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/) 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.)
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.
I know this is possibly the saddest thing anyone has ever said, but the computing museum is one of my favourite places on earth.
It's a joyful place with so much old technology yet a refreshingly hands on attitude. I don't think there was a single exhibit that wasn't interactive by one method or another - which really matters when you're talking about technology that is largely at an age where kids are too young to have grown up with so it gives them a chance to play with the predecessors to their much loved consumer hardware - and it gives us adults a chance to do more than just reminisce about the fun days experimenting with emerging technologies.
I'd highly recommend that museum on it's own merit; let alone spending the day exploring the site and Bletchly Park as well.
On the subject of early technology I highly recommend 'The Centre for Computing History' in Cambridge. They have a good collection and a lovely atmosphere.
They're currently located in an industrial estate in Cambridge, I'm sure if/when they move they will get much more attention.
Mercury delay lines are literally tanks of liquid, which are prone to leaks, sometimes without warning. Dangerous anywhere, particularly ill-suited to a museum kids may visit.
As to architectural properties, the main thing that they want out of them is that they delay signals by the same number of microseconds; arranging that is not a problem.
I went just before the lottery funding (2009 i think?). The national museum of computing was reasonably new - obviously the intended purpose was to attract more people and stop it falling down. The split was successful in this way. I appreciated both sides - bletchley park was a lot more history (with volunteers who could tell you more about it than you needed) and the NMC had old consoles set up playing games, amongst the rebuilt WWII stuff. Best museum ive (group) i b e been to anywhere. Im happy they are getting more funding though of course the quality will gradually decrease.
Really neat to hear it's being restored; a bit saddened that it's being done through a regressive tax though. Ideally the problems with that model will be recognized and workable alternative funding sources can come into effect.
But other forms of gambling are not? The bookies? The slot machines in the pub? Online poker?
I don't see why the lottery (which is the only gambling that has any measurable positive impact on society) deserves to be singled out. Or is it that the positive impact that makes it a tax, instead of just a way of [company k] making profits.
While I don't buy, I think if someone does so with disposable income, I don't see a problem. Honestly I could even see some people might even enjoy the process of buying a lottery ticket so they might actually be getting a value back for every ticket.
> You can't spend the time dreaming you'll win it, if you don't buy a ticket.
I think this statement is more key to a lot of things than people realize. You can never be lucky if you don't take chances. People often like to defend gambles they take in life by using expected returns/risks as a premise that they are making an "informed risk". At the end of the day, however, buying stocks, creating a business, starting a new job, etc, are all gambles.
>put in a visitor's center, a children's playground, a cafe, and, of course, a gift shop.
That's pretty standard. Most of those are profit centers as well. That 10 dollar turkey sandwich has a massive markup. Frankly, its weird to go to a tourist venue that doesn't have some level of merchandising. I don't see Bletchley as some holy ground where these kinds of things defile it. Perhaps people need to have more realistic ideas of what a tourist destination means.
We visited in early January 2012 - was a spontaneous decision, and one we're grateful we did (especially having now watched The Imitation Game, which was even more enjoyable for having been there and heard the history).
Colossus was running by that point (we made a separate donation), but most of the extras you've mentioned are clearly new. Certainly glad to know it's not going to crumble into obscurity anytime soon.
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.
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.
No, this was about 7+ yrs ago. I should have it somewhere in storage though.
IIRC it showed a disheveled older man, with a big beard and dressed like a stereotypical 'hobo', eating some food out of a tin can and making some snarky comment which I don't remember. The drawing, in black and white, had a bit of feel like the older Mickey Mouse or Tom and Jerry style to it, but didn't seem too obviously out of date.
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.
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...
>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.
> 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?
It's different in the eyes of the security services because of the potential for blackmail. A single guy picking up girls is not particularly blackmail-able. A gay man in a society that imprisons and chemically castrates gay people? That is someone who is trivially subject to blackmail.
Even to this day, I believe the security services will ask if you are homosexual and still in the closet, as you are keeping a secret from friends and family that could be used as leverage.
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.
> 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.
Its a massive scandal not just because of her age but because of the allegations that the 17yo was a victim of human trafficking and that this was known to the Prince (and because it is on top of the Prince's other connections to the alleged trafficker, which were already a scandal before the specific allegation), and at least one of the encounters is alleged to have taken place in a jurisdiction (the US Virgin Islands) where the age of consent is 18.
Ah, I was not aware of all the details - all I'd seen was mention of Epstein being a "convicted paedophile" [solicitation of a 15yo IIRC] and then the details on the news of the age of the young lady connected to Prince Andrew and the picture of the two of them + the suggestion that she may not have been there entirely consensually.
Thanks for the added info - my example was clearly poor, but I think the concept still stands: that a dim view is generally taken of people in the public eye who have short-term sex-based trysts with those much younger than themselves (particularly with teenagers)?
Ephebophilia isn't used to describe the presence of sexual attraction to people ~15 years old, it is used to describe primary or exclusive sexual interest in people ~15 years old. Pretty much everyone has some level of sexual attraction to people ~15 years old (the 'term' for that would be 'average').
Paedophilia is also often misused as a term, because it means attraction to pre-pubescent people, generally younger than 11, but sometimes as old as 13. Not 17, not 15, not even 14.
The laws we've universally passed to for pornography (actors must be 18 or older) to protect vulnerable <18 people from exploitation have bled into the public having an opinion that having sexual attraction for people less than 18 is equivalent to paedophilia, which is pretty strange (I know that I would personally view someone who is attracted to a 15 year old differently than someone who is attracted to a 5 year old). Laws of consent obviously differ a lot per country, but are for the most part 16-18, sometimes as low as 14.
There's even more to it, because our laws regarding age of consent do not exist exclusively to protect against paedophiles: they are in place to protect young people from exploitation. Public opinion is sort of confused about this, again.
If a media outlet says 'Person X accused of sexual relations with a minor', they have not in any way said that person was a paedophile, just that person A had sexual relations with someone considered a minor (as old as 17 in some places). The public often takes this as 'Person X accused of paedophilia', which is incorrect.
There's also the issue of viewing all pornography of people <18 as 'child pornography'. This is basically a legal grey zone, which is silly, because a person who forces a 5 year old to take sexual pictures is pretty different than someone who asks a horny 15 year old for pictures (in my opinion, again).
To go back on topic, Prince Andrew being accused of having sex with a 17 year old has nothing to do with paedophilia (at least not with the legal or psychological definition of paedophilia), it has to do with exploitation of a minor.
>To go back on topic, Prince Andrew being accused of having sex with a 17 year old has nothing to do with paedophilia //
I'm not sure what point you're making. I never claimed this was paedophilia, she's clearly not pre-pubescent and was above the UK age of consent.
I also spoke about Turing's tryst being "apparently" ephebophilia (definition: http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/epheboph...) and was quite within normal usage. Yes, Turing may not have exclusively engaged in ephebophilic sexual relationships I don't know.
You'll note in a sibling comment I mentioned Epstein being a "convicted paedophilia" and noted in parentheses the actual crime. The term is in quotes as this is how media referred to him. There are accusations of [non-exclusive] paedophilic activities against him but AFAIK no such conviction. Mass media tends, as you intimate, to refer to all those convicted of sexual activity with minors to be "paedophiles" but I felt I'd gone to reasonable pains to avoid wrongly doing the same.
> There's also the issue of viewing all pornography of people <18 as 'child pornography'. This is basically a legal grey zone
Let's be quite clear: it is not a legal grey zone. At all. It is illegal.
While I agree that the two examples you gave are different, they both involve adults in a position of power/authority taking advantage of impressionable children that do not yet know any better.
Your version inexplicably discards the age difference the parent post included. Straight men who picked up _underaged_ girls would indeed be vulnerable to compromise (legally or by blackmail etc.), and I think the parent poster would agree.
The blackmail argument was always depressingly circular anyway. "We have to fire you if you're gay, because somebody could blackmail you by threatening to get you fired for being gay."
The blackmail argument was always depressingly circular anyway. "We have to fire you if you're gay, because somebody could blackmail you by threatening to get you fired for being gay."
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-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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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!
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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.
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:
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.
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."
"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."
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.
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.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/E_mc2/www/ says the original, translated from German, was the text "If a body gives off the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass diminishes by L/c²", that is, m = L / c². L was used for energy at that time, instead of E.
There is no square root. If you include the momentum term it's E²/c² - p² = m²c², which solving for E gives a square root, leading to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation .
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.
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
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/) 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.)