My friend & colleague Laszlo Kun and his wife Reka Kun have just had the good news that they have been granted Australian Citizenship and the ceremony is in just a few weeks! Also Reka has just got her new business, “Healing Touch“, a massage therapy service, up and running. Congratulations folks!
Category Archives: People
Great Quote on Early Computing
Found this great quote whilst reading up more about Alan Turing being the first person to really comprehend what a modern computer would be like, a quote by Howard Aiken (of Harvard Mark I fame) in 1956 (the year after Turing’s death):
If it should turn out that the basic logics of a machine designed for the numerical solution of differential equations coincide with the logics of a machine intended to make bills for a department store, I would regard this as the most amazing coincidence that I have ever encountered.
Luckily Turing was right and he was wrong.. 😉
UK Government Apologises to Alan Turing
55 years after Alan Turing, one of the fathers of modern computing and one of the intellectual powerhouses behind the achievements of Bletchley Park, committed suicide following his conviction for “gross indecency” for being gay and his subsequent exile from GCHQ the UK Prime Minister has apologised for his treatment.
Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later. […] we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.
The BBC has a good article on Turing, his persecution and the apology.
Alan, we all owe you a massive debt of gratitude for all your work and I’m very sorry the UK treated you so very cruelly. We cannot right those wrongs, all we can hope to do is to learn from them and try to not let them be repeated.
(Heard via an InsideHPC blog)
Abusing OpenID for Phun and Profit
My esteemed friend Dr. Rich Boakes has noticed some odd behaviour in his Apache logs that turned out to be people abusing his OpenID server to make page requests to remote sites, presumably as a way of increasing clicks. He raises an interesting point as to whether this makes OpenID servers potential DDoS amplifiers (I suspect he’s right).
Donna’s painting clearance sale :-)
My wife Donna has been painting and sculpting for years (not to mention writing and composing), and has sold almost 100 of her originals worldwide so far. Problem is that she paints far faster than people buy them so she’s doing a bit of a clearance sale on eBay at the moment as we’ve run out of room in the house! 🙂
The 13 pieces are both figurative and abstract pieces of autistic art; some in oils, some in acrylics and some in mixed media. The starting bids on these pieces are just $10-$15 and have 4 days to go. You too can be a budget collector of outsider art!
Happy Birthday Alan!
As is traditional at this time of the year I must embarrass my brother through a public proclamation of his birthday.. 😉
Happy birthday Alan! 😎
One year on
Go Anne!
Here’s some good news, our good friend Anne McDonald has won the Personal Achievement Award in the 2008 Australian National Disability Awards! She was at the awards ceremony at the Federal Parliament in Canberra on the International Day of People with Disability to hear who’d won. The press release says:
Anne was born with cerebral palsy and at age of three was admitted to the St Nicholas Hospital state institution, unable to walk, talk or feed herself. Eventually Anne learnt to communicate by pointing to letters on an alphabet board and at 18 years old went to court to win her freedom from St Nicholas. She has since written a bestselling book, graduated from university with a Humanities degree and dedicated her life to advocating for the rights of people who can not talk.
But they don’t mention bungee jumping, Mona Lisa or a wicked sense of humour.. Well done Anne! 🙂
The Atheist Bus Campaign
Good to see it took the Atheist Bus Campaign just 10 hours to raise all the money necessary for this!
With your support, we hope to raise £5,500 to run 30 buses across the capital for four weeks with the slogan: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.†Donate online now!
It really riles me to hear folks say that you have to have religion to have a moral compass, It smacks of a desire to inspire fear in those who don’t believe. I feel there is plenty of evidence that religion itself can result in people doing things that are immoral (( No, I’m not saying that it’s always a bad thing )).
I’ve gone through a number of different belief systems in my time but in the long term none of them made any sense to me in terms of gods; in the end it just wasn’t logical to me that supernatural being(s) exist, there’s just no evidence for them and they seem to me to be entirely superfluous.
I concur pretty much with what Alec has to say about things, I’ll just carry on trying to be good to people and treat them as I’d wish to be treated (hopefully succeeding sometimes).
(Via)
A new version of “Nobody Nowhere”
So we’ve just received the revised edition of Donna’s classic autobiography “Nobody Nowhere” from the publishers with an updated forward, some of the quotes about it on the back and one of Donna’s paintings, “Swing“, on the cover!
Donna originally wrote Nobody Nowhere was in 1990 and as it is considered a classic autobiography of a person with autism a lot of folks don’t realise that Donna never meant it to be published.
Nobody Nowhere was written in 4 weeks. I barely ate, washed or slept. I wrote the book as a goodbye and a last hope. My plan was to let just one person read it, then shred it and burn it then jump in front of a train. But life is rarely as simple as our plans. Instead of the confirmation of hopelessness I expected, I was thrown a challenge; to allow the book to help others. Instead of shredding it, it became copied and read by millions of people around the world. Instead of being burned, it spent 15 weeks on the New York times Bestseller list and shot to number 1 in US, Canada, Japan, and Norway and got translated into over 20 languages worldwide.
The book is still in print and still selling almost two decades later!