Remembering Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalization of the concepts of “algorithm” and “computation” with the Turing machine, which played a significant role in the creation of the modern computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence.
During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre. He devised a number of techniques for breaking Germanciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.
Turing’s homosexuality resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952, when homosexual acts were still illegal in the United Kingdom. He accepted treatment with female hormones (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. He died in 1954, several weeks before his 42nd birthday, fromcyanide poisoning.
An inquest determined it was suicide; his mother and some others believed his death was accidental. On 10 September 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.
First quantum computer just sold to Lockheed Martin but binary computers fight back
On Wednesday, D-Wave Systems made history by announcing the sale of the world’s first commercial quantum computer. The buyer was Lockheed Martin Corporation, who will use the machine to help solve some of their “most challenging computation problems.” Lockheed purchased the system, known as D-Wave One, as well as maintenance and associated professional services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
D-Wave One uses a superconducting 128-qubit (quantum bit) chip, called Rainier, representing the first commercial implementation of a quantum processor. Built around a superconducting processor, the entire system’s footprint is approximately 100 square feet. The total wall-plug power consumed by a D-Wave One system is 15 kilowatts (a standard laptop uses about 60 watts). Unfortunately the actual speed of the computer is secret, but this is because speed isn’t actually the point of a quantum computer.
A normal computer operates on the basis of units known as bits. Each bit in a normal computer can only be one of 0 or 1 and nothing else. No matter how many bits you have, each computer at a single point in time can only occupy one combination of these bits in order for the programming to actually work.
A quantum computer is different from this because of a principle in quantum mechanics known as superposition. The sort of problem that a conventional computer is very slow at which a quantum computer would be very good at are the ones where you are trying to find one out of billions of billions of billions of combinations which produces an answer. A conventional computer has to go through all the possibilities one by one, the quantum computer can in some sense try them all out at once and can therefore do the calculation in far fewer steps. They are however extremely expensive, the DWave has been rumoured to cost a cool $10-Million.
Despite the fact traditional binary machines have started to reach their limits, new emerging concepts are showing incredible promise. Marc McAndrew is one individual who has invented a machine known as The Charity Engine. The surprising thing is it’s more of a concept than an actual computer. McAndrew has realised that the wasted processing power of machines can be collectively harnessed to make the worlds most powerful supercomputer – for nothing.
By simply running his software on your PC (when it’s idle), you’ll be part of the world’s fastest computer, helping research cures for cancer or new technologies. And the best part of this is that the money the network generates from this research goes to charity. It’s infinitely more environmentally friendly and is so revolutionary that the likes of Amnesty International, Water Aid, Oxfam and ActionAid have all created donation programs to plug in to it – they also monitor the research that takes place to make sure it’s all completely 100% ethical from head to toe. McAndrew (an already successful business owner) has also signed up to a The Giving Pledge that guarantees if he ever makes any real money from the business most of his share will go to charity too. Could you ask for more?
You can sign up to the facebook page here, find out when the Engine will be launching and do your bit for charity too. To encourage you, everyone who signs up is automatically entered in to a completely free lottery draw of $1Million.
Adam Curtis – All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
Without a doubt Adam Curtis is one of the most important documentary makers alive today. His work isn’t just ground breaking in it’s messaging, the sheer volume of information and the way he delivers is food for thought itself. Using a mixture of well found retro footage and expert narration, Curtis delivers his own distinct form of sociopolitical theatre. Even if you were to completely disagree with him, it’s utterly thought-provoking and entertaining. It’s possibly the only reason to own a TV.
Curtis completed a Bachelor of Arts in Human Sciences at the University of Oxford, where he studied genetics, evolutionary biology, psychology, politics, sociology and elementary statistics. Curtis also taught Politics there for a time.
His work has received more than a few awards to date – here’s a run down of our favourites:
1992 – Pandora’s Box – examines the dangers of technocratic and political rationality – BAFTA Award for Best Factual Series.
1996 - 25 Million Pounds – study of Nick Leeson, collapse of Barings Bank – Winner at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
1997 – The Way of All Flesh – The story of Henrietta Lacks - Golden Gate award.
1999 – The Mayfair Set – the climate of the Thatcher years - BAFTA Award for Best Factual Series.
2002 – The Century of the Self - Edward Bernays’ development of public relations - Broadcast Award, Longman Award.
2004 - The Power of Nightmares - the rise of Islamism and Neoconservatism - BAFTA for Best Factual Series
2007 – The Trap – a series addressing the modern concepts of freedom.
Curtis has also provided many snippets of brilliance to the Charlie Brooker series Screenwipe in 2007 and Newswipe in 2009. What more you could ask for I do not know.
His current series All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace is now showing on BBC 2 / iPlayer and is utterly essential watching. It is a series of films about how humans have been colonised by the machines they have built. Although we don’t realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.
Episode one of 3 is available now – I recommend watching it 3 times at least and take notes too.
Stephen Hawking: ‘There is no heaven; it’s a fairy story’
In a dismissal that underlines his firm rejection of religious comforts, Britain’s most eminent scientist said there was nothing beyond the moment when the brain flickers for the final time. Hawking, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21, shares his thoughts on death, human purpose and our chance existence in an exclusive interview with the Guardian today.
The incurable illness was expected to kill Hawking within a few years of its symptoms arising, an outlook that turned the young scientist to Wagner, but ultimately led him to enjoy life more, he has said, despite the cloud hanging over his future.
“I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first,” he said. ”I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark,” he added.
Hawking’s latest comments go beyond those laid out in his 2010 book, The Grand Design, in which he asserted that there is no need for a creator to explain the existence of the universe. The book provoked a backlash from some religious leaders, including the chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, who accused Hawking of committing an “elementary fallacy” of logic.
Full Article at Guardian Science
Orson Welles May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985
Welles was born May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, son of Richard Hodgdon Head Welles (1873, Missouri – December 28, 1930, Chicago, Illinois) and Beatrice Ives (1882 or 1883, Springfield, Illinois – May 10, 1924, Chicago, Illinois). His family was raised Roman Catholic. Despite his parents’ affluence, Welles encountered many hardships in childhood. In 1919, his parents separated and moved to Chicago.
October 30, 1938 radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells brought Welles instant fame. The combination of the news bulletin form of the performance with the between-breaks dial spinning habits of listeners from the rival and far more popular Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy program, was later reported in the media to have created widespread confusion among listeners who failed to hear the introduction, although the extent of this confusion has recently come into question. Panic was reported to have spread (after citation from rumors) among many listeners who believed the news reports of a Martian invasion. The myth of the result created by the combination was reported as fact around the world and disparagingly mentioned by Adolf Hitler in a public speech a few months later. The 1970s “docu-drama” The Night That Panicked America was based on events centering around the production of, and events that resulted from, the program.
In the 1940′s, Welles organized the Mercury Wonder Show, a touring magic and variety act put together to entertain U.S. soldiers going to war. He performed on many television shows and even had a prime time magic special taped (that unfortunately never aired).
Red letter day for Darwin Correspondence Project
The project mapping Charles Darwin’s life and work in the 15,000 letters he wrote or received during his extraordinary lifetime will be completed after a £5 million funding package was announced.
The awards, announced today by Cambridge University Library and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), will ensure the full completion of the definitive, award-winning edition ofThe Correspondence of Charles Darwin.
More than 15,000 currently known letters written by or to Darwin will be published, in full, by 2022. The edition is the work of the Darwin Correspondence Project, widely acknowledged as the greatest editorial project in the history of science, and one of the major international scholarly projects of the past half-century.
It is jointly managed by the University Library and ACLS. By the time the edition is complete, locating, researching, and editing the letters will have taken several teams of scholars more than forty years. Summaries of all known letters are freely available to the public through the Project’s website
More at CAM
Happy Birthday Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchens (born 13 April 1949) is an English-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation,Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008. He is a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits and in 2005 he was voted the world’s fifth top public intellectual in a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll.
Hitchens is known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson and for his excoriating critiques of, among others, Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Henry Kissinger. His confrontational style of debate has made him both a lauded and controversial figure. As a political observer, polemicist and self-defined radical, he rose to prominence as a fixture of the left-wingpublications in his native Britain and in the United States. His departure from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the “tepid reaction” of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini’s issue of a fatwā calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie.
The 11 September 2001 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called “fascism with an Islamic face.” His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, while Hitchens insists he is not “a conservative of any kind.”
Identified as a champion of the “New Atheism” movement, Hitchens describes himself as an antitheist and a believer in the philosophical values of the Enlightenment. Hitchens says that a person “could be an atheist and wish that belief in god were correct,” but that “an antitheist, a term I’m trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there’s no evidence for such an assertion.” He argues that the concept of god or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization. He wrote at length on atheism and the nature of religion in his 2007 book God Is Not Great.
Happy Birthday Hitch.
Autistic boy,12, with higher IQ than Einstein develops his own theory of relativity
DAILY MAIL: “A 12-year-old child prodigy has astounded university professors after grappling with some of the most advanced concepts in mathematics.
Jacob Barnett has an IQ of 170 – higher than Albert Einstein – and is now so far advanced in his Indiana university studies that professors are lining him up for a PHD research role. The boy wonder, who taught himself calculus, algebra, geometry and trigonometry in a week, is now tutoring fellow college classmates after hours.
And now Jake has embarked on his most ambitious project yet – his own ‘expanded version of Einstein’s theory of relativity’. His mother, not sure if her child was talking nonsense or genius, sent a video of his theory to the renowned Institute for Advanced Study near Princeton University. According to the Indiana Star, Institute astrophysics professor Scott Tremaine -himself a world renowned expert – confirmed the authenticity of Jake’s theory.
In an email to the family, Tremaine wrote: ‘I’m impressed by his interest in physics and the amount that he has learned so far. ‘The theory that he’s working on involves several of the toughest problems in astrophysics and theoretical physics. ‘Anyone who solves these will be in line for a Nobel Prize.’”
Read more at The Daily Mail (Thanks Rob)
Jean-Martin Charcot
Neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot believed that there may be a connection because he could simulate almost any aspect of hysteria through suggestion in susceptible individuals. Hysteria is now typically diagnosed as conversion disorder and its a condition where people appear to have neurological problems despite their nervous system seeming to be in perfect working order.
It turns out that the idea of hypnosis is a bit of a smokescreen because it depends much more on the person listening to the suggestions, than the person making the suggestions.
His work greatly influenced the developing fields of neurology and psychology. He was the “foremost neurologist of late nineteenth-century France” and has been called “the Napoleon of the neuroses”.
Born in Paris, France, Charcot worked and taught at the famous Salpêtrière Hospital for 33 years. His reputation as an instructor drew students from all over Europe. In 1882, he established a neurology clinic at Salpêtrière, which was the first of its kind in Europe.Charcot was a part of the French neurological tradition and studied under, and greatly revered, Duchenne de Boulogne.
“He married a rich widow, Madame Durvis, in 1862 and had two children, Jeanne and Jean-Baptiste, the latter becoming both a doctor and a famous polar explorer”.
Article via MindHacks
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