UK Government apologises for its treatment of Alan Turing Friday, Sep 11 2009

For those who don’t know, and frankly you should, Alan Turing was one of mankinds greatest brains, jointly responsible for the first electronic computers, using it to break the Wehrmacht’s Enigma ‘unbreakable’ codes. Station X was one of the most important parts of the Allied war machine in World War 2. The Battle of the Atlantic was won because of ‘Station X’ at Bletchley. German troop movements throughout the campaign in North West Europe following D-Day were known in advance, sometimes Churchill was reading Hitler’s messages before Hitler was.

Not just that, but the fact that you are reading this is due in no small part to Turing. He was a also a major factor in how we see AI today.

He was also criminalised because he was gay, eventually commiting suicide.

However Her Majesty’s Government have now made an official apology, in the wake of a petition signed by many thousands of us, gay and straight.
Full text below the fold

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Purchase Win Tuesday, Mar 3 2009

My monitor has been playing up- it brightens and then darkens as though on a dimmer switch.  I’ve been waiting for it to go altogether, then bitch about having to buy a new one.  In town on Saturday (28th) I dropped into the Curry’s, which is closing down- there is a large Curry’s on the trading estate, plus a PC World (also owned by DSG) next door, and the restructure was announced pre-credit crunch, so it was only a matter of time.

There, sitting on a shelf, was a CRT with a label “£5, please buy me”.  I asked, and it turned out nothing wrong, just been sitting in store for years, no box, and in these LCD days they wanted to get rid of it. 

£5! So I bought it. Only down side was having to carry a boxless CRT monitor over a mile!  Carry heavy purchases home appears to be a new hobby.  On the 22nd I had to buy a new car battery, and carry that 2  miles (on account of having no working car).

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Hard drives- WOW. Thursday, Nov 27 2008

Found over at ***Dave’s place- why you shouldn’t thump your computer to fix it.

Hard drives, by analogy

 We are so blasé about hard drives and how they work. But the precision involved is astonishing:

 

The dimensions of the head are impressive. With a width of less than a hundred nanometers and a thickness of about ten, it flies above the platter at a speed of up to 15,000 RPM, at a height that’s the equivalent of 40 atoms. If you start multiplying these infinitesimally small numbers, you begin to get an idea of their significance.
 Or, to give an amazing analogy:

 

Consider this little comparison: if the read/write head were a Boeing 747, and the hard-disk platter were the surface of the Earth:

• The head would fly at Mach 800
• At less than one centimeter from the ground
• And count every blade of grass
• Making fewer than 10 unrecoverable counting errors in an area equivalent to all of Ireland.

 Wow. 

(via kottke)

Wow indeed- do you really want to jog something floating at 40 atoms height?

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