Charles PetzoldBooks and other writings by Charles PetzoldGay Rights and the Prosecution of Alan Turing- June 28, 2008 In January, 1952, English mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing was arrested for having sex with another man. The law that Alan Turing broke was the infamous Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Section 11 prohibited "any act of gross indecency with another male person" and specified that offenders "be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour." The term "gross indecency" was not specifically defined in the law, but it was.http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2008/06/Gay-Rights-and-the-Prosecution-of-Alan-Turing.h... Perhaps It Wasn't Peter Fonda- June 25, 2008 I'm pretty sure I've never been to MTV's web site before, and I definitely won't try to claim that I'm familiar with everyone mentioned in the article Lil Wayne, Kanye West And LL Cool J Fly Girl Talk's Friendly Skies, Unknowingly, In Bigger Than The Sound, but check out what book Peter Fonda was reading on the plane (4th paragraph, 4th line). Or perhaps the guy just looked like Peter Fonda, like so many other readers of The Annotated Turing. .http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2008/06/251037.html Reading Copelands Colossus- June 22, 2008 The Collected Works of Alan Turing are published by Elsevier, an Amsterdam-based publishing house. The four volumes reproduce Turings 30-odd papers and articles, as well as other material, mostly in facsimile with valuable introductory essays. The only drawback is the price: the individual volumes range from $165 to $190. An excellent low-cost alternative is the The Essential Turing (Oxford University Press, 2004), edited by B. Jack Copeland, Professor of Philosophy at the University of..http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2008/06/220824.html Memorizing the Multiplication Tables- June 13, 2008 Chapter 9 of Turing-biographer Andrew Hodges' new book One to Nine (which I discussed Monday) takes on mathematics education, which probably everyone agrees is pretty much a disaster. One of the aspects of math education that Hodges seems to be against is memorization: Whether it is even essential to memorize the base-10 multiplication table, I doubt. It is more important to have a good general sense of what people call ballpark estimates; to know motes from beams, gnats from...http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2008/06/Memorizing-the-Multiplication-Tables.html Reading Hodges One to Nine- June 9, 2008 Anyone writing a book that has anything to do with Alan Turing (such as my book The Annotated Turing) benefits from having at the outset a valuable and ultimately indispensable resource: Andrew Hodges' extraordinary biography Alan Turing: The Enigma published in Great Britain and the United States in 1983. This biography is a model of its kind: very well researched, beautifully written, accurately informative about the mathematics, and quite moving. My book The Annotated Turing is...http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2008/06/Reading-Hodges-One-to-Nine.html The Annotated Turing Hot Off the Presses!- June 5, 2008 Yesterday I received a few hot off the presses copies of The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine, kindly forwarded to me by Wiley, the book's publisher. Even after writing 15 books over the past 20 years, I still get a thrill when I see the first copies. Just to get a sense how the book is shipping to people other than the author, a couple weeks ago Deirdre and I submitted test orders to Amazon and Barnes...http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2008/06/Hot-Off-the-Presses.html The Alan Turing James Bond Connection- June 1, 2008 Last Wednesday, May 28, 2008, was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. A front page article in today's Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times by Charles McGrath entitled "That License to Kill Is Still Unexpired" includes a photo of the famous Enigma machine with the caption "The first Bond novelist, Ian Fleming, worked for British naval intelligence during World War II and was concerned with devices like the German Enigma, an...http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2008/06/010824.html |