• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

G.T. Labs

  • Home
  • Blog
  • Artists
  • Writers
  • Events
  • Store
  • Contact

news

More advice from the United States War Department (1942)

Tweet
“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)
Posted in honor (honour?) of The Imitation Game by Leland Purvis and me…read it at Tor.com.

Alan Turing on brains, machines, and porridge

Tweet
“[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.
Posted in honor of The Imitation Game by Leland Purvis and me…read it at Tor.com.

Advice from the United States War Department (1942)

Tweet
“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)
Posted in honor (honour?) of The Imitation Game by Leland Purvis and me…read it at Tor.com.

New story: “The Imitation Game” is here

Tweet
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.)

Secret research trip for FutureBook™, tweeted after the fact

Tweet
My social media advisor (a.k.a. my wife) says nobody likes a blizzard of tweets, and even if they did I’d be too forgetful to post these and am too lazy to configure auto-tweeting software to schedule them.
And, some of these are no doubt too long…I’m also too lazy to count to 140.
So, here is a large batch of pseudo-tweets in the form of a single blog post. Yeah, a blog. Very retro, which is appropriate since this happened a while back. But now all — okay, some — can be revealed…
Update, 14Nov2013: Here’s the announcement on BoingBoing!

##
19May2013: Secret research trip commences. Plan is to post these as Time Delayed Tweets (TDTs) upon successful completion…
TDT/May19-20: Best (not recommended) way to beat jet lag: Board 10:10pm flight at 11:40pm, sit on runway for 4.5 hrs, get off plane, try again next day.
TDT/May19-20: BTW, the above technique assumes you don’t do more than doze for an hour or so for the duration.
TDT/May20-21: Took 4 tries to get to Atlanta, on to London 1st try after that. Yesterday: not best day ever. Today: still not great, but not worst.
TDT/May21: Arrived in England, took train to Cambridge, walked from station to room to clear our heads.
TDT/May21: Leland Myrick meets us at end of (our) road. Great to see him, for all the reasons you’d imagine.
TDT/May21: Dinner at former student haunt of our Research Subject.
TDT/May21: The Tickell Inn: Higher end than usual student bar. Doesn’t smell like filthy rag soaked in stale beer, for one thing.
TDT/May21-22: Accommodations not luxurious; mattress is a good simulation of thing of same name…
TDT/May21-22: …but totally fine, and no apparent jet lag. See above for brilliant technique!
TDT/May22: Into the archive. 100s of photos taken, dozens of priceless things held in bare hands. #gobsmacked
TDT/May22: Ruined forever, thanks to friends Malcolm & Anna and CAMRA beer, cider, and perry festival. Weak, unsubtle, and bad U.S. cider will never do now.
TDT/May22: Also, good cider is strong. #typinghardafterhomanypintswasthat?
TDT/May23: More archives. Not all end up being on task, but worth it because…ho-hum, there’s A.A. Milne’s handwritten m.s. for Winnie the Pooh.
TDT/May23: Ho-hum, Newton’s library. As in Isaac Newton’s personal library. Right there. I’m now about to pull a book off the shelf. With my own hands.
TDT/May23: Title in question: “The General Delusions of Christians, Touching the Ways of God’s Revealing Himself to, and by the Prophets
TDT/May23: “…Evinc’d from Scripture and Primitive Antiquity…
TDT/May23: “…and Many Principles of Scoffers, Athiests, Sadducees, and Wild Enthusiasts Re-futed…
TDT/May23: “…The Whole Adapted, As Much As Possible, to the Meanest Capacity.” 
TDT/May23: Oh, Isaac Newton — you’d have loved the National Enquirer! (And it would love you.)
TDT/May23: Apparently you can tell if Newton actually read a particular book because he turned down corners. The librarian in me blanches, but…
TDT/May23: …there’s the fold, and I’m delighted.
TDT/May23: Into Inner Sanctum. 100s more pictures taken with a stupefied look on my face. #whatamIdoinghere? 
TDT/May23: More than one picture of Feynman on display in Inner Sanctum. #heh
TDT/May23: Appropriate, since Feynman (or rather, Feynman) is in part the reason we’re here.
TDT/May23: Into Innermost Inner Sanctum. Wonderful stories (most on deep background) told in a #whatamIdoinghere? setting.
TDT/May23: Great Indian to end the day. Cobra Beer = fantastic. Malcolm & Anna = more fantastic.
TDT/May24: Back to archive and a few 100 more photos, incl. early drafts of The Book. 
TDT/May24: Re. The Book’s early drafts: Calista/@01FirstSecond, when time comes, please don’t edit me w/chapter-by-chapter letter grades. #kthx
TDT/May24: Run in rain through Cambridge. Can’t sneak in for Trinity Court run. Got lost, found way back again. Almost hit by 3 different cars.
TDT/May24: Had a great time, IOW.
TDT/May24: Drinks in Fellows Club before dinner. Malcolm pronounces wine not quite ready. Leland, Kat and I think it’s fantastic. #lowbrows
TDT/May24: Dined at Trinity High Table. #whatamIdoinghere? Tried not to think of Hogwarts every few seconds. #failed
TDT/May24: They eat fast at High Table. (Hypothesis 1: To get out of there and leave students to own revels.) (Hypothesis 2: To get to the cheese and port.)
TDT/May24: Cheese and port after dinner — by candle light — with Fellows. #whatamIdoinghere?
TDT/May24: Learn that Trinity College has 40-50 year supply of port.
TDT/May24: Given consumption this evening…w/only 7 of us…I imagine subterranean reservoir size of Lake Huron.
TDT/May24: Rain clears after dinner for our stroll through Trinity Court. Magical, and gratified to hear our host is not jaded in the least.
TDT/May25: Work part done. (And per above what a horrible load and burden it was!) Traveling to Wales.
TDT/May25: Caerdydd Castell. Wisgi Cymreig. Da.
TDT/May25: Also, and this time in English: great dinner in Splot. (#notmakingthatup!) Featured 80s techno dance club soundtrack, complete w/New Order.
TDT/May26: Tintern Abbey is not-shockingly sublime. Lovely weather too…
TDT/May26: …so any impression that after rocky start this trip has been full of good luck is correct.
TDT/May27: London. Churchill’s underground War Rooms. Also sublime, but entirely unlike Tintern. (I know, shocking!) #ACTIONTHISDAY
TST/May27: #ACTIONTHISDAY reminds me that “The Imitation Game”, by me and Leland Purvis, is almost done. Look for it soon via @tordotcom.
TDT/May28: Onward to Down House to complete our Great Scientists tour.
TDT/May28: The grounds here are even more beautiful than Inner Inner Sanctum’s, and the stuff inside is much older. We don’t touch it, either.
TDT/May28: Fleshed out closing sequence for the FutureBook™ on Darwin’s Sandwalk. #thankyouCharlesDarwin
TDT/May29: Flying home in biz class, thanks to amazing help from amazing friend. Upside: biz class. (#whatamIdoinghere?) Downside: future travel ruined forever.
TDT/May29: 804 miles from home, which is less than the number of reference photos I took on the device I’m also using to write with.
TDT/May29: Signing off from the lap of luxury, in an age of wonders.
Nov13: Did I forget to reveal the subject of FutureBook™? Sorry. (#notreallysorry) More to be revealed tomorrow, via @01FirstSecond and @BoingBoing/boingboing.net.
Nov13 ± N months: #writingwritingwritingwritingwriting. Also, #writingwr
itingwritingwritingwriting.

Primates!

Tweet

Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas is out, and Maris and I would like to know what you think. So…please add your comments below. We look forward to hearing from you!

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Go to page 4
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 9
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Store Links

View shopping cart
Go to Checkout

Recent Blogs

  • Feynman, banned. Yes, you read that right… September 12, 2023
  • Keep Copyright Human August 31, 2023
  • Don’t believe AI, or, No, my next book is definitely not coming out this year June 5, 2023
  • The (Second) Year of the Dog April 24, 2023
  • Solar System Ambassador, 2023 (!) April 3, 2023
Tweets by @gtlabsrat

Footer

Creative Commons Logo
Follow @gtlabsrat
GT Labs logo

Copyright © 2023 · Author Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in