal (well, that's the same for many of our white friends, but that's not the case right now) - they try to act like they were criminals and prostitutes, while that's in my opinion not a behavior I could accept. Many of my friends are black - and I don't really care, what's their race - unless they act like a criminal or prostitute. I still think, that in ordinary situations, a person has to act like we white people do - and if I use the term "black" to describe disparagement - I only mean people, who act like that. That's something, that doesn't really depend on what your race is. Just think about it."
You'd find that incredibly offensive, wouldn't you? Doesn't every sentence bite? Why is it ok to do that to gay people? For God's sake, just because someone has a culture different than yours (and different groups *do* form their own culture - try to talking to a member of the religious right in the deep south, for example), doesn't give you some almighty right to make fun of them. If the world had that sort of mentality as a whole, war and riots would never cease.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
As long as marriages are "sanctified" by the government in the form of licenses, divorce law and the like, no legal definition of marriage should exclude any citizen of legal age from marrying another citizem of legal age, whatever their respective anatomies.
I would finally note that calling for a constitutional amendment in order to strictly define marriage is idiocy. Neither our nation's existence nor the rights of heterosexuals are threatened by two men or two women getting married. I can therefore only assume that people in favor of such an amendment (or similar laws) are bigots.
(I'll take 1 point off this comment myself for being on a tangent drifting ever further away from the subject of Alan Turing.)
Relgious-based intolerance was the root cause, not homosexuality. There is no problem with homosexuality if you live in a tolerant society, just as there are no problems with being black or a woman if you live in an enlightened society--not that we do, but you get the point.
And by the way, if you think it's on-topic just because it's sort-of, half-way, in part related to the real cause, do you also think it is on-topic for me to point out that G. Dubya Bush was an alcoholic coke fiend who has the IQ of a two-by-four every time there is an article about him anywhere?
Homosexuality didn't cause Turing's death any more than Bush's drug addictions caused him to be perhaps the stupidest elected official of modern times.
That's amusing. He served his country and was awarded medals for his bravery while your shrub was AWOL from the guard snorting anything white and powdery in between capitalizing on his Texanness by doing the drunken highway slalom from one whore to the next as fast as he could.
Kerry is the one without principles. Wtf are you talking about?
I work in intelligent robotics. The turing test is nonsense. It tests if you can create a electronic clone of the current human answerer, not 'intelligence'.
Consider this, a human 4 year is intelligent by most people's measures. However, if you were to replace me with a 4 year old in a turing test, it would be obviously not myself and thus, not 'intelligent'.
Similarly, if the turing test was conducted in chinese, and you asked me to fill in the part of the computer, I would also fail it.
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You think medical practice is any more scientific today than it was in the 1950s? Now, I'm not saying medical research isn't scientific, because it is (although the studies are often questionable due to the special interest groups funding them). It's just that medical practice is often as much voodoo as it was 50 years ago. Neither is clinical psychology any better. Mental illness is often culturally defined. Here in the U.S. in 2004 it just so happens that it's no longer socially acceptable to believe that homosexuality is a mental illness. Doesn't stop a whole lot of nutter Christian fundies from believing otherwise though.
The problem isn't that Wolfram hasn't discovered anything impressive. The problem is that he doesn't acknowledge the work of others, and this borders on plagiarism. He writes a 1200 page supposedly scientific book without a "references" section! He almost makes it sound that he is the one who discovered cellular automata and he says outright that he is the first to notice that simple rules lead to complex behavior (this is not true: chaos theory existed before Wolfram came along). Finally, his "assistant", the person who did the real work in proving the only tangible result in the book (that rule 110 is universal), barely gets a mention in the "notes" section. If I were him, I'd be pissed. That concludes my Wolfram rant :)
I remember learning about his life and death some years ago, when I was new to the field, just starting school. How many geniuses died early or tragically? Niels Henrik Abel, Oliver Heaviside, Srinivasa Ramanujan...
What enraged me even more than the injustice of it all, the stupid, pointless unfairness, was the fact that he was well in the middle of his most productive years. Who knows what he would have come up with if he hadn't been hounded to death?
It is as if Isaac Newton had been struck down in the middle of his life---how much would physics have lost? How dare they! I believe that we shall not see his like again.
By Turing's death, we are all diminished.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Again? I wasn't aware that I said a single word about religion, but then again people are reading a lot more into my short post than is actually there.
As for the reasoning behind the government recognition of marriage, there are other benefits of marriage that have nothing to do with children. One would be shared health care costs - while many companies have opened up their health insurance benefits to unmarried couples, it's by no means universal. Another is in the case of life/death decisions if a partner is incapacitated, perhaps brain dead and on life support. In the absence of a living will, a partner - even if the cohabitation had been going on for 20 years or more - doesn't have the same legal status as a wife/husband. Ditto if a person dies without a will, or if a will is contested. Next of kin status is only afforded to married partners and blood relations.
Not to mention that all of your "raising children" arguments break down if homosexuals are permitted to adopt children (and they are).
In short, as long as the government is affording specific legal rights to married partners which are not extended to homosexual partners, the law is discriminatory...and a constitutional amendement, in my possibly ultra-liberal, apparently anti-religious opinion, would be blasphemy.
Why should gays act "normal"? Why is acting normal more important than acting in a manner that makes you feel happy and comfortable? I'm straight but I'm certainly not normal (posting on Slashdot late at night for example). You're probably not totally normal yourself. So what: abnormality is what makes the world interesting.
The first post in this thread was in the context of social status. The subsequent post was a typical response of the privileged - "No, there's plenty of diversity here. We all think about math and science in different ways." A statement like that unfairly minimizes the weight of the first post's message. The message is "Hey - there is hope that I can achieve something in my chosen field and my accomplishment will not be overshadowed by prejudice against my sexual orientation." The white straight male never has to worry that his accomplishments will be minimized or ignored due to prejudice against his race, sex, orientation, or different way of thinking about math and science. That is a tremendous privilege.
At the time, homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom. That would have made Turing a target for blackmail in the eyes of the security organisations. In terms of the moral and legal climate of the time, they probably felt themselves to be totally justified in what they did.
One of the reasons why he was treated so badly by the legal organisations (i.e. those that arrested and condemned him for breaking what is now considered an abhorrent law) is that they didn't know what he had done for his country during the war. It was still classified then.
The tradgedy not that Turing brought this on himslef, but that people didn't know any better then.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Also, you don't really need an evolutionarily useful reason. It may just be a side effect of the powerful brain. Nerds sitting at home at night, not mating, is hardly something that's the direct result of something evolutionarily useful.
It always saddened me that gay people felt they had to scientifically justify their emotions. In a properly constructed free society, the people never grant the government the power to regulate sexuality in the first place. "Reasons" for anything are nothing more than scientific curiosities, and should have nothing to do with politics.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
In general, intelligence agencies (be it KGB, CIA, Mossad, what have you) make note of anyone with sexual tastes not in the accepted mainstream, not just homosexuality, since this is something easy to exploit. It allows you to not only offer them something that is difficult for them to seek out on their own, but also to hold power over them by concealing it. At the time, homosexuality was far less publicly accepted than it is now, so it could be used as a pressure point. Understandably something like that could make the CIA nervous.
Now, I wasn't present, so I can't tell you if that actually was what motivated them and what affected Turing, nor am I saying that this makes his experience any less awful or sad, just pointing out that there's reasoning behind such things.
You're absolutely right. I apologize for letting one of my personal bugaboos from shining through. It would have been perhaps better to say "nutter religious fundamentalists."
As far as relevance to the conversation I shouldn't have just tagged that line onto the end of my post. I think what I was trying to convey at the time was that religious or superstitious beliefs are often manifested in medical practice and policy, even in the modern day U.S. There is a tendency to the medicalization of culturally unacceptable behaviors.
While we often see this in fundamentalist Christian attitudes towards homosexuality (and stem cell research, the "war" on drugs, and a host of other issues), that particular group should not be singled out, although the present degree of their politcal power in the U.S. at present brings their beliefs to the fore. However, this certainly doesn't exempt good old secular humanists from effecting medical policy and practice based on beliefs rather than science. Others have pointed out the growing trend in what might be over-medicating children for questionable diseases such as ADD and depression which are fine examples. Another would be reluctance of the medical community to understand the full extent of AIDS in the early 80s choosing to think that it was a "gay disease."
The "obesity epidemic" is one particular meme that seems to be effecting medical policy and practice on a global level. Here in particular we see a cultural intolerance of what should be a neutral descriptor ("fat") fueling a massive amount of questionable research (based mostly on correlative evidence often funded by special interest groups) driving public policy.
Singling out just religious fundamentalists for my scorn is more revealing of my personal biases than accurate or relevant, as all cultures have a tendency toward instantiating their norms and mores into medical policy and practice. Thanks for calling BS on that line in my post.