10 ms·

Alan Turing's notes found being used as roof insulation at Bletchley Park

393 points by antimora 12y ago

dang 12y ago
This site (edit: I mean the site of the current URL) seems to have stolen the content and contains no attribution. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/turing-papers-that-cracked-nazi-code-found/story-fnb64oi6-1227203530706?nk=d934b76c676b15ff264dcca02e78a003 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/turing-papers-tha... has the story, so we changed to that, but its paywall seems worse than what HN will tolerate, so we put it back. This is unsatisfactory. Can anyone suggest a better URL? Edit: Sorry, it seems I got this wrong and the original post was just fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8993631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8993631. (That might mean it was other sites ripping off MKWeb and not the other way around. So I'm glad we didn't change the URL after all.)
- rodgerd 12y ago
  http://www.mkweb.co.uk/pictures/8203-BLETCHLEY-PARK-Alan-Turing-s-notes-used-roof/pictures-25966005-detail/pictures.html http://www.mkweb.co.uk/pictures/8203-BLETCHLEY-PARK-Alan-Tur...
  - dang 12y ago
    That's the current URL, which appears to have copied the content without attribution.
    - basicallydan 12y ago
      Are you sure it's not the original? MKWeb is quite a local paper for Bletchley Park.
      - dang 12y ago
        Wow, thanks. That was a pattern-matching failure on my part—it looked like the sites we frequently see which rip content off, and the "MK" in "MKWeb" escaped me completely. Sorry to the good people of Milton Keynes and their fine local paper!
        lotsofmangos 12y ago
        If you go and drive round a roundabout three times in penance, they will forgive you.
        basicallydan 12y ago
        Haha, I'm sure they won't mind :) I figured that was exactly the thought process, too! "MKWeb" doesn't immediately sound like a reputable source ;) It probably isn't usually, anyway! Source: I grew up with MK as my local city.
    - bootload 12y ago
      seems to be moving into MSM https://gigaom.com/2015/02/03/alan-turing-documents-used-to-stop-drafts-to-go-on-display/ https://gigaom.com/2015/02/03/alan-turing-documents-used-to-...
- adamseabrook 12y ago
  http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/turing-papers-that-cracked-nazi-code-found/story-fnb64oi6-1227203530706 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/turing-papers-tha...
  - antimora 12y ago
    When I click on this link, I am presented with a "sign-up" page. """ YOU'VE REACHED A SUBSCRIBER-ONLY ARTICLE. Would you like to become a subscriber for 50% less for the first 12 weeks?* Sign up now and access the full breadth of The Australian's content in minutes. """
  - SomeCallMeTim 12y ago
    I get the paywall for that as well.
  - itcmcgrath 12y ago
    Protip: Paste URL into Google Search, click result. No paywall. Same works with a lot of news sites that don't show paywalls on search traffic, but do on other referrals.
    - antimora 12y ago
      Thanks, it works. Here is a URL from the search result: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theaustralian.com.au%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Fturing-papers-that-cracked-nazi-code-found%2Fstory-fnb64oi6-1227203530706&ei=PTDRVNiWAcj5ywPuw4KoBw&usg=AFQjCNHnkJqQn2286xVNI8q-NcmlPWXmXQ&sig2=4LhtjWEuurVudoQ78dfGJQ https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
- lstamour 12y ago
  http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4340369.ece http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4340369.ece ... has a few paragraphs with a link for "more photos". Sadly, also paywall protected.
  - radicalbyte 12y ago
    They're sister papers, i.e. News Corp / Murdoch / Fox News.
- lambda 12y ago
  When you say "this site", please include the actual site that you are referring to (edit: like "mkweb.co.uk", rather than "this site" or "the site of the current URL"). It is hard for others to tell if a comment like this is actually referring to the current article, or it has subsequently been changed. Edit: this applies to people other than mods here too. In general, if discussing the title or some aspect of whether the correct source was used for the news story in question, please quote the title or include the name of the site you are referring to, as otherwise a subsequent change by the moderators can make your comment nonsensical. As a note: I really wish that HN would include a history of title and/or link changes for an article, so that when you go to a thread an people are complaining about some problem with one of them (or are reading the article with an interpretation based on the old title), it becomes easier to tell what they were referring to by checking against the history. As it is, in a large number of the cases in which a title or link is changed, a large portion of the discussion no longer makes sense as it was referring to the old title and/or link.
  - mod 12y ago
    Agreed. Later, if dang gets his better url, his comment might read "17 hours ago" "the site of the current url" and we'll be thinking some proper source ripped off the content. All of the solutions are sub-optimal, but preserving a history would be nice, at least.
    - dang 12y ago
      We wouldn't change the URL again without updating my comment about the URL change.
      - triplesec 12y ago
        humans err. it's why we have version control. but good to know your intentions
- blahedo 12y ago
  Would this do? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2934358/How-chilly-scientists-used-secret-papers-broke-Enigma-Code-draught-excluders.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2934358/How-chilly-s...
j2kun 12y ago
These notes don't particularly seem very important. On the other hand, I always thought it would be interesting to have an art piece that is like "famous mathematicians notes at the moment when the inspiration struck."
- rodgerd 12y ago
  "The documents also included the only known examples of Banbury sheets, a technique devised by the mathematician Alan Turing to accelerate the process of decrypting Nazi messages. No other examples have ever been found." Was the third paragraph too hard to reach?
  - dang 12y ago
    > Was the third paragraph too hard to reach? This comment would be much better without that acerbic swipe. Please stay substantive.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    The structure and use of Banbury Sheets appears to have been well known prior to this discovery? TBH I'd say a specific piece of paper someone drew or wrote on isn't important if we know the content of that paper already; but I know many would disagree.
    - Turing_Machine 12y ago
      Well, sure. Original, handwritten documents are almost always considered more valuable/important than nth-generation copies. E=MC^2 is going to be a lot more valuable in Einstein's handwriting than it is in this post. An original, signed Declaration of Independence or Magna Carta is a national treasure, but a printed copy won't be worth more than the cost of printing.
      - xxs 12y ago
        AFAIK Einstein didn't write it actually as E=mc^2 but used square root instead.
Animats 12y ago
The restoration effort at Bletchley Park has gone over the top. I visited the place on a weekday in 2002, when almost nobody went there unless they were really into crypto history. It was run down, and there were only about 10 people visiting that day. The tour guide was more into the architecture of the mansion than the crypto, although they had a bombe model (a prop made for a 2001 movie) and had started on the Colossus rebuild. The only thing that worked back then was one Enigma machine. A non-working Lorenz machine and some other gear was in glass cases. The guide pointed out where various of the huts had been. It was just one of those obscure, slightly run down historical spots one visits in England, with the usual lake and swans. Then they got National Lottery funding. Now they've rebuild most of the huts in brick, re-landscaped the grounds, have elaborate displays, added the "National Museum of Computing", renamed it "Historic Bletchley Park", put in a visitor's center, a children's playground, a cafe, and, of course, a gift shop. There's "Turing Gate" "Colossus Way", "Enigma Place", two memorials, and more stuff under construction. All this is on the Bletchley Park side. The Colossus rebuild is at the National Museum of Computing, which is on the same property but has separate staff and funding. (http://www.tnmoc.org/ http://www.tnmoc.org/) They don't get along with the Bletchley Park tourist operation and don't have public funding. ("Other exhibitions are available at Bletchley Park, but operated independently of the Bletchley Park Trust.", says the Trust site.)
- rst 12y ago
  Not sure whether "over the top" was meant as a complaint; I visited last summer, and thought the (obviously expensive) displays were pretty effective. The main grounds of the museum (the "tourist operation") also now has a bunch of interesting working replica gear, including a Bombe and some of its less publicized support equipment. The computing museum is also interesting; BTW, in addition to the Colossus rebuild, they're also constructing a working EDSAC replica (using metallic delay lines instead of mercury tanks for memory, but otherwise as exact as possible), and have a bunch of other interesting old machines in the collection. For visit planning, though, it's open fewer days than the Trust-managed property.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    Presumably the reason for not using mercury is safety? Are metallic delay lines sufficiently similar to mercury tanks that it's not an architectural issue to switch them?
logicallee 12y ago
There is something really interesting about this title (phrasing or how it reads) but I can't put my finger on it. Anyone?
- andrewchoi 12y ago
  Maybe it's that you want to stop after "found"? Leave it as: Alan Turing's notes found.
  - logicallee 12y ago
    Yes, that's it you've found it. It's an interesting effect: "Alan Turing's notes found...being used as roof insulation at Bletchley Park". It's a very unexpected continuation of the sentence. (If you know the end you'd expect it to be written "Alan Turing's notes being used in roof insulation at Bletchley park" if that's the main point.) Thanks.
    - krallja 12y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      The "found" adds a suggestion of surprise. "X's y being used as insulation" makes it seem commonplace or unremarkable and also suggests a continuation of the use. "X's y found ..." makes it clear it was a surprise and also suggests that the notes were removed. /Native en-GB speaker.
    - userbinator 12y ago
      As far as UK headlines go, this is one of the more readable ones. There's a trend of compressing them to the point that they sometimes become ambiguous with humourous alternative meanings; something like: "Alan Turing notes roof insulation"
    - LukeB_UK 12y ago
      To me the title sounds like they just took some of Turing's known notes and stuffed them into the roof not that they've just discovered more notes.
clapas 12y ago
This man was literally inventing modern computing and cryptography. Those papers must be very valuable for collectionists. This reminds me that I got to know recently about the famous Turing test being passed. Amazing. What a vision.
- IshKebab 12y ago
  The Turing test hasn't been passed yet. Don't let those chatbot publicity stunts fool you.
  - jackweirdy 12y ago
    Not to mention it’s not really a “test” so much as a thought experiment. It’s far too loosely designed to be a real test.
    - throwawayaway 12y ago
      it's a test, but few consider it from the opposite angle, the robot passes, the human fails.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    also, as I understand it, the original game is a computer convincing an observer that it is a woman as well as a man can, or a man as well as a woman can in that version the human and the computer are then involved in a more similar task, which to me makes it far more experimentally interesting than most of the modern attempts on the idea
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
DanBC 12y ago
They've only just (the past few years) declassified some of his papers from GCHQ so it's nice that we get to see these without much of a wait. http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17771962 http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17771962
- jameshart 12y ago
  My first thought was: some old guy or girl who worked at Bletchley in the war is probably about to get a knock on their door and a questioning under the official secrets act for their failure to properly dispose of classified documents, because they had the bright idea of using some of the loose papers they were supposed to take to the incinerator to make their hut a little more cosy during the winter of '44...
toddsiegel 12y ago
Back in the old days anything they could stuff in a wall was insulation. I was a volunteer firefighter years back. We had a call in the old part of town, with buildings dating back to the 1700s (George Washington slept here!). We had to open up the walls in a few spots and really cool old bottles, papers, and other stuff came out.
- meric 12y ago
  I wonder if Alan Turing installed that insulation himself.
- huxley 12y ago
  Seaweed was a pretty common insulator in old houses in fishing communities along the eastern seaboard of Canada and the US.
- msutherl 12y ago
  I used to work in the largest brick building in Canada. In parts of the building that were under renovation, the walls were open and hundred year-old seaweed and/or newspapers were falling out. Pretty cool.
  - DonHopkins 12y ago
    I was re-plastering the walls of my house in Berkeley, and I found a bottle of "Shinola"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinola https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinola Now I can say that I know shit from Shinola. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/know_shit_from_Shinola https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/know_shit_from_Shinola
- jeffwass 12y ago
  When we redid the bathroom in my 100 year old Baltimore house, we found some pretty rad stuff. Old crumpled newspapers from the time of construction were shoved in the walls. These were interior walls, I think to assist with holding the plaster in the laths. I was able to salvage part of one page with a comic strip. You wouldn't have even thought the comic was much out-of-date either. <even more off-topic> So at some point one of the prior owners decided to 'modernize' the bathroom and turn the original clawfoot tub into a modern recessed bath. They did this by buding a brick surround around it, covered with tiles. Weighed a TON. But underneath when we demished the surround, we saw planks of wood lying next to the tub. Turns out they weren't wood but dusty marble trim that originally surrounded the walls along the floor. Original charm from the original house! We had no idea the tub was even a clawfoot, much less there was marble trim.
throwaway8899 12y ago
Something to think about ... Alan Turing wasn't a national security risk because he was gay, but he actually was a risk because he was that good. Anybody who could break rotor ciphers circa WW2 was very valuable indeed.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  >Alan Turing wasn't a national security risk because he was gay // I always though he was bi, explaining the near marriage - supposedly it wasn't until late on in their courtship that he informed his fiancée that he had a predilection for men and she was supposedly shocked. That aside I'd imagine anyone in their 40s privy to Top Secret info who picked up unknown teenagers for short-term sexual encounters would be a national security risk. Want access to his papers and pillow-talk - send in strapping teen to chat him up? [this is basically what happened (apparently barring the national security elements, but I always wondered) when he was robbed that led to reports of this particular homosexual tryst to the police]. >Anybody who could break rotor ciphers circa WW2 was very valuable indeed. Indeed, http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/virtualbp/poles/poles.htm http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/virtualbp/poles/poles.htm Turing did fantastic and utterly amazing work, both in crypto and comp sci of course.
  - ketralnis 12y ago
    Try it this way: > That aside I'd imagine anyone in their 40s privy to Top Secret info who picked up women in bars for short-term sexual encounters would be a national security risk. Want access to his papers and pillow-talk - send in an attractive lady to chat him up? Is that different? Or do you think that straight men are somehow immune?
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      I think the _apparent_ ephebophilia¹ makes a difference. Other than that, no; ergo I said "anyone" and didn't mention the sex of the person privy to national secrets nor of the person they picked up for casual sex. Certainly a honey-trap isn't unheard of. I do however have a feeling that at the time a considerably younger male would be a more effective lure based on the societal mores as the subject is far more likely to let them get away than to raise an alarm. If² this were what happened with Turing it would be a demonstration of quite notable devotion to his country to have handed himself in in order to report the incident. We've seen recently in the news reports of the UK's Prince Andrew at 42 having allegedly had sex with a 17yo (that's above the age of consent in UK). It's a massive scandal apparently. But Turing was 39 and he had sex with a 19yo. Despite prima facie Andrew's tryst being legal - there is a question of consent - it's clear that it's seen as something that could have leverage over him and there is inference that Epstein might have used knowledge of the encounter to apply duress. This for an apparently legal heterosexual encounter in 2015 - how much more scandal for an illegal homosexual encounter in 1952? -- ¹ I'd theorise it wasn't ephebophilia per se but a longing for his boyhood friend who died. My theory. ² There is no substantiation of the idea that there was a security breach.
ekanes 12y ago
If anyone's interested in Bletchley Park, or the intersection between encryption and WWII, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson is a fantastic book.
reality_czech 12y ago
I thought Mr. Turing worked on the foundations of computer science, not on the roof.
- Vecrios 12y ago
  That's quite a Turn in ones career.

393 points by antimora 12y ago

dang 12y ago

This site (edit: I mean the site of the current URL) seems to have stolen the content and contains no attribution. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/turing-papers-that-cracked-nazi-code-found/story-fnb64oi6-1227203530706?nk=d934b76c676b15ff264dcca02e78a003 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/turing-papers-tha... has the story, so we changed to that, but its paywall seems worse than what HN will tolerate, so we put it back. This is unsatisfactory. Can anyone suggest a better URL? Edit: Sorry, it seems I got this wrong and the original post was just fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8993631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8993631. (That might mean it was other sites ripping off MKWeb and not the other way around. So I'm glad we didn't change the URL after all.)

rodgerd 12y ago
http://www.mkweb.co.uk/pictures/8203-BLETCHLEY-PARK-Alan-Turing-s-notes-used-roof/pictures-25966005-detail/pictures.html http://www.mkweb.co.uk/pictures/8203-BLETCHLEY-PARK-Alan-Tur...
- dang 12y ago
  That's the current URL, which appears to have copied the content without attribution.
  - basicallydan 12y ago
    Are you sure it's not the original? MKWeb is quite a local paper for Bletchley Park.
    - dang 12y ago
      Wow, thanks. That was a pattern-matching failure on my part—it looked like the sites we frequently see which rip content off, and the "MK" in "MKWeb" escaped me completely. Sorry to the good people of Milton Keynes and their fine local paper!
      - lotsofmangos 12y ago
        If you go and drive round a roundabout three times in penance, they will forgive you.
      - basicallydan 12y ago
        Haha, I'm sure they won't mind :) I figured that was exactly the thought process, too! "MKWeb" doesn't immediately sound like a reputable source ;) It probably isn't usually, anyway! Source: I grew up with MK as my local city.
  - bootload 12y ago
    seems to be moving into MSM https://gigaom.com/2015/02/03/alan-turing-documents-used-to-stop-drafts-to-go-on-display/ https://gigaom.com/2015/02/03/alan-turing-documents-used-to-...
adamseabrook 12y ago
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/turing-papers-that-cracked-nazi-code-found/story-fnb64oi6-1227203530706 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/turing-papers-tha...
- antimora 12y ago
  When I click on this link, I am presented with a "sign-up" page. """ YOU'VE REACHED A SUBSCRIBER-ONLY ARTICLE. Would you like to become a subscriber for 50% less for the first 12 weeks?* Sign up now and access the full breadth of The Australian's content in minutes. """
- SomeCallMeTim 12y ago
  I get the paywall for that as well.
- itcmcgrath 12y ago
  Protip: Paste URL into Google Search, click result. No paywall. Same works with a lot of news sites that don't show paywalls on search traffic, but do on other referrals.
  - antimora 12y ago
    Thanks, it works. Here is a URL from the search result: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theaustralian.com.au%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Fturing-papers-that-cracked-nazi-code-found%2Fstory-fnb64oi6-1227203530706&ei=PTDRVNiWAcj5ywPuw4KoBw&usg=AFQjCNHnkJqQn2286xVNI8q-NcmlPWXmXQ&sig2=4LhtjWEuurVudoQ78dfGJQ https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
lstamour 12y ago
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4340369.ece http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4340369.ece ... has a few paragraphs with a link for "more photos". Sadly, also paywall protected.
- radicalbyte 12y ago
  They're sister papers, i.e. News Corp / Murdoch / Fox News.
lambda 12y ago
When you say "this site", please include the actual site that you are referring to (edit: like "mkweb.co.uk", rather than "this site" or "the site of the current URL"). It is hard for others to tell if a comment like this is actually referring to the current article, or it has subsequently been changed. Edit: this applies to people other than mods here too. In general, if discussing the title or some aspect of whether the correct source was used for the news story in question, please quote the title or include the name of the site you are referring to, as otherwise a subsequent change by the moderators can make your comment nonsensical. As a note: I really wish that HN would include a history of title and/or link changes for an article, so that when you go to a thread an people are complaining about some problem with one of them (or are reading the article with an interpretation based on the old title), it becomes easier to tell what they were referring to by checking against the history. As it is, in a large number of the cases in which a title or link is changed, a large portion of the discussion no longer makes sense as it was referring to the old title and/or link.
- mod 12y ago
  Agreed. Later, if dang gets his better url, his comment might read "17 hours ago" "the site of the current url" and we'll be thinking some proper source ripped off the content. All of the solutions are sub-optimal, but preserving a history would be nice, at least.
  - dang 12y ago
    We wouldn't change the URL again without updating my comment about the URL change.
    - triplesec 12y ago
      humans err. it's why we have version control. but good to know your intentions
blahedo 12y ago
Would this do? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2934358/How-chilly-scientists-used-secret-papers-broke-Enigma-Code-draught-excluders.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2934358/How-chilly-s...

j2kun 12y ago

These notes don't particularly seem very important. On the other hand, I always thought it would be interesting to have an art piece that is like "famous mathematicians notes at the moment when the inspiration struck."

rodgerd 12y ago
"The documents also included the only known examples of Banbury sheets, a technique devised by the mathematician Alan Turing to accelerate the process of decrypting Nazi messages. No other examples have ever been found." Was the third paragraph too hard to reach?
- dang 12y ago
  > Was the third paragraph too hard to reach? This comment would be much better without that acerbic swipe. Please stay substantive.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  The structure and use of Banbury Sheets appears to have been well known prior to this discovery? TBH I'd say a specific piece of paper someone drew or wrote on isn't important if we know the content of that paper already; but I know many would disagree.
  - Turing_Machine 12y ago
    Well, sure. Original, handwritten documents are almost always considered more valuable/important than nth-generation copies. E=MC^2 is going to be a lot more valuable in Einstein's handwriting than it is in this post. An original, signed Declaration of Independence or Magna Carta is a national treasure, but a printed copy won't be worth more than the cost of printing.
    - xxs 12y ago
      AFAIK Einstein didn't write it actually as E=mc^2 but used square root instead.

Animats 12y ago

The restoration effort at Bletchley Park has gone over the top. I visited the place on a weekday in 2002, when almost nobody went there unless they were really into crypto history. It was run down, and there were only about 10 people visiting that day. The tour guide was more into the architecture of the mansion than the crypto, although they had a bombe model (a prop made for a 2001 movie) and had started on the Colossus rebuild. The only thing that worked back then was one Enigma machine. A non-working Lorenz machine and some other gear was in glass cases. The guide pointed out where various of the huts had been. It was just one of those obscure, slightly run down historical spots one visits in England, with the usual lake and swans. Then they got National Lottery funding. Now they've rebuild most of the huts in brick, re-landscaped the grounds, have elaborate displays, added the "National Museum of Computing", renamed it "Historic Bletchley Park", put in a visitor's center, a children's playground, a cafe, and, of course, a gift shop. There's "Turing Gate" "Colossus Way", "Enigma Place", two memorials, and more stuff under construction. All this is on the Bletchley Park side. The Colossus rebuild is at the National Museum of Computing, which is on the same property but has separate staff and funding. (http://www.tnmoc.org/ http://www.tnmoc.org/) They don't get along with the Bletchley Park tourist operation and don't have public funding. ("Other exhibitions are available at Bletchley Park, but operated independently of the Bletchley Park Trust.", says the Trust site.)

rst 12y ago
Not sure whether "over the top" was meant as a complaint; I visited last summer, and thought the (obviously expensive) displays were pretty effective. The main grounds of the museum (the "tourist operation") also now has a bunch of interesting working replica gear, including a Bombe and some of its less publicized support equipment. The computing museum is also interesting; BTW, in addition to the Colossus rebuild, they're also constructing a working EDSAC replica (using metallic delay lines instead of mercury tanks for memory, but otherwise as exact as possible), and have a bunch of other interesting old machines in the collection. For visit planning, though, it's open fewer days than the Trust-managed property.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Presumably the reason for not using mercury is safety? Are metallic delay lines sufficiently similar to mercury tanks that it's not an architectural issue to switch them?

logicallee 12y ago

There is something really interesting about this title (phrasing or how it reads) but I can't put my finger on it. Anyone?

andrewchoi 12y ago
Maybe it's that you want to stop after "found"? Leave it as: Alan Turing's notes found.
- logicallee 12y ago
  Yes, that's it you've found it. It's an interesting effect: "Alan Turing's notes found...being used as roof insulation at Bletchley Park". It's a very unexpected continuation of the sentence. (If you know the end you'd expect it to be written "Alan Turing's notes being used in roof insulation at Bletchley park" if that's the main point.) Thanks.
  - krallja 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    The "found" adds a suggestion of surprise. "X's y being used as insulation" makes it seem commonplace or unremarkable and also suggests a continuation of the use. "X's y found ..." makes it clear it was a surprise and also suggests that the notes were removed. /Native en-GB speaker.
  - userbinator 12y ago
    As far as UK headlines go, this is one of the more readable ones. There's a trend of compressing them to the point that they sometimes become ambiguous with humourous alternative meanings; something like: "Alan Turing notes roof insulation"
  - LukeB_UK 12y ago
    To me the title sounds like they just took some of Turing's known notes and stuffed them into the roof not that they've just discovered more notes.

clapas 12y ago

This man was literally inventing modern computing and cryptography. Those papers must be very valuable for collectionists. This reminds me that I got to know recently about the famous Turing test being passed. Amazing. What a vision.

IshKebab 12y ago
The Turing test hasn't been passed yet. Don't let those chatbot publicity stunts fool you.
- jackweirdy 12y ago
  Not to mention it’s not really a “test” so much as a thought experiment. It’s far too loosely designed to be a real test.
  - throwawayaway 12y ago
    it's a test, but few consider it from the opposite angle, the robot passes, the human fails.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  also, as I understand it, the original game is a computer convincing an observer that it is a woman as well as a man can, or a man as well as a woman can in that version the human and the computer are then involved in a more similar task, which to me makes it far more experimentally interesting than most of the modern attempts on the idea

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DanBC 12y ago

They've only just (the past few years) declassified some of his papers from GCHQ so it's nice that we get to see these without much of a wait. http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17771962 http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17771962

jameshart 12y ago
My first thought was: some old guy or girl who worked at Bletchley in the war is probably about to get a knock on their door and a questioning under the official secrets act for their failure to properly dispose of classified documents, because they had the bright idea of using some of the loose papers they were supposed to take to the incinerator to make their hut a little more cosy during the winter of '44...

toddsiegel 12y ago

Back in the old days anything they could stuff in a wall was insulation. I was a volunteer firefighter years back. We had a call in the old part of town, with buildings dating back to the 1700s (George Washington slept here!). We had to open up the walls in a few spots and really cool old bottles, papers, and other stuff came out.

meric 12y ago
I wonder if Alan Turing installed that insulation himself.
huxley 12y ago
Seaweed was a pretty common insulator in old houses in fishing communities along the eastern seaboard of Canada and the US.
msutherl 12y ago
I used to work in the largest brick building in Canada. In parts of the building that were under renovation, the walls were open and hundred year-old seaweed and/or newspapers were falling out. Pretty cool.
- DonHopkins 12y ago
  I was re-plastering the walls of my house in Berkeley, and I found a bottle of "Shinola"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinola https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinola Now I can say that I know shit from Shinola. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/know_shit_from_Shinola https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/know_shit_from_Shinola
jeffwass 12y ago
When we redid the bathroom in my 100 year old Baltimore house, we found some pretty rad stuff. Old crumpled newspapers from the time of construction were shoved in the walls. These were interior walls, I think to assist with holding the plaster in the laths. I was able to salvage part of one page with a comic strip. You wouldn't have even thought the comic was much out-of-date either. <even more off-topic> So at some point one of the prior owners decided to 'modernize' the bathroom and turn the original clawfoot tub into a modern recessed bath. They did this by buding a brick surround around it, covered with tiles. Weighed a TON. But underneath when we demished the surround, we saw planks of wood lying next to the tub. Turns out they weren't wood but dusty marble trim that originally surrounded the walls along the floor. Original charm from the original house! We had no idea the tub was even a clawfoot, much less there was marble trim.

throwaway8899 12y ago

Something to think about ... Alan Turing wasn't a national security risk because he was gay, but he actually was a risk because he was that good. Anybody who could break rotor ciphers circa WW2 was very valuable indeed.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
>Alan Turing wasn't a national security risk because he was gay // I always though he was bi, explaining the near marriage - supposedly it wasn't until late on in their courtship that he informed his fiancée that he had a predilection for men and she was supposedly shocked. That aside I'd imagine anyone in their 40s privy to Top Secret info who picked up unknown teenagers for short-term sexual encounters would be a national security risk. Want access to his papers and pillow-talk - send in strapping teen to chat him up? [this is basically what happened (apparently barring the national security elements, but I always wondered) when he was robbed that led to reports of this particular homosexual tryst to the police]. >Anybody who could break rotor ciphers circa WW2 was very valuable indeed. Indeed, http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/virtualbp/poles/poles.htm http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/virtualbp/poles/poles.htm Turing did fantastic and utterly amazing work, both in crypto and comp sci of course.
- ketralnis 12y ago
  Try it this way: > That aside I'd imagine anyone in their 40s privy to Top Secret info who picked up women in bars for short-term sexual encounters would be a national security risk. Want access to his papers and pillow-talk - send in an attractive lady to chat him up? Is that different? Or do you think that straight men are somehow immune?
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    I think the _apparent_ ephebophilia¹ makes a difference. Other than that, no; ergo I said "anyone" and didn't mention the sex of the person privy to national secrets nor of the person they picked up for casual sex. Certainly a honey-trap isn't unheard of. I do however have a feeling that at the time a considerably younger male would be a more effective lure based on the societal mores as the subject is far more likely to let them get away than to raise an alarm. If² this were what happened with Turing it would be a demonstration of quite notable devotion to his country to have handed himself in in order to report the incident. We've seen recently in the news reports of the UK's Prince Andrew at 42 having allegedly had sex with a 17yo (that's above the age of consent in UK). It's a massive scandal apparently. But Turing was 39 and he had sex with a 19yo. Despite prima facie Andrew's tryst being legal - there is a question of consent - it's clear that it's seen as something that could have leverage over him and there is inference that Epstein might have used knowledge of the encounter to apply duress. This for an apparently legal heterosexual encounter in 2015 - how much more scandal for an illegal homosexual encounter in 1952? -- ¹ I'd theorise it wasn't ephebophilia per se but a longing for his boyhood friend who died. My theory. ² There is no substantiation of the idea that there was a security breach.

ekanes 12y ago

If anyone's interested in Bletchley Park, or the intersection between encryption and WWII, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson is a fantastic book.

reality_czech 12y ago

I thought Mr. Turing worked on the foundations of computer science, not on the roof.

Vecrios 12y ago
That's quite a Turn in ones career.