Quotulatiousness

July 20, 2013

UK government inches closer to giving posthumous pardon to Alan Turing

Filed under: Britain, History, Law, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

In the Guardian, Nicholas Watt updates the news on a private member’s bill that would give Alan Turing a pardon:

Alan Turing, the Enigma codebreaker who took his own life after being convicted of gross indecency under anti-homosexuality legislation, is to be given a posthumous pardon.

The government signalled on Friday that it is prepared to support a backbench bill that would pardon Turing, who died from cyanide poisoning at the age of 41 in 1954 after he was subjected to “chemical castration”.

Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, a government whip, told peers that the government would table the third reading of the Alan Turing (statutory pardon) bill at the end of October if no amendments are made. “If nobody tables an amendment to this bill, its supporters can be assured that it will have speedy passage to the House of Commons,” Ahmad said.

The announcement marks a change of heart by the government, which declined last year to grant pardons to the 49,000 gay men, now dead, who were convicted under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act. They include Oscar Wilde.

Update: On the other hand, Matt Ridley thinks that there’s a major problem with this approach.

That Turing deserved an apology in his lifetime for this appalling treatment is not in doubt. What will be debated tomorrow is whether a posthumous pardon from today’s Government is right, or may be a further insult to his memory. After all, the word pardon implies that his crime is still a crime, which it is not, and it will do nothing for the victim (especially since he was an atheist), and do nothing to untarnish his reputation, which history has already fully untarnished. Also it could be unfair to other, less famous convicted gay men and may even seem to rewrite history rather than leaving it starkly to reproach us. By rights, Turing should be pardoning the Government, but that’s not possible.

So it is not easy to judge if a pardon is the right thing. For my part, I think a greater matter is at issue — whether we have done enough to recognise Turing’s scientific reputation and how we put that right. It becomes clearer by the day that, irrespective of his tragic end and even of his secret war service, he ranks for the momentous nature of his achievements with the likes of Francis Crick and Albert Einstein in the 20th-century scientific pantheon. This was not just a moderately good scientist made famous by persecution; this was the author of a really big idea.

[…]

When the war broke out, Turing’s genius proved as practical as it had been ethereal in the 1930s. His crucial contributions to three successive computing innovations at Bletchley Park — the “bombe” machines for replicating the settings of the German Enigma encryption machine, the later cracking of the naval Enigma machine enabling U-boat traffic to be read, and finally the Colossus computer that broke the Germans’ “tunny” cipher machine — provided Churchill with the famous “ultra” decrypts that almost certainly shortened the war and saved millions of lives in battlefields, ships and camps.

For this he was appointed OBE, but secrecy shrouded his work until long after his death, so he wasn’t known to be a hero, let alone the man who saved so many lives. He moved to what would become GCHQ, but in the paranoid days after Burgess and Maclean fled east, his homosexuality conviction categorised him as a security risk.

The Angry Nerd comes down on Comic Con weapon checks

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:27

“A man walks down the street in that hat, people know he’s not afraid of anything” – except copyright lawyers

Filed under: Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:41

At TechHive, Leah Yamshon talks about the fuzzy edge of law in the fan community:

Undying devotion to your favorite TV show can lead to much worse than a sedentary life parked on the couch. For Stephanie Lucas, it threw her right in the middle of an intellectual-property lawsuit: In March she was hit with a cease-and-desist order from 20th Century Fox Television.

Her actionable offense? She was selling a knitted hat inspired by a Fox TV show on Etsy.

Lucas is a member of the Firefly fan community, a group dedicated to Joss Whedon’s short-lived “space western” series that originally aired on Fox. “I’m absolutely in love with this show and its characters,” Lucas says. And thus her shop features one special item dedicated to her fellow Browncoats (a nickname for the Independence fighters in Firefly, and now for the fans themselves).

[…]

The Etsy market is full of unofficial, handmade hats.

The Etsy market is full of unofficial, handmade hats.

Fans who had been knitting these hats for years were now screwed, thanks to Fox’s claim that they broke the law after the official version debuted. But which law?

“Merchandising rights is a monster that has grown without any proper legal backing,” says Madhavi Sunder, a professor of law currently at University of California, Berkeley, with a specialty in intellectual property and culture. “Under traditional copyright law, the exclusive right to make these goods is not there,” she says. The U.S. Supreme Court has made no rulings in regard to merchandising rights, so intellectual-property violations have to be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Intellectual property is protected under both trademark and copyright, but the two concepts are different: Trademark protects names, terms, and symbols used to identify an original work or brand, and copyright protects the creative work itself. According to U.S. copyright law, the only groups with the right to distribute works based on an original creation are copyright holders. So, technically, only the original story creators are allowed to make pieces featuring images and concepts for which they hold the copyright.

Investigators still don’t know what caused the explosion in Lac-Mégantic derailment

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Railways — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:02

In the Globe and Mail, Jacquie McNish and Grant Robertson report on the ongoing investigations into the causes of the fatal explosion:

Federal officials probing the Lac-Mégantic disaster are testing the chemical composition of crude oil carried by the runaway train as they seek to answer the crucial question of what triggered the unusual and devastating explosion after the derailment.

[…]

Edward Burkhardt, chairman of Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway Inc., which operated the derailed train, said Canadian authorities have impounded the rail cars to take “a huge number of samples of oil.” He said the investigators and officials in the rail and oil industries “are asking how come there were explosions here. Crude does not blow up.”

People familiar with the investigation said the TSB is examining the composition of the oil that fuelled the explosion.

Industry sources said there are several possibilities. One is whether the crude, which came from the Bakken oil region of North Dakota, contained volatile chemicals. A possible scenario is that additives were intentionally combined with the crude oil to speed up the transfer of the syrupy oil, common for pipelines but rare in the rail industry. Another possibility is that the tanker cars had chemical contaminants from a previous shipment. Another question is whether the oil contained high levels of flammable hydrogen sulphide gas, which is sometimes present in Bakken oil.

[…]

Regulators in the United States say rail carriers are responsible for knowing what they are carrying, and that the shipper and the railway company are required to work out such details when the train is being loaded.

“The carriers have to know exactly what it is that they’re hauling at all times,” said Warren Flateau, a spokesman for the Federal Railway Association in Washington.

Mr. Burkhardt said MM&A received a detailed bill of lading from the U.S. oil services company, which he declined to identify, and no chemicals were identified as being present in the crude. The intermediary oil services company leased the rail cars, loaded them with oil and then contracted three separate railway companies to transport them.

The first carrier was Canadian Pacific Railway, which handed over the train to MM&A in Montreal. From there, MM&A was to deliver the oil cars to a small rail company in New Brunswick owned by the Irving family.

Orwell’s rules of writing

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

George Orwell wasn’t a perfect writer, but most of us could stand to be able to write more like he did. Here, from his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”, are the rules he recommended to produce clear, understandable writing:

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one’s meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one’s words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

However, as Tom Chivers points out, even Orwell could be wrong:

One: never use a figure of speech which “you are used to seeing in print” is a bit weird. For example, you could make the case that “figure of speech” is a figure of speech, since the things it refers to are not literal figures, ie physical shapes or written symbols, but metaphorical ones. And you’ve definitely seen it in print lots and lots. And there’s nothing wrong with it. “Don’t resort to cliché” is what he means, but it’s so obvious it doesn’t need saying.

Two: Language Log nails the “Never us a long word” and the “Never use a foreign phrase” one neatly by pointing out that “when a shorter one will do” or “an everyday English equivalent” are entirely subjective terms. In the very same essay, they point out, Orwell talks of “scrupulous writers”. Could he have said “careful”, Language Log wonders: “Not quite the same meaning, of course. But would it have done?” Similarly, foreign and technical words have subtly different meanings to the English equivalents: there are no true synonyms. “Don’t show off by using needlessly fancy language”, again, is so obvious and unhelpful that it doesn’t need saying; it’s little better than saying “write well”.

Three: “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out” should, by its own rule, be “If it is possible to cut a word, cut it.” Or even “Cut words where possible.” Is that better?

Four: “Never use the passive” is complete nonsense and Orwell uses it regularly himself because there is nothing wrong with it.

Five we’ve dealt with; see two.

Six: So what you’re saying, Mr Orwell, is that applying rigid rules to writing is unhelpful and silly? At last we agree.

All Orwell needs to say is that we should take care over writing, and that cliché and needlessly showy language are worth avoiding. That’s great, if largely empty (“Be better at the things you do” is rarely helpful advice). But the Six Commandments on their tablets of stone are all ridiculous, and if you go through your prose sternly applying them – or worse, if your editor does – then it is very unlikely to make it any better.

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