9 ms·

10 Downing Street: Treatment of Alan Turing was "appalling"

237 points by handelaar 17y ago

gstar 17y ago
That's the most heartfelt thing I've read from Gordon Brown (or his aides) .. fantastic. I'm very pleased that the apology was made.
- hnhg 17y ago
  I've just come away from watching series one of The Thick of It so I'm nothing but cynical about this. I do hope my doubts are wrongly placed.
- Agent101 17y ago
  I like Turing and it was appalling what they did to him. But I don't see why people care about an apology to a dead guy? It won't make him any less dead. There is lots of other more important stuff we need to deal with.
  - lucumo 17y ago
    Apologies are a way to acknowledge that mistakes were made in the past as well as that there's an intention not to make them again. As such they help us prevent future mistakes.
    - Agent101 17y ago
      I can see that on the scale on individuals? But governments? They make a habit of going against what the previous incumbents did or said, just so they look like they are doing something different. As such I don't see how this apology will make one jot of difference to the UK governments future actions (it already has openly gay MPs, I can't see them backing legislation that criminalizes their sexual preference).
      - sethg 17y ago
        There is a legal fiction that a government is not merely the vector-sum of actions made by its functionaries, but that it has a corporate identity that decides and acts and persists over time. This is fiction, of course, but it's a useful fiction--a model, if you prefer--and it has some connection with the way humans as social animals identify with their tribes. So the United Kingdom (represented by its Home Office and judiciary in the 1950s), as a thing with a corporate identity, did wrong to Alan Turing, and it is appropriate for the United Kingom (represented by its Prime Minister) to apologize for its misdeeds.
      - pyre 17y ago
        It's more of a way for a society to formally make reparations for past bad (group) actions. Even if the person is dead, there is an implicit promise to never let this happen again.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    It's about two things: First of all a point of principle, a sense of justice for Turing and all those like him, wrongfully branded criminals for simply following their nature. Even today there are plenty of cases of overt violence against homosexuals and it certainly won't hurt to remind potential perpetrators on the current stance of the government in these matters. Second, to put the spotlight on all kinds of discrimination happening today, not just because of sexuality. Maybe it will make some people think about what the long term consequences of these stupid policies can be. You can't bring the dead to life, that's for sure. But at least we can make the living think a little bit about the consequences of their actions. The country that I live in (nl) does all kinds of unspeakable things to foreigners (jail them, make them take tests to prove their going to be good dutch people and so on), in short discriminates against them left, right and center. For gays, lesbians and 'others' (no, I'm not forgetting you this time), the battle here (nl) is mostly won, there are plenty of others that still need doing. (see http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/05/14/netherlands-discrimination-name-integration http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/05/14/netherlands-discrimina...) Alan Turing being British and gay instead of Moroccan, Turkish or from some other 'scary' country with a 'scary' religion seems to be unrelated, but these cases are all about unjust laws singling out groups that have done absolutely nothing wrong. I'm sure that for other groups this has absolutely no weight, but with every apology by some government official for past wrongdoings we get one step closer to governments that can be held accountable in the present. 50 years is way too long, but it is better than nothing. So, I agree there is lots of more important stuff that we need to deal with. But it's 'cost free' because it does not actually go at the expense of one of those things, and it may help in the future to avoid stupid 'mistakes' like these so that at that time there will be less important stuff that needs dealing with.
    - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
      " ... wrongfully branded criminals for simply following their nature." The argument that an action is simply a persons "nature" is impotent. Do you hold forth that same argument when such pederasty, due to age restrictions, is classed as child abuse? People probably levelled the same argument against Socrate's [reported by Plato and Xenophon] denouncement of the buggery of juveniles by older men.
  - nate_meurer 17y ago
    You say that as though an apology is preventing "us" from doing "more important stuff". Like the apology would somehow consume resources or be a distraction. If you don't like it, feel free to not read the article.
    - Agent101 17y ago
      It is a headline in papers and online news sites. It is not only my attention that it is consuming. And attention is valuable right? There is only a finite amount of it to go around for good causes etc. If everyone was doing their best to help the living, I would have no issue with it.
- ekanes 17y ago
  Actually, it could have been a little less "I'm proud to say" and "I'm pleased to have the chance"... When you(r country) messed up and it's your duty to apologize, don't be proud and pleased. Simply be sorry.
  - weavejester 17y ago
    That's what I thought. If the government is apologising, then they are essentially saying they are shouldering some of the responsibility for the mistakes of previous governments. If that's the case, they shouldn't be pleased or proud, but regretful and reflective.
  - jacoblyles 17y ago
    Given that neither Gordon Brown nor any members of the current government are culpable in the brutal treatment of Alan Turing a lifetime ago, they are not capable of making a sincere apology for that treatment. The only thing they are capable of is in making a self-congratulatory statement that amounts to "Look how much better we are today than our forefathers!". That is what this is, and that is all they can give us. Anything else would be dishonest.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      They could formally pardon him as well.
      - russss 17y ago
        I'm not sure there is any history of the UK government issuing posthumous pardons.
        jacquesm 17y ago
        There are actually plenty, such as a lot of people that were executed during World War I for 'cowardice', there are others dealing with people wrongly accused of crimes.
jacquesm 17y ago
So much for a posthumous knighthood I guess... That's a real pity, it would have been nice to see this go one step further up the ladder. But it is quite nice to see something this positive come from jgrahamc's efforts.
- nate_meurer 17y ago
  I agree. This statement is very good-- a sincere apology-- and I like that it includes the details of Turing's conviction and sentence. I want to see a knighthood though. By any standard, Turing deserves one.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    And a full pardon as well, note that the statement by Brown is just an apology, not a pardon, so Turing remains a convicted criminal as far as the law is concerned.
    - electromagnetic 17y ago
      Agreed, he will likely have to be pardoned before he would ever be Knighted. (I'm unsure, does the Queen only pardon soldiers' crimes?)
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        interesting reading on that subject here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon#United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon#United_Kingdom
        electromagnetic 17y ago
        Thanks, I tried searching for something on it, but I believe I was idiot-googling as I was in a rush. Really the government needs to establish a procedure for posthumous pardons, essentially a 'posthumously pardoned under present laws'.
philjackson 17y ago
A spine-tingling read.
heycarsten 17y ago
It's about time.
bravura 17y ago
"In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ - in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence - and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison - was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later." Yes, and he killed himself by eating a cyanide-laced apple. This poetic method of suicide allowed him, as one final gesture, to give his mother the comfort of thinking her son's death was accidental. His mother maintained that her little Alan was always tinkering in the lab, and it was most likely an accident that his apple became contaminated with the cyanide that killed him.
- staunch 17y ago
  It's also possible that he was assassinated. We'll probably never know for sure.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    "Alan Turing, the man who knew too much", by David Leavitt. The speculation goes that if Turing was a homosexual he was a security risk. I'm not sure what to make of that though, after all he was no longer allowed to work with the machines which were advancing very rapidly indeed. Similar rumours keep cropping up about David Kelly. The problem is that with such a lack of transparency even if these are nonsense there is no way to debunk them, that alone gives them a semblance of credence. As you said, we'll never know.
    - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
      If Turing had been heterosexual and had gone out to the cinema to pick someone up and then invited them back to his house for sex .. that too would have been seen as risky behaviour likely to lead to being snared in a honey trap, no? Presumably the situation of his arrest wasn't the first time he had acted in this way.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        The circumstances are quite different. From what I know about the case, and I've only read a book or two on it and quite long ago, the friend that Turing took home later broke in to his house or something to that effect. Turing reported to the police and in the process of the investigation the whole thing spilled out. So, even if it wasn't the first time he acted that way it doesn't really matter because there is 0 proof that Turing was 'blackmailable' because of his sexuality.
rw 17y ago
I've been saying for a while that Turing's premature death set back mathematics by years, if not decades. :( Discrimination still happens to a large enough degree (gender, race and class) that we're shooting ourselves collectively in the foot by not enabling people to contribute as much to society as they are able.
- arithmetic 17y ago
  This apology was long overdue. I'm glad that Britain finally came out with it.
- pbhjpbhj 17y ago
  Complete speculation but it's possible that, being Freudian for a moment, the childhood loss and trauma that led Turing to pick-up teenage boys for casual sex was the driving force that pushed him to pursue mathematics to such a degree.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    I really have a hard time trying to understand how you can even begin to reach such a conclusion. Turing was already well underway to become a very special person indeed long before that happened, his mathematical and scientific skills were beyond dispute at a very young age. A quote from the wikipedia article on Alan Turing: "Despite this, Turing continued to show remarkable ability in the studies he loved, solving advanced problems in 1927 without having even studied elementary calculus. In 1928, aged 16, Turing encountered Albert Einstein's work; not only did he grasp it, but he extrapolated Einstein's questioning of Newton's laws of motion from a text in which this was never made explicit"
    - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
      It's quite common, particularly long after the fact, for teachers to say things like "of course we knew he was special". The Turing Scrapbook, which is at least partially biased in favour of Turing as a demi-god(!), makes no claims as to Turing being notably gifted as a child; indeed mentioning he was nearly stopped from doing his exams. He was certainly a gifted child but his exceptional mathematical abilities only appear to have really taken root during his University career.
thras 17y ago
Whenever a politician apologizes to his voters for the actions of individuals long dead towards other individuals long dead, I somehow fail to be impressed. I suppose it is sort of interesting in a National Geographic, watch the natives with their bizarre religious customs, type of way.
- mkramlich 17y ago
  Agreed. I always have the same reaction. Now if the perpetrators apologized I would be more impressed. But even if those folks did, it still wouldn't bring him back. If the laws in Britain today are already such that they couldn't do that sort of thing again legally, then, this is even more of an irrelevant event. Just one particular unfortunate situation that happened to one particular person a long time ago. Of course, I hear there was this one guy who got literally nailed to a cross for just talking to people, 2000 years ago, and people are still talking about that today. That really blows me away.
ashwinl 17y ago
A good 10 min. documentary excerpt on 'The Death of Alan Turing' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7_WzNzHwJY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7_WzNzHwJY "I am rather afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future Turing believes that machines think Turing lies with men Therefore machines do not think"
TravisLS 17y ago
Congratulations to jgrahamc on making this happen. This apology was long overdue and would not have happened without your effort.
- jgrahamc 17y ago
  Thanks. It's quite a surprise to actually have this happen. And it was more of a surprise when my mobile phone rang and a Scottish man said "Hello John. It's Gordon Brown."
  - rms 17y ago
    That's awesome. In the USA, you get "Please hold for the President of the United States".
    - jgrahamc 17y ago
      Actually it went like this: the phone rang and a woman called Kirsty who I'd had previously spoken to said "Gordon would like to talk to you" and then Gordon was on the line...
  - huntse 17y ago
    Completely awesome. Good work! I signed the petition (of course) and encouraged others to do so, but I have to admit that I am delighted that it actually happened.
- matthewcford 17y ago
  It's the first time I signed a petition on number10.gov.uk. I wasn't sure if anything would come of it, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it worked.
brown9-2 17y ago
Reading the PM's statement, is anyone else from the US struck by the feeling that this kind of statement could never be made by the US govt in 2009?
- shrikant 17y ago
  "I will never apologize for the United States of America ? I don't care what the facts are." - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_H._W._Bush http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_H._W._Bush - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 Draw your own conclusions.
- teeja 17y ago
  Rare, but it happens .. "President Bush apologized Thursday for the humiliation suffered by Iraqi prisoners at the hands of U.S. soldiers.." "President Clinton has apologized to the elderly black survivors of a government-run study of untreated syphilis." "The significance of a presidential apology was recognized recently when the President apologized to those harmed by Cold War radiation experiments." "In 1990, the U.S. president apologized to and compensated Japanese-Americans for their internment during the war."
whirlycott1 17y ago
I didn't know much about his life until I read "A madman dreams of Turing machines," which is a great book about Turing and Godel. Tortured souls, both of them.
jodrellblank 17y ago
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/MISC/ORACLE/Oracle.html http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/MISC/ORACLE/Oracle....
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Thank you very much. Too long for me to read it now but I've read the first chapter and it is quite a find.
springcoil1 17y ago
Congratulations to all those who were behind this petition. As an Irish man (educated in the UK) I now have slightly more respect for Gordon Brown.
Jem 17y ago
I didn't necessarily agree with the petition (that is, don't necessarily see the point of posthumous apologies) but you did a fantastic job, jgrahamc. Congratulations on making this happen.
- jgrahamc 17y ago
  Thank you for that. Recognition from people who don't actually agree with me is always very welcome.
s-phi-nl 17y ago
How is this any more appropriate for Hacker News than President Obama's speech to schoolchildren (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=810399 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=810399)? It seems to me that both are a national leader saying basically common things.
- mkramlich 17y ago
  The Obama/school thing lacks either of the two major themes of this site (in my eyes anyway): computing and entrepreneurship. The Turing story has Alan Turing, one of the forefathers of modern computing, and probably an idol, of sorts, to many of the readers here. So on those grounds, yeah, I could see how the latter is much more appropriate for this site.

237 points by handelaar 17y ago

gstar 17y ago

That's the most heartfelt thing I've read from Gordon Brown (or his aides) .. fantastic. I'm very pleased that the apology was made.

hnhg 17y ago
I've just come away from watching series one of The Thick of It so I'm nothing but cynical about this. I do hope my doubts are wrongly placed.
Agent101 17y ago
I like Turing and it was appalling what they did to him. But I don't see why people care about an apology to a dead guy? It won't make him any less dead. There is lots of other more important stuff we need to deal with.
- lucumo 17y ago
  Apologies are a way to acknowledge that mistakes were made in the past as well as that there's an intention not to make them again. As such they help us prevent future mistakes.
  - Agent101 17y ago
    I can see that on the scale on individuals? But governments? They make a habit of going against what the previous incumbents did or said, just so they look like they are doing something different. As such I don't see how this apology will make one jot of difference to the UK governments future actions (it already has openly gay MPs, I can't see them backing legislation that criminalizes their sexual preference).
    - sethg 17y ago
      There is a legal fiction that a government is not merely the vector-sum of actions made by its functionaries, but that it has a corporate identity that decides and acts and persists over time. This is fiction, of course, but it's a useful fiction--a model, if you prefer--and it has some connection with the way humans as social animals identify with their tribes. So the United Kingdom (represented by its Home Office and judiciary in the 1950s), as a thing with a corporate identity, did wrong to Alan Turing, and it is appropriate for the United Kingom (represented by its Prime Minister) to apologize for its misdeeds.
    - pyre 17y ago
      It's more of a way for a society to formally make reparations for past bad (group) actions. Even if the person is dead, there is an implicit promise to never let this happen again.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  It's about two things: First of all a point of principle, a sense of justice for Turing and all those like him, wrongfully branded criminals for simply following their nature. Even today there are plenty of cases of overt violence against homosexuals and it certainly won't hurt to remind potential perpetrators on the current stance of the government in these matters. Second, to put the spotlight on all kinds of discrimination happening today, not just because of sexuality. Maybe it will make some people think about what the long term consequences of these stupid policies can be. You can't bring the dead to life, that's for sure. But at least we can make the living think a little bit about the consequences of their actions. The country that I live in (nl) does all kinds of unspeakable things to foreigners (jail them, make them take tests to prove their going to be good dutch people and so on), in short discriminates against them left, right and center. For gays, lesbians and 'others' (no, I'm not forgetting you this time), the battle here (nl) is mostly won, there are plenty of others that still need doing. (see http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/05/14/netherlands-discrimination-name-integration http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/05/14/netherlands-discrimina...) Alan Turing being British and gay instead of Moroccan, Turkish or from some other 'scary' country with a 'scary' religion seems to be unrelated, but these cases are all about unjust laws singling out groups that have done absolutely nothing wrong. I'm sure that for other groups this has absolutely no weight, but with every apology by some government official for past wrongdoings we get one step closer to governments that can be held accountable in the present. 50 years is way too long, but it is better than nothing. So, I agree there is lots of more important stuff that we need to deal with. But it's 'cost free' because it does not actually go at the expense of one of those things, and it may help in the future to avoid stupid 'mistakes' like these so that at that time there will be less important stuff that needs dealing with.
  - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
    " ... wrongfully branded criminals for simply following their nature." The argument that an action is simply a persons "nature" is impotent. Do you hold forth that same argument when such pederasty, due to age restrictions, is classed as child abuse? People probably levelled the same argument against Socrate's [reported by Plato and Xenophon] denouncement of the buggery of juveniles by older men.
- nate_meurer 17y ago
  You say that as though an apology is preventing "us" from doing "more important stuff". Like the apology would somehow consume resources or be a distraction. If you don't like it, feel free to not read the article.
  - Agent101 17y ago
    It is a headline in papers and online news sites. It is not only my attention that it is consuming. And attention is valuable right? There is only a finite amount of it to go around for good causes etc. If everyone was doing their best to help the living, I would have no issue with it.
ekanes 17y ago
Actually, it could have been a little less "I'm proud to say" and "I'm pleased to have the chance"... When you(r country) messed up and it's your duty to apologize, don't be proud and pleased. Simply be sorry.
- weavejester 17y ago
  That's what I thought. If the government is apologising, then they are essentially saying they are shouldering some of the responsibility for the mistakes of previous governments. If that's the case, they shouldn't be pleased or proud, but regretful and reflective.
- jacoblyles 17y ago
  Given that neither Gordon Brown nor any members of the current government are culpable in the brutal treatment of Alan Turing a lifetime ago, they are not capable of making a sincere apology for that treatment. The only thing they are capable of is in making a self-congratulatory statement that amounts to "Look how much better we are today than our forefathers!". That is what this is, and that is all they can give us. Anything else would be dishonest.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    They could formally pardon him as well.
    - russss 17y ago
      I'm not sure there is any history of the UK government issuing posthumous pardons.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        There are actually plenty, such as a lot of people that were executed during World War I for 'cowardice', there are others dealing with people wrongly accused of crimes.

jacquesm 17y ago

So much for a posthumous knighthood I guess... That's a real pity, it would have been nice to see this go one step further up the ladder. But it is quite nice to see something this positive come from jgrahamc's efforts.

nate_meurer 17y ago
I agree. This statement is very good-- a sincere apology-- and I like that it includes the details of Turing's conviction and sentence. I want to see a knighthood though. By any standard, Turing deserves one.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  And a full pardon as well, note that the statement by Brown is just an apology, not a pardon, so Turing remains a convicted criminal as far as the law is concerned.
  - electromagnetic 17y ago
    Agreed, he will likely have to be pardoned before he would ever be Knighted. (I'm unsure, does the Queen only pardon soldiers' crimes?)
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      interesting reading on that subject here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon#United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon#United_Kingdom
      - electromagnetic 17y ago
        Thanks, I tried searching for something on it, but I believe I was idiot-googling as I was in a rush. Really the government needs to establish a procedure for posthumous pardons, essentially a 'posthumously pardoned under present laws'.

philjackson 17y ago

A spine-tingling read.

heycarsten 17y ago

It's about time.

bravura 17y ago

"In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ - in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence - and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison - was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later." Yes, and he killed himself by eating a cyanide-laced apple. This poetic method of suicide allowed him, as one final gesture, to give his mother the comfort of thinking her son's death was accidental. His mother maintained that her little Alan was always tinkering in the lab, and it was most likely an accident that his apple became contaminated with the cyanide that killed him.

staunch 17y ago
It's also possible that he was assassinated. We'll probably never know for sure.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  "Alan Turing, the man who knew too much", by David Leavitt. The speculation goes that if Turing was a homosexual he was a security risk. I'm not sure what to make of that though, after all he was no longer allowed to work with the machines which were advancing very rapidly indeed. Similar rumours keep cropping up about David Kelly. The problem is that with such a lack of transparency even if these are nonsense there is no way to debunk them, that alone gives them a semblance of credence. As you said, we'll never know.
  - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
    If Turing had been heterosexual and had gone out to the cinema to pick someone up and then invited them back to his house for sex .. that too would have been seen as risky behaviour likely to lead to being snared in a honey trap, no? Presumably the situation of his arrest wasn't the first time he had acted in this way.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      The circumstances are quite different. From what I know about the case, and I've only read a book or two on it and quite long ago, the friend that Turing took home later broke in to his house or something to that effect. Turing reported to the police and in the process of the investigation the whole thing spilled out. So, even if it wasn't the first time he acted that way it doesn't really matter because there is 0 proof that Turing was 'blackmailable' because of his sexuality.

rw 17y ago

I've been saying for a while that Turing's premature death set back mathematics by years, if not decades. :( Discrimination still happens to a large enough degree (gender, race and class) that we're shooting ourselves collectively in the foot by not enabling people to contribute as much to society as they are able.

arithmetic 17y ago
This apology was long overdue. I'm glad that Britain finally came out with it.
pbhjpbhj 17y ago
Complete speculation but it's possible that, being Freudian for a moment, the childhood loss and trauma that led Turing to pick-up teenage boys for casual sex was the driving force that pushed him to pursue mathematics to such a degree.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  I really have a hard time trying to understand how you can even begin to reach such a conclusion. Turing was already well underway to become a very special person indeed long before that happened, his mathematical and scientific skills were beyond dispute at a very young age. A quote from the wikipedia article on Alan Turing: "Despite this, Turing continued to show remarkable ability in the studies he loved, solving advanced problems in 1927 without having even studied elementary calculus. In 1928, aged 16, Turing encountered Albert Einstein's work; not only did he grasp it, but he extrapolated Einstein's questioning of Newton's laws of motion from a text in which this was never made explicit"
  - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
    It's quite common, particularly long after the fact, for teachers to say things like "of course we knew he was special". The Turing Scrapbook, which is at least partially biased in favour of Turing as a demi-god(!), makes no claims as to Turing being notably gifted as a child; indeed mentioning he was nearly stopped from doing his exams. He was certainly a gifted child but his exceptional mathematical abilities only appear to have really taken root during his University career.

thras 17y ago

Whenever a politician apologizes to his voters for the actions of individuals long dead towards other individuals long dead, I somehow fail to be impressed. I suppose it is sort of interesting in a National Geographic, watch the natives with their bizarre religious customs, type of way.

mkramlich 17y ago
Agreed. I always have the same reaction. Now if the perpetrators apologized I would be more impressed. But even if those folks did, it still wouldn't bring him back. If the laws in Britain today are already such that they couldn't do that sort of thing again legally, then, this is even more of an irrelevant event. Just one particular unfortunate situation that happened to one particular person a long time ago. Of course, I hear there was this one guy who got literally nailed to a cross for just talking to people, 2000 years ago, and people are still talking about that today. That really blows me away.

ashwinl 17y ago

A good 10 min. documentary excerpt on 'The Death of Alan Turing' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7_WzNzHwJY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7_WzNzHwJY "I am rather afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future Turing believes that machines think Turing lies with men Therefore machines do not think"

TravisLS 17y ago

Congratulations to jgrahamc on making this happen. This apology was long overdue and would not have happened without your effort.

jgrahamc 17y ago
Thanks. It's quite a surprise to actually have this happen. And it was more of a surprise when my mobile phone rang and a Scottish man said "Hello John. It's Gordon Brown."
- rms 17y ago
  That's awesome. In the USA, you get "Please hold for the President of the United States".
  - jgrahamc 17y ago
    Actually it went like this: the phone rang and a woman called Kirsty who I'd had previously spoken to said "Gordon would like to talk to you" and then Gordon was on the line...
- huntse 17y ago
  Completely awesome. Good work! I signed the petition (of course) and encouraged others to do so, but I have to admit that I am delighted that it actually happened.
matthewcford 17y ago
It's the first time I signed a petition on number10.gov.uk. I wasn't sure if anything would come of it, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it worked.

brown9-2 17y ago

Reading the PM's statement, is anyone else from the US struck by the feeling that this kind of statement could never be made by the US govt in 2009?

shrikant 17y ago
"I will never apologize for the United States of America ? I don't care what the facts are." - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_H._W._Bush http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_H._W._Bush - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 Draw your own conclusions.
teeja 17y ago
Rare, but it happens .. "President Bush apologized Thursday for the humiliation suffered by Iraqi prisoners at the hands of U.S. soldiers.." "President Clinton has apologized to the elderly black survivors of a government-run study of untreated syphilis." "The significance of a presidential apology was recognized recently when the President apologized to those harmed by Cold War radiation experiments." "In 1990, the U.S. president apologized to and compensated Japanese-Americans for their internment during the war."

whirlycott1 17y ago

I didn't know much about his life until I read "A madman dreams of Turing machines," which is a great book about Turing and Godel. Tortured souls, both of them.

jodrellblank 17y ago

http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/MISC/ORACLE/Oracle.html http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/MISC/ORACLE/Oracle....

jacquesm 17y ago
Thank you very much. Too long for me to read it now but I've read the first chapter and it is quite a find.

springcoil1 17y ago

Congratulations to all those who were behind this petition. As an Irish man (educated in the UK) I now have slightly more respect for Gordon Brown.

Jem 17y ago

I didn't necessarily agree with the petition (that is, don't necessarily see the point of posthumous apologies) but you did a fantastic job, jgrahamc. Congratulations on making this happen.

jgrahamc 17y ago
Thank you for that. Recognition from people who don't actually agree with me is always very welcome.

s-phi-nl 17y ago

How is this any more appropriate for Hacker News than President Obama's speech to schoolchildren (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=810399 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=810399)? It seems to me that both are a national leader saying basically common things.

mkramlich 17y ago
The Obama/school thing lacks either of the two major themes of this site (in my eyes anyway): computing and entrepreneurship. The Turing story has Alan Turing, one of the forefathers of modern computing, and probably an idol, of sorts, to many of the readers here. So on those grounds, yeah, I could see how the latter is much more appropriate for this site.