"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Turing: Calculated Pardon

The man and the machine
EXTRACT: But central to the sheer volume and intensity of the praise heaped upon Turing is the fact that it was a Briton who invented the computer and laid the basis for the worldwide web, and it was British ingenuity that rescued the world from Nazi tyranny, etc. Get the picture? Turing is now almost up there with Winston Churchill in the pantheon of national heroes. Hypocritically, Turing is being politically used to promote a narrow nationalist agenda.

There is another dimension to the Turing question which is far more welcome, however. Namely, the steady normalisation of homosexuality in society. No longer does being gay mean ostracism or criminal charges. Nowadays, even members of the Dáil in Ireland can mention they are gay without generating an uproar - a significant shift in societal attitudes. And virtually no-one in official Britain would bat an eyelid if an MP or government minister announced they were gay - so what? Stop boring us and get on with it.
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Posted by at 11:17 am

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