Alan Turing's notes found being used as roof insulation at Bletchley Park
mkweb.co.uk
mkweb.co.uk
Then they got National Lottery funding. Now they've rebuild most of the huts in brick, re-landscaped the grounds, have elaborate displays, added the "National Museum of Computing", renamed it "Historic Bletchley Park", put in a visitor's center, a children's playground, a cafe, and, of course, a gift shop. There's "Turing Gate" "Colossus Way", "Enigma Place", two memorials, and more stuff under construction.
All this is on the Bletchley Park side. The Colossus rebuild is at the National Museum of Computing, which is on the same property but has separate staff and funding. (http://www.tnmoc.org/) They don't get along with the Bletchley Park tourist operation and don't have public funding. ("Other exhibitions are available at Bletchley Park, but operated independently of the Bletchley Park Trust.", says the Trust site.)
The computing museum is also interesting; BTW, in addition to the Colossus rebuild, they're also constructing a working EDSAC replica (using metallic delay lines instead of mercury tanks for memory, but otherwise as exact as possible), and have a bunch of other interesting old machines in the collection. For visit planning, though, it's open fewer days than the Trust-managed property.
Are metallic delay lines sufficiently similar to mercury tanks that it's not an architectural issue to switch them?
As to architectural properties, the main thing that they want out of them is that they delay signals by the same number of microseconds; arranging that is not a problem.
It's a joyful place with so much old technology yet a refreshingly hands on attitude. I don't think there was a single exhibit that wasn't interactive by one method or another - which really matters when you're talking about technology that is largely at an age where kids are too young to have grown up with so it gives them a chance to play with the predecessors to their much loved consumer hardware - and it gives us adults a chance to do more than just reminisce about the fun days experimenting with emerging technologies.
I'd highly recommend that museum on it's own merit; let alone spending the day exploring the site and Bletchly Park as well.
They're currently located in an industrial estate in Cambridge, I'm sure if/when they move they will get much more attention.
I don't see why the lottery (which is the only gambling that has any measurable positive impact on society) deserves to be singled out. Or is it that the positive impact that makes it a tax, instead of just a way of [company k] making profits.
There's plenty of poor people that know there is better stuff to spend you money on.
You can't spend the time dreaming you'll win it, if you don't buy a ticket.
I still don't buy it, but I've stopped being so judgemental on people who buy them.
> You can't spend the time dreaming you'll win it, if you don't buy a ticket.
I think this statement is more key to a lot of things than people realize. You can never be lucky if you don't take chances. People often like to defend gambles they take in life by using expected returns/risks as a premise that they are making an "informed risk". At the end of the day, however, buying stocks, creating a business, starting a new job, etc, are all gambles.
Colossus was running by that point (we made a separate donation), but most of the extras you've mentioned are clearly new. Certainly glad to know it's not going to crumble into obscurity anytime soon.
That's pretty standard. Most of those are profit centers as well. That 10 dollar turkey sandwich has a massive markup. Frankly, its weird to go to a tourist venue that doesn't have some level of merchandising. I don't see Bletchley as some holy ground where these kinds of things defile it. Perhaps people need to have more realistic ideas of what a tourist destination means.
Old crumpled newspapers from the time of construction were shoved in the walls. These were interior walls, I think to assist with holding the plaster in the laths. I was able to salvage part of one page with a comic strip. You wouldn't have even thought the comic was much out-of-date either.
<even more off-topic> So at some point one of the prior owners decided to 'modernize' the bathroom and turn the original clawfoot tub into a modern recessed bath. They did this by buding a brick surround around it, covered with tiles. Weighed a TON. But underneath when we demished the surround, we saw planks of wood lying next to the tub. Turns out they weren't wood but dusty marble trim that originally surrounded the walls along the floor. Original charm from the original house! We had no idea the tub was even a clawfoot, much less there was marble trim.
Is it posted somewhere?
IIRC it showed a disheveled older man, with a big beard and dressed like a stereotypical 'hobo', eating some food out of a tin can and making some snarky comment which I don't remember. The drawing, in black and white, had a bit of feel like the older Mickey Mouse or Tom and Jerry style to it, but didn't seem too obviously out of date.
How very 2015 ;)
Alan Turing wasn't a national security risk because he was gay, but he actually was a risk because he was that good.
Anybody who could break rotor ciphers circa WW2 was very valuable indeed.
I always though he was bi, explaining the near marriage - supposedly it wasn't until late on in their courtship that he informed his fiancée that he had a predilection for men and she was supposedly shocked.
That aside I'd imagine anyone in their 40s privy to Top Secret info who picked up unknown teenagers for short-term sexual encounters would be a national security risk. Want access to his papers and pillow-talk - send in strapping teen to chat him up? [this is basically what happened (apparently barring the national security elements, but I always wondered) when he was robbed that led to reports of this particular homosexual tryst to the police].
>Anybody who could break rotor ciphers circa WW2 was very valuable indeed.
Indeed, http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/virtualbp/poles/poles.htm
Turing did fantastic and utterly amazing work, both in crypto and comp sci of course.
> That aside I'd imagine anyone in their 40s privy to Top Secret info who picked up women in bars for short-term sexual encounters would be a national security risk. Want access to his papers and pillow-talk - send in an attractive lady to chat him up?
Is that different? Or do you think that straight men are somehow immune?
Certainly a honey-trap isn't unheard of. I do however have a feeling that at the time a considerably younger male would be a more effective lure based on the societal mores as the subject is far more likely to let them get away than to raise an alarm. If² this were what happened with Turing it would be a demonstration of quite notable devotion to his country to have handed himself in in order to report the incident.
We've seen recently in the news reports of the UK's Prince Andrew at 42 having allegedly had sex with a 17yo (that's above the age of consent in UK). It's a massive scandal apparently. But Turing was 39 and he had sex with a 19yo. Despite prima facie Andrew's tryst being legal - there is a question of consent - it's clear that it's seen as something that could have leverage over him and there is inference that Epstein might have used knowledge of the encounter to apply duress. This for an apparently legal heterosexual encounter in 2015 - how much more scandal for an illegal homosexual encounter in 1952?
--
¹ I'd theorise it wasn't ephebophilia per se but a longing for his boyhood friend who died. My theory.
² There is no substantiation of the idea that there was a security breach.
Its a massive scandal not just because of her age but because of the allegations that the 17yo was a victim of human trafficking and that this was known to the Prince (and because it is on top of the Prince's other connections to the alleged trafficker, which were already a scandal before the specific allegation), and at least one of the encounters is alleged to have taken place in a jurisdiction (the US Virgin Islands) where the age of consent is 18.
Thanks for the added info - my example was clearly poor, but I think the concept still stands: that a dim view is generally taken of people in the public eye who have short-term sex-based trysts with those much younger than themselves (particularly with teenagers)?
Paedophilia is also often misused as a term, because it means attraction to pre-pubescent people, generally younger than 11, but sometimes as old as 13. Not 17, not 15, not even 14.
The laws we've universally passed to for pornography (actors must be 18 or older) to protect vulnerable <18 people from exploitation have bled into the public having an opinion that having sexual attraction for people less than 18 is equivalent to paedophilia, which is pretty strange (I know that I would personally view someone who is attracted to a 15 year old differently than someone who is attracted to a 5 year old). Laws of consent obviously differ a lot per country, but are for the most part 16-18, sometimes as low as 14.
There's even more to it, because our laws regarding age of consent do not exist exclusively to protect against paedophiles: they are in place to protect young people from exploitation. Public opinion is sort of confused about this, again.
If a media outlet says 'Person X accused of sexual relations with a minor', they have not in any way said that person was a paedophile, just that person A had sexual relations with someone considered a minor (as old as 17 in some places). The public often takes this as 'Person X accused of paedophilia', which is incorrect.
There's also the issue of viewing all pornography of people <18 as 'child pornography'. This is basically a legal grey zone, which is silly, because a person who forces a 5 year old to take sexual pictures is pretty different than someone who asks a horny 15 year old for pictures (in my opinion, again).
To go back on topic, Prince Andrew being accused of having sex with a 17 year old has nothing to do with paedophilia (at least not with the legal or psychological definition of paedophilia), it has to do with exploitation of a minor.
Let's be quite clear: it is not a legal grey zone. At all. It is illegal.
While I agree that the two examples you gave are different, they both involve adults in a position of power/authority taking advantage of impressionable children that do not yet know any better.
I'm not sure what point you're making. I never claimed this was paedophilia, she's clearly not pre-pubescent and was above the UK age of consent.
I also spoke about Turing's tryst being "apparently" ephebophilia (definition: http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/epheboph...) and was quite within normal usage. Yes, Turing may not have exclusively engaged in ephebophilic sexual relationships I don't know.
You'll note in a sibling comment I mentioned Epstein being a "convicted paedophilia" and noted in parentheses the actual crime. The term is in quotes as this is how media referred to him. There are accusations of [non-exclusive] paedophilic activities against him but AFAIK no such conviction. Mass media tends, as you intimate, to refer to all those convicted of sexual activity with minors to be "paedophiles" but I felt I'd gone to reasonable pains to avoid wrongly doing the same.
Even to this day, I believe the security services will ask if you are homosexual and still in the closet, as you are keeping a secret from friends and family that could be used as leverage.
They don't care one whit if you're homosexual, bisexual, asexual, what-the-fuck-ever. They care a lot if you can be blackmailed.
Can anyone suggest a better URL?
Edit: Sorry, it seems I got this wrong and the original post was just fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8993631. (That might mean it was other sites ripping off MKWeb and not the other way around. So I'm glad we didn't change the URL after all.)
""" YOU'VE REACHED A SUBSCRIBER-ONLY ARTICLE. Would you like to become a subscriber for 50% less for the first 12 weeks?* Sign up now and access the full breadth of The Australian's content in minutes. """
No paywall.
Same works with a lot of news sites that don't show paywalls on search traffic, but do on other referrals.
Here is a URL from the search result:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
Sorry to the good people of Milton Keynes and their fine local paper!
It probably isn't usually, anyway!
Source: I grew up with MK as my local city.
As a note: I really wish that HN would include a history of title and/or link changes for an article, so that when you go to a thread an people are complaining about some problem with one of them (or are reading the article with an interpretation based on the old title), it becomes easier to tell what they were referring to by checking against the history. As it is, in a large number of the cases in which a title or link is changed, a large portion of the discussion no longer makes sense as it was referring to the old title and/or link.
All of the solutions are sub-optimal, but preserving a history would be nice, at least.
Anyone?
/Native en-GB speaker.
"Alan Turing notes roof insulation"
Was the third paragraph too hard to reach?
This comment would be much better without that acerbic swipe. Please stay substantive.
E=MC^2 is going to be a lot more valuable in Einstein's handwriting than it is in this post. An original, signed Declaration of Independence or Magna Carta is a national treasure, but a printed copy won't be worth more than the cost of printing.
There is no square root. If you include the momentum term it's E²/c² - p² = m²c², which solving for E gives a square root, leading to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation .
in that version the human and the computer are then involved in a more similar task, which to me makes it far more experimentally interesting than most of the modern attempts on the idea