Captain Kweer's Bloglet

Catholic Church of Hypocrisy

2004-06-27T16:17:00.000-07:00

The catholic church is actively encouraging people to participate in actions which lead to them contracting HIV and die. That was the message delivered by the catholic church, as exposed by BBC's Panorama tonight. In an excellent piece of reporting following up on last years revelations that "condoms have holes in which allow HIV to pass thru and infect people", not only did the BBC debunk this myth, they showed the true level of hypocrisy and ignorance in one of the worlds biggest religious institutions.

When it comes to people dying from HIV, the church doesn't care. When asked "Is is possible you are making a mistake?", the bishop said "yes". The reporter asked the bishop:

"Are you saying it would be better to die that to use a condom?"
"Yes"
"Isn't that doctrine a little harsh?"
"Christ's teachings were never easy."

As an organisation, the catholic church speak the words of love for your neighbour, but the perform the actions of hatred, death and damnation. Christ said, "for the tree is known by his fruit" (Matthew 12:33) - like the fundamentalist pharisees of whom Jesus was speaking, the catholic church is filled with hypocrites who say one thing and do another.

The fruit of this tree is maggot-ridden, moudly and poisonous. I cannot put into words how such a position reviles me. It goes against every fibre of my being: to continue to teach something which will, without doubt, kill people who need not die is murder as surely as it is murder to plunge a knife into someone's heart.

Many Baptist and Anglican Christians, many of whom are close, dear friends, say, "but that's the Catholic Church, we're different. Don't tar us with the same brush." I know these friends believe that the position espoused by the catholic bishops is extreme and wouldn't go so far as to say that death is better than using a condom, but they cannot in outright condemn the position either.

They support the position that sex outside of marriage (and marriage is a holy institution between a man and a woman, lest you forget it) is sinful. They would agree with the bishops position that there must be something wrong with someone who cannot say no to sex. Many of them agree that abstinence is the way forward.

It's a position of denial. The deny that people might have sex. They deny that poverty and social circumstances increases the amount of "promiscuity". They deny the very existence of gays. People who believe this ignore reality. Ignorance is not a lack of knowledge; it's having the knowledge and choosing to ignore it in favour of a more acceptable position. And boy are these people choosing to be ignorant.

The concept of "natural law" is another example of deliberate ignorance. "Dog's don't use condoms" said another ignorant catholic bishop. He's quite right of course, dog's tend not to use contraception. Equally, dog's tend not to be around to look after the puppies later on. A dog's commitment at the stage of the fuck isn't to 20 years of upbringing and the social economic strains that places on an individual. The dog isn't even too concerned about prevent HIV, gonnorhoea, herpes or any of the other free gifts you can get when you go skinny dipping.

"Natural law" is an entirely artificial construct. It's a promotion of all that is perceived to support the doctrine in question, and deliberately ignoring anything which might hinder "the truth". Remarkably like the concept of "family values". Equally arbitrary, equally vague and equally ridiculous.

We live in a society which accepts ignorance-by-choice and promotion of murder in the name of religious freedom. I don't personally see how we match our values of human rights with these murderous hypocrites. Perhaps it's time we re-evaluated what is more important to us: freedom to hate or freedom to live.

You can find out more about the Panorama show at the BBC's website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/3844945.stm.

Gay Heroes

2004-06-22T04:44:00.000-07:00

Sandi Toksvig is turning into a bit of a minor hero of mine. Despite being learnéd and amusing, it may come as a surprise to none of you to learn that Ms Toksvig is a Woman who Wears Sensible Shoes.

Those amoung of us of a more bent bent, or indeed with a generically queer view on life, may rue the fact that there aren't many ghey heros. Gay icons we have aplenty - what with Geri Haliwell and Steps and Whitney Houston and Cher and , one can barely turn on a radio station without double-clicking accidentally. But these are not heroes of gaydom.

When I think of gay heroes, I think of people who's very impact on history was in some way tied to their assertion of their sexuality, or indeed their refusal to deny their sexuality. I think the reason there are so few is that the modern gay has only really existed for less that 30 years. We haven't really built up a pantheon of heros yet.

And yet a few names spring to mind. One can almost not start the list by mentioning Oscar Wilde. "The love which dare not speak it's name" was his undoing - he said what he believed and he suffered for it. He was a man ahead of his time, and he might just have gotten away with it if he'd been born just 100 years later.

Then, just last week we remembered the death of one of my all time heros, Alan Turing. Computer visionary extraordinaire, he eventually committed suicide because of the way society treated him, a homosexual. He never denied his sexuality, and forcing him to take female hormones was the ultimate undoing of someone who changed the face of the world. (The machine you're reading this on is a universal turing machine!)

Quentin Crisp is another person of whom I think, a-ha, Hero. He said that he could only live life true to himself, and if his life impacted society then it was all the better. Certainly, Quentin Crisp played a role in the change of attitude towards homosexuality which started in the 1960s; his book "The Naked Civil Servant" started people talking about gay people like they were human. His interview with Parkinson remains a classic: "People would say to me, 'what are you meant to be, a man or a woman?' And I would say, 'why what do you have in mind?'".

Then there are those "media stars" which everyone knows is gay, but who, frankly didn't do much about it. The Frankie Howerds, the Kenneth Williams, the Noel Cowards. Yes, they were gay, but they were products of their time, and not, if one is completely honest, heroic about much at all. That is not to say that one castigates these people in anyway - they contributed to gay identity, but not so much by what they did as what they didn't do. The combination of a slightly dodgy, extremely camp roman slave combined with the polari wit of Julian and Sandy could be argued to form the basis of the modern gay stereotype, but I am not convinced it contributes much to the gay identity.

Who do we have today? Boy George - pass. Graham Norton - ground breaking TV, but heroic? Peter Tatchell - oh boy yes, even if I don't always agree with him. They do all seems to be men though :-/

And this is, stunningly, where Ms Toksvig stands out. Quietly, yet assertively, sapphic, Sandi lives with her (female!) partner, and her child, plus, I am led to believe, several animals of varying varieties. Well known for her appearances on such televisual highlights as Through The Keyhole, Call My Bluff and Whose Line Is It Anyway, I remember larfing at Sandi even before I knew what a lesbian was! Sandi now has a daily show on LBC, on air and online between 1200 and 1400 daily.

And frankly, it is the campest, gayest show on talk radio. Yes, there are other gay people who have shows, but they don't seem to be quite as comfortable with their identity as Sandi is. Her sexuality is never an issue; it's part of who she is and part of her personality that is projected across the airwaves.

She is, I believe, the epitome of the gay hero for the modern generation. Able to switch from serious (she seethes at the mention of Mr Ronsonol as a politician) to hilarious at the touch of a button, she projects a positive, healthy image of what being gay means. Which is that it's perfectly normal and frankly we just wish sometimes that we could just get on with it[1]. And that, I am sure Sandi would agree, would be a very fine thing indeed.

Alan Turing

2004-06-22T04:42:00.000-07:00

Born on 23 June 1912, Alan Turing was born to Julius Mathison and Ethel Sara Turing. Alan Turing spent an isolated childhood away from his parents, as he was fostered in the UK whilst his parents served in the Indian Civil Service. He was later accepted into the Sherborne Public School, where in 1928 he became a close friend of Christopher Morcom. Christopher Morcom provided him with an intellectual companion which only ended with Morcom's sudden death in 1930. This provided him with an impetus to study as he endeavoured to achieve what Morcom could not.

He studied at King's College Cambridge from 1931. In 1932 he studied the works of von Neumann on the logical foundations of quantum mechanics, which shifted his interest from emotional enquiry to a rigourous intellectual thirst for understanding.

At the same time, he started to explore his sexuality and it was at King's College that Turing's homosexuality became part of his self-identity. Although associated with the anti-War movement, his interest didn't turn into Marxism (as was fashionable at the time), nor into pacificism. He generally didn't relax with with the 'King's College homosexual milieu', being more interested in the physical activities of rowing, running and sailing.

Alan Turing graduated with a distiguished degree in 1934, obtained a Fellowship of King's College in 1935 and another prize in 1936 for his work on probability theory. It was possible that Turing could have ended up as yet another slightly mad maths professor, but his interests and unique mindset thrust him into a different area.

To answer the question of Decidability (could there exist, at least in priciple, a definite method or process by which it could be decided whether any given mathematical process was provable?), Turing developed a method which was precise and compelling. He developed the concept of a machine which could be given instructions to solve carefully defined mathematical problems.

However, at the same time, another paper was published on the same subject by Alonzo Church (an American); whilst their solutions were disimilar (Church relied on mathematical principles whilst Turing worked on Real World logic), Turing was robbed of the full reward for his originality. However, the uniqueness of his approach was recognised and the concept of the Turing machine is the foundation of modern computers.

A Turing machine is somewhat akin to the concept of an equation. There are infinite possible equations, and there are also infinite Turing machines (algorithms) which can solve those infinite equations. However, Turing was able to take it one step further. He realised that if each algorithm was written out in a standardised method of representation, then the work of interpretting the algorithm is also a "mechanical" process. A Universal Turing Machine can be made to do what any other particular Turing machine could do, by providing it with the algorithm in a standard form.

Essentially, Turing was the first to create the concept of "pluggable" software. Today, a PC can run a piece of software to solve most any problem, which is equivalent to the work of a Turing machine. However, the PC itself is the Universal Turing Machine, as it interprets the algorithm.

Turing spent additional time studying at Princeton University, publishing On Computable Numbers ... at the end of 1936. Turing was constantly in the shadows, doing work on algebra and number theory. He demonstrated that his definition of computability coincided with Church's definition, and write a PhD thesis on Ordinal Logics, an extension of his ideas.

Whilst at Princeton, he made a cipher machine based on electromagnetic relays to multiply binary numbers. He saw the link between "useless" logic - it was then just a philosophical and mathematical exercise rather than having any real-world uses - and practical computation.

As the War approached, he sponsored the entry into Britain of a young German Jewish refugee. He was also working secretly for the Government Code and Cypher school carrying out cryptanalysis (the study of codes, normally with a view to breaking them!). For the first time, cryptanalysis had a formal scientific input instead of what was, at the time, considered an arts subject. However, the artists were unable to break the Enigma code used by Germany. No real progress was made, however, until some vital ideas and information were made by Poland in 1939 where they had been studying the problem for a longer period of time.

When the British declared war on 3 September 1939, Turing started full-time work at Bletchley Park, the first Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The Polish had developed the concept of a Bomba, but Turing was able to derive a new machine, the Bombe, which was able to break any Enigma message where a small portion of the plaintext (unecrypted message) could be correctly guessed. Famously, of course, this relied on the U-boats sending weather reports on a daily basis - weather reports for which they knew what was being sent. Whilst the Bombe wasn't the work of only Turing, it was certainly Turing's mechanisation of subtle logical deductions which made the entire project the success it became.

However, the German's then changed the way they were using the Enigma machine, leaving Bletchley Park unable to decode the messages. Turing had to refine his ideas, and Newman pressed into employment telephone engineers to change the mechanical Bombes into the first electronic computing machine - Colossus..

Turing cross the Atlantic in November 1942 to provide high-level liaison, not only on the U-boat crisis, but also on the electronic encryption of the speech conversations between the US President and the British Prime Minister. Before Turing's return from America in March 1943, weaknesses in the U-boat system had been detected and the Allies were able to read the U-boat signals for the rest of the war,

Turing became a general consultant to the entire Bletchley Park complex, and the Colossus Machines were able to decrypt high-level command communications from Hitler to his general staff. Turing learned electronics, apparently to develop a speech secrecy system, but in fact to allow him to develop an electronic form of the Universal Turing Machine. Turing invented the first digital computer.

After the war, Turing was employed by the National Physical Laboratory to plan a rival project to America's EDVAC plan. As Senior Principal Sicentific Officer on the Automatic Computing Enging (ACE) project, Turing developed an architecture which was able to switch between different types of operation. He envisioned subroutines, remote terminals and even developed the Abbreviated Code Instructions - the first programming language. However, ACE was never constructed, and Alan was very frustrated.

Turing spent the 1947/48 academic year at Cambridge. Rather than continue his studies in computing, Turing spent time studying neurophysiology, and out of this came a pioneering paper on what we now call neural nets (a neural net described the way neurons in brains are connected, allowing us to learn by trial and error). This paper wasn't published in his lifetime.

In October 1949, Turing went to work at Manchester University as the Deputy Director of the Computing Laboratory. Turing's role was to organise the first programming for the electronic system. What followed was a confusing period as Turing hovered between old and new, never really developing his complex software ideas.

In 1950, a new direction for his skills developed - the personal application of the computer. He developed an entirely new field - mathematical morphogenesis: the theory of growth and form in biology. He developed theories on how chemical reactions interacted, and used the computer to "simulate" his ideas. He became the first user of the electronic computer for mathematical research.

Turing became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951 for the work carried out 15 years prior. However, he also published The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, which was a founding paper in the subject.

On 1952, Alan Turing was arrested, and on 31 March he came to trial as a result of his sexual relationship with a young man in Manchester. He never denied the offence, seeing nothing wrong in his actions. Rather than go to prison, he accepted injections of oestrogen intended to reduce his libido. (The theory at the time [until the late 1970s, early 1980s] was that homosexuality was a psychiatric illness. Since homosexuals weren't manly enough, they first tried to treat homosexuals with injections of testosterone, in the hope they would become more manly and start to prefer women. What happened was that they got a bunch of very horny agressive homosexuals, so that method was discarded. They then tried oestrogen in order to reduce their sexuality. What happened, of course, was quite different, as modern hormone therapy for transsexuals demonstrates.)

He continued his morphogenetic research, and wanted to understand the appearance of Fibonacci sequence number in the leaf patterns of plants. (The Fibonacci sequence is the series of numbers where each number is the sum of the two numbers preceding it: { 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 }). He also returned to his interest in quantum mechanics.

He had continued to work for GCHQ since the war, but his conviction for homosexuality rendered him ineligible for security clearance. He spoke to an MI6 friend of his deep bitterness over this. Another crisis occurred in March 1953 when police were deployed across the country to search for a Norwegian "friend" who was visiting him. Turing also started seeing a Jungian therapist.

On 8 June 1954, Turing was found dead, having eaten half of a cyanide-laced apple. The coroner's verdict was suicide.

Turing made what can only be described as ground-breaking contributions, which eventually led from machines which were designed to execute specific algorithms, to electronic digital computers which were able to execute arbitrary algorithms. Turing played a key role at Bletchley Park, and it is arguable that had Alan not developed a large amount of computing theory, we might not have cracked Enigma or "Fish" - it's therefore arguable that Alan's work won the war for us.

In 1952, Nazi war criminals were leaving prison. At the same time, Turing had to chose between prison and chemical castration. Turing turned the "love that dare not speak it's name" into the love which didn't see what it was doing wrong - he stood up for and punished for what he believed and felt.

He didn't leave a suicide note, so we will never know what finally drove him to suicide, but it is easy to conclude that society's attitudes towards homosexuality made a large contribution to his final decision. I would like to echo Andrew Hodges: The law may have killed Turing, but his enduring spirit, his legacy, has given him life.

Every computer you ever use will be a Turing machine.