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Topic: The killing of Alan Turing (Read 1369 times) |
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MoEnzyme
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The killing of Alan Turing
« on: 2009-09-13 22:08:04 » |
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Mo: The man gives us the model for our greatest technology, and then we kill him. A long overdue acknowledgement. I'm relieved to see that attitudes towards homosexuality have improved since then.
full article:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212910/How-Britain-drove-greatest-genius-Alan-Turing-suicide--just-gay.html
excerpts:
Quote:| By breaking the German military's secret codes - created using the famous Enigma machine - Turing helped British Intelligence stay one step ahead of Hitler, allowing the Navy to defeat his U-boats and win the Battle of the Atlantic. Turing's work even laid the foundation for the creation of modern computers, leading Time magazine to name him one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century. 'Everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a wordprocessing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine,' it said. |
Quote:Yesterday, {sept 10} 55 years after his tragically premature death, and after a campaign to demand an official apology, Gordon Brown finally said a heartfelt sorry for the way Turing was treated by the Establishment, describing it as 'appalling'.
The Prime Minister added: 'On behalf of the British Government and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work, I am very proud to say: we're sorry - you deserved so much better. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted, as he was, under homophobic laws were treated terribly.'
According to leading computer scientist John Graham-Cumming, who was behind the campaign to obtain a posthumous apology: 'He was a national treasure and we hounded him to his death.' |
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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Hermit
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Re:The killing of Alan Turing
« Reply #1 on: 2009-09-14 00:31:14 » |
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Slow news day in the UK, and with the wheels having come off in Afghanistan, Brown needed other stories to seek relevance and attempt to keep the cameras pointing at him. Still he could have done worse things than apologise to the shades of Alan Turing.
Fondly
Hermit&Co
PS Alan Turing is one of our proposed Saints (and a great candidate though I personally think that Emilie du Chatelet should be nominated first, given that the death of Hypatia (Our second Saint) closed one golden age and ushered in the dark ages, so it would be very symmetrical if Emilie, the Philosopher Without a Beard, who stood at the beginning of the Age of Reason, were to act as a matching bookend, to coin a phrase, to the centuries of religiosity that dominated Europe between them. And Shannon, von Neumann and Popper should be considered along with Turing too), which is why I posted this story there when it first came out.
PPS If the idea of the CoV beautifying people that we hold to exemplify our interests and lived what we might see as exemplary lives still interests you, it is worth rating people at http://www.churchofvirus.org/bbs/index.php?board=;action=rateIndex
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:The killing of Alan Turing
« Reply #2 on: 2009-09-14 08:02:24 » |
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[Blunderov] Alan Turing is a personal hero of mine. I vote unreservedly to beatify him. I appreciate the appeal of the symmetry to which the Hermit refers; nonetheless my vote goes to Turing.
Best Regards
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Hermit
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Re:The killing of Alan Turing
« Reply #3 on: 2009-09-14 10:24:06 » |
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At the moment, the officially proposed process of Illumination is here - http://www.churchofvirus.org/wiki/Illumination and a modified process is described here http://churchofvirus.org/wiki/VirianSaints.
Lucifer has, in writings to the BBS but not reflected in the Wiki, suggested that we incorporate Nomicon (Reply 2) into the process. I'm not sure if this is in addition to the Meridion voting or possibly the Meridion rating proposal (supra).
Nominees can be found at http://www.churchofvirus.org/wiki/StNominees
The current nominees are:
* StBierce?
* StClemons?
* StDodgson
* StEliot
* StMacchiavelli?
* StNietzche? - see FriedrichNietzsche
* StPopper? - see KarlPopper
* StRussell?
* StSemmelweis
* StTuring?
* StVoltaire?
Where there is a "?" behind the name, it means that no nominating page has yet been written. I notice that nobody has written a wikipage for Emilie du Chatelet or Alan Turing.
Right at the moment, these are the ratings from Meridion (My ratings for Emilie du Chatelet and Alan Turing:are equal at 9).
6.79 Charles Darwin
6.59 Leonardo da Vinci
6.54 Albert Einstein
6.54 Alan Turing
6.50 Mark Twain
6.45 Friedrich Nietzsche
6.33 Richard Dawkins
6.32 Douglas Adams
6.29 Bertrand Russell
6.25 Voltaire
6.25 Benjamin Franklin
6.22 Hypatia of Alexandria
6.19 Francis Bacon
6.13 Aristotle
6.13 Philip K. Dick
6.13 Noam Chomsky
6.12 George Orwell
6.10 Carl Sagan
6.09 Douglas Hofstadter
6.08 Galileo Galilei
6.08 Kurt Godel
6.08 Karl Popper
6.06 H. L. Mencken
6.06 Arthur C. Clarke
6.05 John von Neumann
6.05 Claude Shannon
6.05 Charles Peirce
6.04 Richard Feynman
6.03 Thomas Jefferson
6.01 Daniel Dennett
5.97 Robert Heinlein
5.94 Stephen Hawking
5.94 Isaac Asimov
5.94 Nelson Mandela
5.92 Stuart Kauffman
5.92 Maria Sklodowska-Curie
5.90 Thomas Henry Huxley
5.89 HP Lovecraft
5.87 Sasha Chislenko
5.87 William Shakespeare
5.86 Charles Babbage
5.83 Tim Berners-Lee
5.82 Thomas Kuhn
5.82 Leonhard Euler
5.81 Mikhail Gorbachev
5.80 Frank Zappa
5.78 Francis Crick
5.78 Ludwig Wittgenstein
5.76 Isaac Newton
5.76 Erwin Schroedinger
5.76 Buckminster Fuller
5.75 Emilie du Chatelet
5.75 Max More
5.74 K. Eric Drexler
5.73 J. R. R. Tolkien
5.73 Robin Hanson
5.72 H. R. Giger
5.71 Ada Lovelace
5.71 Che Guevara
5.70 Johann Gutenberg
5.69 Neal Stephenson
5.69 Michael Shermer
5.69 Helen Keller
5.67 Carl Friedrich Gauss
5.67 Gottfried Leibniz
5.67 Sam Harris
5.67 William S. Burroughs
5.64 Nikola Tesla
5.64 Alfred Korzybski
5.63 Karl Marx
5.61 René Descartes
5.61 James D. Watson
5.60 Marvin Minsky
5.59 Steve Jobs
5.59 Vernor Vinge
5.59 Raymond Kurzweil
5.58 Nicolaus Copernicus
5.58 Jack Kevorkian
5.58 Thomas Hobbes
5.58 Thomas Bayes
5.58 Stanislaw Lem
5.57 William Harvey
5.57 Kazimierz Leski
5.56 Anders Sandberg
5.55 Nick Bostrom
5.53 Bill Leeb
5.53 Aubrey de Grey
5.52 Greg Bear
5.52 Timothy Leary
5.51 Neil Armstrong
5.51 Howard Bloom
5.48 John Forbes Nash
5.48 Blaise Pascal
5.48 Jonas Salk
5.48 Christopher Langton
5.48 Alexander Shulgin
5.48 Greg Egan
5.47 Steven Pinker
5.47 Friedrich Hayek
5.47 David Chalmers
5.46 Socrates
5.46 Plato
5.44 Ray Solomonoff
5.44 Andrey Kolmogorov
5.44 Norbert Wiener
5.44 Douglas Engelbart
5.44 William Gibson
5.42 Martin Heidegger
5.41 Diana, Princess of Wales
5.41 Niels Bohr
5.40 Roger Penrose
5.39 Aleister Crowley
5.38 Hans Moravec
5.38 Ralph Merkle
5.38 Paul Feyerabend
5.37 Fidel Castro
5.36 Rosa Parks
5.35 Richard Stallman
5.35 Ben Goertzel
5.35 Terence McKenna
5.34 Mary Wollstonecraft
5.34 Lew Rockwell
5.34 Anton LaVey
5.32 Bruce Klein
5.32 Ted Nelson
5.32 Tenzin Gyatso
5.32 Robert Anton Wilson
5.30 George Boole
5.30 Gottlob Frege
5.30 David Brin
5.30 Paul Allen
5.30 Jürgen Schmidhuber
5.30 Danny Hillis
5.30 Cosma Shalizi
5.30 Damien Broderick
5.30 William Calvin
5.30 Ward Cunningham
5.30 Konrad Zuse
5.30 Francis Heylighen
5.30 David Friedman
5.30 Marcus Hutter
5.30 Lee Daniel Crocker
5.30 Paul Graham
5.30 Greg Burch
5.30 Peter Suber
5.30 John McCarthy
5.29 Genesis P-Orridge
5.29 FM-2030
5.29 Bruce Lee
5.28 Alexander Graham Bell
5.27 Eliezer Yudkowsky
5.26 Marshall McLuhan
5.25 Martin Luther King Jr.
5.23 Freeman Dyson
5.22 Bill Hicks
5.22 Mahatma Gandhi
5.20 David Hume
5.20 Lynn Margulis
5.20 Sigmund Freud
5.19 Abraham Lincoln
5.18 John Locke
5.18 Bruce Sterling
5.18 Robert Freitas
5.17 JG Ballard
5.16 Bill Gates
5.15 Adam Smith
5.15 Imre Lakatos
5.15 Paul Dirac
5.15 Stephen Wolfram
5.15 Jef Raskin
5.15 Wrye Sententia
5.15 Kip Thorne
5.15 Ilya Prigogine
5.15 Rosalind Franklin
5.15 Murray Rothbard
5.15 Mitchel Resnick
5.15 Nathaniel Branden
5.15 David Pearce
5.15 Hans Bethe
5.15 Peter Singer
5.08 Boyd Rice
5.08 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
5.08 Immanuel Kant
5.06 Natasha Vita-More
5.04 Ruhollah Khomeini
5.03 George Berkeley
5.00 George Eliot
5.00 Ken MacLeod
4.97 John F. Kennedy
4.97 Lyndon LaRouche
4.97 Ayn Rand
4.96 Michael Moore
4.96 Margaret Sanger
4.92 Napoleon I of France
4.91 Friedrich Engels
4.90 Walt Disney
4.88 James Hughes
4.88 Steven Jay Gould
4.87 Franklin Delano Roosevelt
4.85 Stuart Hameroff
4.84 Vladimir Lenin
4.76 Jeremy Rifkin
4.75 Timothy McVeigh
4.70 Leon Kass
4.68 Immanuel Velikovsky
4.66 Rachel Carson
4.63 Tipper Gore
4.59 Saddam Hussein
4.58 John Walker
4.52 Mao Zedong
4.49 Christopher Columbus
4.42 Winston Churchill
4.42 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
4.41 Osama bin Laden
4.40 Jeffrey Dahmer
4.13 Adolph Hitler
4.09 Billy Graham
4.03 Joseph Stalin
4.02 L. Ron Hubbard
4.02 Pat Robertson
4.01 Pope John Paul II
3.92 Ann Coulter
3.87 Jerry Falwell
3.84 Mother Theresa
3.83 Charles Manson
3.46 George W. Bush
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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MoEnzyme
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Re:The killing of Alan Turing
« Reply #4 on: 2009-09-20 18:04:03 » |
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I've thought about it a few days, and I'm definitely intrigued by Alan Turing as a virian saint. First of all, he clearly gave us quite a lot - any transhumanist would recognize his contributions to our world view comparable to Darwin's, and the results are plenty tangible as we type away on our computers today. Secondly, the timliness . . . now that UK has officially apologized for his death, he's a bit higher in the collective consciousness for a while. Thirdly and in that vein, he offers some cautionary tragedy in his death. It is difficult to imagine or quantify how much humanity lost by his cruel death - how many more years ahead of ourselves we could now be towards solving more of our direst problems. By embracing him as a saint, and indeed as a martyr, we as a church more explicitly recognize the sinfulness of homophobia, which remains a blight in much of the world today. I think its worth putting him through the paces and consider all pros and cons. I say carry-on.
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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