Alan Turing

A good read from The New Yorker. I saw a special on the Enigma Project once and they interviewed a woman who had worked with Turing at Bletchley Park. She basically said that everybody at BP was phenomenally bright, but that Turing was a genius and that the difference between being intelligent and being a genius was the difference between going from A to G and from A to Zed. Genius didn't need the intermediate steps that even the very brightest of us require.

That sounds lonely to me.

COMMENTS
Al Marcy's picture

Some problems are interesting, to some people, until they are solved, or forgotten.

John Atkinson's picture

Four degrees of separation time: following WW2, Bletchley Park became the Post Office Research Center. Some years after Turing's death, one Mike Skeet started working there," who later contributed the infamous ""Garage Door"" track to the first Hi-Fi News Test CD", which I produced in 1985. I wouldn't go so far as saying that in England everyone actually knows everyone else, but it is almost a small-enough country for the degrees of separation to be smaller than anywhere else, save perhaps Holland, Denmark or Japan!

Wes Phillips's picture

I loved that garage door track! Best ever demo was Apogee Scintillas driven by monster Krell monoblocks—I always wondered if those ribbons had an advantage over other transducers in getting that dynamic rattle going. Will that track show up on Engineer's Choice II?

Buddha's picture

Apogees, yes. Although," we must approach these ""stunt listening"" tasks with caution. Remember the ""sound of a car door slamming"" listening tests that revealed Klipschorns to be the most ""accurate?"" Was it Dick Olsher who did that?

Alan in Victoria's picture

If you're fond of watching English drama and comedy reruns on TV, you would be forgiven for thinking that there are only 14 actors working in the UK. On any given night, these 14 get murdered on Morse, yuk it up with Harry Enfield, relive the 50s with Ma and Pa Larkin, gather in small Yorkshire villages, buy and sell forged antiques, and tell porkies to Inspector Frost.

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