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Updates

Lunchbreak Interlude VII

Geoff W

Recently on Facebook, I’ve seen this going around:

You are posting on a social network created by an Atheist (Mark Zuckerberg), using an OS created by a Buddhist (Steve Jobs) or an Agnostic (Bill Gates) or maybe an athiest (Linus Torvalds), that is executed through hardware based on the work of an Atheist homosexual (Alan Turing) that works thanks to the electric networks developed by a free thinker (Thomas Edison).

I’m not going to preach or say anything about people’s views or religions (those without preach/proselytize just as much as those with), but I thought it was interesting to think about.  In addition I thought it was pertinent as the next two books I plan to read  Alan Turing, whose 100th birthday is this year.  I plan on reading The Man Who Knew Too Much by David Leavitt, a library book, and The Secret Lives of Codebreakers by by Sinclair McKay, a Net Galley.

I don’t know much about Turing other than he was prosecuted for being gay and took his own life at some point after being chemically castrated.  There are still petitions to the UK Government for an official pardon and apology, but little has come from them.  However, Alan Turing’s legacy in math, codebreaking, computing and artificial-intelligence lives on.  Google recently based on the Turing Machine:

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Quotes

Quotes from You Shall Know Our Velocity – Dave Eggers

Geoff W

“They were dressed magnificently, one in the yellow of a rose, one in a rich and ancient orange, the third in a late-evening blue–three queens sitting on folding tables…” – 50

“He wants to make sure God wants him to live. So he spends a lot of time asking. He brings himself close to the edge and he feels God’s breath on his back. If God wants to take him, all he needs to do is blow.” – 72

“They were busy devoting their attention to traveling, to watching the progress of the boat–instrumental in traveling is the witnessing of passage. And I was traveling, too, I was serious about it.” – 160

“I grew up obsessed with dragons, knew everything, knew that scientists or people posing as scientists had calculated how dragons might have flown, that to fly and breathe fire they’d have to be full of hydrogen, at levels so dangerous and in such tremulous balance that– I wondered quickly if I’d give my life so that a dragon could live. If someone offered me that deal, your life for the existence of dragons. I thought maybe yes, maybe no.” – 180

“Her English was seamless. Everyone’s was. I had sixty words of Spanish and Hand had maybe twice that in French, and that was it. How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.” – 220

“We knew nothing; the gaps in our knowledge were random and annoying. They were potholes–they could be patched but they multiplied without pattern or remorse. And even if we knew something, had read something, were almost sure of something, we wouldn’t ever know the truth, or come anywhere close to it. The truth had to be seen. Anything else was a story, entertaining, but more embroidered fib than crude, shapeless fact.” – 238

“To travel is selfish–that money could be used for hungry stomachs and you’re using it for your hungry eyes, and the needs of the former must trump the latter, right? And are there individual needs? How much disbelief, collectively, must be suspended, to allow for tourism?” -253

“There is a corner of the sea that is deep but not so deep that it’s black. It’s the blue of a blueberry, violet in its heart, though this blue allows light through its million unseeable pores. The hue is evenly painted but electric, a klieg light pushing through a gel of cyan.” – 310