Fight Begins To Secure Turing Papers For Bletchley Park Museum 66
Blacklaw writes "Auction house Christie's is planning to sell offprints of Alan Turing's early work for an estimated £500,000 — and the fight has begun to raise the money so UK codebreaking museum and charity Bletchley Park can house the documents in the building where Turing performed his war-winning work and birthed the concept of a modern 'universal computer.' If the money isn't raised, the papers could disappear into a private archive, never to be seen again."
Love to play Devil's Advocate... (Score:1)
Worst case scenario, they are lost forever in a private archive by a fire. Granted, worst case.
Medium case, the papers are held privately, but returned to light at the owner's or heir's choosing.
Best case, they are held but allowed to be in a public museum for viewing.
It's a somewhat obscure purchase. Would someone willing to spend that much on those papers be unsympathetic to the ideas behind the papers?
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These are off-prints, i.e., free sample copies of a journal article that authors are given.
Chances are, you can already go to a good university library and make photocopies of the articles.
If your university has a subscription, you can also see the articles on JSTOR:
http://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=au:(Turing)
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You won't be buying the copyright, just the original physical article.
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Just donate to Bletchley if you're interested, they're the experts at handling this kind of material and making it available for the public, better to let them do it and give them your money.
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Plus I'm sure there's pictures and copies of those papers around. I'm all for a bit of fetichism and idolatry, but I'm surprised geeks play at it too.
Re:Love to play Devil's Advocate... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Preprints are interesting in their own right. My collection of preprints (culled from the Departmental Library with permission, when the library was having a throwing out session) includes the signatures of one of the first geochronologists, on several papers documenting improving methods of geochronology and the first really scientific estimates of the age of the Earth. I also have the signature of one of the last people to see Malloy and Irvine on Everest.
While I'm a Friend of Bletchley Park (it's only a
Re:Love to play Devil's Advocate... (Score:4, Funny)
This belongs in a MUSEUM. </Indiana_jones>
The lesson of politics is that... (Score:1, Insightful)
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Alan Turing committed suicide. He was not assassinated by Men In Black.
Bletchley Park [bletchleypark.org.uk] is not a front organisation for The Nasty Government.
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Well... the UK Government was treating him pretty badly at the time.
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Re:The lesson of politics is that... (Score:5, Informative)
You are trolling, but for the sake of accuracy here is what is generally acknowledged to be the case.
- after the war he struggled to get the kind of role and financial support he should have been given without a quibble or a bat of the eye - he eventually got a very good job at the University of Manchester, which is a great place, but it is amazing that he wasn't treated as a national treasure (was it 2 of Hilberts challenges he solved? Even allowing for the secrecy around the work during the war someone in the know should have pushed it on that basis)
- he was targeted for blackmail due to being gay when it was illegal
- the police arrested him and he was prosecuted and punished with hormone therapy
- the depression caused by the therapy and the awful behavior of society towards him, and his own personal isolation caused him to take his life
- he did it in such a way to allow his mother to go on believing that it was an accident
In 1956 the UK government had no reason to kill him, in fact it never did - quite the opposite. Instead they treated a great man with indifference and contempt because of his sexuality. I can't say that I can think of a more pathetic story in all senses of the word.
If you want to feel worse about it (as a human) then think what might have been if he had lived 25 more years and had enjoyed the appropriate support
Re:The lesson of politics is that... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Can someone please explain why the above post was moderated down? I have suggested that he was not driven to suicide for being homosexual, since anyone in the right situation could get away with practising homosexuality. IOW it was a very selectively enforced law. Recall Churchill on the Navy: rum, sodomy and the lash.
In what way is this is trolling? thanks.
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I believe it was intended to reduce libido (chemical castration). "Turing agreed to take hormone therapy for a year instead of going to prison." [digital60.org]
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Re:The lesson of politics is that... (Score:5, Insightful)
What must be more sad (if it's a question of volume) is that uncounted numbers of people like Turing were then, before, and are treated this way today, but there is no sympathy or support or help for them because they are just people and not geniuses. We don't know who most of them are because, like Turing, they hide the truth from most people in their lives.
They may not be subject to hormone therapy (though some were) but are ostracized, ridiculed, excluded, persecuted, killed. Even here on Slashdot surrounded by supposedly smart people.
We can do better.
Re:The lesson of politics is that... (Score:4, Insightful)
So they didn't hold the weapon, but they destroyed his life until he ended it. Yeah, I'd say they killed him...
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but rather as a side effect of bigotry and/or indifference.
In other words, gross negligence.
They committed what we would call today a hate crime.
If you have a duty of care, commit gross negligence, and a person dies, you would be heading to jail with charges of manslaughter.
The governments' killing of the man, by causing his own suicide, is no different.
They knew or should have known, the ramifications of horome therapy, before forcing anyone into it.
Even when punishing criminals, the govern
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In 1956 the UK government had no reason to kill him, in fact it never did - quite the opposite. Instead they treated a great man with indifference and contempt because of his sexuality.
They killed him by being a culpable, responsible party to his suicide.
Culpable, because the government chose what actions to take.
Responsible, because the actions (therapy) that were taken caused his suicide.
So basically, yes, the government murdered him, as in they caused and were responsible for his death. The fact
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Couple of points, he was a man in his early 40's - he was arrested when called the police on a teenager he picked up at the cinema and invited back to his house for sex. He knew that he would be arrested for his admission of sex with the young man; this suggests to me it was something more serious than just theft that he was reporting. I'd guess he was being blackmailed by foreign service agents, but it's a guess, it's certain that something doesn't add up in the reports that I've read. If it were a girl of
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If you want to feel worse about it (as a human) then think what might have been if he had lived 25 more years and had enjoyed the appropriate support
He'd have got into a pissing contest with Vint Cerf, and the IP4 address space would have been 64 bits wide.
[Obligatory M$-bashing] Bill Gates would have stuck with his college courses instead of dropping out and writing BASIC interpreters.
World hunger would have been solved in the late '70s.
A little sad at this point... (Score:2)
From the website:
Target: £500,000
Raised so far: £140
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Don't be silly. It would take away the incentive for Mr Turing's estate to write any new papers.
Save yoyr money (Score:2, Insightful)
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Hell, for that much money we could make a clone of Alan Turing.
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appropriation (Score:3, Insightful)
His work was funded by the people, built on the knowledge of the people, is part of the heritage of the people and its content belongs to the people. At worst, the "owner" should be required to maintain its condition and make it publicly available, and to provide digital copies which enter the public domain. Just like any item of antiquity or listed building.
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His work was funded by the people, built on the knowledge of the people, is part of the heritage of the people and its content belongs to the people. At worst, the "owner" should be required to maintain its condition and make it publicly available, and to provide digital copies which enter the public domain. Just like any item of antiquity or listed building.
All of your work is built on the knowledge of the people. I demand that you place it all on display immediately.
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Erm, all my intellectual work which amounts to more than scraps or drill exercises is publicly available and can for the most part be downloaded. I'm not providing you with links because I maintain anonymity using this account. But I make a point of not hoarding my work, and I've got in more than several arguments with people who want me to do so.
The few times I have tried to build with my hands, I have made such a hash of it that it would probably threaten your safety if you tried to use the fruits of my l
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It's a ridiculous argument, if anything it should be scanned if it's the only copy and then it can be used for bumwad for all I care. Individual pieces of media are often destroyed regardless of paper or plastic.
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So you are agreeing with the principle and just debating the detail of whether the original hard copy has any value. Now, the latter question is argued in the positive by museums across the world, so I don't think we need to rehash that.
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I agree with the principle that the data is priceless, but not that someone should be subjected to expense because of that. Priceless shouldn't mean that you can be expected to pay any price because you own something :p
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Its content belongs to the people, but not the original physical papers. Physical papers generally belong to whoever possessed them and imprinted things upon them, maybe their employer in some cases --- but definitely not the public.
Turings' work is subject to copyright, therefore won't be public domain for a long time, but the essential content of these things WAS published. Its not like they contain data or text that are not already available through Turings' published works
manuscripts? (Score:2)
I think reading the papers through the Internet, in a library, or from your own print-out is enough.
I would suggest Alan Turing would feel the same.
(How would you feel about your own writing being auctioned, but easily available otherwise?)
Stephan
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(How would you feel about your own writing being auctioned, but easily available otherwise?)
That depends on who is auctioning them.
If they were being sold by my spouse / kids, because they really needed the money, I would be all for it.
Otherwise, I would rather have it burned than auctioned.
Onoes! (Score:3, Insightful)
If the money isn't raised, the papers could disappear into a private archive, never to be seen again."
OR they could be bought by a private collector who could just as easily "indefinitely loan" them to Bletchley Park. Just as many private art collectors have pieces on loan to museums.
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> Just as many private art collectors have pieces on loan to museums.
I thought that was so they could avoid insurance premiums and get them cared for properly until they wanted to display them above the television in the breakfast nook.
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Makes sense.... not only does the collector retain ownership in that case, but the museum can be responsible for keeping it in pristine condition. The collector looks good to the public because they are being nice and allowing the museum to display the work.
If the collector wants to sell... the museum is also free advertising in regards to the nature of the work, and the fact it exists and might be available for purchase later.
and in other news (Score:1, Funny)
The German navy files suit under the DMCA
could be fake (Score:1, Funny)
How do we know this is really Turing's work and not, say, an imitation by an advanced AI?
Who cares? (Score:2, Insightful)
What difference does it make what happens to his "original" papers? They have been published and are accessible to all.
With Turing, of all people, one should understand that it is the information contained in those papers that matters--which is public--not the physical artifact.
Misleading headline (Score:3, Informative)
The headline is, as usual, misleading. These aren't Turing's papers (which usually means personal papers and notes belonging to the person named), they're copies of [professional] papers he wrote.
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"in the building where Turing performed his war-winning work and birthed the concept of a modern 'universal computer.'"
Given that his paper, On Computable Numbers, was published in 1937, well before WWI started, I'm wondering exactly where this building might be...
It seems you're thinking of an alternate universe... :)
Here's what the article should say: (Score:1)