Turing notes found warming Bletchley Park's leaky ceilings Top secret documents devised by Alan Turing, which should have been destroyed under wartime rules, have been found during renovations of Bletchley Park where they were used in roof cavities to stop draughts. The documents have been identified as 'Banbury sheets', papers punched with holes to allow manual comparison of …
When I read notes, I thought this must be an early version of Lotus Notes.
Then I realised how stupid would that be, if Alan Turing had played with Notes it would be far, far better than it is now and might even be multithreaded.
I've been at IBM too long, however my last day is tomorrow as I have been 'voluntary separated' from the company. Looking forward to more time with the family, not sure the family is looking forward to me though....
When I read notes, I thought this must be an early version of Lotus Notes. Then I realised how stupid would that be (...).
True. However it's reasonable to suppose that during his lifetime Turing did occasionally record his thoughts on pieces of paper, no? Well, where I come from that's what we usually mean by "notes", and wouldn't it be nice if we found some previously undiscovered ones by Turing! Whereas throwaway scribblings of the kind one makes when working on a math problem could also be called "notes", I guess, but except perhaps as historic artifacts it's hard to see much value on those.
Two options, TRT:
1) Tear along the perforations (you never know, the innovation might catch on)
2) Use two sheets where the holes don't coincide (the "grater" could be a far more efficient means of scraping off clag, saving entire rain forests from being sawn down, pulped, and used for bottom wiping).
"Except maybe as bog roll...."
"M" - So, Bond, the secret documents you recovered, what's the Kremlin's mole up to? Is it an assasination attempt on the ambassador, or is he after the plans for the ultra-decryption device?
Bond - I really couldn't say Sir. Though he appears to have a penchant for sweetcorn, and really doesn't get enough fibre in his diet...
Actually using secret documents as bog roll happened rather a lot. Brixmis was the UK military mission to East Germany carried on throughout the Cold War. The Soviets saw fit not to provide their troops with toilet paper. However headquarters were provided with large amounts of soft and absorbent onionskin paper, in order to do encryption/decrytion of signals. This was all then to be burned, but Soviet troops disposed of it in another manner.
After Warsaw Pact excercises Brixmis would rush to the area, find where the HQ had been, and go looking for poo with secret messages attached... I believe there's a saying in the army for jobs like that, "if you can't take a joke, you shouldn't have joined".
This has a long history. In World War 1 a British Army of African conscripts (and Indian volunteers) chased a German army of African conscripts all over East Africa. The Germans used paper signal pads and then, er, used paper signal pads. First stop after the Germans departed was the latrines, with a shovel. The Brits called it the DPM - Dirty Paper Method.
"So lad, what branch of the Army would you like to serve in?"
"Military Intelligence Sir!"
"Silly boy, you're in!"
Sadly the truth is that there were no nice parts of the estate, though the house was better than the huts. If you read what books are available (and believe them) and tour the museum, its all pretty dreadful. Managers did work in the huts as well as the rest of their team.
Sorry to bring an element of truth into a far more interesting hypothesis.
Queen Victoria would say the same thing of Mrs Brown.
George VI would say the same thing of The King's Speech.
Tolkien would say the same thing of Lord of The Rings.
Hell, the Mary Poppins author HATES the movie.
It's a movie. It will not be accurate. Ever.
However, it's a great blast for this Turing fan to be in a "Turing-like" historical environment for a couple of hours. And, hell, it's not bad enough to condemn it by any means. I mean, sure, I'd kick Keira Knightley into shape a bit for her performance but other than that, the bits I'd want to add/remove/change would just turn the film into a documentary (and a boring one at that).
(P.S. Studied Computer Science and Mathematics at university, with particular emphasis on Coding Theory, etc. and work in the industry created by those people... I'd be the first to lump onto it if it was actually U-571 bad, as opposed to just a Hollywoodisation).
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I would understand if you had used a sarcasm icon, but the plain text in the balloon had been read and posted about by several people before your post. If you want to use the boffin icon, you will have to acknowledge that bias depends on your data source. In this case, a bias towards values between 0110 0001 and 0111 1010 would lead me to expect more than 50% 1s.
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