Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note • Hacker News Board

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#161

Post by dhruvrrp » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:28 PM UTC

jsty wrote: post #44

lavezzi wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because £50 notes have always been associated with fraud and money laundering, which has negative connotations for both users and merchants.

Paying for something with £50 notes is a nerve-racking experience rivalled only by attempting to attempting to spend Scottish notes in England (I usually chicken out and just deposit them all at a bank)

I had a lot of trouble spending leftover Jersey pounds when i reached London. People didn’t even recognize the bills! I think a McDonalds ended up accepting them.

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#162

Post by dmix » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:28 PM UTC

hollerith wrote: post #56

dmix wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That $5 pound note looks great, I love the white sides with the emblem of the notes in general. But the pattern remains, those bills are for the most part extremely dense and overflowing with information and layered graphics. Especially the existing $50 one which is crammed full of stuff. It's like someone came up with a list of ideas and said yes to all of them.

If the design were more minimalist, they would be easier to counterfeit.

That's no excuse to make it ugly. There are plenty of ways to achieve this without massively cluttering it.

Just look at Canada, Australia, or even Mexican plastic currency. These are nowhere near as bad but are just as secure.

Canada: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/92/Canadian_Fron...

Aus: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d3/91/b8/d391b8dafd8c60277a81...

MX: https://www.inside-mexico.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Fot...

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#163

Post by michaelmrose » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

jjeaff wrote: post #113

michaelmrose wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? His accomplishments aren't extremely notable.

Getting elected as the first black president in a country founded on the enslavement of black people is a pretty impressive accomplishment in and of itself.

It's notable for the country more so than it is for the man.

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#164

Post by michaelmrose » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:32 PM UTC

arcadeparade wrote: post #140

michaelmrose wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any US president could have presented the Kim family with a photo Op. This is not a meaningful accomplishment.

At the moment you are correct but if things work out with Korea he could be remembered, rightly or wrongly as the person who started a new path.

He started by ridiculing said person on twitter and then obediently appearing for a photo op when he stroked his ego.

If anything is accomplished it will be because china put the screws to them.

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#165

Post by andybak » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:32 PM UTC

arcadeparade wrote: post #140

michaelmrose wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any US president could have presented the Kim family with a photo Op. This is not a meaningful accomplishment.

At the moment you are correct but if things work out with Korea he could be remembered, rightly or wrongly as the person who started a new path.

How many people remember Nixon for China over his other "accomplishments"? (I'm British and first I heard about it growing up was via the opera)

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#166

Post by leggomylibro » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:34 PM UTC

PorterDuff wrote: post #136

johnchristopher wrote: post #6

These announcements always make me ponder about the people we'll put on bank notes or erect statues in honour of in 50 years and are alive and persecuted today but not recognized by society.

'Being persecuted' strikes me as a crummy reason to put someone on currency, it's more a sign of the times than a sign of gravitas.

Turing was persecuted, but he was also instrumental to the Allies' victory in WWII. Without Bletchley Park and the massive advances in electromechanical computing that Turing helped to spearhead, the world would probably look very different today.

It seems more like an acknowledgement that his past persecution shouldn't have any bearing on our perception of his myriad accomplishments. FTA:

>Alan Turing provided the theoretical underpinnings for the modern computer. While best known for his work devising code-breaking machines during WWII, Turing played a pivotal role in the development of early computers first at the National Physical Laboratory and later at the University of Manchester. He set the foundations for work on artificial intelligence by considering the question of whether machines could think.

I mean, we sometimes call general-purpose computers "Turing Machines", and we use "Turing Tests" to determine if an AI can demonstrate enough intelligence to pass as human.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#167

Post by gerdesj » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:36 PM UTC

jsty wrote: post #44

lavezzi wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because £50 notes have always been associated with fraud and money laundering, which has negative connotations for both users and merchants.

Paying for something with £50 notes is a nerve-racking experience rivalled only by attempting to attempting to spend Scottish notes in England (I usually chicken out and just deposit them all at a bank)

Its nowhere near as bad as it was back in the '70s or so when some places devalued the other countries' Sterling by 10% before accepting it or flatly refused it. I've spend several eg Bank of Clydsdale £20 notes in pubs in southern England. I've also spent a fair bit of English Sterling up (proper) north with no problems.

It doesn't help that there are five or so different banks in Scotland issuing notes with different designs, so to spot a dud you need to really know your stuff.

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#168

Post by philwelch » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:38 PM UTC

soneca wrote: post #103

iamnotacrook wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just got back from a trip to the States and I have to say that US money is very boring by comparison to UK money. How on earth do blind/old people deal with the fact that all denominations are practically the same size, design, colour etc?

I recently moved to the US and I hate its coins. To the point that I consider all of them unusable. When I get home, I leave all the coins that I received as change on a plate by the door, hoping someday I will bring all of them at once somewhere to change for bills (I believe there are machines that do this). My complaints: i) They do not have numbers on them!! You have to read words to know the value ii) To make po…

The quickest way to recognize US coins is to recognize which of our four greatest presidents[1] is displayed on the coin: George Washington on the quarter (25 cents), Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the dime (10 cents), Thomas Jefferson on the nickel (5 cents), and Abraham Lincoln on the penny (1 cent). The only recent significant change to the front design is that Jefferson is looking at you on the newer nickels, rather than to the side as he did previously.

This is a completely arbitrary system, but American schoolchildren learn it very early on and memorize it, and it remains valid for the entire rest of their lives.

[1] You may recall that the faces of our four greatest presidents are also engraved on Mount Rushmore, except instead of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt is on the mountain. This is because Mount Rushmore was carved during the administration of FDR, and he had not yet had the opportunity to displace his cousin within the top four. Also, neither ranking is especially unanimous among historians or the public, but it is relatively close to the consensus.

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#169

Post by dijit » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:39 PM UTC

winter_blue wrote: post #145

chrisfinazzo wrote: post #61

The US needs some updating as well - see the kerfuffle about trying to get Harriet Tubman on the $20, which Trump nixed, because racism. He wanted to put her on a reissued $2 bill, but I'm not sure there's an appetite for that. Symbolism matters in this case, and Trump is clueless. I still like this concept from a while back: https://kottke.org/10/08/us-dollar-redesign Replacing GW with Obama might be a bit contentio…

> https://kottke.org/10/08/us-dollar-redesign Wow, that redesign is really impressive! I hope something like it gets adopted eventually.

That’s incredibly bold and ambitious. I kind of love it. It breaks a universal tradition that I didn’t consider before.

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#170

Post by boring_twenties » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:43 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #66

toomuchtodo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May they live as long as they wish a happy and healthy life, and may they die when they are ready and have made the choice themselves.

What will happen is that you will have a bunch of very rich centenarians who will own just about everything simply for having a couple of decades head start on the newcomers. The same thing is already happening today. Unless you want to cap wealth and property this is not going to end well. It's already at the point today where real estate and other relatively scarce resources are much more available to and owned by…

I mean, if we're fantasizing we might as well have a post-scarcity society along the lines of Manna: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm