Saturday, April 29, 2006
Blogging Against Disablism Day - Celebrity Endorsement!!
Blogging Against Disablism Day now has its own celebrity endorsement, but I shall let Lady Bracknell tell you all about it as it is all her doing.
Andrew and Granny, a year on.
Well, as you can see – because I know you’ve been counting – we now have 117 participating blogger for Blogging Against Disablism! Thanks very much to BBC Ouch who have given us a third mention today on their weblog. Also, I found out yesterday that Brownfemipower moved the date for Blogging For Radical Fun Day from May 1st to May 5th in order to avoid coinciding with our event, so a big thank you to her. Thank you to Damon who has added a link to BADD as an external link on the Wikipedia entry for Disablism. And of course, thank you to everyone who has signed up so far.
Today is the first anniversary of my uncle Andrew’s death. Here is that lovely
photograph of him that R took at my cousin Jenny’s wedding.
We were down in Suffolk when it happened and whilst Andrew here, I didn’t write much about that strange day.
We went down to Suffolk on the Tuesday. There was no particular reason why we visited at that time. Mum had the day off on the Thursday and she was going to drive us to Ipswich to see Granny Kelly, who was very ill in hospital. Her life wasn’t in direct danger, but she had had all sorts of problems which meant that effectively she’d lost the skin from her calf muscles. Despite everyone’s best efforts, she had got into quite a state trying to manage at home, lost a lot of weight and was now suffering from jaundice.
Andrew was in also hospital but this was neither unusual or worrying. In this case he had an impacted bowel. The way he was, Andrew wouldn’t have complained of being constipated and even having pain until it was severe enough for medical intervention. Andrew had been very distressed and disorientated on the ward, which had made Dad a little nervous. Trouble with Andrew and his distress was that as well as being upsetting to see him upset, people who didn’t know him could be quite frightened. And indeed, Andrew would hurt someone who he thought was going to hurt him.
Anyway, the family agreed that Granny was not to know about this. And indeed, there was really no point in mentioning the fact that Andrew was in hospital at all; he would be out by the weekend and then we could mention it. We thought she might not have long for this world and just a little bit of worry could send her over. Not for the first time in her life, the family underestimated its matriarch.
And it all went wrong with Andrew. Clostridium difficile is a bacterium that lives in the gut and can grow out of control when the natural flora is unbalanced. Clearing out an impacted bowel can do it. Really simple stuff. By the time Thursday arrived, we knew he was on his way out.
The fact that [...], Mum and I were on our way to visit Granny when we heard he had died; the fact that I was in Suffolk and Mum had the day off were just some of the many coincidences which meant that within an hour of Andrew's death, Granny was surrounded by her family.
And Granny, tiny and slightly yellow at the time, was amazing. This is a lady who is severely ill herself, and has just discovered that her youngest and most vulnerable child (who was always a child, in many ways) has died of a short illness she never even knew about. Within five minutes of our arrival at the hospital she said to me, “When Andrew was twenty-four, he had a kidney infection and I prepared myself for his death then. So as far as I am concerned, every year since then has been a blessing. I have had twenty-four years with him that I didn’t expect to have.”
Later when we gathered in the family room, sitting in the centre of the room in a horrid hospital wheelchair and a nightdress that would have seen better days even if it wasn’t two sizes too big for her, she addressed the family. She questioned my Dad and uncles about the important points; had he been in pain? Were you there? They didn’t need to explain the fact that they hadn’t told her, “I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it if you had,” she said. Which, of course, is true.
Then she said, “I have seen the end of him. I was always concerned about what would happen to him in the future, but now I know that he had a swift and peaceful end with his family close by.”
My Granny is an incredibly woman. A year later, and she is much better. She walks with a stick now and has had a stair-lift installed; two years ago, she had no mobility issue at all, she claimed to have entered her eighties with no arthritis whatsoever. I actually doubt this assertion, but certainly she’d never had anything to complain of. But she’s getting about and doing her own shopping and everything. I honestly didn’t think she would be able to go home again, let alone live independently; generally folks that age who get sick don't get better.
Hmm, don't mean to suggest her good health is some sort of moral achievement, but she did actively hold on. She held on to make R&A's wedding in August. Now she's knitting blankets for her first great grandchild.
I find it very difficult to remember that Andrew is gone. I don’t miss him on a regular basis because I would only have seen him at family occasions. But then he is missing. Well, I wrote last year about what he meant to us.
Today is the first anniversary of my uncle Andrew’s death. Here is that lovely
photograph of him that R took at my cousin Jenny’s wedding.We were down in Suffolk when it happened and whilst Andrew here, I didn’t write much about that strange day.
We went down to Suffolk on the Tuesday. There was no particular reason why we visited at that time. Mum had the day off on the Thursday and she was going to drive us to Ipswich to see Granny Kelly, who was very ill in hospital. Her life wasn’t in direct danger, but she had had all sorts of problems which meant that effectively she’d lost the skin from her calf muscles. Despite everyone’s best efforts, she had got into quite a state trying to manage at home, lost a lot of weight and was now suffering from jaundice.
Andrew was in also hospital but this was neither unusual or worrying. In this case he had an impacted bowel. The way he was, Andrew wouldn’t have complained of being constipated and even having pain until it was severe enough for medical intervention. Andrew had been very distressed and disorientated on the ward, which had made Dad a little nervous. Trouble with Andrew and his distress was that as well as being upsetting to see him upset, people who didn’t know him could be quite frightened. And indeed, Andrew would hurt someone who he thought was going to hurt him.
Anyway, the family agreed that Granny was not to know about this. And indeed, there was really no point in mentioning the fact that Andrew was in hospital at all; he would be out by the weekend and then we could mention it. We thought she might not have long for this world and just a little bit of worry could send her over. Not for the first time in her life, the family underestimated its matriarch.
And it all went wrong with Andrew. Clostridium difficile is a bacterium that lives in the gut and can grow out of control when the natural flora is unbalanced. Clearing out an impacted bowel can do it. Really simple stuff. By the time Thursday arrived, we knew he was on his way out.
The fact that [...], Mum and I were on our way to visit Granny when we heard he had died; the fact that I was in Suffolk and Mum had the day off were just some of the many coincidences which meant that within an hour of Andrew's death, Granny was surrounded by her family.
And Granny, tiny and slightly yellow at the time, was amazing. This is a lady who is severely ill herself, and has just discovered that her youngest and most vulnerable child (who was always a child, in many ways) has died of a short illness she never even knew about. Within five minutes of our arrival at the hospital she said to me, “When Andrew was twenty-four, he had a kidney infection and I prepared myself for his death then. So as far as I am concerned, every year since then has been a blessing. I have had twenty-four years with him that I didn’t expect to have.”
Later when we gathered in the family room, sitting in the centre of the room in a horrid hospital wheelchair and a nightdress that would have seen better days even if it wasn’t two sizes too big for her, she addressed the family. She questioned my Dad and uncles about the important points; had he been in pain? Were you there? They didn’t need to explain the fact that they hadn’t told her, “I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it if you had,” she said. Which, of course, is true.
Then she said, “I have seen the end of him. I was always concerned about what would happen to him in the future, but now I know that he had a swift and peaceful end with his family close by.”
My Granny is an incredibly woman. A year later, and she is much better. She walks with a stick now and has had a stair-lift installed; two years ago, she had no mobility issue at all, she claimed to have entered her eighties with no arthritis whatsoever. I actually doubt this assertion, but certainly she’d never had anything to complain of. But she’s getting about and doing her own shopping and everything. I honestly didn’t think she would be able to go home again, let alone live independently; generally folks that age who get sick don't get better.
Hmm, don't mean to suggest her good health is some sort of moral achievement, but she did actively hold on. She held on to make R&A's wedding in August. Now she's knitting blankets for her first great grandchild.
I find it very difficult to remember that Andrew is gone. I don’t miss him on a regular basis because I would only have seen him at family occasions. But then he is missing. Well, I wrote last year about what he meant to us.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Flesh and Bone by The Telephone
Johnny Cash. That’s the answer to the question, “Who did the best version of Personal Jesus originally written and performed by Depeche Mode?” in case that was playing on your mind.
The pain has been quite severe and I have lost a lot of sleep over the last few nights. I have invented a number of new and exotic curses that I mutter to myself for the duration of any period on my feet. These include; tiffitut, cuggafug and fucklebunk.
Basically I am okay. Frankly, the inability to sleep because of pain is slightly preferable to the sort of nightmares I was having last week. Swings and roundabouts and none of them too bad really.
[...] has acquired a sampler for the keyboard on eBay. You can record or download a sound and spread it across the keyboard; so for example, you could record a sung “Do” and then create that sound at a pitch you would never be actually able to sing. All music students, in my experience, record their own bodily functions and play Moonlight Sonata in farty noises; it’s a rite of passage.
But perhaps most crucially, living in Whitby, we now have the rare opportunity to produce songs such as Space Age Love Song and Wishing by a flock of seagulls, quite literally.
We’ve now set a date to go visit my folks in about a month’s time which I am really looking forward to. They have a lovely big garden and a hammock, what more can I say? They also have a pond now.
For my folks' miraculous thirtieth anniversary, we were making them a firescreen. Two years later, we still haven't finished this project. However, it was only in the eleventh hour that we realised we weren't going to do it on time and the heroic P took me on a wild dash across the North Yorks Moors looking for something, anything that would do as a present. It looked like I was going to have to buy them one of those vacuum cleaner cover things. Rather like these. I have no taste for them but that was honestly the best thing I could find - my choices were that appalling.
As a last resort P drove me to a pottery place he knew in Pickering. He didn't know what it was called, but as we drove up I saw it was The Green Man Gallery. And indeed, most of their items were green men - you know, leafy ceramic faces you find in gardens and places (this explains what they are and what they mean). And Mum and Dad's first date took place at the Green Man pub on Halloween 1973.
This was a piece of luck.
My parents adored the Green Man we bought them and attached it to the side of the house. They then bought a second, smaller one which they put on a garden wall. I have recently bought a couple more in bisque (unfinished ceramic), which I am going to paint up for my folks' garden. I thought that if we put them out now, by the time Tinker is old enough he or she can go looking for them in secret overgrown places.
My Mum wants to take us to all sorts of towns and beauty-spots when we're down south. I'm a little worried about this; at Christmas she had counted on my being able to go shopping with her in order to get my birthday presents and how ill I was came as an unpleasant shock. She's talking about Cambridge, Kings Lynn and I don’t know how long she has been going on about the gardens at Angelsea Abbey. Here are some rather nice pictures. When she first told us about them my mother declared, “It is a lovely place and they even have a motorised buggery for people who can't walk very far.”Publish Post
I hate disappointing people generally, but especially Mum who is really quite particularly bothered to see me suffering at all. Never mind, I think she will be more realistic this time. And to be honest, there's still a part of me thinking, "I've got a month. I could improve a great deal within a month and be able to have all sorts of adventures come the end of May."
We'll see.
The pain has been quite severe and I have lost a lot of sleep over the last few nights. I have invented a number of new and exotic curses that I mutter to myself for the duration of any period on my feet. These include; tiffitut, cuggafug and fucklebunk.
Basically I am okay. Frankly, the inability to sleep because of pain is slightly preferable to the sort of nightmares I was having last week. Swings and roundabouts and none of them too bad really.
[...] has acquired a sampler for the keyboard on eBay. You can record or download a sound and spread it across the keyboard; so for example, you could record a sung “Do” and then create that sound at a pitch you would never be actually able to sing. All music students, in my experience, record their own bodily functions and play Moonlight Sonata in farty noises; it’s a rite of passage.
But perhaps most crucially, living in Whitby, we now have the rare opportunity to produce songs such as Space Age Love Song and Wishing by a flock of seagulls, quite literally.
We’ve now set a date to go visit my folks in about a month’s time which I am really looking forward to. They have a lovely big garden and a hammock, what more can I say? They also have a pond now.
For my folks' miraculous thirtieth anniversary, we were making them a firescreen. Two years later, we still haven't finished this project. However, it was only in the eleventh hour that we realised we weren't going to do it on time and the heroic P took me on a wild dash across the North Yorks Moors looking for something, anything that would do as a present. It looked like I was going to have to buy them one of those vacuum cleaner cover things. Rather like these. I have no taste for them but that was honestly the best thing I could find - my choices were that appalling.
As a last resort P drove me to a pottery place he knew in Pickering. He didn't know what it was called, but as we drove up I saw it was The Green Man Gallery. And indeed, most of their items were green men - you know, leafy ceramic faces you find in gardens and places (this explains what they are and what they mean). And Mum and Dad's first date took place at the Green Man pub on Halloween 1973.
This was a piece of luck.
My parents adored the Green Man we bought them and attached it to the side of the house. They then bought a second, smaller one which they put on a garden wall. I have recently bought a couple more in bisque (unfinished ceramic), which I am going to paint up for my folks' garden. I thought that if we put them out now, by the time Tinker is old enough he or she can go looking for them in secret overgrown places.
My Mum wants to take us to all sorts of towns and beauty-spots when we're down south. I'm a little worried about this; at Christmas she had counted on my being able to go shopping with her in order to get my birthday presents and how ill I was came as an unpleasant shock. She's talking about Cambridge, Kings Lynn and I don’t know how long she has been going on about the gardens at Angelsea Abbey. Here are some rather nice pictures. When she first told us about them my mother declared, “It is a lovely place and they even have a motorised buggery for people who can't walk very far.”Publish Post
I hate disappointing people generally, but especially Mum who is really quite particularly bothered to see me suffering at all. Never mind, I think she will be more realistic this time. And to be honest, there's still a part of me thinking, "I've got a month. I could improve a great deal within a month and be able to have all sorts of adventures come the end of May."
We'll see.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Wednesday Morning, 3 a.m
I don't know why I am up at this ungodly hour. . I am miserable that my pain seems to have got worse after a period of improvement, so much worse that I'm thinking about returning to the doctor and talking about other pain relief options. Unfortunately my GP is half way up Everest just now and it's not so very bad I can be bothered to explain my life history to another doctor only for them to suggest something truly ridiculous.
I have just realised that it is actually Tuesday Morning, 3 a.m but that isn't in a song.
On a more cheerful note, we now have seventy bloggers Blogging against Disablism on next Monday. And we got a second mention on BBC Ouch, hoorah!
Blogger was playing tricks on me all yesterday, so while I was waiting for it to sort itself out I started fiddling with my template and produced my ever-so-slightly new look. What do you think? Don't all shout at once. Yeah, that was what I was thinking; I'll try putting it right later.
I finally began reading The Da Vinci Code after much maternal badgering and a certain friend's reassurance that it was "highly readable nonsense". I was a touch apprehensive as I have heard a lot of silly things said about it. Of course people either love or hate something when it becomes so popular and I sensed a lot of snobbishness being expressed about it, perhaps because it is a best-selling novel, it is about some fairly big ideas and yet it is perfectly accessible to the great unwashed.
When I'm done I will write a review for Blogging Bookworms but it has already wound me up. It isn't snobbishness; I have my moments, but this is more the fact that as a member of the great unwashed, I resent being patronised. It's not the religious stuff that bothers me, but the assumption that Mr Brown's readers know absolutely nothing about absolutely anything.
For example, during a rather cheesy flashback, the protagnoist has his Harvard students gasping to learn about phi (the golden ratio or Divine Proportion as Brown prefers) and the Fibonacci sequence. As you'll remember, phi is 1.618 (well approx. one plus the square route of five, divided by two) and like the Fibonacci sequence is all over the place in nature, in all sorts of physical and numeric proportions. Now I fell ill and left school at fifteen, but we'd covered that already. And we didn't gasp or gape or suddenly develop a crush on our teacher (whose strong jaw and grey highlights didn't add anything to their bookish appeal).
I realise it may be wrong to assume that that everyone knows this. However, I don't think it is ridiculous to assume that those people at Harvard had a far superior education to my own. I could give many such examples. I mean, it is fine to recap on any relevant subject matter, but I'm half expecting a passage coming up;
Right, perhaps I'll have another go at sleep.
I have just realised that it is actually Tuesday Morning, 3 a.m but that isn't in a song.
On a more cheerful note, we now have seventy bloggers Blogging against Disablism on next Monday. And we got a second mention on BBC Ouch, hoorah!
Blogger was playing tricks on me all yesterday, so while I was waiting for it to sort itself out I started fiddling with my template and produced my ever-so-slightly new look. What do you think? Don't all shout at once. Yeah, that was what I was thinking; I'll try putting it right later.
I finally began reading The Da Vinci Code after much maternal badgering and a certain friend's reassurance that it was "highly readable nonsense". I was a touch apprehensive as I have heard a lot of silly things said about it. Of course people either love or hate something when it becomes so popular and I sensed a lot of snobbishness being expressed about it, perhaps because it is a best-selling novel, it is about some fairly big ideas and yet it is perfectly accessible to the great unwashed.
When I'm done I will write a review for Blogging Bookworms but it has already wound me up. It isn't snobbishness; I have my moments, but this is more the fact that as a member of the great unwashed, I resent being patronised. It's not the religious stuff that bothers me, but the assumption that Mr Brown's readers know absolutely nothing about absolutely anything.
For example, during a rather cheesy flashback, the protagnoist has his Harvard students gasping to learn about phi (the golden ratio or Divine Proportion as Brown prefers) and the Fibonacci sequence. As you'll remember, phi is 1.618 (well approx. one plus the square route of five, divided by two) and like the Fibonacci sequence is all over the place in nature, in all sorts of physical and numeric proportions. Now I fell ill and left school at fifteen, but we'd covered that already. And we didn't gasp or gape or suddenly develop a crush on our teacher (whose strong jaw and grey highlights didn't add anything to their bookish appeal).
I realise it may be wrong to assume that that everyone knows this. However, I don't think it is ridiculous to assume that those people at Harvard had a far superior education to my own. I could give many such examples. I mean, it is fine to recap on any relevant subject matter, but I'm half expecting a passage coming up;
"I have no idea how big this circle is," said Sophie, her big green eyes welling with feminine tears.No sorry, the trouble is I haven't read any books in ages and I have been editing the novel which makes me highly critical if not downright pinickety. It isn't nearly as bad as I make out. My own novel is currently much much worse. I am just transferring my own literary frustrations onto one of the best selling books in the entire world. This is the agony of my art and all that, so do forgive me if you love the book. I'm not yet half way through and I do want to find out what happens next. And I am in pain.
Langdon thoughtfully scratched his handsomely dimpled chin. "If only we knew the radius we could work it out."
"Ooh la la!" said Sophie in German. "You surely do not mean that there is a way of telling how big a circle is from how long the radius is."
"That's right," said Langdon, raising a scholarly eyebrow "Using a thing called pi."
"Pie? Like in the song by your Don Maclean?"
"No, pi is just a bit over three," Langdon explained, "If you times the square of the radius by just a bit over three, you should get the area."
Sophie began to faint but Langdon caught her in his manly arms. "My God, Robert!" she cried, "I have a doctorate in Mathematics and I never knew such a thing!"
Right, perhaps I'll have another go at sleep.
Saturday, April 22, 2006
The Fall of Civilisation
I intended to write a grand essay for Blogging Against Heteronormativity Day but as I have been rather poorly all week, you’ll have to make do with the little story of one of our heroes, Alan Turing.
The world might be a very different place if it wasn’t for Alan Turing. Most famously of course, the Allied Forces may not have proved victorious in the Second World War if it wasn’t for Turing’s contribution to the cracking of the Enigma Machine. What is certain is that very many more lives would have been lost on both sides and the whole thing may have lasted much longer.
You really ought to read the magnificant Simon Singh’s The Code Book if you are at all interested, as my capacity for maths may fall rather short of even explaining the gist of the problem. Basically you have a machine which creates and translates an alphabetic code. But in a very complicated way – check out the Wikipedia entry if you even begin to understand probability. This machine might be configured in so many different ways that even
a modern computer would take literally years to work through all the possibilities. Add to this the fact that the configurations of this machine were changed on a daily basis
Nazi Germany were entirely confident that this was an uncrackable code and used it to communicate all sorts of strategic information – including, for example, the whereabouts of U-Boats in the Atlantic Ocean. With two grandfathers in the navy, the Goldfish’s unborn self was at stake. Maybe you too.
With the help of an older version of the Enigma machine given to us by the Polish (who had been working on this long before us) Turing and his team created a new machine called the Bombe, a computer which… well, look I really can’t do the maths so you’ll have to take my word for it that it was very clever and it did the job. And we won the War.
After the War, all this remained a total secret and Enigma machines were still used for military purposes elsewhere in the world, genuinely believed to be uncrackable. This is one of the reasons that Turing was not hailed as the national and international hero he really was, during his lifetime.
Another profound way in which Alan Turing has effected our lives is his contribution to computer science. Turing invented the Turing Machine, a mathematical thought experiment which could stimulate the logic of any computer which could possibly be constructed. Do you understand what this means? In 1936, this guy laid down the model for at least the next seventy years of computing theory. My computer works according to principles he said were inevitable. So does yours. He is therefore widely considered to be the father of modern computer science.
Turing also made a tremendous philosophical contribution to our age and this is the aspect of the man which has gained hero status in my own esteem. He was one of the first people to seriously discuss the implications of artificial intelligence and perhaps most notably, the questions about the nature of human existence and experience that arise when we are confronted with the idea of intelligent computers (still much more of a fantasy back then).
If I think therefore I am then what it is about the act of thinking which distinguish me from a computer’s computing? What am I, beyond a sophisticated organic computer? What are our thoughts and emotions beyond chemical and electrical events? Is there something more to life? Is there something which makes the thought processes of a human impossible to imitate and if so, what would that be? What are we? Who are you? What? Eh?
The answer to these questions and more will not be coming to a blog near you any time soon. Point is that Turing contributed at least as much to Philosophy of the Mind in the Twentieth Century as Freud. And these are just the highlights. The guy also did all sorts of things I don’t really understand because he was so very much more clever than I am.
So why am I telling you all this for Blogging Against Heteronormativity Day?
Am I telling you all this to demonstrate that gay people are capable of making a contribution too? Uh, no.
Am I telling you all this because of the tragic way our nation chose to treat my hero? Only a few years after he had saved the world, he was arrested and convicted for gross acts of indecency (committed in his own home, behind closed doors, with one other fully consenting adult). He escaped prison on condition he took hormonal therapy, which amounted to a sort of chemical castration. He became impotent, obese and developed breasts. His private life was exposed in the newspapers. Meanwhile, his security clearance was taken away – when our lives depended on it, we trusted this known homosexual with our most precious secrets, but in peacetime he was out on his ear.
Am I telling you all this because even now we are trying to write the guy out of history, with movies like The Enigma which has the problem solved by rosey-cheeked straight boys and girls with no mention of our beloved stuttering homosexual?
Nope. The reason I am telling you this is because Alan Turing was just forty-one when he (rather poetically) ate an apple laced with cyanide. Forty-one. I don’t think that it is fanciful to assume that he wasn’t quite finished at this point; that he perhaps had a great deal more to give. That we effectively killed one of the greatest minds of the Twentieth Century, of any century because of our preoccupation with sexual conformity, our obsession that other people’s most private and intimate activities should look and feel exactly the same as everyone else’s.
Leonardo da Vinci was twenty-four when he found himself in prison charged with Sodomy. Fortunately, his Papa got him off. Fortunately for him, fortunately for us, (fortunately for Dan Brown), fortunately for almost everyone who has lived in Europe since.
An important principle in both biological evolution and human history is that progress is only ever made by the mutants; those organisms or individuals who break the rules. Non-conformity is a necessary condition for greatness. It isn’t a sufficient condition; some mutations are harmful, most are neither here nor there. However, attempts to suppress such superficial differences are not only to the detriment of an individual who has a right to these freedoms, but to the detriment of every one of us alive and all those of us yet to come.
This was not at all articulate but given my current state it was either this or writing merely “Heteronormativity is a bad thing. Stop it!”
The world might be a very different place if it wasn’t for Alan Turing. Most famously of course, the Allied Forces may not have proved victorious in the Second World War if it wasn’t for Turing’s contribution to the cracking of the Enigma Machine. What is certain is that very many more lives would have been lost on both sides and the whole thing may have lasted much longer.
You really ought to read the magnificant Simon Singh’s The Code Book if you are at all interested, as my capacity for maths may fall rather short of even explaining the gist of the problem. Basically you have a machine which creates and translates an alphabetic code. But in a very complicated way – check out the Wikipedia entry if you even begin to understand probability. This machine might be configured in so many different ways that even
a modern computer would take literally years to work through all the possibilities. Add to this the fact that the configurations of this machine were changed on a daily basisNazi Germany were entirely confident that this was an uncrackable code and used it to communicate all sorts of strategic information – including, for example, the whereabouts of U-Boats in the Atlantic Ocean. With two grandfathers in the navy, the Goldfish’s unborn self was at stake. Maybe you too.
With the help of an older version of the Enigma machine given to us by the Polish (who had been working on this long before us) Turing and his team created a new machine called the Bombe, a computer which… well, look I really can’t do the maths so you’ll have to take my word for it that it was very clever and it did the job. And we won the War.
After the War, all this remained a total secret and Enigma machines were still used for military purposes elsewhere in the world, genuinely believed to be uncrackable. This is one of the reasons that Turing was not hailed as the national and international hero he really was, during his lifetime.
Another profound way in which Alan Turing has effected our lives is his contribution to computer science. Turing invented the Turing Machine, a mathematical thought experiment which could stimulate the logic of any computer which could possibly be constructed. Do you understand what this means? In 1936, this guy laid down the model for at least the next seventy years of computing theory. My computer works according to principles he said were inevitable. So does yours. He is therefore widely considered to be the father of modern computer science.
Turing also made a tremendous philosophical contribution to our age and this is the aspect of the man which has gained hero status in my own esteem. He was one of the first people to seriously discuss the implications of artificial intelligence and perhaps most notably, the questions about the nature of human existence and experience that arise when we are confronted with the idea of intelligent computers (still much more of a fantasy back then).
If I think therefore I am then what it is about the act of thinking which distinguish me from a computer’s computing? What am I, beyond a sophisticated organic computer? What are our thoughts and emotions beyond chemical and electrical events? Is there something more to life? Is there something which makes the thought processes of a human impossible to imitate and if so, what would that be? What are we? Who are you? What? Eh?
The answer to these questions and more will not be coming to a blog near you any time soon. Point is that Turing contributed at least as much to Philosophy of the Mind in the Twentieth Century as Freud. And these are just the highlights. The guy also did all sorts of things I don’t really understand because he was so very much more clever than I am.
So why am I telling you all this for Blogging Against Heteronormativity Day?
Am I telling you all this to demonstrate that gay people are capable of making a contribution too? Uh, no.
Am I telling you all this because of the tragic way our nation chose to treat my hero? Only a few years after he had saved the world, he was arrested and convicted for gross acts of indecency (committed in his own home, behind closed doors, with one other fully consenting adult). He escaped prison on condition he took hormonal therapy, which amounted to a sort of chemical castration. He became impotent, obese and developed breasts. His private life was exposed in the newspapers. Meanwhile, his security clearance was taken away – when our lives depended on it, we trusted this known homosexual with our most precious secrets, but in peacetime he was out on his ear.
Am I telling you all this because even now we are trying to write the guy out of history, with movies like The Enigma which has the problem solved by rosey-cheeked straight boys and girls with no mention of our beloved stuttering homosexual?
Nope. The reason I am telling you this is because Alan Turing was just forty-one when he (rather poetically) ate an apple laced with cyanide. Forty-one. I don’t think that it is fanciful to assume that he wasn’t quite finished at this point; that he perhaps had a great deal more to give. That we effectively killed one of the greatest minds of the Twentieth Century, of any century because of our preoccupation with sexual conformity, our obsession that other people’s most private and intimate activities should look and feel exactly the same as everyone else’s.
Leonardo da Vinci was twenty-four when he found himself in prison charged with Sodomy. Fortunately, his Papa got him off. Fortunately for him, fortunately for us, (fortunately for Dan Brown), fortunately for almost everyone who has lived in Europe since.
An important principle in both biological evolution and human history is that progress is only ever made by the mutants; those organisms or individuals who break the rules. Non-conformity is a necessary condition for greatness. It isn’t a sufficient condition; some mutations are harmful, most are neither here nor there. However, attempts to suppress such superficial differences are not only to the detriment of an individual who has a right to these freedoms, but to the detriment of every one of us alive and all those of us yet to come.
This was not at all articulate but given my current state it was either this or writing merely “Heteronormativity is a bad thing. Stop it!”
Friday, April 21, 2006
One In Seven
Lady Bracknell's esteemed editor has composed this excellent post which sums up my own feelings about disablism. A fantastic rallying cry.
Life is a lemon and I want my money back
Check out Lady Bracknell's alternative lyrics to As some day it may happen that a victim must be found from the Mikado and Agent Fang's alternative graphic for Blogging Against Disablism Day.
Yesterday was a thoroughly shitty day. I wasn’t able to sleep much during the day, but I seemed incapable of any sensible thought whatsoever. Just lying there was distressing because I was so extremely confused about every electrical signal that passed through my brain.
Fortunately I was able to distract myself. I lay in bed and watched three films beginning with a C; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Caught on a Train and Cold Mountain. The latter two I hadn’t seen before, the first is an old favourite I am slightly ashamed to say (it is terribly melodramatic, isn’t it?). Caught on a Train was part of my viewing the complete works of Stephen Poliokoff in no particular order (have now seen Shooting the Past thanks Vaughan, it was gorgeous). Cold Mountain was just one that it has taken me ages to get round to seeing. It was a bit too much really, beautifully made but a bit of an ordeal. I had lost perspective on my own physical discomfort and thought all these sissy men with their septic gunshot wounds should pull themselves together. Pain? What would they know about pain?
Today I am feeling slightly more human, and managed to have a much needed bath. The television licence enforcement officer then came round before I was decently dressed so I had to deal with him and demonstrate that we weren’t receiving a signal. Now feeling very weak and generally pathetic, but am tucked back up in bed and seem to have regained the ability to think.
And I’m pissed off. What’s set this off? I don’t think I have had a virus of any sort. I haven’t been particularly overdoing things. I have been altogether very well behaved. So much pain when I've hardly done anything, it just isn't bloody fair.
Yesterday was a thoroughly shitty day. I wasn’t able to sleep much during the day, but I seemed incapable of any sensible thought whatsoever. Just lying there was distressing because I was so extremely confused about every electrical signal that passed through my brain.
Fortunately I was able to distract myself. I lay in bed and watched three films beginning with a C; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Caught on a Train and Cold Mountain. The latter two I hadn’t seen before, the first is an old favourite I am slightly ashamed to say (it is terribly melodramatic, isn’t it?). Caught on a Train was part of my viewing the complete works of Stephen Poliokoff in no particular order (have now seen Shooting the Past thanks Vaughan, it was gorgeous). Cold Mountain was just one that it has taken me ages to get round to seeing. It was a bit too much really, beautifully made but a bit of an ordeal. I had lost perspective on my own physical discomfort and thought all these sissy men with their septic gunshot wounds should pull themselves together. Pain? What would they know about pain?
Today I am feeling slightly more human, and managed to have a much needed bath. The television licence enforcement officer then came round before I was decently dressed so I had to deal with him and demonstrate that we weren’t receiving a signal. Now feeling very weak and generally pathetic, but am tucked back up in bed and seem to have regained the ability to think.
And I’m pissed off. What’s set this off? I don’t think I have had a virus of any sort. I haven’t been particularly overdoing things. I have been altogether very well behaved. So much pain when I've hardly done anything, it just isn't bloody fair.
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