Category Archives: Writing

Writing

Great Quote on Early Computing

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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.. πŸ˜‰

UK Government Apologises to Alan Turing

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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 Γ’β‚¬Λœgross indecencyÒ€ℒ – 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. […] weÒ€ℒre 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)

Charlie Stross on Mercy, Al Megrahi and America

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A very eloquent blog post from Charlie Stross on the kerfuffle over the release of Al Megrahi, mercy and the US.

Even if Al Megrahi is a mass-murderer, the fact remains that he is dying. It is long-standing policy in Scotland to exercise the prerogative of mercy when possible; in general, if an imprisoned criminal is terminally ill, a request for release (for hospice care, basically) is usually granted unless they are believed to be a danger to the public.

That’s because the justice system isn’t solely about punishment. It’s about respect for the greater good of society, which is better served by rehabilitation and reconcilliation than by revenge. We do not make ourselves better people by exercising a gruesome revenge on the bodies of our vanquished foes.

Well worth reading!

(Via Jim)

40Fires – Open Source Hydrogen Fuel Cell Electric Car

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There was a message today on the OpenMoko community list from Roland Whitehead asking how well the OpenMoko community works. The reason for the query is really interesting!

I am working with the 40 Fires Foundation [http://www.40fires.org] to try to build a framework for the development of open source hardware. You might have heard that the first project is the “hyrban” car – a car powered by a hydrogen fuel cell – the prototype of which was revealed by Riversimple [http://www.riversimple.com] earlier in the summer and whose designs have been licensed to 40 Fires.

It appears that the plans for the car will be licensed under a Creative Commons license (though it’s not clear which variant – the current 40Fires wiki content is licensed under the 3.0-BY-NC version) though they do recognise that some components of the car may not be available under open source licenses. It does sound like an interesting project, will be interesting to see how it develops!