G.T. Labs

Jim Ottaviani

More advice from the United States War Department (1942)

“A British woman officer or non-commissioned officer can — and often does — give orders to a man private. The men obey smartly and know it is no shame. For British women have proven themselves in this way. They have stuck to their posts near burning ammunition dumps, delivered messages afoot after their motorcycles have been blasted from under them. They have pulled aviators from burning planes. They have died at gun posts and as they fell another girl has stepped directly into the position and “carried on.” There is not a single record in this war of any British woman in uniformed service quitting her post or failing to do her duty under fire.
“Now you understand why British soldiers respect the women in uniform. They have won the right to the utmost respect. When you see a girl in khaki or air-force blue with a bit of ribbon on her tunic — remember she didn’t get it for knitting more socks than anyone else in Ipswich.”
Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942, issued by the United States War Department in 1942, published by the Bodelian Library, University of Oxford, in 2004 (ISBN 1-85124-085-3)

Alan Turing on brains, machines, and porridge

“[W]e are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge. We don’t want to say ‘This machine’s quite hard, so it isn’t a brain, so it can’t think.'”
Alan Turing (1952). “Can automatic calculating machines be said to think?” BBC Third Programme, 14 and 23 Jan. 1952, discussion between M.H.A. Newman, Alan M. Turing, Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, and R.B. Braithwaite.

Advice from the United States War Department (1942)

“Don’t be misled by the British tendency to be soft-spoken and polite. If they need to be, they can be plenty tough. The English language didn’t spread across the oceans and over the mountains and jungles and swamps of the world because these people were panty-waists.”
Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942, issued by the United States War Department in 1942, published by the Bodelian Library, University of Oxford, in 2004 (ISBN 1-85124-085-3)

New story: “The Imitation Game” is here

Turing at the time of his election to Fellowsh...

Turing at the time of his election to Fellowship of the Royal Society. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At last! The book was first announced in Publishers Weekly a…while ago. After a whole lot of work, Leland Purvis and my book about Alan Turing has begun to appear at Tor.com. Here’s our pitch from way back when:

“The atomic bomb shortened WWII by months, and the whole world knew it, instantly. The code-breakers at Bletchley Park shortened the war by years, but everyone who worked there remained anonymous and everything they did remained secret…for decades. As Winston Churchill put it, Bletchley people were the geese that ‘laid the golden egg, but never cackled.’

Flying at the head of Churchill’s flock was Alan Turing, the mathematician who cracked the German Enigma code. That alone would be enough to secure his place in history, but before the war he launched modern computer science via his creation of the Universal Turing Machine and after the war he created what is now known as the Turing Test, a benchmark for artificial intelligence. He called his test ‘The Imitation Game’.
He was also openly gay in a time and place where gays were treated criminally. And not just metaphorically — he killed himself with a cyanide-tainted apple after being convicted of homosexuality and forced to undergo estrogen treatment.
Our world is one of computers and secure communications, and Turing’s work is at the heart of both. He was an eccentric genius, an Olympic-class runner, a witty and clear communicator about complicated ideas, and open and honest to a fault. The secret he kept to safeguard his country could have saved him; the secret he refused to keep to save himself meant his destruction at the hands of that same country.”
We hope you enjoy it! Here’s that link again: The Imitation Game.
(I scheduled this post to appear at 10:01:01 local time. Binary and prime: I hope Alan Turing would approve.)

Yesterday

In order of appearance, yesterday I…
…got soaked up to the hamstrings walking to work.
…made some more research available online. 
…received a royalty check for a previous book. 
…finished and submitted the first draft of the Hawking book. 
…ran some trails in my favorite trail running shoes. 
…ate leftovers and a slice of Go! Ice Cream’s Carrot Cake Pie. 
…read The Love Bunglers by Jaime Hernandez, again. (It killed me, again.) 
…had a sip (or two) of Grass Widow Bourbon from Two James Spirits of Corktown, Detroit. 
…thought, “Hey, I’m really lucky.”  
Today? Today I worked and tutored at 826mi and joined my friend Lara in celebrating her move to full-time writing. And I buried the lede. 

Dear Billy Collins

I read your poems aloud
to my wife as she makes us salad,
a task she says she hates
but whose tedium I can relieve
by reading poetry,
which she also says she hates.
She asks for the “New and Selected” and “Other” 
verses while she tears lettuce and
scoops avocado and digs olives from a jar,
 
putting too few in my bowl and too many in hers,
even though when I count them we have the same number.
And she interrupts you all the time with laughter,
putting you in the good company of
every movie, novel, meal, television show, 
or walk with no destination in mind
that we’ve ever enjoyed together.
If you keep writing poetry, then I
will keep reading it to her
and we will keep eating salad,
which I’m sure you’ll agree
is a fair trade.