Codebreaker At The Science Museum
This morning, I went to see the exhibition about Alan Turing called Codebreaker at the Science Museum.
Posters for Codebreaker
it is actually only a small exhibition, but with good quality and some unusual exhibits, including a differential analyser built out of Meccano.
There was also some exhibits and documents on Turing’s personal life, including the Coroner’s report on his suicide.
The exhibition says that his mother thought his death may not have been suicide and in his Wikipedia entry, this is said.
Turing’s mother argued strenuously that the ingestion was accidental, caused by her son’s careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing may have killed himself in an ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability. Hodges and David Leavitt have suggested that Turing was re-enacting a scene from the 1937 film Snow White, his favourite fairy tale, both noting that (in Leavitt’s words) he took “an especially keen pleasure in the scene where the Wicked Queen immerses her apple in the poisonous brew.”
If you look at others like Turing, such as Newton, you find characters very much on the edge. I used to work with a programmer, who always sang and made strange noises as he coded. He argued that programming was such a logical business, you had to do something mad to balance the mind. Turing wasn’t a programmer in the sense we think now, but he was someone steeped in logic and I suspect the same applied to him.
Sadly, in today’s world, Turing would probably be treasured in much the way Stephen Hawking is.
At least now, hopefully his sexuality would not have been the problem it was in the 1960s.
One Line Spam E-Mails
I have seen a large increase in the number of one line spam e-mails over the last week or so.
Typically, the e-mail has the following characteristics.
- There is rarely a Subject
- The sender maybe someone you know and the e-mail address is not encoded.
- The e-mail is copied to lots of other people, who often are connected to the sender. I’ve just received one from Australia and it is copied to masses of people in the country.
- The body of the e-mail consists of a single complicated link. Don’t click this, as you’ll get infected with a virus or an advert for a drug you don’t need.
So what should you do if you get such an e-mail?
Ask Leo has the details here. Read it.
He says that the sender’s e-mail account has been hacked, so contact them immediately and get them to run a virus check on their computer and change their password and account recovery questions.
I would also advise, that if they use HOTMAIL, GMAIL, YAHOO or any other free e-mail to move away from that account and get a new account. I know it’s a pain, but they could use your account to send other things that you might not like, as they have your current ID and password.
Read Leo as I said and if you don’t believe me, believe him.
I have had five of these e-mails in the last couple of weeks; two from friends, a couple from Australia and another from who knows where.
The frequency seems to be increasing.
A Note For Those On The Other side of the World
The BBC is streaming their coverage of Royal Ascot on the web.
It’s a long way for all those pixels to go.
Turing Remembered
The BBC has an excellent article about Alan Turing on its web site. Interestingly, the article is by Vint Cerf, a guy I saw lecture at the University of Hertfordshire a few years ago. They also share a birthday of June 23rd.
The article has been published because next year, the Science Museum will be mounting an exhibition on Turing. That should be well worth a visit.
Facebook Is a Pain
I keep getting people wanting me to join Facebook. I’m afraid, I don’t join any social networking site, that will have me as a member. I was a member once, but I cancelled it a few months ago.
People Shouldn’t be so Thin-Skinned
There is a story in the Standard last night entitled Tantrum of the Opera. A Twickenham housewife tweeted to her friend that although she had seen the musical eighty times, she couldn’t stand the star. It has now developed into a full-blooded row.
I would make three conclusions from this.
In the first place the comment was only tweeted to a friend and thus the star is being a bit over the top.
Secondly, the lady has seen the musical eighty times, and so as she is effectively paying some of the star’s wages, she deserves a little respect.
Lastly, if I was producing a musical, I know someone, who I wouldn’t be employing.
They were also discussing another case on BBC Breakfast this morning, where someone made a comment about an X-Factor contestant. She has now suffered months of abuse.
She was possibly a bit unwise to say what she says, but it does illustrate, why you should always be careful what you say on social networking sites. However to abuse the lady and call her all sorts of unwise things in totally wrong.
The sooner we have a high profile case, where one of these so called trolls, gets some time at Her Majesty’s pleasure, the better. It will be interesting to see how much abuse the judge gets.
I have had a bit of abuse in my time over this blog and suspect it was because the post was about an odious foreign government.
The Olympic Torch is Now On The Red Button
This is so much better. And doesn’t use all that bandwidth on the Internet.
I wonder why it’s now available.
LinkedIn Passwords
LinkedIn has been hacked and their passwords have been st0len. There are details here.
Usually, I keep my passwords pretty random and unique, but mine must be one that they thought could get them into my Google Account. I didn’t, as I got this e-mail from Google.
Someone recently tried to sign in to your Google Account, xxxx@xxxx.xxx. We prevented the sign-in attempt in case this was a hijacker trying to access your account. Please review the details of the sign-in attempt:
Thursday, June 7, 2012 9:38:32 AM GMT
IP Address: 188.158.25.46
Location: Tehran, Iran
I didn’t trust the e-mail, but logged in manually to Google and changed my password. Incidentally, when I logged in, Google informed me of the suspicious activity.
So it does look like there is some hanky-panky going on.
So login to all your important accounts, where your e-mail address is used as login in any way and check things out.
FiReControl Was Abysmal Failure
FiReControl was one of the Blair government’s flagship projects, which had the aim of sorting out the 999 services for the fire brigades across England. According to this report from the the National Audit Office, it wasn’t a success. Here’s the first paragaph.
The project to replace the 46 Fire and Rescue Services’ local control rooms across England with nine purpose-built regional control centres linked by a new IT system has been a comprehensive failure. The DCLG acted to cut its losses by terminating the contract in December 2010 but at least £469 million will have been wasted.
Lord Prescott defended the system in the media last week and felt that others were to blame.
Now a letter from Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigades Union is published in The Times with the title of this post as a title, which drops Prescott in the doo-dah. If the FBU won’t support you, something must be wrong.
I hope he’s got his wet suit on!
Prescott is one of those politicians, who in my view, are not fit to run a whelk stall.
He should do everybody a favour and retire from public life. Preferably to a cottage by Spurn Head.
When Social Media Goes Awry
The Telegraph reports an unseemly spat between Joe Simpson, the author of Touching the Void, and schoolchildren doing the book for GCSE.
It is the sort of thing that can happen on social media and I suspect both parties could have been a little bit more discrete or less outrageous with their replies.
I had a letter published once and it attracted some fairly abusive letters in reply. In the end, history has shown that I was right.
The Anonymous Widower 