Cory Doctorow has the good news about Bletchley Park’s recent grant:
Bletchley Park, the birthplace of modern crypto and the home of the WWII codebreaking effort, has received a £4.6m Heritage Lottery Fund grant to fund restoration efforts and new exhibits. Bletchley was broken up after the war and its work was literally buried as part of the Cold War climate of secrecy that prevailed. In the years that followed, neglect and time led to the near-destruction of many of the historic sites. The Bletchley Park trust has since done amazing work on a shoestring budget to restore and preserve Bletchley, creating a fabulous museum and rebuilding some of the most beautiful electromechanical computers I’ve ever seen.
[. . .]
Ironically, the money to restore Bletchley has come from the lottery, a government-run system designed to reinforce and exploit statistical innumeracy of the sort that Bletchley’s cryptographers overcame in order to help win the war.
