Tag Archives: World War II

Books, Episode Links

Tweet Relief

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While Bletchley Park— the home of the World War II British codebreakers — is a thriving museum these days, the site  was once perilously close to collapsing into the forgotten past. Thanks to her persistent blogging efforts and a robust Twitter campaign to raise awareness, the educator and author  Dr. Sue Black, (OBE) brought attention to Bletchley Park’s plight and helped get the funding needed to preserve this important part of computer history.

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While visiting New York City this week, Dr. Black was kind enough to drop by the Pop Tech Jam microphone and chat about her recent book with Stevyn  Colgan, Saving Bletchley Park: How #SocialMedia Saved the Home of the WWII Codebreakers. (You can listen to the episode here.) The book’s chapters weave together 1940s wartime history showing just how important Bletchley’s work was in stopping the Nazis, with Dr. Black’s memories of discovering the crumbling facility in 2003 and the race to save the place before it was too late.

Bletchley Park was also an important milestone for women in technology. Thousands of women were employed there in all kinds of jobs during the war — and some even cracked codes right alongside the men. For those wanting a little more background on the topic (and a working copy of the Adobe Flash plug-in), check out The Women of Station X video created by the British Computer Society‘s women’s networking group, BCSWomen.

Dr. Black, (who is an Honorary Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University College London and a Senior Research Associate at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge) also shared her experiences with #techmums, a group she founded to help women help themselves through technology.

So, if you like codebreaking, military history, World War II, computer history or want to know more than what was on screen in The Imitation Game or The Bletchley Circle, check out Saving Bletchley Park. And compared to recent times, it’s also a Twitter story with a happy ending. We love those!

Podcast

PTJ 116: No Need to Put a Quarter Up

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It’s that time of year when the weather gets chillier but the Oscar race heats up in Hollywood. The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch is an early award season favorite but if you just can’t wait for the biopic of cryptanalyst,  computer pioneer, and super-boffin Alan Turing, J.D. tells us where we can get a biographical fix of the WWII hero.

In the news,  Google’s Nexus 9 tablet is now available, as is the latest iteration of their mobile OS; the Apple Pay roll-out gathers momentum;  researchers identify a costly glitch in Visa’s contactless credit cards; Microsoft joins the wearable fitness tracker game; Amazon unveils their Prime Photos cloud service; lots and lots of corporate hookups; and The Internet Archive debuts their Internet Arcade with 900 classic games.

Episode Links, Movies

The Turing Test

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Fall has kicked into overdrive and the serious movies are all heading for the theaters in time for the Oscar nominations. Most geeks already know The Hunger Games, Mockingjay Part 1 is landing in theaters on November 21st . But there’s a smaller, much more low-budget British film scheduled to open on November 28th that gets even more serious nerd cred. It’s called The Imitation Game.

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The movie tells the story of how Alan Turing — the Cambridge mathematician, creator of the Turing Test and pioneer of modern-day computing — used his genius to help crack encrypted Nazi messages with a huge team of cryptographers at Britain’s top-secret Bletchley Park code-breaking facility. US President Dwight D. Eisenhower has even estimated that the work done at Bletchley Park shortened the war by two years. Oh, and in case you haven’t heard, it stars English actor and modern Sherlock Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing (above).

bookIf you’re interested Turing’s life and want to do a little background research before seeing the film, one definitive place to start is with the extensive biography, Alan Turing: The Engima, written by Andrew Hodges. The book was originally published in 1983, but has been updated a few times since then, including in 2012 for the centenary of Turing’s birth. It’s not one of those short biographies — 600 to 770 pages depending on the edition. Upon its arrival, the book was well-reviewed and Jim Holt of The New Yorker even called it “One of the finest scientific biographies ever written.” Here in the States, Alan Turing: The Enigma is currently out now from Princeton University Press, which has posted a PDF of the first chapter if you want to try before you buy; it’s also available as an ebook from the usual suspects.

jacobiThe Imitation Game film was actually based on the Hodges biography, as was an earlier adaptation from 1996 called Breaking the Code, which starred Derek Jacobi (left) as Turing. The 90-minute BBC film is available to watch for free online on YouTube. For a more academic approach, the Turing Digital Archive, hosted by King’s College at Cambridge, has about 3,000 images of letters, photos, papers and other material related to Alan Turing.

Once you’ve tackled Turing, you can also find plenty of online resources on the science of cryptography, including a fact sheet on World War II cryptology from the National Museum of the United States Air Force, the Google Cultural Institute site devoted to Bletchley Park and the BBC’s guide to code-breaking. For a more modern-day look, there’s also a free online Coursera course in cryptography from Stanford University.

So geeks, get ready. This could be the film for you this season — and something to tide us all over until next year’s The Avengers:  Age of Ultron and of course, Star Wars VII.

P.S. Want to smarten up your wardrobe with the same Turing t-shirt the Pop Tech Bunny is modeling at the top of this post? Order it here. (Rabbit not included.)

Episode Links

Museum Piece

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If you like museums — but find you don’t have the time or money to travel around to them — check out the Google Cultural Institute. It’s an online repository that helps explain and illustrate history right in the web browser. The project launched in 2011, and now includes more than six million digitized items, including high-resolution photos, archival video clips, maps, documents and artwork. Google’s partners in this effort include the British Museum in London, Museo Gallileo in Florence, the Museum of Polish History in Warsaw, Museum Nasional Indonesia and institutions in more than 40 countries.

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The site is roughly divided into three main topic areas: Art Project , paintings, sculpture and other creative works from around the world; Historic Moments, exhibits that focus on pivotal events in the human timeline; and World Wonders, detail tours of heritage sites around the globe. You may learn more just by wandering the site and randomly stumbling into things you didn’t know were there in the first place, like The Palace of Versailles in 3D or the site’s LIFE magazine photo collection.

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For geeks, there’s a trove of material from Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking center during World War II, as well as an exhibit from the country’s National Museum of Computing on Colossus & The Breaking of Lorenz, a Nazi cipher thought to be uncrackable. War is well represented on the site — for example, more than 40 items are on display from the National World War I Museum in Kansas City. That exhibit is part of a larger World War I project with material from other institutions like the Imperial War Museum in Britain. Cornell University has a collection on Lincoln at Gettysburg and there are plenty of other military topics explore.

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Music and comics are covered, too. There’s an exhibit called Unveiling the Mysteries of the King Cello, which looks at the world’s oldest surviving cello, as studied in CT scans and icongraphic studies. Tezuka Osamu: Revival of the God of Manga, another exhibit, focuses on the works of the Japanese master of the form.

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Too many cool, informative things are waiting online at the Google Cultural Institute to mention here, so go look if you’re interested. The site also has its own YouTube channel (which has a video that explains how to use the Google Cultural Institute), an online tour and a Google+ page. It may not be quite the same as being there, but hey — no airfares, long lines or hefty museum admissions fees.