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Collection of letters by Alan Turing found in filing cabinet

theguardian.com

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Re: Collection of letters by Alan Turing found in filing cabinet

#11

Post by manyhands »

grzm wrote: post #10
manyhands wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this downvoted? It's true.

The site guidelines ask > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I don't have any insight as to why this particular comment was down voted. (Edit to add: I suspect it was down voted because it misquotes the source material.) If it's something you're really interested in looking into more in general, I sug…

My question was entirely rhetorical. I thought it important to clarify that the post was factually correct, and one should not take its font color as an indication otherwise, even though that is usually a sensible assumption regarding downvoted posts that are simple statements of fact.

Incidentally, when did HN guidelines start privileging entertainment value? That is certainly at odds with what I consider the spirit of this community to be.

Re: Collection of letters by Alan Turing found in filing cabinet

#12

Post by DonbunEf7 »

manyhands wrote: post #9
rurounijones wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"detest", not "despise". Small thing I know but accuracy is important.

Fortunately those two words are synonyms, so readers have not been terribly misled.

Hi! Lemme help you out here.

"Detest" and "despise" are not synonyms. To detest is to speak out against; to despise is to look down upon. Their roots come directly from Latin/French. If you detest something, you are issuing speech which indicates that you dislike it. If you despise something, you have observed it and disliked your observation (or, more usually, something about the detail of the observation!)

When people use these words in idioms like, "I despise and detest their actions," they are saying that they have seen the actions, they do not like what they have seen, and they are now speaking out to denounce those actions.

Re: Collection of letters by Alan Turing found in filing cabinet

#13

Post by grzm »

DonbunEf7 wrote: post #12
manyhands wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately those two words are synonyms, so readers have not been terribly misled.

Hi! Lemme help you out here. "Detest" and "despise" are not synonyms. To detest is to speak out against; to despise is to look down upon. Their roots come directly from Latin/French. If you detest something, you are issuing speech which indicates that you dislike it. If you despise something, you have observed it and disliked your observation (or, more usually, something about the detail of the observation!) When peo…

> To detest is to speak out against

Interesting. I've never heard this use. The definitions I've seen of detest are some form of dislike intensely.

Reviewing Merriam-Webster[0], I see there is an obsolete sense of detest that means to curse.

> 1 : to feel intense and often violent antipathy toward : loathe · detests politics · They seem to truly detest each other.

> 2 obsolete : curse, denounce

I can't recall ever having across across the word used in this way in American English. I've only seen the first sense used, and would have interpret someone saying "despise and detest" to be effectively doubling (redundantly) for emphasis, not to distinguish between the two.

[0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/detest

Re: Collection of letters by Alan Turing found in filing cabinet

#14

Post by mirimir »

manyhands wrote: post #11
grzm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site guidelines ask > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I don't have any insight as to why this particular comment was down voted. (Edit to add: I suspect it was down voted because it misquotes the source material.) If it's something you're really interested in looking into more in general, I sug…

My question was entirely rhetorical. I thought it important to clarify that the post was factually correct, and one should not take its font color as an indication otherwise, even though that is usually a sensible assumption regarding downvoted posts that are simple statements of fact. Incidentally, when did HN guidelines start privileging entertainment value? That is certainly at odds with what I consider the spirit…

Well, it's clear that he died of cyanide poisoning. It's been thought that he committed suicide. It's arguable that UK authorities are responsible for that, given his prosecution for homosexuality, and court-ordered estrogen therapy to reduce his sex drive.

Some have further suggested that British Security Services assassinated him.[0,1] Rudy Rucker features that theory in Turing & Burroughs, but has Turing survive. Roger Bristow argued that the FBI assassinated him.[2] I don't believe that any clear evidence has been revealed.

0) http://mentalfloss.com/article/64049/did-alan-turing-inspire...

1) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2530751/Security-ser...

2) https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/was-alan-turin...

Re: Collection of letters by Alan Turing found in filing cabinet

#15

Post by kdoherty »

burkaman wrote: post #6
gerdesj wrote: post #4

It's rather sad that the only thing a trained journalist can find in 150 letters written by a hero of the first order is “I would not like the journey, and I detest America.” - a remark made once by him. I'd like these letters to be analysed by people who could make some real sense of them and put them into a decent context. Finding a throwaway remark that many have made on the spur of the moment and headlining it is…

You can analyze them if you want: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/4f6c3f0c-9a70... This article is written for a general audience, and there's probably not much else of general interest in them if they're mostly about academics.

All I could find on these archives were summaries of the letters, is there anywhere where we can view the actual documents that are archived (either scanned or OCR)? I admit, I had a hard time navigating that page, so I may have missed something obvious.

Edit: My bad, after reading the Conditions Governing Use I found this: "Photocopies and photographic copies of material in the archive can be supplied for private study purposes only, depending on the condition of the documents." So it looks like these written summaries are all we can get?

Re: Collection of letters by Alan Turing found in filing cabinet

#16

Post by School-Cotton »

DonbunEf7 wrote: post #12
manyhands wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately those two words are synonyms, so readers have not been terribly misled.

Hi! Lemme help you out here. "Detest" and "despise" are not synonyms. To detest is to speak out against; to despise is to look down upon. Their roots come directly from Latin/French. If you detest something, you are issuing speech which indicates that you dislike it. If you despise something, you have observed it and disliked your observation (or, more usually, something about the detail of the observation!) When peo…

I'm a native English speaker and I have never met anyone who makes this distinction, after having spoken English with many thousands of people in my life.

Etymology doesn't determine meaning.

I'm open to the possibility that in 1950s England these words meant what you say (even though in my native dialect of English they don't), but to argue that you would need to give citations, not etymologies.

Re: Collection of letters by Alan Turing found in filing cabinet

#17

Post by cooper12 »

This makes me wonder what remnants we'll have left of the greats of this generation amidst tech juggernauts bound to fall and every URL expiring after only a few months. People forget passwords, the owners of accounts die, hard drives fail, but ephemera like letters are tangible things that can last longer if stored properly. I think in the future they'll just say "x was known to have an account on defunct service Instagram and his profile picture on his private Facebook account has him wearing sunglasses".

Re: Collection of letters by Alan Turing found in filing cabinet

#18

Post by [deleted] »

gerdesj wrote: post #4

It's rather sad that the only thing a trained journalist can find in 150 letters written by a hero of the first order is “I would not like the journey, and I detest America.” - a remark made once by him. I'd like these letters to be analysed by people who could make some real sense of them and put them into a decent context. Finding a throwaway remark that many have made on the spur of the moment and headlining it is…

[deleted]

Re: Collection of letters by Alan Turing found in filing cabinet

#19

Post by coldtea »

DonbunEf7 wrote: post #12
manyhands wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately those two words are synonyms, so readers have not been terribly misled.

Hi! Lemme help you out here. "Detest" and "despise" are not synonyms. To detest is to speak out against; to despise is to look down upon. Their roots come directly from Latin/French. If you detest something, you are issuing speech which indicates that you dislike it. If you despise something, you have observed it and disliked your observation (or, more usually, something about the detail of the observation!) When peo…

>"Detest" and "despise" are not synonyms. To detest is to speak out against; to despise is to look down upon. Their roots come directly from Latin/French. If you detest something, you are issuing speech which indicates that you dislike it. If you despise something, you have observed it and disliked your observation (or, more usually, something about the detail of the observation!)

Not for the last 2-3 centuries it is not. For people reading Beowulf in the first edition, maybe.

Detest

1. to feel abhorrence of; hate; dislike intensely. (dictionary.com)

1 to feel intense and often violent antipathy toward : loathe detests politics They seem to truly detest each other. 2 obsolete : curse, denounce (Merriam-Webster)

1. to hate someone or something very much (Cambridge dictionary)

1. Dislike intensely (Oxford dictionary)

>Their roots come directly from Latin/French.

Which is irrelevant as to their current meaning.

Now, we are not that different. My correction is also driven by the same joy of correcting others that makes people learn some obscure obsolete factoid and insist on it as if the whole world is wrong and they are right. The only difference is I'm right :-)

Re: Collection of letters by Alan Turing found in filing cabinet

#20

Post by bahjoite »

gerdesj wrote: post #4

It's rather sad that the only thing a trained journalist can find in 150 letters written by a hero of the first order is “I would not like the journey, and I detest America.” - a remark made once by him. I'd like these letters to be analysed by people who could make some real sense of them and put them into a decent context. Finding a throwaway remark that many have made on the spur of the moment and headlining it is…

"An exchange of letters relating to a teenage prodigy's contribution to linear algebra" [0] would have been a more interesting choice, especially if the article would include some research on Lionel March [1] and his "rebmun algebra".

[0]: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/data/gb133-tur%2Fadd%2Ftur%2F...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_March

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