Posthumous Apology For Alan Turing

Alan Turing was a mathematical genius and some would consider him a war hero for his cracking of the German Enigma machines in World War II, allowing the allies to decipher encrypted messages sent by the enemy. Turing also made significant contributions to the advancement of artificial intelligence and is well known in the field of AI for the test he envisioned would determine whether or not a machine was intelligent, The Turing Test. Unfortunately for Turing, he was also a gay man in a time when there was no acceptance for the sexual preference. Turing was imprisoned for his sexual orientation and would later take his own life.

Yesterday British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized for his country's treatment of Turing saying "While Mr Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him."

The apology came after an online campaign, the idea of computer scientist John Graham-Cumming and backed by Ian McEwan, scientist Richard Dawkins and gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.

Source: BBC

Jobs Returns To The Stage At Apple

“I’m vertical, I’m back at Apple and I’m loving every day of it,” said Steve Jobs after a standing ovation by the crowd gathered at the Apple news conference held yesterday. “I feel great. I probably need to gain about 30 pounds, but I feel really good,” said Jobs in a post event interview “I’m eating like crazy. A lot of ice cream.”

During the conference Apple announced a new version of iTunes and a line of iPod Nanos that have a video camera, microphone, speaker, FM radio tuner and pedometer built in and will have a starting price of $149 US. The new features are meant to rejuvenate the slumping sales of iPods and take a bite out of the market for small video devices such as the Flip Video. The new Nano is compared in size to a package of gum while the Flip is roughly the size of a deck of playing cards.

Source: New York Times

Twitter User Celebrates 104th Birthday

Ivy Bean of Bradford, near Leeds, is an active twitter user with 27,000 followers. She tweets about the highs and lows of her life like many of the rest of us, only Ivy is 104 years old and is believed to be the oldest active Twitter user. Ms Bean tweets from the care home where she lives, Hillside Manor, "We're trying to do something different than knitting or crochet," says Pat Wright, the home's manager.

Before Twitter, Ivy was an active Facebook user, where she had maxed out her 5,000-friend limit.

Source: CNN

9-9-09 Preview Beatles: Rock Band

In this G4 tv's XPlay video Blair Herter talks to John Drake from Harmonix about the upcoming 'Beatles: Rock Band,' On sale tomorrow 09-09-09! Can't wait...

Video Game - E3 2009 - X-Play

Space Junk Explained

With the recent near miss, within a mile, of the International Space Station (ISS) by a large piece of space junk I decided to do a little searching regarding how much junk is out there and how dangerous it is to orbiting craft. The Science Channel produced a short video of the subject that does a good job of explaining. Check it out here: http://science.discovery.com/videos/spaced-out-space-junk.html