Turing: A poem 14 Sep 2009 By Matt Harvey from here: POEM: ALAN TURING here’s a toast to Alan Turing born in harsher, darker times who thought outside the container and loved outside the lines and so the code-breaker was broken and we’re sorry yes now the s-word has been spoken the official conscience woken – very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted – and the story does suggest a part 2 to the Turing Test: 1. can machines behave like humans? 2. can we? H/T Language Log History Science
History It’s a mystery 28 May 2010 Since the earliest times in recorded Graecoroman history, there have been mystery cults. Every cultic practice for a god had secret rituals and spaces, and there were a number of mystery religions, known as the Eleusinian mysteries, that developed that we know little about. In an excellent review of a… Read More
Evolution Another claim for priority from New Zealand 3 May 200818 Sep 2017 One of the enduring patterns of the history of the history of evolution is for historians to claim that their favourite individual, or their country’s best and brightest, invented evolution. The most recent appears to be this guy from New Zealand, claiming that evolution was actually invented by an artist,… Read More
General Science Etruscans 20 Jun 200718 Sep 2017 In a well known quote, the nineteenth century historian and classicist Theodore Mommsen said that the origins of the Etruscans was “neither capable of being known nor worth the knowing”. He had no idea of the results made possible by molecular genetic studies, naturally, as nobody did at that time,… Read More
On the topic of Turing and poetry, here (http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/loopsnoop.html) is a proof of the undecidability of the halting problem in the form of a poem! Written by linguist Geoffrey Pullum with the help of computer scientist Philip Wadler.