Category: rePosts

Amazing Story!

How Alan Turing Finally Got a Posthumous Apology
by John Graham-Cumming | @jgrahamc | comments: 12
Guest blogger John Graham-Cumming initiated and led the successful petition drive to procure an apology to Alan Turing from the UK government. John is the author of The Geek Atlas, CTO of a stealth-mode start-up, and a longtime programmer who has a doctorate in computer security. If you’re in London this Saturday, September 19, come by the launch party for his book at the Brunel Museum.
There’s a long tradition in the UK of direct democracy, with citizens petitioning the Prime Minister themselves. Typically, thousands of signatures are collected on paper and then delivered directly to the Prime Minister’s home at No. 10 Downing Street in London. The petitioners arrive at No. 10 and hand the signatures through the open front door.
But the British government has made great strides to bring many aspects of government relations into the electronic age. Through the non-profit MySociety.org the government has created web sites (all with open-source code) for citizens to interact with local and central government offices.
One such web site is the No. 10 Downing Street petitions page (its code is open-source and can be found here).
I used the petitions web site, a collection of Web 2.0 technologies, and a bit of media savvy to successfully petition the government to apologize for the prosecution of the seminal computer scientist Alan Turing.
via How Alan Turing Finally Got a Posthumous Apology – O’Reilly Radar.

This is version 0.0.1 of what Ender had at the Battle School’s game computer. So Cool!

There’s this part I love in the movie Ratatouille where a critic says, “The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.” It’s something I always try to keep in mind and it’s moved me to first, before we do anything else, celebrate what a staggering accomplishment Scribblenauts is.
It’s a game where you solve simple puzzles with almost any object you can dream up (as long as it’s not libations, licensed or lascivious) and every item acts the way you’d expect: bears chase honey and dogs chase cats. It’s a game where you can spend hours just messing around to see what creatures can beat God in a fight (zombies: no; vampires: yes). As a technical achievement and as a toy, it’s really brilliant. Scribblenauts is a thing of wonder.
via Review: Scribblenauts.

First heard about this from Marc, damn amazing game!

Scribblenauts was first conceived in the second quarter of 2007, near the same time that they had envisioned Lock’s Quest.[4] Creative Director for 5th Cell, Jeremiah Slaczka, stated that they were seeking counterparts of Nintendogs and Brain Age, games that had attracted a much wider demographic than most other niche games, that 5th Cell could develop.[13][16] The concept of Scribblenauts came from a combination of a previous idea he had for the DS that was similar to Mad Libs and a dream he had about solving life-situation puzzles in rooms.[14] An additional idea that was envisioned by Slaczka was to allow players to write out complete sentences on the bottom touchscreen and having the sentence come to action on the top screen, but realized the game would be tedious and that players would only be interested in using keywords.[16] They combined these ideas to create the core concept of Scribblenauts.[16] Slaczka realized that the concept of the game may have been considered impossible by other programmers, but found that 5th Cell’s Technical Director Marius Fahlbusch felt confident they could create the required elements.[4] As Lock’s Quest was thought of first, they focused on releasing that game first while beginning the development of Scribblenauts. The game entered beta around May 2009, and had numerous play-testers exploring the game.[17] About half of 5th Cell’s staff worked on the game.[4] It was developed alongside the DS version of Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter.[18]
via Scribblenauts – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.
Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. 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.
Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.
I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.
But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.
So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.
Gordon Brown
via Treatment of Alan Turing was “appalling” – PM | Number10.gov.uk.

I hope I’m wrong buy is this another sign pointing to a real estate crisis Philippine style? I really hope I’m wrong.

RP banks increase lending to property developers
09/10/2009 | 11:00 AM
The Philippine banking system increased its exposure to the real estate sector by 23 percent year-on-year during the second quarter as more lending was extended to property developers, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said.
Data from the BSP showed thrift banks, universal and commercial banks’ exposure reached P377.81 billion from P306.32 billion. It went up 2.77 percent quarter-on-quarter from P 367.61 billion.
“Additional exposure for the quarter came solely from real estate loans, which rose by P11.1 billion to P368.9 billion. This more than offset the decline in investments in securities issued by real estate companies by P0.9 billion to P8.9 billion,” the central bank said.
via RP banks increase lending to property developers – Business – GMANews.TV – Official Website of GMA News and Public Affairs – Latest Philippine News.

I meant to post this much earlier but my internet connection was having problems and I sadly left this as a draft.

“This is the cause of my life,” Ted Kennedy wrote. “For four decades I have carried this cause — from the floor of the United States Senate to every part of this country. It has never been merely a question of policy; it goes to the heart of my belief in a just society.”

Kennedy was talking about health care. But then, Kennedy was always talking about health care. He was talking about it when he helped pass Medicare and Medicaid in the ’60s. When he tried to reach a deal with Richard Nixon in the ’70s. When he made it the center of his challenge to Jimmy Carter in the ’80s. When he created the Children’s Health Insurance Program in the ’90s. When he directed his staff to begin educating senators and stakeholders for President Obama’s effort late last year.

There is an impulse to honor the dead by erasing the sharp edges of their life. To ensure they belong to all of us, and in doing, deprive them of the dignity conferred by their actual choices, their lonely stands, and their long work. But Ted Kennedy didn’t belong to all of us. He didn’t even belong to all Democrats. He was not of the party that voted for more than a trillion in unfunded tax cuts but cannot bring itself to pay for health-care reform. He was not of the party that fears the next election more than the next failure to help America’s needy. Rather, he belonged to the party of Medicare and Medicaid, the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Civil Rights Act and immigration reform. He belonged to the party that sought to advance the conditions and opportunities of the least among us. He was, as Harold Meyerson says, “the senior senator from Massachusetts and for all the excluded in American life.” <emphasis min @angol>

via Ezra Klein – The Cause of Ted Kennedy’s Life.

I meant to post this much earlier but my internet connection was having problems and I sadly left this as a draft.

“This is the cause of my life,” Ted Kennedy wrote. “For four decades I have carried this cause — from the floor of the United States Senate to every part of this country. It has never been merely a question of policy; it goes to the heart of my belief in a just society.”
Kennedy was talking about health care. But then, Kennedy was always talking about health care. He was talking about it when he helped pass Medicare and Medicaid in the ’60s. When he tried to reach a deal with Richard Nixon in the ’70s. When he made it the center of his challenge to Jimmy Carter in the ’80s. When he created the Children’s Health Insurance Program in the ’90s. When he directed his staff to begin educating senators and stakeholders for President Obama’s effort late last year.
There is an impulse to honor the dead by erasing the sharp edges of their life. To ensure they belong to all of us, and in doing, deprive them of the dignity conferred by their actual choices, their lonely stands, and their long work. But Ted Kennedy didn’t belong to all of us. He didn’t even belong to all Democrats. He was not of the party that voted for more than a trillion in unfunded tax cuts but cannot bring itself to pay for health-care reform. He was not of the party that fears the next election more than the next failure to help America’s needy. Rather, he belonged to the party of Medicare and Medicaid, the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Civil Rights Act and immigration reform. He belonged to the party that sought to advance the conditions and opportunities of the least among us. He was, as Harold Meyerson says, “the senior senator from Massachusetts and for all the excluded in American life.” <emphasis min @angol>

via Ezra Klein – The Cause of Ted Kennedy’s Life.