Celebrity Friday: Alan Turing Gets Honored With British Stamp

Alan Turing, the gay mathematician who helped the British win World War II by breaking the German's Enigma code, is being honored by his country with an official stamp in their "Britons of Distinction" series. 

The first-class stamp tribute, naming him as one of 10 ‘Britons of Distinction’, comes at a time when there is still a campaign running seeking a posthumous pardon for his conviction for homosexuality in 1952.

The stamp will be released in Britain on 23 February from Royal Mail. Today, there are an estimated 2.5 million stamp collectors and gifters in the UK and millions more worldwide.

Turing was a mathematician and computer scientist, whose work with the code-breakers at Bletchley Park helped to speed up the end of the Second World War.

The Cambridge don had invented the Turing machine, a calculator capable of solving any mathematical problem, which was created in his head many years before the technology existed to build the actual computer.

Interestingly, in researching this blog post I discovered that Turing was also a staunch atheist, which in my book is another excellent reason that he is such a great person!

Do The Math: We Don't Know Who Won Iowa 2012

On the first official presidential contest of 2012 on January 3rd the mainstream consensus was that Mitt Romney had "won" by 8 votes (out of nearly 120,000 votes cast) ahead of Rick Santorum. This was such a ludicrous claim that I didn't even blog about it, deciding to wait until the official vote tallies were released. 8 votes out of  120,000 is a MUCH smaller margin of error than the margin between Bush and Gore in 2000 (an alleged 437 votes out of 5.8 million). No voting system that we currently use has the capability to resolve that kind of margin (.00005%).

Well, now the official final vote tallies from the 2012 Iowa caucuses are in and they are:

Mitt Romney 29,805
Rick Santorum 29,839

Curiously, now Republican officials are coming around to mathematical realities and calling the results a "split decision" or tie. This is what they should have done at the very beginning! DO THE MATH. The point here is that, no, Romney did not win the first two nomination contests, he tied in the first and won in a state where he owns a house and was Governor of its largest neighboring state.

Whether this new information will be enough to stop Romney's supposed inevitable momentum to the Republican nomination for the presidency we will see. Also, this is an ominous sign that the 2012 presidential election may be as close as the 2000 election, and I really don't think we want the Supreme Court deciding two elections of the last four, do we?