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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?
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?
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.
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.
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..."
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.
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.
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