Adding:
Friday 11 September 2009
Gordon Brown issued an unequivocal apology last night on behalf of the government to Alan Turing, the second world war codebreaker who took his own life 55 years ago after being sentenced to chemical castration for being gay.
(If anyone knows the source of this image, please let me know. I'd love to give proper credit.)
Source.
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Awesome. Thank you...so many of us just fade into black. I read about him in several books on WWII..no clue.
Will .. So simple and powerful a message. Thank you.. forwarding may now commence!
Shameless plug for a colleague's book on Turing, "A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines":
http://www.jannalevin.com/books.html
I never knew this. There is so much harm we humans do in our ignorance.
This is such a 'sad' way to start my blog-reading-day!
I think this is the source for the poster.
http://coffeeghost.net/2010/02/09/alan-turing-dont-ask-dont-tell-poster/
Cool thanks.
Alan Turing's death is one of the single most despicable acts of this century. The man was brilliant!!!! Read about him please and understand that history is filled with these examples. Now the question is can we evolve.
Side note: Rachel thank you so much for wearing Levi's 501's and a t-shirt. I am now a fashion plate cuz I've dressed like Rachel since I was in Junior High when my mom finally let me dress myself. Teehee. I still wear them and will be cremated in them! Nothing is more comfy than a pair of 501's men's button down fly. Keep up the good work!!! Like you better with out all the make up!!!!!!!!!!
I hear you... me, too. Levi Strauss changed the design in the last year. Thought I could get away with leaving my 501s behind in Phoenix and get a new pair later... no such luck--they're different!!! Sacrilege! I was greatly distressed, on a soapbox all day plus some when I bought the new ones. UGH. I do not wish to pack a picnic in my shorts nor look like I could if I wanted to, thank you. UGH. did I say that already?? ARGH!!! **why'd they do that after all these years? and why did they market them as the originals when clearly they are not?!! #*@^&=!
http://www.epinions.com/content_136739393156
Yes, Rachel looks very hot in her 501s. Drool.
Aye, very hot. Scorching.
Oh yeah, back to Turing... for many, if you're gay, you are never enough. Very sad, very disturbing. I flashback to a magazine image of two young men hanged in Iran for being gay, their innocent flirtation and exploration crushed and annihilated by scapegoating bigotry, demonization, religion and control.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/19/AR2006071902061.html
the enigma code wasnt broken. an enigma cypher machine was captured off a disabled u boat which the crew had (unsucessfully) attempted to scuttle. after the brits took the crew prisoner, they boarded & removed the machine then sunk the boat so the germans' wouldnt know. as an aside, churchill said the most diff decision he made was to allow luftwaffe bombing raids to remain unintercepted until radar contact lest the germans deduce that enigma was compromised.
"Turing had already made major contributions to mathematics and the embryonic computing sciences before the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. But it was for his work among the wartime Enigma code crackers at Bletchley Park for which he will be best remembered. 'Turing realised that we had to turn what was then a cottage industry of code breaking into a full scale industry. He was probably the most important person there,' said Simon Greenish, director of Bletchley Park Trust.
Turing had already made major contributions to mathematics and the embryonic computing sciences before the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. But it was for his work among the wartime Enigma code crackers at Bletchley Park for which he will be best remembered. 'Turing realised that we had to turn what was then a cottage industry of code breaking into a full scale industry. He was probably the most important person there,' said Simon Greenish, director of Bletchley Park Trust.
His 'bombe' machine was able to rapidly de-code the 158 million, million, million variations used by the Nazis in their commands with the creation of a prototype high speed processor. It saved tens of thousands of lives and variations on the original helped both the British and the US to eventual victory."
--The Independent, Tuesday, 18 August 2009
Turing is, and has always been, one of my heroes. As a computer scientist, I have a deep appreciation for his contributions to this field. That he was one of the greatest thinkers of all time is quite evident to anyone familiar with his work and accomplishments.
The fact that this war hero was tortured and driven to suicide is one of Britain's most shameful legacies.
there were captures, but the Enigma Code was broken, by a gay man.
again, im not denigrating turing nor bletchley. they had some success but never broke the main enigma code until the machine was captured. the movie to which u refer was based on a true accout tho hollywoodized. im a progressive & support full gay rights. i also served w gays like choi (see my below post) who brougth honor upon themselves, the service, & the nation.
This is from Wikipedia: OhioOrrin just so you know the human known as Alan Turing was and extremely worthwhile person to keep around.
During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre. For a time he was head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. After the war he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he created one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, the ACE.
Towards the end of his life Turing became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis,[2] and he predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, which were first observed in the 1960s.
So that computer your typing on was partially influenced by the work of Alan Turning.
Some claim we would not have computing at all, if it weren't for Turing.
thx mojave. i fear ive been misunderstood or perhaps didnt make myself entorely clear. im progressive & support full gay rights. i posted to this thread to provide historical context re enigma is all.
No Ohio I know your facts are good. I've read one too many history books. I wanted to flesh out the known things he did. So people will understand that oppressing just one person oppresses all of us. Just think of the things he could have done if left to be himself.
Another book to be sure to check out is Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. While Turing is not the primary story, his presence in the larger work is essential. Neat angle on him.
That book was my inspiration to read another ton of books on cryptography. He's a really good author and so wickedly funny.
The theme of Cryptonomicon, which one can forget amid its brilliant sequences of intellectual drama, is the task of preventing persecution and oppression by securing the stability and integrity of economic relationships by ensuring anonymity of the same with encryption, i.e., to practically implement Rawls' veil of ignorance (in some fashion).
Turing is a peripheral character, but the spirit of his work permeates the story like frankincense. The story flips back and forth between mathematicians circa WWII and then their inheritors in the modern day.
A great book. Not Stephenson's best, however. His Baroque Cycle imagines itself into the late enlightenment. Newton and Leibniz are the "Turings" of that series of novels, which reanimate the irresistible influence of a few great minds (and a few great rascals) on the course of history, on the history of mankind's conception of its world; "Pero si muove."
The far right opposes abortion at times by arguing that you may be aborting a future Einstein, but they have no problem in forcing gays and lesbians out of jobs and out of society, even to the point of suicide. Remember that life is only important while it is unborn. After that, everyone is on their own!
That's why I love the bumper sticker, "May the fetus you save be gay."
I knew about his suicide, but not that they basically forcibly gave him a sex change. How horrible.
Ignorance is seldom bliss! I had no idea about Turing, what a tragic loss. But I am saddened whenever people look at other people and only see one difference and obssess on that difference.
I think it is odd and 'different' to obssess on another person's sex life, no matter who that person is, unless you are having sex with that person or wish you were having sex with that person! By my logic, those that only see this aspect of a person, are themselves different!
Just be and be just!
Excellent article on Lt Choi !
"Lieutenant Dan Choi personifies the growing rift between gay-rights activists who want to cooperate with lobbyists and elected officials, and those who demand direct action. It's pretty obvious that the establishment activists—having allies controlling the White House and the Congress for two years with little to show for it—are having a hard time keeping people like Choi in line."
http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-10-27/news/bad-lieutenant-dan-choi/
Uffdaguy, with their warped thinking they do not believe that Einstein type brilliance can be housed in a homosexual person.
What someone's sexual orientation has to do with anything but them and their partner's relationships has always been and will always be a puzzle to me.
The scary thing about the wackjobs is they may see nothing wrong with aborting a baby who is gay --- lo and behold, their only exception for allowing abortion.
But what am I thinking, they believe being gay is a choice and a good 12 step programme can break the gay habit.
Their thinking reminds me of a time many moons ago when a doctor (psychatrist to boot) of all people told me that being allergic is a choice. That some unsuspecting soul would choose to die of anaphylactic shock from eating a peanut or being stung by a bee etc. etc. rather than live, did not even seem preposterous to her, even after I pointed it out.
As the saying goes, "a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."
Doubt it. There'll just be a push for a reliable method of setting sexuality in utero or fixing it in childhood.
Mad Michele Bachmann's husband is a therapist who claims he can cure the gay with therapy. Both parents are insane, so I fear for the kids they have.
i was just thinking about Turing the other day in the context of DADT. not only should gay activists and allies push Turing's story as a concrete example of potential consequences of DADT and in the context of bullying and suicides of gay youth, but maybe we should more substantially honor him with an Alan Turing Day, a nice combination of gay and geek, tho computers and the internets are hardly exclusively geek domain. June, maybe, as that's when he was born (and died, just about 2 weeks before his birthday; i always find that particularly sad).
also, perhaps ironically, Brown's official apology was due to an internet campaign, not necessarily the goodness of his heart or sense of justice.
There's been some stories of schools reducing anti-gay bullying by teaching gay history, including Alan Turing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/oct/26/gay-history-lessons-bullying-schools
This comment is not going to make me popular... however, for some reason I feel the need to defend the people who prosecuted Turing and sentenced him to the chemical castration, we need to remember that this happened 58 years ago, in less enlightened times.
What they did was wrong and unforgivable, but this was 15 years before homosexual acts between men became legal in the UK, and he was not sentenced to prison with hard labour which was one of the sentences available to the judge at the time. So it may well have been percieved that he was given the lighter sentence.
His work and that of Bletchley park was not recognised by the British Government until the 1970's they couldn't afford him any special dispensation to him when he was arrested for Gross indecency. Blackmail was still a real concern at that time, especially for people with high security clearance, I don't know if his homosexuality was an open secret while he was at Bletchley or any time afterwards, but imagine what might have happened had be been blackmailed for being gay, there could have been a very different outcome to the war.
All that said, also remember that the UK is now way ahead of the US on Gay rights, gays can serve openly in the military, I volunteer with Pride London, and every year I well up when I see them marching at the head of the parade as they have done for the past 10 years. We have the right to civil partnership, while not being full marriage, now has straight couples starting legal procedures to be allowed to enter into civil partnerships rather than marriage. We still have a way to go, imigration law still isn't quite there, there are still kids being bullied and people being attacked for being gay. I'm sure the US will get there too, and I don't know what to suggest to speed up the process, we had a labour parliament with a strong majority that managed to push these changes through, some battles were harder than others. but you'll get there, I'm sure.
I don't understand this. I don't grok it. What was wrong was that it was illegal for gay people to exist. The punishment made it that much worse.
The US did the same to gay people. In fact, I think other countries got their ideas on what to do with homosexuals, ranging from sterilization to forced aversion therapy, from the US. Instead of imprisoning them, they tried to cure them or cleanse the "gay gene" from the population under Eugenics programs which the Nazis admired. And I'm not saying that as an analogy, but there have been attempts to cleanse homosexuality from the population by multiple governments.
But why defend being less enlightened? You could just as well say they are less enlightened in Uganda right now where a newspaper created a hit list of 100 gays instructing to hang them.
When I think of gay rights, I really don't think in terms of borders. The gay population knows no border.
Imogen, am I correct in recalling my history, that only male homosexuality was illegal, as Queen Victoria didn't believe that there could be such a thing as lesbians?
Female homosexuality was removed from the bill because they didn't want women to know about it. But those relationships were usually called "romantic friendships."
Thanks for the correction. I knew I had read something about it years ago, and it has been repeated in some tv programs over the years.
@ Uffdaguy I've heard various versions of the reason why lesbianism was not included in Labouchere Amendment, including that they "just didn't think about it". To me the one that sounds most feasible is as GrrrlRomeo stated, The men who wrote it removed references to lesbianism so as not to influence women... like they wouldn't think of it themselves!
@GrrrlRomeo, you ask why I defend the less enlightened times, I'm not entirely sure that I am defending them, I'm just trying to envisage the world in which the persecution of men like Alan Turing took place. The world today is a different place, and as such I would never dream of defending the actions and lack of enlightenment of countries like Uganda. I believe that our diplomats should do everything within their power to change that point of view, especially as we, (The British) exported our victorian values during the expansion of the empire, and our particularly nasty habit of finding a nice, resource rich country and deciding to stay there, killing anyone and everyone who got in our way.
I have lived in 4 different countries, all with varying laws about homosexuality, while I would love for borders to be irrelevant to any human right, it just doesn't work that way, unfortunately. Diplomats and politcians have managed to effect some change in Eastern European countries by setting some prerequisites to joining the EU, decriminalisation of homosexuality is one of those prerequisites. On the other hand I also believe that there is a lot of truth in the cliche "you can lead a horse to water, but you can not force it to drink" We cannot and should not force our view of the world onto countries who don't want it. They have to find their own way there. We should however make it as easy as possible for people who are persecuted under those regimes to leave and live in a country where their sexual orientation is not a crime.
Quoting myself:
I meant borders don't matter to me in whether or not I care. And American conservatives have been quietly influencing Ugandan politics. We already influence others.
imogenfm I take it that you mean for the chronology you gave to make one think "look how far we've come.' I am not angry or upset with you for pointing this out, I am upset that it was/is ever a bad thing to be different from the majority in one's sexual orientation.
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