
Alan Turing Documentary - shawndumas
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2011/04/03/alan-turing-documentary/
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rauljara
"...he faced prosecution by the British government because he was gay. In
1954, Turing committed suicide at age 41 after being forced to undergo hormone
therapy to “fix” his sexual orientation."

I don't know how I never heard of that before. It's certainly not from lack of
hearing about Alan Turing in comp sci lectures. I feel kind of cheated that I
didn't find out about it until now. Did the professors just not know? Were
they too squeamish to talk about it? Did they think his biography was
irrelevant in discussing his contributions to the field? It's just kind of
unsettling to have heard him talked about as a genius so many times yet to
have never heard it acknowledged that he was so profoundly mistreated.

~~~
danssig
>It's just kind of unsettling to have heard him talked about as a genius so
many times yet to have never heard it acknowledged that he was so profoundly
mistreated.

At the time, being homosexual was considered a mental disorder. This is how we
used to treat people with mental disorders. Now, go to your nearest insane
asylum and see if we're any less barbaric today. Be prepared for
disappointment.

~~~
JonnieCache
_> Now, go to your nearest insane asylum and see if we're any less barbaric
today. Be prepared for disappointment._

Erm, care to back that one up there my friend?

~~~
raganwald
Today we "treat" children with drugs to 'correct' their depression, their ADD,
and so on. How can we be sure that a generation from now, we won't look back
and realize that we were damaging their brains during a crucial learning
window? How can we be sure that a generation from now, we won't look back and
realize that we were playing God with people's personalities?

I'm not _against_ pharmapsychiatry, but at the same time I would stop well
short of saying that everything we do with it is unassailably beneficial for
the patients. Perhaps in a generation we will realize that trying to 'cure'
ADD isn't very different from trying to 'cure' homosexuality.

~~~
JonnieCache
Forcing a person who is past the age of legal responsibility to take massive
doses of sex/gender hormones against their will is not the same as giving kids
ritalin, and it is mildly offensive to say so.

We do not put ADD kids in "insane asylums." Have you ever seen the inside of a
mental hospital? Most modern ones are nicer places than the average school.

Psychiatry before the 60s/70s was basically a different thing altogether to
modern psychiatry. One flew over the cuckoos nest has a lot to answer for. It
wasn't even an accurate portrayal of practices at the time the book was
written, let alone when the film was made.

I broadly agree with the ADHD thing though. But don't throw the baby out with
the bathwater.

(The US healthcare system and the incentives around drug proscriptions don't
help a lot.)

~~~
danssig
>Forcing a person who is past the age of legal responsibility to take massive
doses of sex/gender hormones against their will is not the same as giving kids
ritalin, and it is mildly offensive to say so.

You're speaking from the moral outrage position _of today_. At the time, this
was thought of as a way to "correct" the issue just as various drugs we force
on kids is now. Personally I find it at least as bad that these drugs are
forced on kids who have no way to defend themselves or even know what's being
done to them.

The last time I was in the US I ended up having lunch with a friend and that
friend's grown up daughter. The daughter, sadly, had a 4 year old son. During
the coarse of lunch the loud, obnoxious daughter explained about all the
disorders her kid had (ADD, OCD, etc.) and all the _drugs_ she gave him to
deal with it. My wife asked what would happen if she just skipped giving him
all this medication. "Oh, you just can't deal with him if he's not on it.".

She then went on to talk about her life. It was pretty clear that she had no
time for the kid; he had to either be with baby sitters or sitting in front of
the TV nearly 24/7. I can't help but think/hope that in 50 years this kind of
lazy, inconsiderate behavior will be considered criminal (since it's the child
who bears the long term affects of it, not the decision maker). That kid
sounded like a normal 4 year old boy to me but he's being drugged into shape
so he can serve a role closer to that of a cat than of a child.

It's been speculated that if Mozart, Beethoven, etc. were born in the US today
they would probably never amount to anything because their parents would
probably drug away their creativity.

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retlehs
Direct: <http://www.turingfilm.com/>

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kwellman
That page has the most elaborate and geeky captcha I've ever seen. It's also
not very practical considering that something like 7 percent of men have some
degree of color blindness. I can barely tell the difference between 3 and 5 on
that scale.

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bravura
Is there any video or audio footage of Alan Turing? I am not aware of any.

It would be really amazing to see video of him, or at least hear his voice.

~~~
dill_day
Yeah, I agree. I think I remember reading maybe in the Hodges biography that
there unfortunately isn't any; I think there was some sort of recorded radio
interview that got lost somehow...

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j2bryson
I was told by a friend, not a prof. But now that I'm a prof I can tell you
that most students look at you weird if you go anywhere near politics in a CS
lecture. Or even into biology / evolution.

~~~
anonymous
Let me guess: you happen to be living in the US?

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api
In terms of actual real-world tangible importance, I consider Alan Turing more
important than Einstein. He and von Neumann are possibly the greatest
scientists of the 20th century.

BTW, another thing people often don't know about Turing and von Neumann was
that their interests went beyond computers and mathematics. Both were very
interested in biology and physics as well, and did important work on those
fields. von Neumann in particular did important work in regard to the theory
of self-replication, early proto-evolutionary-information-theory, etc.

