Mailund on the Internet

I’ve been down with the flu all week.

It seems to be very popular these days.  A lot of people get the flu around here.  Personally, I don’t really see the attraction — I didn’t enjoy it one bit.

Anyway, I’m finally mostly recovered, so I’m up and about again, and getting ready to go to Hinxton for a meeting in the Gorilla Genome Consortium tomorrow.  I’m pretty happy that I recovered just in time, ’cause this is a meeting I’ve been looking forward to.

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That’s Nov 9, not Sep 11, for you guys out there who use the weird month/day/year notation…

There is nothing to celebrate Sep 11, but Nov 9 is a day for celebration, and today we celebrate the 20 year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall which is as good a date as any for celebrating the end of the Cold War.

I was in Berlin a few weeks after the fall of the wall myself. That was on a trip that was planned before the fall of the wall, so it was pure luck that I experienced this historical event first hand.

It is hard today to imagine how east and west Europe was separated and practically two different worlds. Today, I have many friends from eastern Europe and the former USSR; that would not have been possible 20 years ago.  We have students here at BiRC and at AU in general from the other side of the iron curtain.  That would not have been possible 20 years ago.

Today is truly a day for celebration!

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Gordon Brown apologizes for the treatment of Alan Turing:

2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

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