Turing Never Said That

“I think that sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.” The line is spoken twice, first by Knightley qua Clarke and then by Cumberbatch qua Turing. But they never said it. It should be attributed to a different genius, the screenwriter, Graham Moore.

I never accepted the quote as genuine, but it came up again when a colleague used it in their signature block. I wanted to warn them about that; so I did another Google search for an authoritative reference to debunk the false citation. I found the work of Sir John Dermot Turing.  

Dermot Turing – like his celebrated uncle Alan Turing – was educated at Sherborne School and King’s College, Cambridge. After doing a D.Phil in Genetics at Oxford, he concluded that scientific research was not for him, and moved into the legal profession. … His specialism was financial sector regulation, particularly the problems associated with failed banks, and financial market infrastructure.  -- More at https://dermotturing.com/about/dermot-turing/

In a blog on his website, Sir John explains: “Fake quotes - July 30, 2019 - We all know about fake news, but only recently I discovered fake quotes. I was asked where Alan Turing’s famous quotation ‘Those who can imagine anything can create the impossible’ had come from. After a lot of digging, the answer was ‘It didn’t.’ Not in his broadcasts. Not in his published papers. Not in his unpublished speeches.” 

The statement is insightful, powerful, and empowering. It deserves repetition and popularization. The author was Graham Moore. Moore received an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for his screenplay of Imitation Game. He understood Turing. 

“I had been this huge computer nerd my entire life. I went to space camp and computer programming camp. I was that kid. From a very young age, I knew about the legend of Alan Turing - among awkward, nerdy teenagers, he is a patron saint. He never fit in, but accomplished these wonderful things, as part of a secret queer history of computer science. And so I always dreamt of writing something about him, and I thought that there had never been a proper narrative treatment of his life, that he deserved. I by chance met the producers of the film at a party, and one of them told me they had optioned a biography. When I asked who it was, they said, 'it's a mathematician that you've never heard of.' When they told me it was Alan Turing, I almost tackled them, and I told them I'd do anything to write this film, I'd write it for free. It was all about luck and passion. That is how it started, and I felt that everyone else involved was just as committed to the story.” -- Graham Moore via IMDB at https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2441699/

 

Dermot Turing has developed an interest in his uncle’s work, publishing several books about the wartime projects at Bletchley Park. I bought two of them through Amazon UK. For myself, that was evocative on several levels. 

First, I am a globalist and I love global commerce. Unlike my conservative comrades who have fallen into the abyss of nationalism, I find an overarching  vista in Ayn Rand’s warnings against the Balkanization of western society. (See the Ayn Rand Institute here.) To be able to buy a product from across the Atlantic ocean with a few clicks is a tribute to human ingenuity in a open market.  

Second, my money was exchanged from dollars to pounds automatically and at a trivial cost. On the one hand a global society needs a global currency. On the other hand, an open market allows a plethora of monetary media. Friedrich A. Hayek called gold “the wobbly anchor.” (On NecessaryFacts here.) At the American Numismatic Association convention in Chicago in 2019, I spoke on the future of money and predicted a world coming soon with personal currencies. (See a version on Necessary Facts here.) During the Middle Ages, bankers rationalized the variegated fabric of local coinages with an abstract system of “pounds-shillings-pence”; and when they met at great fairs, using the new Arabic numbers and algebraic methods, they cleared their books without ever touching a coin.

 

Third, the transaction was secured with public key cryptosystems. Software agents shook hands and established trust in order to safely carry my money and order the transport of the seller’s product. 

 

A final note on Turing from Turing: “One scene in the movie which had puzzled me is the one where a young Alan Turing is pinned beneath the floorboards at his boarding-school and jumped on by his schoolmates. That’s bizarre, in many ways, not least because there is no evidence that Turing was bullied at school, and certainly none in Hodges’s book. Oho, it turns out that this scene is lifted from another book altogether – A Madman dreams of Turing machines, a novel by Janna Levin. So what started as fiction has been recycled as biography.” – Sir John Dermot Turing.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

A Successful Imitation of Alan Turing 

Turing’s Cathedral 

Variations on Enigma 

BASIC: Turing’s Truth 

The Code Book 

Coins and Codes 

THE UNWISE SAPIENS OF YUVAL NOAH HARARI

Harper, 2014, 443 pages

I was on a long waiting list despite the many copies at the Austin Public Library. When I was done, I could not renew the checkout because other people were waiting. Gratefully, I did not pay for the book. Despite (or perhaps indicative of) its runway popularity, it is shallow and facile, drawn from second-hand sources and not well integrated in its presentations.

Harari failed to correctly explain the origin of writing, the origin of counting, the origin of money, and the origin of coinage.  They are all tightly bound. In every case, his supporting citations point to other popularizers, rather than validated peer-reviewed academic publications. So, he gets a lot of the details wrong. From those he builds his attractive and erroneous narrative. Finally, like me and other bloggers, he is a synthesizer, collecting and republishing ideas that he likes without actually challenging any of those claims for their want of proof. 

One such assertion is that the agricultural revolution was not worth the price. Domestication of wheat brought longer working hours and slavery. It actually brought malnutrition, and set the stage for periodic starvation never known to hunter-gatherers. I reviewed Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization by Richard Manning (North Point Press,  2004 ISBN: 0865476225) for the Objectivist discussion site, Rebirth of Reason, here  in 2006 and later in 2010 here.  I wrote: "Among Manning's many points is that the "surplus" usually went to a handful of unproductive people, priests and nobles."  

Moreover, as I pointed out in my original review, the nobles themselves hunted -- which they denied to those who were bound to the cultivating fields.  Nobles did not suffer a steady diet of grain.  When times were good, they ate well, a variety -- another point Jacobs made about city life -- with lots of fresh meat." It is an interesting fact to consider. But Harari just stops there. He does not see strawberries in January. Cutting off our food supply is integral to his thesis, which includes disdain for liberal humanism. Harari advocates for the postmodern anti-industrial revolution. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Not Conned by Seghal’s “Coined” 

Debt: the Seed of Civilization 

Accounting for Civilization 

Art as Ordered Narrative

Money as Speech 

Ten Most Popular Page Views

Since, I opened this blog on January 2, 2011, these articles have tallied the most readers.

What (if Anything) Did Dorothy Learn? 

(3600 pageviews. January 6, 2012)

At the end of the 1939 movie version of The Wizard of Oz, Glinda the Good Witch says that Dorothy could have gone home any time, but she had to learn that for herself.  Scarecrow asks Dorothy what she learned.  …  Clearly, what begins as a cliché ends as a contraction.

Contradictions in the Constitution 

(2721 pageviews. August 13, 2013)

This grew out of a discussion on Galt’s Gulch Online.  Ayn Rand suggested that as admirable as the Constitution is, not having been based on a consistent philosophy, it contained the seeds of its own destruction.

Alongside Night to Run in Austin; Author to Appear  

(1800 pageviews. May 27, 2014)

With help from my anarcho-capitalist comrades here in town, we brought a screening of this movie and its author here for a weekend.

With a cameo by Ron Paul, Alongside Night is the story of the final economic collapse of the United States. We see it through the eyes of 16-year-old Elliot Vreeland.  Elliott searches for his father, a Nobel laureate economist who was targeted for arrest because he consulted with the Europeans to create a gold-based currency that effectively destroyed all confidence in the U.S. dollar. 

Bob Swanson and Genentech 

(689 pageviews.  July 3, 2013)

Bob Swanson was 29 when he provided the money for Prof. Herbert Boyer to start Genentech.  Like all overnight successes, the real story is more complicated, with deep roots.  Bright, accomplished, and motivated, Swanson had obvious potential – and a string of failures to show for it.

William Sheldon: Psychologist,Numismatist and Thief  

(603 pageviews. September 1, 2013)

Dr. William Herbert Sheldon, Jr., (1898 – 1977) came from a privileged family. The philosopher William James was his godfather. Sheldon created the 70-point grading scale that is the standard in modern American numismatics.  He also pioneered the study of Early American Copper, the Large Cents and Half Cents struck until 1857. He also stole coins from the American Numismatic Society; and he defrauded other collectors.

Debt: the Seed of Civilization 

(555 pageviews.  December 28, 2011)

In these days of anti-capitalist protest, it is important to know that keeping track of debts led to the inventions of counting and writing, and eventually gave voice to art.

There is no John Galt: And That’sWorse

(359 pageviews. September 13, 2014)

What you tax you get less of; and what you subsidize you get more of.  The brightest people in the world are making video games; and no one is on the Moon.  It did not take a genius to figure this out: it is a universal law of human action

Supplies and Demands

(342 pageviews. November 25, 2011)

In Economics 101, the Supply curve and the Demand curve are displayed.   The point where they intersect is called “equilibrium” where the most efficient allocation of resources is claimed to occur.  This ignores the fact that the other choices do not disappear. People are still demanding and supplying all along both curves.

Scripophilly

(337 pageviews. August 10, 2013)

Scripophily is the study of stock certificates, bonds, and related fiduciary instruments. It is a subset of numismatics, the art and science that studies the forms and uses of money. Like coins, banknotes, checks (drafts), and tokens, stock certificates reveal the daily life and work of the times. And like other numismatic items, they can be highly artistic.

Republicans for Voldemort

(323 pageviews.  May 20, 2014)

In point of fact, such a claim would be unnecessary, as for instance, "Republicans for Bush" or "Republicans for Palin."  Logic demands that we accept Voldemort as a Democrat and allow that some Republicans favor his reign.

POPULAR THIS WEEK

In addition to those above, these were among the other posts that recently gained some attention.

Against Gulching

(88 pageviews. December 25, 2016)

The defining attribute of fans of the Atlas Shrugged movies is that they are people who want to set themselves apart in a separate, isolated and hidden community of like-minded people. Many dream of a physical locale. Most enjoy online communities. In those discussions, the occasional reports of attempts at a “Galt’s Gulch” receive close attention. Although the plot element of “Galt’s Gulch” served a poetic purpose, it was not a call to action.

Short Snorters

(14 pageviews. September 26, 2016)

A short snorter is paper money, signed by people who share a common experience. During World War II, with 16 million men and women in the American armed forces, the custom spread rapidly. After the war, it faded just as quickly.

Art and Copy

(7 pageviews. January 23, 2013)

Products become icons because of the insightful and compelling work of advertising.

Art & Copy (2009) is a film by Doug Pray.  “Everything that was done to launch that product is now done differently because of that product. ... Every computer company on the planet does their ads on a Mac.” – Lee Clow, creator of the Macintosh “1984” ad.

The Weatherman Songbook

(5 pageviews. February 5, 2014.)

"Some of the best things in life are free / If you can steal them from the bourgeosie!" When Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn came to Eastern Michigan University to speak to the New Students for a Democratic Society in 2010, I was there. Bill did not recognize me even though I was at the Flint War Council, December 27-31, 1969.

Peace is More Powerful

(4 pageviews. May 31, 2105)

Imagine a successful protest in Berlin 1943 against the Holocaust.  Between February 27 and March 6, about 200 German women stood outside a detainment center, demanding the release of their Jewish husbands. …  "Researchers used to say that no government could survive if just 5 percent of the population rose up against it," Chenoweth says. "Our data shows the number may be lower than that. No single campaign in that period [1900-2000] failed after they'd achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population." She adds, "But get this: every single campaign that exceeded that 3.5 percent point was a nonviolent one. The nonviolent campaigns were on average four times larger than the average violent campaigns."

JUST TO NOTE

I found a mirror site in Sweden:  http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.se/  I did not set it up; someone else unknown to me did that.  I also found that many readers come here via a Russian site, yandex.ru, which I have never visited because my personal protection is not strong enough for me to go gallivanting.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Open Secrets   

Science in the Middle Ages  

Money is Speech  

Laboratory Misconduct in the Courtroom  

India Two Point Oh: Amita and Raj 

Police in a Global Culture

English is the lingua franca of Earth. Just about anywhere you go, important information will be in English, certainly in cities where visitors are common.  It is a fact of history and sociology that cities attract people. Urbanism is a distinct culture. If you have taken a subway in Boston, you can navigate the Metro in Budapest. So, it is not surprising that the police in Athens are labeled in English. Even if you could read out "Astunomia" you would not want to mistake that for "Astronomia." Of course, few astronomers assemble in ranks with shields and batons. But why do the police in Teheran use English? 

From the Telegraph (UK)
ASTUNOMIA literally means "city management"
but is the modern Greek word for POLICE.

Bulgarian police at subway entrance in Sofia

Korean Police

Teheran
(but it could be anywhere)

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
Laissez Faire Criminology
Junk Criminology as Pseudo-Science
Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security
Employee Theft

The Problem of Cultural Patrimony

From Agent Presse France 
via Al-Arabiya online here 

On February 18, 2015, news services (Reuters here) reported that a group of amateur undersea divers from Israel found 2000 gold coins from about 1000 CE, off the coast of the ancient city of Caesarea which is now in the modern state called Israel.  The coins were struck during  the Fatimid Caliphate.  Speculation by archaeologists from the Israeli Antiquities Authority included the suggestion that the coins were taxes collected for the ruling center of the time at Cairo in Egypt.  An alternate theory is that the coins came from a private merchant ship moving from port to port.  No article cited the problem of patrimony.

Fatimid dinars feature the names of the caliphs they were minted under, as well as the date and location where they were minted. "They're first-class historical documents," explains Robert Kool, curator of the IAA's Coin Department.  […] A cursory study reveals that the earliest coin from the hoard was minted in Palermo, Sicily, while the majority came from official Fatimid mints in Egypt and other parts of North Africa and date to the reigns of Caliphs al-Hakim (A.D. 996-1021) and his son al-Zahir (A.D. 1021-1036).  -- National Geographic News online here.

UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) has a broad mandate.  In the past fifteen years, it has arranged with national governments around the world – chief among them, the United States of America – for the passage of laws requiring that “cultural patrimony” be returned to the country of origin.  The Boston Museum of Fine Art and the Getty Museum are among the most newsworthy victims. Several problems haunt the laws. The problem of patrimony is multidimensional. The claims of UNESCO and their allies suffer from internal contradictions because they have no objective basis in epistemology: no standard of value exists for identifying right from wrong.

First, modern nations did not exist in ancient times.  The Boston Museum returned to Turkey a statue called “The Weary Herakles” from 200 BCE. But there was no “Turkey” in 200 BCE.   They called it “Helliades” – and you need to understand what that means.

In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Greeks called themselves “Achaeans.”  About 400 years later, during the Hellenistic Era, they called themselves “Hellenes.”  Hellas is the modern Greek name for Greece.  But grammatically Helliades is much wider than Hellinike. 

Hellenike would be any Greek city with ties to the old homeland.  Tarentum in Italy was Taras; Naples (Napoli) was Neopolis.  Marseilles in France was Marsalla.  Benghazi in Libya was Berenike.  They were Greek cities.  Greeks built them; Greeks inhabited them.  Sicilians are not Italians.  Italy is a peninsula. Sicily is an island. They are different places.  The people of eastern Sicily are Greeks. In the west, they are Carthaginian.

However, after Alexander the Great, many cities of diverse ethnicities came into the Greek sphere. The orator Demosthenes said, “The name ‘Hellene’ no long applies to a race, but to a state of mind.”

 

Ancient Coin Collectors Guild
lobbied for the rights of private citizens

On that basis, should not every coin from Pakistan to Spain, from Egypt to England go back to Athens? In truth, as the laws are applied, coins from Greek cities of Sicily do not go back to the government museums of Greece: they go to the government museums of Italy. 

Consider the Roman Empire.  In addition to the central mint, coins were struck in what are today Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, France, and England.   Moreover, Roman legions came from all across the empire, but could be stationed anywhere.  The legion name (cognomen) could reflect where they were drawn from or where they won a battle.  We have epigraphic evidence to show that Legio IX Hispanica served in England from 65 to 120 CE. Legio III Cyrenica (modern Libya) served in what are today Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Legio III Italica was stationed in what is Regensburg for 200 years, from 165 CE.  Galba reorganized former marines into Legio I Adiutrix (“Rescuer”) in 68 AD, and stationed them in what is today Mainz.  However, for most of the second century (106 to 198) their base was in a town later known for many years as Szőny in Hungary, but which is now called Komárom on the border with the Slovak Republic.  So, when a hoard of coins found in England contains the product of a mint from Croatia to pay Roman troops from Spain, whose patrimony is it?

Second, the assumption of UNESCO and the co-operating national governments is that the national public museums have a moral right to first claim.  Private collectors are rebuked as looters of protected sites. 

Old World traditions acknowledge the ruler as the owner of all property. The king could grant a title and land to go with it because all of his realm was his to dispose of as he saw fit.  In America today, that continues as eminent domain: the state can take what it needs.  So, when a farmer in Egypt or England finds an ancient coin on his land, it is not his at all: it belongs to the national government.  (England relaxed its “treasure trove” laws; but even that granting of latitude was from the rulers down to their subjects.) The governments of Turkey, Greece, Italy claim that these artifacts were "looted" from "historic sites" but it is easy to make any place historic if other people ever lived there before you did.  Historicity is just an excuse.  In their minds, private property does not exist.

“I’ve been reading only about the Italians and Greeks 

and how they’ve succeeded,’’ said [former Turkish 

cultural official Engin] Ozgen.  “This will show the world 

that the Turks are not ignorant anymore, that they will fight 

for their past and their heritage.’’ This statue is attributed 
as a Roman copy of a lost Greek work.  
It comes from the city of Antalya in modern Turkey.
The town was founded by Attalus II of Pergamon in 180 BCE. 

 Seljuk Turks entered the area about 1500 years later. 

The Boston Museum of Fine Art returned this 
statue of "The Weary Herakles" to the city of Antalya. 

Read here.

Third, why is a museum in Rome more entitled to these artifacts than I am?  It is my patrimony as well.  And, like most Americans, I have a lot of patrimony.  In addition to the Sicilians (Greeks), my mother’s side of the family was loosely identified as “Hungarian.” However, my maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Croatian.  The family just moved up the river inside of a large, multi-ethnic empire in central Europe.  My maternal grandfather’s immigration records identify him as German-Hungarian.  Are not the artifacts of the legions also my cultural inheritance?

Fourth and more to the point, I cite Demosthenes above: “Hellene” is a state of mind.  UNESCO and the national governments couch their claims in the language of race, ethnicity, and genetics.  The fact of the matter is that we are creatures of intellect living in a planetary society.  Seiji Ozawa (Japanese; born in China) and Yo-Yo Ma (Chinese; born in Paris) have as much right to buy Beethoven’s belt buckle as do any of the current inhabitants of Bonn.  

Fifth, national borders are fluid.  Economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and his brother, mathematician Richard von Mises (1883-1953), were born in a town called Lemberg in the Austro-Hungarian empire.  Treaty of Versailles put the town in the Ukraine, where today it is called L’viv.  According to the UNESCO theory of culture, the people there lost their patrimonic right to enjoy the artifacts of one milieu, but were given the consolation prize of another matrix of icons and exemplars. 

Coin of Sinope in modern Turkey, struck about 375 BCE 


when Diogenes the Cynic was mint master.  


Accused of debasing the coinage, he moved to Athens 

and became a philosopher. 

Under the eagle's wing DIO below the dolphin, SINO. 

The test cut shows that the coin was suspected 
of being false.

The ANA measured the specific gravity and found it 

to be only 
90% pure silver, acceptable to us, 


but debased to the ancients.

Ultimately, the ideological nationalization of museums contradicts the fundamental intention of a museum.  Every leading institution seeks to own and display as broad a collection as possible. That motivation derives from the liberal Enlightenment theory of humanity.  Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, I benefited from time spent at the Cleveland Museum of Art. It seemed to me then – and is still supportable today – that the entirety of human culture was housed there. 

A hundred yards away, the Natural Science Museum displayed meteorites and dinosaur fossils.  Those, too, are arguably someone else’s patrimony. One of the displays about Humans was a panel explaining Culture. I do not know if the Jivaro would be culturally enhanced by the return of their shrunken heads, or if the Inuit need another old canoe; but I certainly am better for having studied them without trekking to Peru and Alaska.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Circumference

Numismatics: History as Market

Newton versus the Counterfeiter

Accounting for Civilization