Happy Birthday, Alan Turing

A belated birthday shoutout to Alan Turing, the reason, as Cory Doctorow reminded us, that you're sitting at a computer, right now, reading this sentence. Please take a moment to thank a faggot for the digital age.

As you may know, Turing was prosecuted for a same-sex relationship, sentenced to jailtime or forced estrogen injections (he chose the drugs), and driven to suicide in 1954 at age 42. Had he lived to see semiconductor computers, what additional contributions might he have made?

I was reminded of this by the silly comment thread on Cosmic Variance. The post itself was sweet: Sean musing about how CA's marriage equality makes him recall, misty-eyed, his own wedding. The comment thread included the usual slippery slope bullshit arguments, plus a "Stick to your posts on physics, Sean."

Nope, no connection between math/sci/tech and queers. None at all.

The Making Shit Up Museum

Anyone yet visited the new, $27M delusionland known as the Creation Museum?
Bad Astronomy alerts us to a planned peaceful protest by rationalists.

According to the NYT, the museum includes "a planetarium paying tribute to God’s glory while exploring the nature of galaxies." Now, sure, the point of a planetarium show is to revel in the vast, beautiful complexity of our Universe. But how can you show a photo of ANY other galaxy yet claim the universe is only 6K yrs old? Our nearest neighbor, the LMC, is ~150,000 light-years away -- if the creationists are right, we can't photograph it, because the light hasn't arrived yet! Let alone every other, more distant galaxy in the Universe.