*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Tuesday, May 17th, 2011 3:10pm PDT - promote requested by rottenseed.

Touched.. by tragedy?

What, a fucking, understatement. Given a choice between imprisonment or hormonal treatment? As if they can.. cure the gay away. Touched by tragedy doesn't even begin to describe the kind of stupidity exhibited in this case, by society, no less.

In January 1952, Turing met Arnold Murray outside a cinema in Manchester. After a lunch date, Turing invited Murray to spend the weekend with him at his house, an invitation which Murray accepted although he did not show up. The pair met again in Manchester the following Monday, when Murray agreed to accompany Turing to the latter's house. A few weeks later Murray visited Turing's house again, and apparently spent the night there.[48]

After Murray helped an accomplice to break into his house, Turing reported the crime to the police. During the investigation, Turing acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray. Homosexual acts were illegal in the United Kingdom at that time,[49] and so both were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, the same crime for which Oscar Wilde had been convicted more than fifty years earlier.[50]

Turing was given a choice between imprisonment or probation conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido. He accepted chemical castration via oestrogen hormone injections.[51]

On 8 June 1954, Turing's cleaner found him dead; he had died the previous day. A post-mortem examination established that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. When his body was discovered an apple lay half-eaten beside his bed, and although the apple was not tested for cyanide,[54] it is speculated that this was the means by which a fatal dose was delivered. An inquest determined that he had committed suicide, and he was cremated at Woking Crematorium on 12 June 1954.[55] Turing's mother argued strenuously that the ingestion was accidental, caused by her son's careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing may have killed himself in an ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability.[56] Others suggest that Turing was re-enacting a scene from the 1937 film Snow White, his favourite fairy tale, pointing out that he took "an especially keen pleasure in the scene where the Wicked Witch immerses her apple in the poisonous brew."[57]

A little background for those who are interested.

During the beginnings of WW2 the Polish saw that the Germans were amassing armies of some magnitude and were certain that they couldn't hope to fight them. So they worked on cracking the codes that the Germans were using for communication. This was a fantastic piece of mathematics and was eventually put into practice via a machine called the Bomba.

The poles handed a copy of their findings to the British intelligence through a man called Knox, who would eventually become Turing's superior at Bletchley Park. It was later found out that Knox was also a homosexual, despite being married.

The enigma machine was altered after the Bomba was made, Turing analysed the code and mathematics and created a machine known as the Bombe. This was capable of cracking the enigma code by looking for contradictions.

This machine was later re-invented as The Colossus machines by a gifted engineer, Tommy Flowers. These machines were capable of cracking an enigma message in roughly 10 minutes. By the end of the war, the British were cracking the broadcasted Enigma coded messages before the Germans could themselves as they decoded messages manually using the enigma machine.

In 1945, Turing was awarded the OBE for his wartime services. He committed suicide in 1954, although this is disputed, especially by his mother.

In 2009 as the result of a petition, a government apology was issued by Gordon Brown for the way Turing had been treated.

"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 ... 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."

I've had the chance to learn a lot about Bletchley park in my studies of computing history, and what a remarkable man Turing was.

A personal hero of mine too. *promote

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Tuesday, May 17th, 2011 11:26pm PDT - promote requested by Seric.