Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by defrost 738 days ago
> He would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted.

That specific bit of reasoning is very likely wrong.

The circumstances of Turings investigation and arrest started with Turing going to the police to report that had been robbed by a person considered to be a rent boy.

If he had the slightest notion of how homosexual behaviour was dealt with by the regular police and that he would be the main subject of interest rather than the robber he would not have reported the theft.

Turing very much came from a class isolated from common consequences, he spent his youth at an elite school and then university, later at Bletchley Park, all places where lads with an odd bent were not at all uncommon, largely tolerated although often teased, and very rarely, if ever, arrested.

1 comments

« Et tous les bourgeois du 16ème / Se demandent pourquoi je t'aime »

What's the (north african?)-set movie to which Mika refers in this tube? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MPtXUeUznY

While I find my eyes and ear (même les américaines comprennent) caught by Mme Mac, and I wouldn't have the foggiest in what context "molly with a Dilly" might usually occur, the video and text make one suspect that MM. Doriand and Mika tended to foreground the other characters (do long guns imply rough trade?).

[come to think of it, an odd bent would probably have been a career advantage at Bletchley, in that one might have been already habituated to picking up on metadata during traffic analysis?]

Hell of a tangent, near non contact but, FWiW I pretty sure it's a Sergio Leone film, many of which had sequences shot in Spain and some in North Africa (IIRC) - the blanket toss back is such a trope.

The following piano man bars just prior to the singing are, to my ear, a definite riff on Moby's Extreme Ways that was repurposed for the Jason Bourne films.

So bouncy .. does no one call back to Arthur Rimbaud anymore? https://genius.com/Paul-kelly-and-the-messengers-the-executi...

Everyone loves long guns, how else can you reach the gate from the house? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7owwTz7Z0OE

Viktor Tsoi (XX): Солнце моё, взгляни на меня (my sun[shine], look at me)

Mark and Sam (XXI): Солнце моё, взгляни за меня (my sun[shine], spot for me)

> Hell of a tangent, near non contact

All transverse geometries are alike, each non-transverse geometry fails to be so in its singular manner.

Lawrence of Arabia

Otherwise, it's Sierra Leone alright ("movie-set")

(Or Maltese Falcon for a very loose def of "set" or "N Africa")

[0] fr wikipedia for the song

> Lawrence of Arabia

They claim that, but I don't see how it could possibly be true, based on the cast listing at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056172/fullcredits : apart from an uncredited nurse (Barbara Cole) it seems like a screenplay calculated to make Ms Bechdel sad.

But not the (biologically male) gay counterpart of Ms Bechdel?

(Consider the period)

True — I ought to have considered that, for I know the book Seven Pillars of Wisdom has in supertext some passages that (if they made it at all) are probably only referred to in the movie as subtext. mea culpa

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP4k3PLr4LQ ("Following the debut of this film, Sagan moved to England.")

Comme je suis bête ! In my defence I saw that one in a 747, so low cabin pressure may not have done my long term memory formation much good. (EDIT: looks like whatever I was remembering as LoA wasn't even that?)

The multivalued functions are a relief — should the sparks/stars lit in my noggin by a comment align in a different direction from intended, it's not that I'm running riot in a deterministic world, but merely finding myself perhaps at the same coordinates, but on a different sheet, in a nondeterministic one?

The Maugham story in which bumble-puppy appears (if slightly later in the decade than in Huxley) is worth reading, especially with the background that WSM worked for MI6 and had (orientation as well as valuation?) reasons to make use of glueings along branch cuts in his personal, as well as his professional, life.

> In a place like the sanatorium where there was little to occupy the mind it was inevitable that soon everyone should know that George Templeton was in love with Evie Bishop. But it was not so easy to tell what her feelings were. It was plain that she liked his company, but she did not seek it, and indeed it looked as though she took pains not to be alone with him. One or two of the middle-aged ladies tried to trap her into some compromising admission, but ingenuous as she was, she was easily a match for them. She ignored their hints and met their straight questions with incredulous laughter. She succeeded in exasperating them.

Being partway through Conflict, War and Revolution(2022)*, I think something may be coming together modelling all your options: Kaczynski and Galois may have been too idealistically violent (the one having done what he could unto others, the other having suffered what he must?) and Grothendieck too idealistically nonviolent (which obviously leads to minimising one's dot product with the world) but Kolmogorov found a nonviolent quadrant inside Machiavelli's pragmatic lead: Fortune provides a martingale process, and virtu consists of minimaxing one's expected interests with respect to her whim.

On a planet like earth it is inevitable that men should seek the favour of Fortune, but it is rarely easy to tell what her feelings are. (or, for that manner, if they even be iid)

* https://press.lse.ac.uk/site/books/m/10.31389/lsepress.cwr/

s/virtu/epsilon of licentiousness/ ?

EDIT: not "viti"

Going to flip through your recommendations (at least) with an eye (3rd) towards ergodicity (or even Hurwitz spaces)

EDIT: don't worry too much about Galois -- you make me wonder if I had not read his letters (esp the fine print in his last testament) too carelessly.

For every epsilon of licentiousness, there exists a delta of venus, such that...? (as an algebraist, it seems analysts spend an awful lot of time chasing tails!)

I have been brought up in a culture where seduction follows a sequence ("running the bases"); are there cultures where that does not suffice, and seduction requires more sophistication: a net*, say, or even a filter?

* in line with the genre fiction cover kind of net, someone once won a competition we had at uni for "best line to get a member of the appropriate sex into your room" with 75 pound test, eg https://fr.aliexpress.com/i/839412765.html

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK9nx7e9IGM (Scholes, Meriwether, and Merton would've done well to listen more to this one?)

The epsilon of tail-chasing beats the delta of (phallic) symbol pushing!

Re: uni- Cantabrigian?

Yes, for "better" seduction technik, you should restrict your search to uni culture.