2012 — ALAN TURING’S CENTENARY YEAR

Alan Mathison Turing was born on 23^rd June 1912 in Maida Vale, London;
he died on 7^th June 1954 in Manchester.

His story is told brilliantly in Andrew Hodges’ biography Alan Turing: the enigma. My humble effort is here ►. Briefly:

• He was an outstanding mathematician (first class honours at Cambridge, Fellow of King’s College, worked at Princeton University in the States), working on quantum mechanics, probability, logic, a world leader in computer and software design, number theory... He developed the Turing Machine, an enormous theoretical advance in designing general-purpose computers.
• He worked during World War II on cracking the codes used to encrypt messages by the German Enigma machine. He and his team worked at Bletchley Park on this, developing Colossus, the world’s first electronic, digital, programmable computer. Colossus and its successors were used by British codebreakers to help read encrypted German messages during World War II. They used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform the calculations. It is claimed that this effort, resulting in the cracking of U-boat messages, saved the battle of the Atlantic, and may have shortened the war by up to two years. In the later years of the war he was the chief Anglo-American crypto consultant, and his computer and software design led the world.
• He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951 and continued with work on machine intelligence and a non-linear theory of biological growth.
• He was an active homosexual, something that was known to his superiors, though his brain was far to valuable to them to do anything about it. (Homosexual acts between men were at that time illegal and often considered to be a security risk because they opened the way to blackmail.)
• His downfall came in January 1952, when Turing met Arnold Murray, a ‘rent-boy’ outside a cinema in Manchester. After a lunch date, Turing invited Murray to spend the weekend with him at his house, an invitation which Murray accepted although he did not show up. The pair met again in Manchester the following Monday, when Murray agreed to accompany Turing to the latter’s house. A few weeks later Murray visited Turing’s house again, and apparently spent the night there. After Murray helped an accomplice to break into his house, Turing reported the crime to the police, expecting them to arrest Murray and his accomplice for burglary. During the investigation, Turing acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray. So instead, both Murray and Turing were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885.
• On conviction, Turing was given a choice between imprisonment or probation conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido. He accepted chemical castration via oestrogen hormone injections. Turing’s conviction led to the removal of his security clearance, and barred him from continuing with his cryptographic consultancy for GCHQ. At the time, there was acute public anxiety about spies and homosexual entrapment by Soviet agents, because of the recent exposure of the first two members of the “Cambridge Five”, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, as KGB double agents. Turing was never accused of espionage but, as with all who had worked at Bletchley Park, was prevented from discussing his war work.
• On 8^th June 1954, Turing’s cleaner found him dead; he had died the previous day. A post-mortem examination established that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. When his body was discovered an apple lay half-eaten beside his bed, and although the apple was not tested for cyanide, it is speculated that this was the means by which a fatal dose was delivered. An inquest determined that he had committed suicide, and he was cremated at Woking Crematorium on 12^th June 1954. Turing’s mother argued strenuously that the ingestion was accidental, caused by her son’s careless storage of laboratory chemicals. His biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing may have killed himself in an ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability.

This year we celebrate Alan Turing’s life and work

This Web Site

Most of the things mentioned on this web-site are things, people or ideas that interest or amuse me — I hope some of them will interest or amuse you too. You won’t learn much from this site, but they may point you to other sites that do lead you to things that amuse you or make you think. This web-site has very little real logic to it, so you’ll just have to take pot luck!

Also there are some of my thoughts on life, the universe and everything — feel free to contact me with your comments.

I’m klunn at tinet.org.

[Start of Excuse:] If you’re wondering why I keep updating this web site, it’s therapy for me; I suffer from bipolar disorder, depression, asthma, migraines, arthritis, muscular cramps and some other age-related things. So adding to and reorganising this web keeps me (almost) sane. [End of Excuse]

And I like polishing nose-cones.

Multi-licensed with Creative Communism

I agree to multi-license my text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under the terms of creative communism. Use it as you seem fit. Spread it. Take what you want, add, remove, change and improve. Why not sign with your own name and claim authorship? One rule, however: Don’t you ever try subjecting this material under the terms of copyright, intellectual property, or similar licences of evil. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under these terms of communism, please check the multi-licensing guide, or use a peer-to-peer network to override such restrictions of free use.

See Wikia Uncyclopedia ► for further information.

Stories and Family Tree

I have written a number of stories, mostly short, but one a bit longer and more complicated. I hope you enjoy them; let me know. They’re here ►.

Here ► is a link to some of my favourite authors; Chaucer and Shakespeare ► deserve special treatment.

I have also done a lot of research into my Family Tree ►, going right back to the 17^th century; I was never very interested in genealogy until I looked into my own family history. There’s a lot of information in this section. It might interest other members of my family, and also other people. At some time I hope to write an account of what I did and how I did it.

Where I Look Things Up

The Guardian and Observer Online web site for news, views, etc. ►
 

Google for searching for information ►

I’m very selective in the words I choose, otherwise I get ‘About 210,000,000 results’! I find the ‘Advanced Search’ to be better, though still full of pitfalls. (Don’t forget that Google is funded by advertising, so the first sites in the lists they present are those with fistfuls of $$$.

The BBC web site for news (and everything else) from the BBC ►

and the BBC again for the local weather forecast ►

The BBC’s 5-day forecast for Tarragona; this is actually for Reus airport; from this site you can check out the forecast for where you are. (I once heard a BBC TV forecaster say one winter: “Temperatures tomorrow could reach double figures or even more.” — Phew!)

Wiki-This-And-That

  Wikimedia ► “The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, a top-ten internet property.”

Wikiphilia: A mental illness characterized by the irrational conviction that any problem faced by a group can be rendered solvable through installation and use of a Wiki. This delusional ailment has been occurring in increasing numbers ever since it was first identified in 1995.

Wikipedia ►

  Wikipedia ►; the free encyclopedia with 3,765,665 articles in English (as of the last time I looked)

  Wiktionary ►; the open content dictionary with 2,581,110 English definitions from over 400 languages (again, as of the last time I looked)

  Wikinews ►; the free news source you can write, “written by people like you! If you find a topic you want to see Wikinews cover, why not create an account and write an article on it?” they ask

  Wikiquote ►; an online compendium of sourced quotations from notable people and creative works in every language, and translations of non-English quotes

  Wikibooks ►; an open-content textbooks collection that anyone can edit; 2,403 books with 37,530 pages

  Wikispecies ►; covering Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Bacteria, Archaea, Protista and all other forms of life, so far with 288,631 articles

  Wikisource ►; an online library of free content publications, with 234,552 texts in the English language library

  WikiLeaks ►
  [photo: Julian Assange]

  Wikiversity ►; a project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and   research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to   university, including professional training and informal learning

  Wikicommons ►; a database of 10,796,592 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute

Fun

This section consists of things that amuse me (and you too, I hope).

Many of them are TV comedy series, like:

• The ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch ► from the Monty Python team.
• The ‘Fork Handles/Four Candles’ sketch ► from the Two Ronnies.
• The ‘Blackberry’ sketch ► from the One Ronnie.
• Other TV comedy series ► and here, too ► from various programmes.
• Not forgetting this classic moment in “Only Fools and Horses” ► where Del Boy falls through the bar (on YouTube).

But not exclusively; there are also odds and ends, like:

• Some jokes ► including one-liners and others with more substance.
• Some Schoolboy (and, no doubt Schoolgirl) Howlers ►
• Some amusing things about the English language ► and odd things you can do with ENgLiSH.
  
• Some Cartoons from The Guardian ►.
• The origins of some odd pub names and while we’re on the subject, some Real Ales.
• Some Puzzles, Riddles and Sudoku ►, including a Dam Wall ► in Italy.
• Madness? ► (a drunken elk in a tree, and the language Polari).
• And finally, Gerard Hoffnung ►; if you’ve heard his Address to the Oxford Union (1958) before, you’ll know how funny he is; if you haven’t, just listen once (and twice, and again and again and again)! (That file also has things about Morecambe and Wise, ’Allo-’Allo, Bill Bailey, David Mitchell and Jo Brand [and any other “Comedy” items I think of before I close this version of my web].)

Art, Music (Classical and Pop) and Fiction

Here I’m looking at the more serious side of life, things that entertain me but not for fun. So there are sections on:

• Paintings and similar ‘works of art’:
     
  
      
  
  If some of the images are too big for your screen, use your web-browser’s ‘Zoom’ function to change the level to, say, 75% or even 50%.
  
  • John Constable, J M W Turner, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, Salvador Dalí, and Vincent van Gogh ►
  • Henry Scott Tuke ►. Tuke was one of Britain’s most significant artists who liked to paint beautiful young men naked (not pornographic) in Cornwall. His work has frequently courted controversy, even up to the more ‘enlightened’ twenty-first century, though it is certainly not in the vast majority of cases, explicit. Read more about him here ►.
  • M C Escher and others ►.
    
    This features a selection of mathematical shapes and figures, all of which I find interesting and some, particularly some of those by the Dutch graphics artist M C Escher, are downright impossible, but which are nevertheless convincing. See Mathematics — Fact and Illusion ► (By the way, some of these are very big so you may need to Zoom to 50%); if illusions fascinate you go to my Mathematics web page ►. If you like those, take a look here ►.
  • Extracting the Michael(angelo): Michelangelo, Leonardo, Dalí, (again), Van Gogh (again) ►.

  I recently saw a catalogue of paintings by Winslow Homer (1836 — 1910), an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects; one was entitled “Boy Fishing” and another “Shark Fishing”!

  Here’s something that quite blew my mind when I saw it on guardian.co.uk: Palau de la Musica by Jean-François Rauzier — interactive ►. It’s described as an “interactive hyperphoto”. Escher would have approved, I’m sure.

• Classical music and musicians (which I have become more satisfied with as a genre with the years):
  
  • 
    Beethoven, Brahms, Litolff, Saint-Saëns and Mahler ►; that’s not an exhaustive list — Dvořák, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Bach, Mussorgsky, Rodrigo, Vivaldi, Mendelssohn, Vaughan Williams and Holst also get a mention.
• Pop music and its artistes (though as I get older it’s nostalgia that kicks in):
  
  • by Del Shannon (‘Runaway’), The Animals (‘House of the Rising Sun’), Grace Jones (‘La Vie en Rose’), John Lennon (‘Imagine’), Queen (‘Bohemian Rhapsody’) and Ashley ►
• Fiction (from what I read as a kid, to some of today’s favourites):
  
  
  
  • Chaucer and Shakespeare ► belong in both this and the poetry categories [Why do I have the compulsion to put everything into pigeon-holes?]
  • Some two dozen writers ► from Douglas Adams via Isaac Azimov, John le Carré, Lewis Carroll, ... to John Wyndham, who’ve given me pleasure over the years.
• Poetry (from the ridiculous to the sublime) and Songs (which in this case are light-hearted poems put to music):
  • by Burl Ives (‘I Know an Old Lady’), Lewis Carroll (‘Jabberwocky’), William McGonagall (‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’), Flanders and Swann (‘The Gasman Cometh’) and a couple of others ►.
    There’s more Flanders and Swann in my selection of their transport songs ►.
    
  • by Edward Lear and others: Limericks ►
• Plays (Loot, Waiting for Godot, One Way Pendulum, Under Milk Wood, etc.):
  • by playwrights Joe Orton, Samuel Beckett, N F Simpson and Dylan Thomas ►
• Films and their ‘stars’ (on which I have a few thoughts, but not many):
  • Laurel and Hardy, Joan Rivers, Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin ►

Photographic Galleries

I don’t include here photographs that are associated with other subjects, for example classical music or films, but these galleries contain some pretty astounding photos:

If you’ve looked at this web site before, you’ll have seen quite a lot of these photographs already, but there are many new ones.

Many thanks to my contributors, especially DD and PC for their Wonders of the World, Cute animals and some remarkable images of a rare albino humming bird. Also Weird and Wonderful nature, and some more serious but nevertheless photogenic things to do with climate change, paths and roads and so on.

There are also photos of wildlife on the Galápagos Islands. (Actually, wildlife is an inappropriate word, as the birds and other animals have no aggression towards nor fear of us.) This section also includes some brief notes about Sir David Attenborough, who has presented wildlife television programmes for decades.

Photographs associated with other subjects (like classical music or films) can be found elsewhere.

Pastimes

• Sports. I have little interest in sports, except that I occasionally enjoy watching swimming, diving and snooker on television, not participating.
  So I’ll devote this section to a British hopeful for the London 2012 Olympic Games: Tom Daley ►, British champion diver.
   
  
• I do crosswords, but only cryptic ones. (Long live AZED!)
  
• I watch silly programmes on TV but only if they’re on after 9 pm British time.
• I do quite a lot of reading, especially on the scientific subjects that are mentioned in the next section, and on transport topics, especially buses and trains. (I even enjoy reading timetables! Did you know that the 08:22 from Barnehurst was back in the 1960s its only train to regularly terminate at Blackfriars?)
• I used to play a lot of Bridge, but haven’t touched it for umpteen years. I once bid and made 7 no-trumps!
• Finally, updating this web site keeps me quite busy!

Science and Mathematics

• Astronomy.
  Great disnub
  dirhombidodecahedron
  Crab Nebula
  Centre of the Milky Way
  This has been an armchair hobby since I was a child. Aspects of cosmology fascinate me, and I’ve written a not-too-technical explanation of what we believe took place at and after the start of the Universe.
  • Astronomy ► (some people, books, etc.).
  • Photographs ► (some beautiful photos taken of and from space).
  • The Big Bang ► (the ‘origin’ of the Universe).
  • The Solar System ► (our local part of the Universe).
• Science. This has been an eternal interest for me, and I enjoy reading reports of new scientific discoveries, or seeing them on television.
  Brian Cox
  Jim Al-Khalili
  Two of the better ‘new generation’ presenters are Jim Al-Khalili (born 1962), Professor of Theoretical Physics and Chair in the Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey and has hosted several BBC productions about science; he is also a commentator about science in other media; and Brian Cox (born 1968), an English particle physicist, a Royal Society University Research Fellow and a Professor at the University of Manchester, who has narrated several television documentaries including Wonders of the Solar System for which he won ‘Best Presenter and Best Science/Natural History program’ by the Royal Television Society. You either love him or hate him! For me, his passion for science is enough to compensate for his toothy grin.
   
  I’ve added to this web-site a not-too-technical explanation of Atoms and their Basic Structure ►.
• Mathematics ►. I studied Maths at Imperial College, London, but have forgotten most of what I learnt there; at least I hope that the rigour of Mathematics has rubbed off on me. I studied there when Professor Abdus Salam (1926 — 1996) was a lecturer; in 1979 he became a Nobel laureate in Physics
  for his work on the electroweak unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces.
  
• Computing ►. Alan Turing was one of the world’s most prominent people in the area of computing, though his brilliant work on breaking German cyphers was never recognized in his lifetime. Following a conviction for committing homosexual activity, he committed suicide in 1954. 2012 marks the centenary of his birth, and I hope you approve of my contribution to describing his life and the ingenious machines he fought against. If not, then please look him up on the web and appreciate what he did for our freedom.

Transport: Trains, Trams, Buses and Planes

London Underground and other British Railways

 
[Left] 1938 Underground Stock at Harlesden; [Centre] Sway (Hants) station;
[Right] Southern Railways class O2 locomotive (Isle of Wight W24 Calbourne)

More about High-Speed Rail Lines ►More about British Railways ►

 
[above] “All Cars Stop Here” —
a car is a tram-car

 
[above] “Mind the Gap”

 
[above] 1938-stock
Underground Stamp
 
[right] Metropolitan
Railway Stamp

Opinions (Mine and Others’) On...

Some Madness! A Collection. A Hotch-Potch. A Gallimaufry. Odds and Sods

• Radio ►, a short note on some radio programmes I have liked.
• ‘Drunken Elk Found in Tree’ and ‘Polari’ ► — a couple of things to maintain my madness!
• Some Schoolboy (and, no doubt Schoolgirl) Howlers ►.

“Th-th-that’s...
 

 
...All, Folks!”...

...unless you’ve got anything for the Recycle Bin on your Desktop...