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Reading around the Alan Turing Pardon

By Peter Rowlett. Posted February 17, 2012

I have a piece in this week’s Pod Delusion episode 123 at 45:00 on the pardon for Alan Turing.

Here are links to some of the bits I talked about in this.

I spoke about concerns of overdoing the Turing celebrations, saying: what Turing did was brilliant, but we should celebrate what Turing actually did, not some imagined feats, and we should not forget others in doing so. You can read more about this and find out about the article which suggested that had Turing lived then Silicon Valley might have been started in the UK at ‘Beware the Alan Turing fetish‘ by John Graham-Cumming.

Turing was convicted under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. In 2009 Gordon Brown issued an official apology for the way Turing was treated. Read about the official Government apology in ‘PM’s apology to codebreaker Alan Turing: we were inhumane‘. Read how the apology came about in ‘How Alan Turing Finally Got a Posthumous Apology‘ by John Graham-Cumming.

Now there is a current e-petition calling for a pardon for Turing. John Leech MP issued an early day motion calling for this pardon. (I also mentioned the current e-petition calling for a pardon for Oscar Wilde.)

Asked a question in House of Lords, a Government Justice Minister said “a posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate”. Read the text of Lord McNally’s statement.

I’ve seen the refusal to pardon Turing described as “homophobic” and an “act of malice“. Particularly, the complaint is that Turing is still seen as a criminal in the eyes of the law.

John Graham-Cumming on ‘Why I’m not supporting the campaign for a pardon for Alan Turing‘, in which he writes about the Protection of Freedoms Bill, which “specifically allows for the disregarding of convictions under the old law that was used against Turing”.

To honour Turing I suggested you might attend events under the Alan Turing Year banner, or donate to Bletchley Park’s Action This Day! fundraising campaign.

This piece used audio from episodes 84 and 85 of the Pulse-Project Math/Maths Podcast.

From Our Own Mathematics Correspondent

By Peter Rowlett. Posted August 19, 2011

You may remember I contributed a piece last month to the Pod Delusion Podcast on the unplanned impact initiative. Well, this week I’ve done it a second piece. This is becoming a habit.

The Pod Delusion describes itself as

a weekly news magazine podcast about interesting things. From politics, to science to culture and philosophy, it’s commentary from a secular, rationalist, skeptical, somewhat lefty-liberal, sort of perspective. A bit like From Our Own Correspondent but with more jokes.

This time my item is about the recent report of the Vorderman taskforce into mathematics education. You may remember I wrote a recent blog post on this topic, ‘People may not like Vorderman, but her report?‘ This piece covers similar ground but in audio and with a couple of days more experience. Plus you can hear me make the “spelling/grammar/literature, arithmetic/algebra/mathematics” argument.

What about the rest of episode 98 (19th August 2011)?

We speak to Craig Reucassel from The Chasers about why satirists should be allowed to use Parliamentary footage, find out about our care footprints, and find out why the arms trade is like slavery (and other cheerful stuff like that).

In the introduction to my piece (starts at 08:45), host James O’Malley describes me as the Pod Delusion’s “mathematics correspondent”. Does that mean there’ll be further contributions (and that I’ve been type-cast)? We’ll see.